Two meanings of "private"

Megan McArdle ably expresses something we were arguing about recently at Cassandra's place: the recent trend to consider everything people do together as some aspect of "government":

In the 19th century, the line between the individual and the government was just as firm as it is now, but there was a large public space in between that was nonetheless seen as private in the sense of being mostly outside of government control -- which is why we still refer to “public" companies as being part of the “private" sector. Again, in the context of largely negative rights, this makes sense. You have individuals on one end and a small state on the other, and in the middle you have a large variety of private voluntary institutions that exert various forms of social and financial coercion, but not governmental coercion -- which, unlike other forms of coercion, is ultimately enforced by the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

McArdle's context (like Bookworm's) is the Hobby Lobby decision, and the progressives' conviction that not forcing an employer to buy an employee's abortifacient is the same thing as allowing a religious fanatic employer to impose its crazed right-wing views on helpless employees.

H/t Bookworm Worm.

Burn it!

William Deresiewicz takes on Lawrence Buell's "The Dream of the Great American Novel," a turgid new contribution to the school of subjecting literary classics to a political-correctness auto-da-fé.  The purpose of this approach is not to explore the intellectual or aesthetic achievements of a novel but to determine how closely it hews to this year's most exacting standards of virtue. "I feel as if we’re back in Salem," Deresiewicz laments. "Maybe he should have just thrown the book in the water to see if it would float."

As so often is the case, the most devastating criticism of Buell's book consists simply of quoting a passage:

Admittedly any such dyadic comparison risks oversimplifying the menu of eligible strategies, but the risk is lessened when one bears in mind that to envisage novels as potential GANs is necessarily to conceive them as belonging to more extensive domains of narrative practice that draw on repertoires of tropes and recipes for encapsulating nationness of the kinds sketched briefly in the Introduction—such that you can’t fully grasp what’s at stake in any one possible GAN without imagining the individual work in multiple conversations with many others, and not just U.S. literature either.

Calling the Great American Novel a "GAN" should be enough to tip us off.

Alive inside

What if Romney had won?

Sadly, I have to agree with this assessment from a commenter at ChicagoBoyz:

I think Romney would have:

1) Failed to repeal Obamacare, instead agreeing to various false compromises to “fix” it, leaving the parts most important to the left intact, because otherwise they wouldn’t agree to any “fix.” The base of the GOP would, of course, feel outraged and betrayed. Result- disaster.

2) Agreed to impose a carbon tax upon the US economy, because he believed in global warming. Conceding that, he would have no real cover when the left resumed shrieking that we need to force Americans to stop using exothermic chemicals reactions, because Gaia. And he’d “compromise,” because that’s just what GOP establishment politicians do, regardless of the consequences. Result--yet more disaster.

3) Fought for another amnesty bill, with no real border security, because that’s what the big money donors want. Of course once again we’d hear all about phony border security provisions, carefully written to mean nothing at all, wrapped up in a giant “guest worker” program, more H1B visas, more immigration, MOAR. And working class Americans, US citizens, would have been thrown into the street by foreigners, including those who have absolutely no interest in the United States other than to send money home. Result- even more disaster, blamed on the Republican president.

4) Continued expensively subsidizing the military requirements of our competitors, such as the EU, Japan, and Israel, while allowing their enemies and ours to pilfer American defense secrets with impunity. As Spengler notes, Israel is doing pretty well. Perhaps we don’t need to give them any more spendy military assistance.

5) Done nothing at all to combat the slow-motion destruction of the Republic by the left, or its relentless subversion of American culture, or the vile hate-America propaganda force-fed to almost every American college student. Nope. I expect he’d come up with another student loan program, to make hate-America propaganda easier to afford.

6) Destroyed the Republican party forever and all time, because the base voters of the GOP have become terribly unwilling to tolerate the endless, mindless, backstabbing failure of the GOP establishment.

"I spend less than I earn"

Shrinking your consumption to match your income?  That's crazy talk.

Greenest administration evah

More recycling, this time of hard drives in the FEC belonging to a former Lois Lerner crony who was under investigation for violations of Hatch Act.  I wonder if they get special grants for that?

Power vacuum

The President argues that it's ridiculous to imagine the border can be controlled. That's just primitive "moats and alligators" thinking.  But if the U.S. doesn't control the border, does that mean it's uncontrolled?  Not at all, reports an Oklahoma congressman.  Cartels have stepped into the breach and locked up the border as tight as a drum:

“There are a lot of children there that have suffered on the trek to the United States of America. We’re talking about cases where people were abused … when you pay criminal organizations to transport children, you’re putting your children in harm’s way,” Bridenstine said. “If you don’t pay [criminal organizations] enough money your children could be subject to forced labor, forced prostitution, sold in the slave trade, and in many cases many cases death. There are mass graves in northern Mexico because somebody didn’t pay the right criminal organization.”

Harder choices

OK, it's the Daily Caller, and maybe they made it up out of whole cloth.  Hillary Clinton is reported to be working on a new book that will repair the damage to her pocketbook and her brand dealt by the disastrous rollout of "Hard Choices."  This time her advisors, including her soi-disant husband and co-executive of Clinton, Inc., are urging a fresh strategy:  tell a little truth.  Seem a little human.  She can call it "Hard Truths" or "True Choices" or even "What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?"

It's about collaboration

An interesting theory about whether the coordination between the White House and the IRS took place via the IRS employee's union.

H/t Bookworm Room.

A weak recovery

This AEI article includes seven charts comparing the shape of the recent recession to the average of all post-WWII recessions. Each graph shows conditions as they existed a certain number of years before and after the official end of the recession, with a cone of uncertainty around the post-WWII average expressed as a single standard deviation above and below. In almost every case, the current recovery hovers around the full-standard-deviation-below line.

Lazy composting

This guy is exactly of our way of thinking. If you're patient, there's never any reason to work hard on a compost pile, or to overthink what you're willing to throw into it.

Two wings, one bird

Jim Geraghty:

Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal told Al-Jazeera last month, “Hamas is comprised of a political wing and a military wing.”

Really? Because from over here, it looks like a public-relations wing and a convenient-scapegoat wing. “Oh, it wasn’t us that fired those rockets! It was our militant wing!” Militant wings are the evil twins of geopolitics. If your organization has a military wing — as opposed to an actual, declared, uniforms-and-everything-military — you’re probably a troublemaker. You notice the good guys in life rarely have a militant wing. “I’m with a hardline faction of the Red Cross.” “I’m with Mother Theresa’s paramilitary branch.”

These groups really seem to think that the political wing can’t be blamed for what the militant wing does. Guys, you’re two halves of the same chicken. Colonel Sanders just sees one bird.

My man Rick

I don't care if Rick Perry did forget the third of the three most useless federal agencies that should be jettisoned instantly, I still like him for president.  This HotAir roundup includes a 15-minute video at the end that's well worth watching.  The Republican 2016 "frontrunners" don't compare favorably, to say nothing of Hillary Clinton.  Perry is a solid executive with a grasp of how policy affects the facts on the ground, not just the media spin-dazzle.

Whatever happens, I'm tremendously grateful to have had him for governor these past years.  It's a shame Texas taxpayers have had to spend half a billion dollars to address the border issues the national government can't grasp.  It's beyond exasperating to hear the President dismiss them as fantasies about moats and alligators, as if it were not he who is living in fantasyland.

An unofficial union

I expected to be outraged by an article entitled "UAW decides to skip election and form union at VW plant anyway," but I found instead that the union is proceeding in just the way I'd like to see.  They're asking workers to join a union, not purporting to force dues on anyone by operation of law, and not expecting management to acknowledge them as the exclusive negotiators for the entire workforce.  If they get big and popular enough, their bargaining position may change.

