Further Considerations on Impeachment

Dr. Codevilla, who has written some thought-provoking pieces on American government in the recent past, has a new piece treating the history of the impeachment clause. Just what was it supposed to control?

Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, “contended that the legislature should have power to remove the Executive at pleasure.” Nobody agreed. Virginia’s George Mason expressed the general sentiment when he argued that, while “the fallibility” of electors and “the corruptibility of the man chosen” makes indispensable “some mode of displacing an unfit magistrate,” nevertheless he “opposed decidedly making the Executive the mere creature of the Legislature in violation of the fundamental principle of good government.” New York’s Gouverneur Morris agreed, but was wary, lest impeachment “render the Executive dependent on those who are to impeach.”

Having agreed to provide for the president’s impeachment, the question became how to define the occasions of it so as to prevent impeachment from becoming a mere tool of political control. Everyone agreed that “treason and bribery ” ought to be causes. But George Mason noted that “Treason as defined in the Constitution will not reach many great and dangerous offenses….He movd. to add after “bribery” “or maladministration.” Mr. Gerry seconded him. Virginia’s James Madison objected: “So vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.” Seeing the sense of that, “Col. Mason withdrew “maladministration” & substituted “other high crimes and misdemeanors”

Dr. Codevilla is worried that partisan politics have rendered this system nonfunctional, as recent Congresses have been unwilling to act to defend Congressional power per se if either house is controlled by the President's party. So in the Clinton administration we saw the House but not the Senate act in impeachment; now the House but not the Senate is suing to try to compel the President to keep his oath regarding 'the faithful execution of the law.' If Congress won't act to defend Congressional powers, but pursues partisan outcomes first and the Constitutional separation of powers second (if at all), the controls no longer function.

It turns out that Alexander Hamilton was worried about this at the time:

Alexander Hamilton warned that [nonpartisanship] would be in short supply. In Federalist 65 he wrote: “A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective.” That is because the “subjects of its jurisdiction…are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL… The prosecution of them…will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”

So it seems to have proven.

By the way, what constitutes "bribery," that offense which the Founders coupled with treason as a clear-cut case? The President spends very much of his time flying from one fundraiser to another.

Bank Run

Credibility is the currency, and sometimes currencies collapse:

This flouting of a U.S. red line by [the Republic of Georgia] might seem relatively inconsequential — Saakashvili, after all, is not under arrest but in Ukraine advising its new pro-Western government. But it is part of a larger trend. Ally after ally of the United States, including regimes that, like Georgia, depend heavily on Washington for military and economic aid, have begun openly defying the Obama administration and, in a few cases, deliberately humiliating its envoys.

Just in the last two months, Egypt sentenced three Al Jazeera journalists to long prison terms on flagrantly bogus charges the day after Secretary of State John F. Kerry announced that he had discussed their case with Cairo’s new strongman, Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi. Bahrain, the Persian Gulf host of the U.S. 5th Fleet, expelled the assistant secretary of state for human rights after he met with members of a legal opposition party. Even tiny Aruba, whose foreign policy is run by the Netherlands, blindsided Washington by releasing a senior Venezuelan general it had arrested on a U.S. drug trafficking warrant. Apparently, it was considered easier to offend the Obama administration than the Chavista regime in Caracas.

Then there is Thailand, a “major non-Nato ally” of the United States, where the army carried out a military coup against an elected government even though it knew U.S. law would mandate a cutoff of military aid; and Burma, which backtracked on political reform promises its president made personally to Obama last year.

“It’s like a bank run,” one congressional foreign policy staffer told me last week. An international consensus seems to have gelled that the United States can’t be counted on to uphold its commitments and red lines, even with allies; the result is a free for all that can be seen as much in the nose-thumbing of Georgia as in Israel’s high-profile rejection of U.S. diplomacy.

What if We Don't Want Anti-Poverty Programs?

A writer at no less than the National Review worries that the Deep South can't be trusted with Federalism, because states there don't tend to enact anti-poverty programs like other states do. He posits that this is because Southern Republicans are white and above-average in income, so that the constituents who vote for Southern governors and many legislators don't want to pay the taxes because they wouldn't benefit from the programs.

Yet even in the Solid South, the Republicans are not always in charge (and have only been in charge for a generation anyway: it was a Democratic stronghold through most of its history).