Not that they should ever have the right to enforce 100% membership or dues payment no matter how popular they get.  If they offer an attractive enough package of benefits, such as automatic legal representation in management-labor disputes, they should be able to attract workers voluntarily.  Our neighbors across the road used to be involved in a sheetmetal workers union that provided job training and certification services that were good for everyone in both management and labor.  It doesn't have to become a boondoggle.  (But with the UAW involved, what are the odds?)

Creative taxi destruction

Are municipal taxi authorities protecting riders or cronies?

For Cassandra

To inspire her rehab efforts.  I watch these guys dancing and sometimes all I can think is "OWWW," as I imagine tendons being abruptly ripped from bones.  When they recover to an upright position from a split, they look as if they were on strings.   How do they do that?



What beautiful, liquid movements.

H/t Ace via Maggie's Farm.

Win-win

The AFSCME was so offended when the United Negro College Fund accepted a generous donation from the evil Koch brothers that it cut all ties with the organization.  I was ready to double my congratulations to the UNCF when I realized all the union was really doing was to withdraw some scholarship funding, but we can always hope that they'll react the same way to other impure organizations by letting them become non-union shops.

Hammock progress

DL Sly brought to my attention a hammock hazard I hadn't fully considered:

Luckily my hammock design is a very tight weave.  I've finished the main body now and am working on the side fringes.

Partition

The Kurds continue to take care of business in the face of increasing collapse in Baghdad.  I really hope this works out for them and that they can defend whatever turn out to be their borders when the dust settles.  Developments like these show how important it is to keep an eye on local systems for handling the essential functions of civilization, even as we experiment with larger, regional systems of coordination.

If this be treason

MSNBC Michael Dyson indulged himself in a bit of pundit-foolery by complaining that talk of impeaching Obama is "treasonous."  Impeachment talk may be misguided, it may be politically stupid, it may be lot of other terrible things, but it can't possibly be treasonous.  It's roughly equivalent to arguing that planning to vote against an incumbent in a re-election contest is treasonous.

But it hasn't been so many centuries since our forebears lived under a very similar rule:  the government is so central to the continuance of our lives that any attempt to oppose or even shame it is treason.  It's a far more dangerous habit of thought than Dyson realizes.  We've gone to considerable trouble in this country to separate the man from the office, because the cult of personality in power is a dangerous road to take, precisely because of its strong emotional appeal in times of high anxiety and desire for order.

Friday Night AMV

Nobunaga. Hideoyoshi. Tokagawa. Heh.

This is sort of like The American Civil war with Giant robots and lasers and stuff. Robert E. Lee riding Traveler through the sky on rockets. Sam Grant shooting lasers and fireballs from his cigars.

Off to the Wild

I will be gone for a few days, perhaps a week.

This should be interesting

Several House members have just filed a resolution to direct the sergeant-at-arms to arrest Lois Lerner for contempt of Congress.

The Coolest

I like Kickstarter.  This guy is raising money for a cooler with a built-in blender, handheld device recharger, music system, and lot of other gizmos.

Battle of Northampton

Today marks the anniversary of the Battle of Northampton in the Wars of the Roses. This battle was a significant York victory, resulting in the capture of King Henry VI. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, led the forces that captured Henry on this day. Warwick would five years later join with Henry's wife -- Queen Margret -- in restoring the king to the throne.

On a related subject, I came across a book by Christina Hardyment titled Malory: The Knight Who Became Arthur's Chronicler. Sir Thomas Malory, in addition to writing Le Morte Darthur, was a partisan of Warwick's during the wars.

Ms. Hardyment has compiled a substantial book! My sense of the historians' opinions has always been that not much could be said for certain about Sir Thomas Malory, not even exactly who he was. This book undertakes to prove that reading quite false. I had thought Ms. Hardyment must be a professional historian given her careful readings especially of English medieval law, but she seems not to be. She has a degree in history but not a doctorate, and is a journalist rather than a practicing historian.

Well done, ma'am.

Border spending

Does the President think "border security" means letting everyone over the border and then finding the money to feed, house, and transport them to other locations within the U.S.?  No wonder he'll have trouble getting a few more billion dollars.

(1) Wide-open borders.
(2) Welfare state.

Pick one.

Catholicism and capitalism

From a 1999 article by Michael Novak, dredged up by AEI in a retrospective of Wall Street Journal pieces on its 125th birthday:

The people of the high Middle Ages (1100-1300) were agog with wonder at great mechanical clocks, new forms of gears for windmills and water mills, improvements in wagons and carts, shoulder harnesses for beasts of burden, the ocean-going ship rudder, eyeglasses and magnifying glasses, iron smelting and ironwork, stone cutting and new architectural principles. So many new types of machines were invented and put to use by 1300 that historian Jean Gimpel wrote a book in 1976 called "The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages."

Without the growth of capitalism, however, such technological discoveries would have been idle novelties. They would seldom have been put in the hands of ordinary human beings through swift and easy exchange. They would not have been studied and rapidly copied and improved by eager competitors. All this was made possible by freedom for enterprise, markets and competition -- and that in turn was provided by the Catholic Church.

The church owned nearly a third of all the land of Europe. To administer those vast holdings, it established a continentwide system of canon law that tied together multiple jurisdictions of empire, nation, barony, bishopric, religious order, chartered city, guild, confraternity, merchants, entrepreneurs, traders, etc. It also provided local and regional administrative bureaucracies of arbitrators, jurists, negotiators and judges, along with an international language, "canon law Latin."

Even the new emphasis on clerical celibacy played an important capitalist role. Its clean separation between office and person in the church broke the traditional tie between family and property that had been fostered by feudalism and its carefully plotted marriages. It also provided Europe with an extraordinarily highly motivated, literate, specialized and mobile labor force.

The Cistercians, who eschewed the aristocratic and sedentary ways of the Benedictines and consequently broke farther away from feudalism, became famous as entrepreneurs. They mastered rational cost accounting, plowed all profits back into new ventures, and moved capital around from one venue to another, cutting losses where necessary, and pursuing new opportunities when feasible. They dominated iron production in central France and wool production (for export) in England. They were cheerful and energetic. "They had," Mr. Collins writes, "the Protestant ethic without Protestantism."

Losing the peace

Bill Whittle.

Eric Blair Is Holding Out On Us

This is your home state, is it not?

According to the criminal complaint, Chad Workman told police that Tyson took out a sword in a bamboo case....

Workman grabbed some nearby barbecue equipment – a grill brush/spatula that he used to defend himself.

“I’m thinking, what am I going to do?” he said. “The only thing I grabbed is a spatula.”

Tyson allegedly took the sword out of its case and struck Chad Workman.

Workman says he had to get a dozen stitches and was beaten pretty badly. However, he said he had one shot and he took it.

“Once across the head,” Workman said. “That’s all it took.”

He says God brought him through and in this case, the brush is mightier than the sword.

Well, that's what George Silver said.

Set two unskillful men together at the rapier and dagger, being valiant, and you shall see, that once in two bouts there shall either one or both of them be hurt. Then set two skillful men together, being valiant at the rapier and dagger, and they shall do the like. Then set a skillful rapier and dagger man, the best that can be had, and valiant man having no skill together at rapier & dagger, and once in two bouts upon my credit in all the experience I have in fight, the unskillful man, do the other what he can for his life for the contrary, shall hurt him, and most commonly if it were in continuance of fight, you shall see the unskillful man to have the advantage. And if I should choose a valiant man for service of the prince, or to take part with me or any friend of mine in a good quarrel, I would chose the unskillful man, because unencumbered with false fights, because such a man stands free in his valor with strength and agility of body, freely takes the benefit of nature, fights most brave, by loosing no opportunity, either soundly to hurt his enemy, or defend himself.

Sometimes you can get too fancy. Always bet on the man with the scars on his knuckles, even if he's armed with a barbecue brush.

Dying Ideas

A host of scholars and scientists discuss their favorite candidate for a (usually scientific) theory that should be abandoned. Some of them are ideas we talk about here from time to time.

Opacity and unaccountability

When a charitable organization starts talking about trade secrets, it may be time to find another charity to support.  The Red Cross has begun to pick up the depressing habits of governments.  I wonder whether it's possible for any useful charity work to get done by a very large organization.  The advantages of scale and coordination may simply be swamped by the evils of arrogance and disconnection.

Oil boom

Texas and North Dakota now produce nearly half of all the oil in the United States, and would rank number five worldwide if they were a single country.  Guess who would shut down all this production if he could possibly figure out how.  One reason he can't figure out how is that none of it is happening on federal land, which is a good reason to think carefully about how much federal land there is.

CDRUSSOUTHCOM on Border Security

Marine Corps General John Kelly leads the combatant command tasked with providing military resources -- among other missions -- to border security along our southern border. He addressed Congress to complain, and to warn.

“In comparison to other global threats, the near collapse of societies in the hemisphere with the associated drug and [undocumented immigrant] flow are frequently viewed to be of low importance,” Kelly told Defense One. “Many argue these threats are not existential and do not challenge our national security. I disagree.”

...

Kelly said that budgets cuts are “severely degrading” the military’s ability to defend southern approaches to the U.S border. Last year, he said, his task force was unable to act on nearly 75 percent of illicit trafficking events.

Who's to blame? Well...

The Democratic coalition wants increased funding and resources for SOUTHCOM and the State Department’s Central American Regional Security Initiative. For fiscal 2015, the Obama administration requested $130 million for the program, which covers seven countries, but that ask is a decrease of $30 million from the current year, the senators noted. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said an additional $161.5 million will be provided for CARSI programs to “respond to the region’s most pressing security and governance challenges” – but the administration has made no mention of additional resources for the U.S. military....

Many Republicans who have effectively blocked reform efforts blame Obama, saying his “amnesty” immigration policies have incentivized the mass migration from Central America. In a letter dated June 20, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, called on the president to send the National Guard to the border. On Monday, freshman Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, introduced legislation to stop all aid to Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Some of the problem is the usual problem: an inability to agree on what policies are right, especially in terms of admitting massive numbers of new immigrants (or waving away the fact that millions and millions are already here). The administration wants to increase foreign aid to the failing states as a mechanism for helping resolve the crisis; the Republicans in Congress want to eliminate that aid as a forcing mechanism to drive foreign action. The administration here as elsewhere has a preference for civilian resources, such as police and State department aid programs, over military action. The Republican response, to secure the border with National Guard forces while eliminating this foreign aid, is 100% opposed to the President's preferred strategy.

One might wonder if the Republicans in Congress really oppose mass immigration at all, given their frequent and repeated noises about amnesty; whereas there is no reason to doubt that the President has political reasons to favor the idea. In any case, their intense opposition is one of the most effective political strategies possible for preventing an effective response.

Beer music

Apropos of Grim's interest in beer, I wonder if these guys are available to perform at wedding receptions?  (Don't worry:  despite the name of the site, it's all SFW.)

H/t my neighbors.

Virtue and Opinion

An inchoate thought of mine, which I am throwing out for discussion.

A recurring theme in some of Cassandra's posts and arguments -- and a healthy thing to examine, whether or not she's right in each particular case -- is conservatives and libertarians falling into the same argumentative vices as their leftist opponents. It's comforting to think the other fellows are less honest, so that "the evidence of [the right side] is to be accepted against [the wrong side] in every case." But, as she's right to watch for, people sharing the true, correct opinions can and do fall into the same intellectual vices as those who oppose them.

Knowing that leaves me no less convinced that my opinions are true and correct (that's what having opinions means), but...I haven't seen strong evidence that people holding one opinion are more virtuous than people holding another, or that I can tell who's a better neighbor by what his ideology is.

(This is a moral problem I have with some world religions, incidentally, since they doom your soul based on your opinions...about whether God exists, for example, or how many of him there are. But that is another story.)

Experience and pop-psychology books convince me that it isn't really right to think of a human mind as a unified whole, with a single "virtue" statistic, but more like a set of subroutines that run simultaneously and don't always cohere. People don't think their way into being virtuous, at least most of them don't ("high-functioning sociopaths" may be an exception) and I don't see why evolution would select for logical consistency. And so perhaps it isn't surprising that a lawyer who'd go to the wall for his clients, or a soldier who'd fall on a grenade for his countrymen, can be an absolute beast to his wife. Broadly speaking it's about being concerned toward your fellowman...but it's unevenly applied. Likewise I can't help but admire a sincere patriot...but if you've served, or even if you haven't, I bet you've known a few who were "decency challenged."

Now, what's interesting to me is this -- can our experiences test the idea, about whether ideas relate to virtue? You know that Phineas Gage had much of his morality torn out by a piece of iron (though per that link, he was able to grow it back; a message of hope too often ignored). A base where I used to work went joint...so that the Air Force took over basic police functions while I was there...and one of them told me how surprised he was at how many domestic violence reports he got from the Warrior Transition Unit. I wasn't very surprised....without going too far, I had to deal with TBI soldiers on occasion, and some of them (and only some of them) really did seem to have their self-control and related virtues shaken a little loose.

None of the articles I've read about Phineas Gage relate whether his political views, his religion, or his ideology changed at all. And the nature of my duties -- and the way I prefer to conduct them -- is such that I almost never learned a soldier's ideology. I have a notion, which I can't prove, that none of these fellows took a sharp turn Left or Right, or High Church or Pentecostal, when they lost some brain functioning and some moral restraint with it...but I was wondering whether anyone here has knowledge, or experience, or thoughts, suggesting a link?

(I have one relative who made an enormous "moral leap upward" when she got religion, and her political views changed at the same time, but I think her changed opinions came as a package deal with the religious experience rather than a result of being more virtuous per se.)

The difficulty of testing cognition

With all the fuss lately about high-stakes testing and the seeming inability to make judgments of any kind about whether schools are worth the price of admission, I found this study of age-related cognition decline interesting.  The blog is entitled "The Importance of Being Wrong," apparently in honor of the author's interest in the process of learning not only by association but by elimination.  (In other words, why a really effective dog trainer--not me--not only rewards the right action but, perhaps even more important, never fails to discourage the wrong one, even when tired or bored.)

The linked post focuses on tests designed to discover whether the ability to recall words alters with age.  The author makes an interesting case that there is a stronger association of poor performance with the size of the sample than with age.  Among the possible explanations are the greater difficulty of excluding specific cognitive diseases from a large sample, or the greater difficulty of ensuring consistent evaluation techniques with a larger research staff.  It's also possible that older research subjects are more anxious being tested by youngsters, or in a university setting, than are younger subjects.

It's a tricky process, determining whether cognitive declines exist and, if so, what causes.  Nevertheless, though testing is fraught with challenges, I remain skeptical that it should be all that hard to get a rough idea whether a group of youngsters is noticeably less ignorant and untrained after a year of publicly funded instruction than before, though I suppose it can be quite tricky to compare two such sets of youngsters, taught by different people or methods, and obtain any certainty about which techniques were more effective.