Did the Democrats who controlled legislatures in the Deep South, black and non-black, play any role at all in the creation and governance of anti-poverty programs? It seems important not to neglect this part of the story. Bouie references the history of the region: “In keeping with their histories as low-tax, low-service states,” Bouie writes, ”places like Alabama and Mississippi have aimed for the minimum, providing as little as possible to poorer residents.” To be sure, Bouie’s point isn’t exactly a partisan one. It could be that it’s not just Republicans in the Deep South who can’t be trusted with anti-poverty efforts, but rather all elected officials in the Deep South, including the Democrats, including the African-American Democrats, who controlled the legislature until relatively recently. (It’s also true that Republicans proved more competitive in races for governor in recent decades, and governors have a great deal of power.) This seems like a dispiriting conclusion to draw, particularly for those of us who have at least some faith in the public-spiritedness of southern lawmakers. Though I would concede that southern policymakers of the past have much to answer for, it seems excessive to discount even the possibility that future southern policymakers will learn from the mistakes of the past.

As a Southerner who has written quite a bit about concern for the poor and the working class in the South, let me suggest that perhaps you're missing the point. There's more than one way to use the government to help the poor and the working class. The Southern way has traditionally been to encourage business development (a tradition that dates to the Reconstruction-era "New South" programs of the Bourbon Democrats who ran the region before, during, and after the Civil War). This is not done by establishing programs that have to be funded by higher taxes, because taxes tend to cause businesses to flee or not to form at all. It is done through a combination of tax brakes and deregulation, that is, by making it cheaper and easier to run your business here. This is the standard wisdom, and it is why the South has been growing at the expense of the Rust Belt for quite a long time now.*

I'm not sure the wisdom is exactly correct, but it is at least partially correct. Having good work is an important part of any anti-poverty program. Where the South has flourished, around cities like Atlanta and Charlotte, it has done so in this way. By attracting major corporations and investors, you create an environment in which small business creation is also encouraged: some small businesses that support the corporations directly, and others that provide services to their employees (or, at a second order, services to people who provide services). I know a young man who recently quit his job at a business that does pressure-washing of trucks (on contract to Federal Express, Pepsi, and others) to take another job at a company that does trimming and cutting trees for subdivisions that house those who have come down during Atlanta's growth over the last several generations. He's working-class, uneducated but energetic and willing to do a hard day's work, and even this terrible economy has provided him with a couple of opportunities from which to choose.

Additionally, the South has not had a good experience with Federally-led anti-poverty programs. Where such programs have had flourishing enrollment, poverty has not declined, but morality has (as a writer at the National Review should know). This had led to a general degradation of the culture in those areas, as well as the people who become wrapped up in this culture of dependency. Where traditional moral structures have held strong, in spite of Federal enticements, rural poverty is not obviously worse yet people live better lives.

Where the Southern anti-poverty strategy falls down seems to me to be in three broad areas:

1) Federal intrusion: It can't defeat Federal regulations, which have badly hurt the working class -- especially the Obamacare regulations, which have lately turned most unskilled workers from full time employees into part-time employees, suppressed business growth and formation, and generally created an atmosphere in which it is harder to create work. Likewise it was very vulnerable to the disruption caused by the housing bubble, which was created in part by Federal regulations on mortgages that destabilized the risk market. No Southern legislature could pass a law countermanding the Federal law that mortgages be issued to people who probably couldn't pay for them, and if they had tried they would have been suspected (and accused) of being racially motivated for it. Yet it would have protected workers in the region from the vastly negative effects of the bubble's formation and collapse.

2) What do we do about people for whom jobs aren't the answer? This strategy gives workers a measure of independence by encouraging the formation of lots of job opportunities, which means that they can elect to move from one job to another. Thus, they aren't quite in the situation of having their lives dominated by a corporate master: they can go work for someone else. But what about those who are getting older and can't work as hard or as long (if they can find an other-than-part-time job, or enough of them); or who lack the resources to train for new skills; or who happen to lack the intelligence to be useful to anyone; or who have developed chronic illness; or, really, anyone else for whom employment isn't the answer? When new technologies alter the playing field for workers, how do we ensure they can adapt to it? What happens if we just need fewer workers because of technological changes -- what do we do about people who can't work though they would? We seem not to have a good set of answers here.