Another post by the same author explores the difficulty in teaching children to recognize color apart from the objects conventionally associated with it.  Very young children may know that bananas are yellow and apples are red without gaining much skill in assigning colors to neutral objects in the laboratory.  I thought that was interesting in light of our discussion a few weeks ago about the oddly indeterminate use of color in Homer, and the differences in color language across cultures.  Anyone who's ever tried to paint in color knows how surprisingly hard it is to choose a color from a palette that will genuinely recreate the impression of a colored object in the real world.  It's not necessarily a natural skill to tell what combinations of frequencies correspond to what we carelessly call "red" or "blue" in various objects.

Ukraine & Tolkien

An Artist's tale.



Some appropriate music to listen to while you are scrolling through the gallery.

Contracting Movement

On January 29th of this year, the federal government posted an advertisement seeking bids for a vendor contract to handle “Unaccompanied Alien Children“.

Not just any contract mind you, but a very specific contract – for a very specific number of unaccompanied minors: 65,000.

• Why would DHS and ICE be claiming “surprise” by the current influx of unaccompanied minors on the border in June, when they were taking bids for an exact contract to handle the exact situation in January?

• Secondly, how could they possibly anticipate 65,000 unaccompanied minors would be showing up at the border, when the most ever encountered in a previous year was 5,000 total ?

The contract posting is listed at the General Services Administration's contract website, FBO.gov, and looks legitimate. The claim that 5,000 was the previous maximal total, however, looks to be false, if we judge from this UNHCR report. The figure hasn't been that low since 2011; it doubled in 2012 and doubled again in 2013. So a 65,000 estimate is assuming a rate of increase that falls rather than continues steady. If the UN report is right, all the states bordering Mexico are seeing such immigration attempts up by about 400%.

So DHS is guilty of good planning, I guess.

Friday Night AMV

Yep, we're all living here.

Gene Hackman on Independence Day

My other favorite cowboy sentiment on the holiday:



In honor of which, today's beer is one I haven't tried before. It's from a company tagged "Lonerider: Ales for Outlaws."

I'll let you know how they turn out.

John Wayne on America

It's an interesting list of reasons, and easy to support: one of the crowning glories of America is the freedom to move at will across this beautiful continent, on vast highways or country blacktops, on the rails or in the air. Political systems aside, the thing itself is beautiful, and lovable, as is the freedom to go out and see it.

Happy Birthday, Revolutionaries.

Vive la france

It's Independence Day, and normally I'm not in a great mood about the French.  But, you know, they did help us during our War of Independence, and by golly the little buggers can cook.

We have a neighborhood party to attend this evening, complete with (I hope) excessively dangerous fireworks.  After considering several things to bring, I opted for lazy security in the form of a big loaf of French bread, now that I have the technique down.  Today's batch is particularly easy, because the NPH, with a higher tolerance for these things, dragged down the old Sunbeam mixer and figured out what was wrong with it that made us put it away on a top shelf years ago.  Now it works like a charm and makes the dough-kneading a snap.  Two big loaves are rising at this moment.

The extra loaf of bread inspired me to get ready to make some onion soup.  My indispensable new Michael Ruhlman cookbook, "Twenty," surprised me with the claim that my onion soup would be better made with water than with chicken stock.  I tried it some a few weeks ago:  he was right.  It eats up some time, but otherwise couldn't be easier.  Starting early in the day, you slice up about eight onions of any kind, pour them into a large heavy pot with a tablespoon or so of butter and some salt, sweat them for a few minutes with the lid on, then cook them down slowly for several hours at whatever temperature you're willing to monitor them at:  the slower, the less often you have to check.  They'll be in there for quite a while before they lose enough water to need much attention.  Towards the end, it's best to keep a sharp eye on them.

When the onions get dark, dark, dark brown after three to five hours, and have shrunk down to quite a small volume, you have not only the makings for instant onion soup but a confection with unlimited uses.  The dark, caramelized flavor is unbelievable, especially if you get a truly dark brown, crunchy bit.  Put them on anything, or refrigerate or freeze them at this point, or go ahead and make soup.

All the soup requires is pouring six cups of water onto the onions, heating it up, and adjusting it to taste with any or all of the following:  salt, pepper, Vietnamese fish sauce, anchovy paste, vinegar, sherry, or red wine.  Then, of course, top it with slices of bread covered with toasted Swiss and/or Gruyère cheese.  Traditionally, you put the bread and cheese on top of individual oven-proof bowls and melt them that way, but I don't have any such bowls at the moment, so I toast the bread-and-cheese on a cookie sheet, then plop one onto each serving of soup.  I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a set of bowls in local antique shops, though, so I can achieve this effect:

It's peasant food, and great stuff.  Not counting the cheese, the whole batch (including the whole loaf of bread) costs about $6 in ingredients.

Slaughter

Matt Walsh ponders our different response to African big-game hunting and abortion:

I can sit here all day and write poems about the beloved walrus or the hallowed dolphin, but my pro-animal stance will likely never require anything of me. . . . A humpback whale will never show up at my door and ask me to take care of it for the next 18 years.  A Siberian tiger probably won't come to my house one day and demand that I change my entire life to accommodate it.  I might go out and adopt a pet, but that is always a deliberate act.  Babies, on the other hand, happen when we have sex.  But sex is fun, and babies are hard work.  Babies intrude on our fun.  They ruin it.  This, and only this, is the reason why we defend the slaughter of children while weeping over the remains of a murdered leopard.

He goes on to wonder how people explain their hierarchies of right and wrong.  Why is killing an endangered species wrong?  Where do you get that idea from?

The Time Has Come

Steve Forbes is not a stupid man, of course. Still:

The current IRS scandals are now bigger than those of Watergate in the 1970s and Teapot Dome in the 1920s. The most powerful and feared government agency was turned loose on groups of citizens who the White House and congressional Democrats felt threatened their power. President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS against opponents, as did Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon....

This should be closely followed by attacks that culminate in defunding almost all of the IRS after the midterm elections, which the Democrats will lose badly. There can be no more continuing resolutions that allow the tax-collection agency to operate business as usual, even though Congress hasn’t passed an appropriations bill. If a continuing resolution is necessary to avoid a government shutdown, then by all means pass one–but specifically do a near-zeroing-out of the IRS (the only exception would be a handful of clerks to process refunds) until these scandals are fully and credibly investigated. If the President vetoes such a budget resolution, the onus is on him, not Congress.

So the idea is that the way to address a scandal worse than the Teapot Dome is to pass a resolution that will certainly be vetoed, thus cementing the IRS's personal loyalty to the President?

The right way to address the issue is to disband the IRS entirely, replacing it with a Federal sales tax that will be collected at the point of sale like other sales taxes. Such sales taxes can be overseen by the state agencies that already oversee them, or by new agencies among the states that lack them. Then we need not worry about audits that can be used to harass political opponents, nor do we have to worry about approval of tax breaks for left-leaning organizations while right-leaning ones are delayed, delayed, delayed.

There are lots of things not to like about sales taxes, especially their regressive nature. But their real benefit lies in a relative absence of tyranny. Stripping the Federal government of the mechanism to act like tyrants is a wise domestic policy, here as elsewhere.

The Fourth of July is tomorrow. It's worth remembering that the Founders were revolutionaries. The document we celebrate on the 4th is not the Constitution but the Declaration of Independence, with its signal guidance "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Whether we alter or abolish, let the replacement be one in which the government has much less oversight over the private aspects of our lives. Let it lose the power to command us to sign away our Fifth Amendment rights when we file and sign a mandatory tax return. Let it lose at least those powers that have become concentrated in the IRS.

Presidential

Delicious tears

I like the way Kevin Williamson thinks, probably because I'm not a nice person.

Progressives mad about Hobby Lobby started a campaign under the motto: “Not my boss’s business.” But Obamacare makes it — pardon me for noticing — literally your boss’s business. And I don’t mean “literally” the way Joe Biden uses it; I mean “literally” the way literally literate people use it. The alternative is this: Your money, your pills, your call. If what you care about is access to contraception, then that’s a pretty good model. If what you care about is using the levers of the state to force moral uniformity on the entire country so that atavistic Evangelical types have to knuckle under to your demands — well, you lost.

Urfeathers

Phenomena, which is the site that hosts Not Exactly Rocket Science, has a post today about Archaeopterix, the "wingless bird with hairy feathers" we all remember from the old cartoon "B.C."  A new specimen preserves some fantastic detail in the feathers.  It seems that dinosaurs first developed feathers for insulation, display, or some such thing, and only later did some species find them useful in developing flight.

MDMP

Looks like the military's planning in Baghdad is structured around covering State's retreat.

Officials would not say how many of the armed helicopters have been sent to the country, stating only that they will be based in Baghdad and could assist with evacuations of American personnel....

"The threat to Baghdad is still very legitimate. And we also want to make sure that we are doing what we can to help our colleagues in the State Department continue to function out of the embassy there and to have the flexibility, if they want to make resource and manning changes there, that we're able — we're in a position to help them do that," [RADM] Kirby said.

UPDATE: This aspect of our withdrawal is the one that I find most morally troubling, and one that is going to be a large stumbling block now. Why would they trust us now, those who were Sons of Iraq, if we did try to reach out to them? We made a lot of promises about ensuring fair treatment during the Surge that the Obama administration just walked away from.

Vox Vulgaris

December Talks To May

A part of an essay by a formerly drug-addled Boomer on reaching 60:

And don’t believe the beauty page gush that you are in fact only as old as you feel. It’s a nonsense, based on the assumption that ageing is primarily a physical process. It isn’t, it’s a maturing one. It’s not a feeling, it’s an experience. You are as old as you can remember....

A contemporary of mine, after a number of marriages, found a girlfriend less than half his age of a transcendent pneumatic beauty who hung on his every word — and dumped her after a couple of months. Why, I asked — she was perfect! “Too many things we didn’t have in common,” he said sadly. Like what? “Well, the Eighties.”

Correlation. Causation?

Gallup correlates two of its polls worldwide, and finds that the answers line up.

Poll 1: Is corruption in your government widespread?

Poll 2: How satisfied are you with the freedom you have to live your life and make your own decisions?

Americans have fallen to 36th place in the second poll, out of the top few in 2006. Nearly four out of five agree that corruption is widespread in our government.

Trust Me. I'm Not Very Nice.

People with more agreeable, conscientious personalities are more likely to make harmful choices. In these new obedience experiments, people with more social graces were the ones who complied with the experimenter's wishes and delivered electric shocks they believed could harm an innocent person. By contrast, people with more contrarian, less agreeable personalities were more likely to refuse to hurt other people when told to do so.

As subsequent studies will doubtless show, bikers are the most trustworthy of all. Interdisciplinary research is already pointing in that direction.

And Now A Moment of National Unity...

Since we've had such a bitter outpouring of divisiveness today, how about a story we (almost) all agree upon?

71% Think IRS Likely to Have Destroyed E-mails to Hide Guilt

Most voters think it’s likely the IRS deliberately destroyed e-mails about its investigations of Tea Party and other conservative groups to hide its criminal behavior. Two-out-of-three now believe IRS employees involved in these investigations should be jailed or fired, and most suspect the agency of targeting other political opponents of the Obama administration.

See? We're not so different after all.

Wah

Matt Walsh encapsulates the unhinged reaction to the Hobby Lobby ruling:

If you won't give it to me, then I cannot have it.  This is what a child might accurately say to his parents.  However your employer is not your parent, and you are not a child.

That SCOTUS Ruling We've Been Awaiting

It turns out to be a very narrow ruling, not a ringing defense of religious liberty, but nevertheless better than an endorsement of the Administration's principle that people must submit their religion to the state if they enter the market. It also isn't an attack on the idea that free contraception should be made available to women as a matter of state policy:

Alito also said the decision is limited to contraceptives under the health care law. "Our decision should not be understood to hold that an insurance-coverage mandate must necessarily fall if it conflicts with an employer's religious beliefs," Alito said.

He suggested two ways the administration could ensure women get the contraception they want. It could simply pay for pregnancy prevention, he said. Or it could provide the same kind of accommodation it has made available to religious-oriented, not-for-profit corporations. Those groups can tell the government that providing the coverage violates their religious beliefs. At that point, the groups' insurers or a third-party administrator takes on the responsibility of paying for the birth control.

Given the narrowness of the ruling and the fact that it doesn't interfere with the government's preferred policy outcomes, you might have expected this to be another unanimous ruling. No, it is not: it was a 5-4, conservative/liberal split. Justice Ginsburg, indeed, took the time to read her dissent in public. Her opinion is that this ruling won't turn out to be as narrow as it was crafted to be: she thinks it will have a sweeping effect that will create "havoc" for attempts by the state to impose its values on religious dissenters to assert a uniform corporate law.

Why Not Weigh The Fish?

On the intersection of Thales, Hume, a Thracian servant girl, and the Merry Monarch.

Violations of Human Rights

Did you know that the United Nations has found Detroit in violation of internationally recognized human rights? Specifically, the right to water.

“Disconnections due to non-payment are only permissible if it can be shown that the resident is able to pay but is not paying," said Catarina de Albuquerque, who is the U.N.'s special rapporteur on the right to safe drinking water and sanitation.

"In other words, when there is genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections."

That's an interesting claim, probably incompatible with the American understanding of rights. It's philosophically defensible, though, if you believe -- as one long tradition does -- that rights come from specific human needs. According to this tradition, if a thing is truly necessary for human beings to exist (like water), or truly necessary to develop their basic capacities (like education), such a being a right to it.

A right to be provided with something you don't pay for, though? Who then must pay for it, and how do you guarantee that there will be enough of it if paying for it is not required? That's the conundrum behind the American concept, whereby your only (mostly) unlimited rights are rights to be left alone -- freedom to choose to practice your own religion, say. Even these rights, which require nothing from anyone else, are subject to practical limits. Even this morning we're waiting to see how unlimited that freedom is. The "Hobby Lobby" ruling is due today.

Still, it's interesting to see Detroit of all places hoisted on the UN's petard. It was the core of what Dr. Mead calls "Blue Model" Liberalism during the 20th century, the same sort of Liberalism that produced the UN and its structures.

UPDATE: Of course, health care is a human right, too.

Syncopation

I tried my hand at setting a bluesy Bonnie Raitt number to musical notation.  As before, you can hit the automated "play" button at the bottom left.