3) Corruption: National and international banks who are protected by lobbying relationships with the Feds are impossible to hold to account locally. Federalism is supposed to be our method of protection here -- it's supposed to provide a level of government that is better able to handle larger-scale actors who may be beyond the reach of a state. Instead it has been captured by the people it was supposed to regulate. The danger of the South's model is that it is inviting state-level corruption of the same kind that has already captured the Federal government. It is a short walk from offering tax breaks and fewer regulations to offering special protections from torts or lawsuits, or to structuring regulations in a way that actually allows bad behavior by the wealthy corporations you'd like to court.

Of these problems, only problem #2 even conceptually might be amenable to solutions of the type this author would like to see. Yet solutions of that type have failed -- see the links under 'such programs have had flourishing enrollment,' above. There isn't a general agreement about what the solutions ought to be in any case; and there's a balance to be achieved between any solution and the general strategy of encouraging the growth of the private sector.

So it could be that the reason there aren't more anti-poverty programs in the South is that the South doesn't want them. That doesn't mean there are no problems, and poverty is certainly a serious issue. It just means that we don't agree about how to address the issue or solve the problems. Government at any level isn't helpful if you don't know what you want it to do; and if you just start screwing around and trying things, you're apt to upset that general strategy of business development. We are only willing to do something that damages the general strategy in the rare case that it has come to command broad democratic agreement that the cost would be worth the benefits.

None of that has anything to do with race.

* This begs the question of why the South didn't grow instead of the Rust Belt, or begin its upswing earlier. After all, the policy is very old. The answer is partially one of infrastructure development: the South was deeply impoverished by the Civil War, and had less money for the infrastructure on which an industrial economy depended; impoverishment only got worse outside of the city centers, because the South's economic structure postwar was a cotton monoculture, which meant that the economic activity was wealth-extracting rather than wealth-creating from the perspective of the region. (It created lots of wealth for those down the line, who were buying cotton cheaper every year and turning it into finished products: but that was done outside the South.) Broad educational attainment was less for a long time for similar reasons, and an industrial worker must be basically educated.

Enemies

A thoughtful post from David Foster explores the mental gymnastics we sometimes engage in to tolerate the sins of our friends (and ourselves) and avoid the duty to forgive our real enemies.  It includes this passage from C.S. Lewis:

“All Christians know that they must forgive their enemies. But “my enemy” primarily means the man whom I am really tempted to hate…. If you listen to young Christian intellectuals talking, you will soon find out who their real enemy is.  He seems to have two names–Colonel Blimp and “the businessman.”  I suspect that the latter usually means the speaker’s father, but that is speculation.  What is certain is that in asking such people to forgive the Germans and Russians, and to open their eyes to the sins of England, you are asking them, not to mortify, but to indulge, their ruling passion.”

?-drive

Wired reports on a possible propellant-free drive that's confusing everyone.

Now you've done it

This forest worker discovers he's got a lifetime job rubbing Bambi's belly:



H/t Ace.

Inventory

The Daily Telegraph has a photo story showing reproduction kits for soldiers in English wars from 1066 until the present day. There's a real proliferation of gear starting in the middle of the 20th century.

Reading for the bar

More via Maggie's Farm:  It used to be commonplace to "read for the bar"--i.e., apprentice oneself to a practitioner rather than get a J.D.--but in recent decades the practice has all but disappeared.  It's a mystery why reading for the bar shouldn't be an excellent alternative.  Assuming the bar exam itself has any validity, why would we care how people learn to pass it?  Not everyone goes to an elite law school with a high bar pass rate, and yet we're comfortable handing out licenses to people from second-rate or third-rate schools as long as they're in the top portion of their class and can eke out a passing score on the bar exam.  It's not as though learning the law required expensive facilities or laboratories.  These days it doesn't even require a good law library, considering that absolutely anything a lawyer is likely to need can be found online.  I haven't done legal research in a book for decades.  There's some value in talking out legal principles in class with a good professor, but less than you might think, and anyway who says you'll have a good professor, outside of a handful of good schools?

This assumption that only an accredited school can disseminate professional knowledge is part of the attitude that denigrates home-schooling.  Judge by the results, sez I, not the trappings and the expensive salaries.  Clients are free to decide whether they want to hire a lawyer with a fancy degree, or just one who's proved he knows his stuff.