Jobs Aren't Fiefs

In his new(ish) digs at Takimag, Theodore Dalrymple takes a swipe at a French campaign "For Women in Science" - featuring posters that declare, "Science Needs Women." His case hits the main logical points you'd expect - "Science does not need women any more than it needs foot fetishists, pole vaulters, or Somalis. What science needs...is scientists." A couple of thoughts of my own:

There's a brand of sub-economic thinking that I think lies behind these posters. It's thinking of jobs (jobs as scientists in this case; but other jobs in others) as fiefs. If you're the Thane of Cawdor, you're entitled to the rents, and no one else; if you're also Thane of Glamis, you get the rents of Glamis and no one else. Presumably the King would like to have a good fighter in those positions, but more importantly he wants someone loyal (through family ties or otherwise), and the central concept is that whether you earned the fief through good service or not -- it is an award of the King's favor; it might go to anyone of any ability; but he chose you. There are only so many little plots of ground in the kingdom, and one more for someone else is one less for you. And if your family isn't getting these favors while his new in-laws are, they're "favored" over you, and if you felt entitled, you may just be angry. ("False, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence" may've been so motivated in his plots against Edward IV.) Naturally, then, in our world of political "tribes" -- you want your tribe to get its share, and you'll clamor and rebel 'til it gets it.

Since jobs, contracts, wealth, and talent are not like that -- abilities are not evenly distributed, and neither are the habits and attitudes that put those abilities to work; and a contract to perform services is not an entitlement of royal favor -- the campaign is as absurd as Dalrymple paints it, though it flatters resentment.

Unfortunately, in the midst of striking down one kind of sub-economic thinking, he falls into another himself:

In any case, we all know that commercial advertising is not intended as an enquiry after truth: it is in general trying to make us want what we do not need, an endeavor which makes the economic world go round. If consumers suddenly decided that they would buy only what they needed, they would do more damage to the economy than whole skyscrapers full of bankers misappropriating shareholders’ funds!

Cute, maybe, but poorly thought out. Firstly he doesn't say what he means by "need" -- an important qualification. "Need" for what purpose? To live another minute, or something more? Maybe he knows what kind of good life we "need" things for, but he ought to have specified or provided a link. (Normally someone who tells me I don't "need" something wants to justify taking it from me...Dalrymple, at least, isn't thinking that way, though I wish he'd watch that kind of language.) Assuming he has something in mind -- bare survival to an average age of 35, say -- I have two answers for him.

The first is from King Lear:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady.
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm....

A perceptive thought from a man Dalrymple often recognizes as unsurpassed in his understanding of human nature. Humans as they are do not limit themselves to "need," and do not need anyone's advertising to persuade them to strive for much more.

My second response is indirectly from Jean-Baptiste Say -- who in turn formulated it in response to an earlier brand of subeconomic thinking. (Into which Dalrymple seems to be falling.) The economic world does not go 'round because we're overproducing stuff that advertising tricks us into wanting (so that our failure to want it would be a terrible harm, and we're only one great moment of enlightenment from collapse); but by people's efforts to get what they want. If we decided, all together, to acquire only what we "needed," we'd decide at the same time to produce only what we "needed" -- and at the end of the adjustment (which might be quite a shock, I grant) the economy would tick along just fine.

Doubtless it would be an economy of extreme poverty, and probably support only smaller populations - maybe built around some kind of subsistence farming, or maybe less than that - but in the world he hypothesizes, so what? No one would mind. It would fit the "needs" of that society. Rousseau might've approved, and we'd have no worries about who practices science...which, presumably, we would not "need" at all.

Iss a puzzlement

The central banks try to figure it out:

"Overall, it is hard to avoid the sense of a puzzling disconnect between the markets' buoyancy and underlying economic developments globally," the report read.

My husband adds:   "It is almost as if the true price of money has been obscured, but that's crazy talk."

The week in pictures

Powerline's week in pictures is always good.  This one adds two good short videos.

The cartoon is tailor-made for our resident philosophers, in case they're planning on a family road trip this summer:

Friday Night AMV

You gotta swing the bat.

So you want to be a moderate

Zero Hedge has an application form for Syrian rebels to fill out.

Complete the following sentence. “American weapons are…”

A) Always a good thing to randomly add to any international hot spot 

B) Exactly what this raging civil war has been missing for the past three years 

C) Best when used moderately 

D) Super easy to resell online

Homesickness

The magic of crowd-sourcing

A Project Gutenberg pen-pal from Spain solved the mystery:  the song was released on a 45 in 1973 or 1974 entitled "Tubular Bells," but the tune I remembered was Side B, also (confusingly) entitled "Tubular Bells."



I remembered the tune very accurately, as it turns out--even the ornaments showed up towards the end--but I'd completely forgotten the background arpeggio except as a dim memory of a kind of rhythm.

I just can't say what a relief this is!  Now I want to go play with the noteflight score to put in the correct left-hand part.

Duffle Blog

The problem with the DB is that its articles so often sound plausible.

". . . the other 24% are comatose."

A new poll finds that 76% of Americans disbelieve the IRS story about the emails.  That includes 63% of Democrats.  And here's a new one:  the dog ate the EPA's subpoenaed emails, too.

This looks handy

A credit-card sized all-purpose tool called the "Grommet."

Doom Awaits You, IRS

Why such uniformity of opinion on the matter? It might have something to do with the fact that no one believes the IRS accidentally lost their email records as the result of a cascading computer failure which the agency remedied by simply throwing the affected hardware away. When asked if they "believe the IRS that the emails were destroyed accidentally," or "they were destroyed deliberately," 76 percent of survey respondents said the latter. Only 11 percent of independents, 5 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent of Democrats managed to convince themselves that the IRS's story was possible, if not likely.

Past due, really. The man was right: a jury, even a jury of public opinion, has every right to conclude that the evidence destroyed was probably not good for the IRS.

Violence and its discontents

From Ricochet:

Kevin [Williamson]’s mistake was stating the biological fact that Laverne Cox is a man. As my new allies inform me, this is hateful and indeed “violence” against transgendered people. I blame kindergarten teachers who have for years trained children to “use their words” as opposed to violence, when apparently, there is no distinction to be drawn between the two.

Anyone who read "Anthem" in his/her/their/xyr youth will remember the fictional society's abolition of the pronoun "I" and the requirement that each persyn self-refer as "we."

Unclear on the concept

More from Maggie's Farm, linking the NY Post:

The New York City Department of Education employs a full-time director of homeschooling to manage the Big Apple’s roughly 4,000 homeschooling families.

Well, as long as a government employee is still drawing a paycheck.

Goals for marriage

The NY Post examines divorce trends in the U.S.  As Cassandra often has reported to us, women have been the primary instigators for a while, but socio-economic clout correlates strongly with staying married:

In the 1970s, when divorce skyrocketed, Wilcox says, many researchers expected that the upper classes would be worst hit.

The sexual revolution seemed to free them from the social strictures of marriage.  Hope for the future of the American family rested on those middle and even lower classes in the heartland.

In fact, the exact opposite has proved true.  Marriage is thriving among the wealthy and educated.

“Who would have thought elites would have devoted themselves maniacally to their children’s success?” asks Wilcox.

It seems as though marriage does well when it is a vehicle for something else — whether that’s making sure your children have food on the table or that they get into an Ivy League school.

Marriage does well when it is a vehicle for "something else"--than the "Cinderella romance" addressed by the article.  Who'da thought.

The author wonders whether women are abandoning marriages because their husbands are maladroit geeks and grubby slackers.  My husband has been remarkably patient with my maladroit geekiness and grubby slackerdom.

"A question foremost on everyone's lips"

An article summarizing trends in the Guardian quotes the burning issues posed by the thinking class, including the exasperation of a professional lesbian over the growing interest in same-sex marriage.  Who needs marriage, anyway?  "Same-sex marriage fits comfortably within the conservative ideology of the self-sufficient family and contributes to the politics of state austerity."  Totally, and what's more:

"Isn’t marriage merely a clever ploy to keep us quiet about the trickier issues such as the deportation of lesbian asylum seekers?"