Moral non-equivalency, part two

Ted Cruz describes two hospitals.  One is used by Hamas as a human shield in a deliberate attempt to produce collateral damage to civilians for propaganda purposes.  The other:

Meanwhile in Israel, Ziv is a center for pediatric and orthopedic medicine. Given its proximity to Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria, Ziv has seen its share of violence, but despite taking direct rocket fire during the 2006 Lebanon war, it has remained in continuous operation.

During the past three years of the Syrian civil war, Ziv has treated more than 1,000 Syrians injured in that conflict — all free of charge. In a visit to Ziv this spring, I met the social worker whose job it is to explain to the patients who wake up grievously injured and surrounded by Israelis that they are not in hell, but that the people who they have been told from birth are the devil are, in fact, working very hard to heal them.

The experience is different for anyone who wakes up grievously injured and surrounded by Hamas.  Hamas, by the way, denies possession of the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped and dragged away during Hamas's almost immediate breach of the most recent ceasefire.  In fact, Hamas says it has "lost contact" with that unit altogether and assumes the entire unit, along with the Israeli soldier, were killed by Israeli bombardments.

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

#Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don't call us about it being down, we don't know when FB will be back up!
— Sgt. Brink (@LASDBrink) August 1, 2014

Sigh. H/t: Ranger Up.

Truthy fiction

The USDA shut down a small-town library's "seed library," citing concerns about corruption of the nation's precious bodily food supply.  The library would be permitted to keep a seed library (from which residents could withdraw seeds at the beginning of the planting season, and replace them with new seeds at the conclusion) only if it tested each sample for germination.  Which brings to mind Jim Gerraghty's well-reviewed new humorous novel, "The Weed Agency."

Senate rules

Yesterday the multi-billion program to keep the border wide open went down in flames in the Senate, for a surprising reason.  Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) first tried to crack open Harry Reid's no-amendment gambit to permit the Cruz amendment, which would have prohibited the President from carrying out his promise/threat to grant amnesty to 6 million or so illegal immigrants by executive order.  That vote failed, 43 yea/52 nay.  But Sessions wasn't done:  he raised a point of order that the expensive program violated the pay-as-you-go rules, because its cost was balanced by neither spending cuts nor tax increases.  The vote to waive Sessions' point of order, which would have required a 60-vote majority to succeed, received only a 50 yea/44 nay vote.

No Surprise: Latest QDR Too Weak For Global Role

It's a feature not a bug, if you want America to decline in global importance and assume a more humble role.  Of course, the question is:  who will fill the gaps?  Iran?  ISIS?  Or someone else?

The panel’s report said the past several years of budget cuts and mandated reduction in personnel and weapons have stirred deep unease among allies who would count on the U.S. in a crisis.

“Not only have they caused significant investment shortfalls in U.S. military readiness and both present and future capabilities, they have prompted our current and potential allies and adversaries to question our commitment and resolve,” the report said. “Unless reversed, these shortfalls will lead to a high-risk force in the near future. That in turn will lead to an America that is not only less secure but also far less prosperous. In this sense, these cuts are ultimately self-defeating.”

Exactly! Nobody else could defeat us, so if America was to be defeated on the world stage, we had to do it ourselves.

The Sentimental Answer May Not Be the Truthful One

This morning on the way to work, I heard an ABC News report out of Gaza. The reporter was listening to a couple of Palestinian women rant about the war, one saying "we should kill Israeli women and children" (she thinks they haven't been?), and another claiming to be tired of it all...In an effort to seem even-handed and humane, no doubt, the reporter ended by saying the real question was "how to explain war to bewildered children." (Paraphrasing from memory.) She didn't back that statement up with any witnesses. If she'd investigated, she'd've found that explaining war to children is easy...especially if those children are boys. Simply have schools and a community that teach them the national myth, the dominant religion, or both...just as the Palestinians do (and Israelis too). Then a ready explanation will come to them.

(Is that a good explanation or a truthful understanding? Separate question, and the answer differs from myth to myth. But neither Palestinians nor most peoples in the world...outside of modern-day Americans...are at a loss for an answer, the way that reporter was.)

Justice

The man who killed my neighbors' grandson appeared in court yesterday, almost a year after the fatal accident, to accept a plea.  The sentence is sixteen years on two or more counts.  Because the sentences will run concurrently, he is likely to serve 90% of the sentence.