The scales have fallen from my eyes.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

The Death of the Ugly

Eli Wallach has died.

Only think

Reading about the New York Times's account of the failed negotiations for a status-of-forces agreement in Iraq call irresistibly to mind this passage from "Sense and Sensibility":

Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters.  To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. . . .

"It was my father's last request to me," replied her husband, "that I should assist his widow and daughters."

"He did not know what he was talking off, I dare say; ten to one but he was light-headed at the time.  Had he been in his right senses, he could not have thought of such a thing as begging you to give away half your fortune from your own child."

"He did not stipulate for any particular sum, my dear Fanny; he only requested me, in general terms, to assist them, and make their situation more comfortable than it was in his power to do.  Perhaps it would have been as well if he had left it wholly to myself.  He could hardly suppose I should neglect them.  But as he required the promise, I could not do less than give it; at least I thought so at the time.  The promise, therefore, was given, and must be performed.  Something must be done for them whenever they leave Norland and settle in a new home."

"Well, then, let something be done for them; but that something need not be three thousand pounds.  Consider," she added, "that when the money is once parted with, it never can return.  Your sisters will marry, and it will be gone for ever.  If, indeed, it could be restored to our poor little boy--"

"Why, to be sure," said her husband, very gravely, "that would make great difference.  The time may come when Harry will regret that so large a sum was parted with.  If he should have a numerous family, for instance, it would be a very convenient addition."

"To be sure it would."

"Perhaps, then, it would be better for all parties, if the sum were diminished one half.  Five hundred pounds would be a prodigious increase to their fortunes!"

"Oh! beyond anything great!  What brother on earth would do half so much for his sisters, even if really his sisters!  And as it is--only half blood!--But you have such a generous spirit!"

"I would not wish to do anything mean," he replied.  "One had rather, on such occasions, do too much than too little.  No one, at least, can think I have not done enough for them: even themselves, they can hardly expect more."

"There is no knowing what they may expect," said the lady, "but we are not to think of their expectations: the question is, what you can afford to do."

"Certainly; and I think I may afford to give them five hundred pounds apiece.  As it is, without any addition of mine, they will each have about three thousand pounds on their mother's death--a very comfortable fortune for any young woman."

"To be sure it is; and, indeed, it strikes me that they can want no addition at all.  They will have ten thousand pounds divided amongst them.  If they marry, they will be sure of doing well, and if they do not, they may all live very comfortably together on the interest of ten thousand pounds."

"That is very true, and, therefore, I do not know whether, upon the whole, it would not be more advisable to do something for their mother while she lives, rather than for them- something of the annuity kind I mean.  My sisters would feel the good effects of it as well as herself.  A hundred a year would make them all perfectly comfortable."

His wife hesitated a little, however, in giving her consent to this plan.

"To be sure," said she, "it is better than parting with fifteen hundred pounds at once.  But, then, if Mrs. Dashwood should live fifteen years, we shall be completely taken in."

"Fifteen years! my dear Fanny; her life cannot be worth half that purchase."

"Certainly not; but if you observe, people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty.  An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it.  You are not aware of what you are doing.  I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father's will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it.  Twice every year these annuities were to be paid; and then there was the trouble of getting it to them; and then one of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such thing.  My mother was quite sick of it.  Her income was not her own, she said, with such perpetual claims on it; and it was the more unkind in my father, because, otherwise, the money would have been entirely at my mother's disposal, without any restriction whatever.  It has given me such an abhorrence of annuities, that I am sure I would not pin myself down to the payment of one for all the world."

"It is certainly an unpleasant thing," replied Mr. Dashwood, "to have those kind of yearly drains on one's income.  One's fortune, as your mother justly says, is not one's own.  To be tied down to the regular payment of such a sum, on every rent-day, is by no means desirable: it takes away one's independence."

"Undoubtedly; and, after all, you have no thanks for it.  They think themselves secure; you do no more than what is expected, and it raises no gratitude at all.  If I were you, whatever I did should be done at my own discretion entirely.  I would not bind myself to allow them anything yearly.  It may be very inconvenient some years to spare a hundred, or even fifty pounds from our own expenses."

"I believe you are right, my love; it will be better that there should by no annuity in the case: whatever I may give them occasionally will be of far greater assistance than a yearly allowance, because they would only enlarge their style of living if they felt sure of a larger income, and would not be sixpence the richer for it at the end of the year.  It will certainly be much the best way.  A present of fifty pounds, now and then, will prevent their ever being distressed for money, and will, I think, be amply discharging my promise to my father."

"To be sure it will.  Indeed, to say the truth, I am convinced within myself that your father had no idea of your giving them any money at all.  The assistance he thought of, I dare say, was only such as might be reasonably expected of you; for instance, such as looking out for a comfortable small house for them, helping them to move their things, and sending them presents of fish and game, and so forth, whenever they are in season.  I'll lay my life that he meant nothing farther; indeed, it would be very strange and unreasonable if he did.  Do but consider, my dear Mr. Dashwood, how excessively comfortable your mother-in-law and her daughters may live on the interest of seven thousand pounds, besides the thousand pounds belonging to each of the girls, which brings them in fifty pounds a year apiece, and, of course, they will pay their mother for their board out of it.  Altogether, they will have five hundred a year amongst them, and what on earth can four women want for more than that?--They will live so cheap!  Their house-keeping will be nothing at all.  They will have no carriage, no horses, and hardly any servants; they will keep no company, and can have no expenses of any kind!  Only conceive how comfortable they will be!  Five hundred a year!  I am sure I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it; and as to your giving them more, it is quite absurd to think of it.  They will be much more able to give you something."

"Upon my word," said Mr. Dashwood, "I believe you are perfectly right.  My father certainly could mean nothing more by his request to me than what you say.  I clearly understand it now, and I will strictly fulfil my engagement by such acts of assistance and kindness to them as you have described.  When my mother removes into another house my services shall be readily given to accommodate her as far as I can.  Some little present of furniture too may be acceptable then."

. . .

This argument was irresistible.  It gave to his intentions whatever of decision was wanting before; and he finally resolved, that it would be absolutely unnecessary, if not highly indecorous, to do more for the widow and children of his father than such kind of neighborly acts as his own wife pointed out.

Beethoven!

Gary Oldman apparently decided to reprise his famous role in The Professional while giving an interview to Playboy -- this time in words, rather than with a shotgun.

Well, I hear the hangovers get worse as you get older. Twenty years ago, blow apart a whole family on the silver screen, nobody bats an eye. Now, speak some disapproved words....

Musical question

I liked an instrumental song that was on the radio long ago, I'm thinking the 70s, whose name I can't recall.  I've heard that there are apps now that will let you hum a tune into your phone and get an i.d.  Pretty cool app, but either this song isn't in my memory or I couldn't produce it faithfully enough with a hum.  Then I found an app that will let me hum a tune into my laptop and see it rendered into musical notation.  Now, that is extremely handy!  It does a pretty good job of dealing with the time signatures, but it has a hard time understand where the measures are supposed to start.  Also, this song had some tricky little ornaments that I couldn't sing quickly and accurately enough.  Not daunted, I found a third site with some interactive software that let me type in notes on a staff and fiddle with the lengths of each note.  Then I could hit play and hear how it worked out.  I think you guys can go to this site and hit "play" at the bottom left and hear it, too, so I'm hoping someone will recognize it and remember the title or the artist.

Diamond stars

I'd really like to hear from James whether this is for real or kind of flaky.

Bannockburn, Day II: The Great Battle

Today we celebrate the 700th anniversary of the pivotal battle of the Bannockburn. It turned the course of the Scottish War of Independence against the English for a generation, and set the stage for Robert the Bruce to bring the Scots to full independence before his death. Out of this war would come the Declaration of Arbroath, one of the first times that a people asserted to the Pope that they would insist upon a right of elective kingship: to support the man God sent to be king only so long as he did his duty in protecting their liberty and rights, and to drive him out and choose another if he failed this duty.

The short version of this story is as follows: the English army under Edward II had to relieve Stirling Castle by a certain deadline, or the castle would surrender to the Scottish King, Robert the Bruce. This was not because the castle was starving, or being ravaged by disease. It was a gentleman's agreement to avoid the slaughter associated either with reducing the place by storm, or starving the troops. The keeper of the fortress was a gentleman, and Edward knew he was going to keep his word and surrender if not relieved. So the English army was in a hurry.

Robert the Bruce was there in force, so Edward brought heavy cavalry in large numbers, as well as infantry and longbowmen. The Scottish cavalry was not in any sense the equal to the English cavalry, as you know if you followed last night's link and read Froissart's account of the Scottish way of warfare in the period. The English army was far larger, perhaps as many as ten thousand men larger. Edward intended to force his way to the castle's relief by main strength.

Now Edward I had been a very great king, not just cunning but wise in the ways of strategy and propaganda. His son, Edward II, was not the man his father was. Robert the Bruce had been in this fight since the days of the father, and had developed a keen sense for both strategy and tactics. In addition, as last night's story of his personal combat shows, he was a knight of great personal prowess.

Yesterday's story was about how the English sought to slip a vanguard past the Scottish lines, which would have allowed them to fix the Scottish position so as to allow the English army to cross in safety, and engage the Scots in good order at a place of their choice. The vanguard was repulsed, killed, or captured. The English thus had to try to cross the Bannock Burn without that security. They were fearful about this, because it was in the midst of just such a maneuver that William Wallace had destroyed their army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

Edward elected to cross at night, in the hopes that the crossing might be effected before the Scots knew of it. In this he was successful, but a consequence of his success was that his army had to encamp against the river as it crossed. If they had pushed further in, to secure better ground for a stand, they might have alerted Scottish scouts.

Thus on the morning of the 24th of June, 1314, word came to Robert the Bruce that the English had crossed the river and were tightly encamped among the wetlands on the shore. The Scottish King knew his cavalry could not stand against them, but he recognized he had a substantial advantage if he could trap them in that boggy ground. So he ordered the cavalry to find and disperse the English archers, in order to cover the approach of his foot. These were arranged in a kind of infantry formation known as a schiltron, similar in concept to the later Spanish tercio but oval: a formation chiefly of spearmen, to repel cavalry in the way we saw in last night's story, but with some axemen and others who could rush out of the formation and kill downed men.

Advancing these formations to pin the English in the muck, Robert the Bruce was successfully covered in his approach by his cavalry's action against the English archers. The Scots advanced on the English camp, and it was then that Edward saw the formations suddenly stop and kneel. A friar went among them.

"Think you, will these Scots fight?" Edward had asked one of his knights a short time before.

"Ay, that will they," was the reply, "to the last."

But now, seeing them kneel, Edward cried out, "They kneel, they kneel; they ask for mercy."

"They do, my liege," was the answer, "but it is from God, and not from us."

The king ordered one of his Earls, a man he had recently accused of cowardice, to lead a charge to disperse the Scottish formations. The charge ended in the slaughter of the Earl's forces, and the Scots came on against the camp. Edward tried to deploy his longbowmen, which would have allowed him much the same effects we hope to get out of artillery today: to damage the Scottish formations' structure, but also to deny them the ability to advance over certain parts of the terrain that were under the danger of the longbows. Once more the Scottish cavalry, led by Sir Robert Keith, recognized the danger and dispersed the archers before they could form up to take action.

Edward then attempted to send his heavy cavalry, the knights who had accompanied him for this purpose. But in the narrow neck of land, made of boggy ground, the cavalry could not well come together for a charge, and could not well maneuver their heavy horses. When they came against the schiltrons, their unstable formations broke.

As the Scots advanced toward the English camp, news of the initial victories had spread back to the Scottish camp nearby. There bands of Highlanders -- irregular forces that Robert the Bruce did not wish to employ in the battle, because they would cause confusion and disorder -- heard the news that the English were being defeated, and came rushing in great numbers. The English, already discomfited, heard the warcries and saw the onrushing forces, and broke. But there was nowhere to retreat except through the river.

Edward II escaped, with the help of his picked men. He fled to Dunbar castle, where as quickly as possible he took ship for England. His retreat from the battlefield turned the English retreat into a rout. In the wake of the battle, the destruction of England's army in the north not only allowed Scottish raiders into England, but took so much pressure off Robert the Bruce that he was able to stage an invasion of Ireland, hoping to open a second front in the war on the Anglo-Norman kings.

Boom

But you know, he really does look pretty good in sunglasses.  Can't really blame the fanboys in the media.

Gospel music

It's not too early to start putting together our Christmas carol repertoire.  Tell me you can resist the idea of going door to door singing this little number in a quartet:



I've got this song on the indispensable six-CD set "Goodbye, Babylon," but it can also be found on the album "Death Might Be Your Santa Claus," available on iTunes, in case you're looking to spruce up your Christmas music collection.  Who could resist "Papa Ain't No Santa Claus (Mama Ain't No Christmas Tree"?

On a milder note:



And abandoning the carol theme altogether:



And to finish up, something to dance to:



I was going to include "Jesus Dropped the Charges," but really, the title says it all, and the music is almost a disappointment.

Everything is under control

Did the takeover of Mosul come out of the blue?

The Kurds became especially alarmed at signs that ISIS had already formed a shadow government in Mosul, weeks before initiating the carefully planned takeover of the city 10 days ago.  According to the same Kurdish military sources it was accomplished with ease and without serious fighting after local Iraqi commanders agreed to withdraw.

The prime minister of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, Nechirvan Barzani, says he warned Baghdad and the United States months ago about the threat ISIS posed to Iraq and the group’s plan to launch an insurgency across Iraq.  The Kurds even offered to participate in a joint military operation with Baghdad against the jihadists.

Washington didn’t respond—a claim that will fuel Republican charges that the Obama administration has been dangerously disengaged from the Middle East.  Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki dismissed the warnings, saying everything was under control.

Alternative forms of commerce

I'm all in favor of whatever kind of exchange leaves both parties to the transaction satisfied enough to complete it, but this is a little weird.

"In Fact I'm Glad You Mentioned It."

Apparently prosecutors make good Congressmen sometimes -- especially in the face of corrupt officials. Trey Gowdy raises an important legal point, and then turns the IRS's defense into an invitation to consider what criminal charges ought to be brought against them.



I love hearing an IRS official stating that he doesn't need to know the law, because you can use "common sense" to know what's right. Yes, in theory, that's how it ought to be. The law ought to line up with common sense, such that an ordinary person need not be a lawyer in order to know how to behave in a fashion that is both moral and lawful. That is the only proper way to arrange a state, given the practical need of division of labor in an advanced economy: we can't train everyone as lawyers, because time and money for education are limited and we need most people to do other things. Therefore, the law should accord with the common sense, so that honest people can rely on the resources they can actually expect to have in order to be good citizens and avoid criminality.

Nothing could be further from the actual facts of how our Federal laws and regulations are ordered, however. How charming to see the defense -- which any court would reject were it raised by a citizen without legal training -- raised by a high official of a Federal regulatory agency who is himself a lawyer!