Certainly the last parole did not work out well.  This was no freak accident resulting from bad luck or a split-second loss of attention.  Several cars had called in reports of a dangerous, weaving driver in the minutes before the wreck.  There were reports that he had been up all night on meth while on a "fishing trip" with his girlfriend, her child, and his own two children; on the return trip he furiously refused to relinquish the wheel.  Despite his criminal record, he had a good job and a real chance of turning his life around.  Instead it all went up in smoke.

The family were told that normally two or three people show up at a plea-bargain hearing.  Yesterday thirty people appeared for the victims, including police officers from the scene, marshals who retrieved the defendant from Arkansas after he jumped bail, and the family of the two people he killed and the half dozen (including five children) that he injured very seriously.  No one appeared for the defendant, who was hauled off to Huntsville prison at the conclusion of the hearing.

Several people gave victim impact statements.  My neighbor said that the judge frequently brought out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes.  I have never seen a judge in tears.  There is something oddly touching about this official, but human, acknowledgement of the family's pain.

Competition and innovation

Mark Perry is an Uber fan.  He loves to chronicle the desperate fight of the taxi cartels to protect themselves from competition, and the innovations that Uber keeps introducing to delight its growing customer base.  In a local fight, the taxi cartels often seem to have the upper hand, with their crony-capitalist lock on protectionism.  What happens when Uber ignores all that and exploits two big advantages:  the willingness to innovate in the areas that are important to their customers, rather than to the entrenched taxi/city power bases, and the ability to coordinate over large geographical areas rather than to tighten their maniacal grip on a local monopoly?

Update:  an oddly absorbing site that shows a New York taxi's typical workday, mostly centered on Manhattan trips.

Invisible antlers

I've always been a little confused by the "male display" explanation for elaborate feathers and antlers and so on. What have they got to do with real survival capability? Why is it a winning evolutionary strategy for females to be impressed? But for whatever reason, they seem to work, unless there's another explanation for their natural selection. Anyway, it's fascinating to see that male beaked whales may have internal antlers that are invisible except to echo-locating females of the species:

These inner structures don’t wreck the whales’ streamlined bodies, as horns or external ornaments surely would. That’s important given how frequently they dive. With internal antlers, they could get the advertising space of a bus and the profile of a Ferrari at the same time.

Market-based medicine

Oklahoma public employees have saved a boatload of money by using a surgery center devoted to price transparency and consumer choice:

Unlike most other medical providers, the Surgery Center of Oklahoma actually posts transparent pricing and offers deeply-discounted, payable-in-advance, cash-only medical procedures. The center does accept private insurance, but it does not accept Medicaid or Medicare — government regulations won’t allow them to post transparent prices online.

Sometimes the Guns Come Out

Mark Steyn links us to a reminder of the nature of government.

Man Shot, Paralyzed Over 31 Unpaid Parking Tickets.

A matter we were discussing at Cassandra's a couple of weeks back: Statists love to pretend that government isn't force, doesn't work through force, and oughtn't to be morally analyzed as force. The first political speech I remember a line from...I mean, I remember hearing it at the time...was Bruce Babbitt addressing a group of schoolkids in the 1988 primaries. I paraphrase: "The Republicans will tell you to be afraid of government. Don't be. Government is us." Or there's the even more repulsive formulation of Barney Frank: "Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together." (Go do 'em to yourself, Barney, thanks very much.)

If the city government wants a tax for parking, or to control where you park...and you don't obey, and pretend the taxes don't apply to you...sooner or later, there's a man with a gun to enforce it. Most of the time we obey and the guns don't come out. But sometimes they do and they're always there. If it oughtn't to be done with guns -- government oughtn't to be doing it at all.

Is it worth pointing a gun to collect city tax and control city parking? I think so...though the traffic cops of Hanoi, if they exist, may not agree[1]. No police force, cars parked wherever urban barbarians want them...this would be less safe yet than having the Pennsylvania State Constables on the prowl. I have a hard time accepting the moral order of the dueling culture, when people pointed guns to enforce simple good manners. (But Grim might talk me around on that one before it's all through.) Wherever we draw that line, though, let's never forget what it really is, and the moral angle of government security, government charity, government culture, or government anything.

[1] Michael Totten's first dispatch from Vietnam is excellent reading and heartwarming, and says some fine things about what humans can do after being crushed by tyranny. You should be reading that instead of me.

Theodore VanKirk

...the last survivor of the Enola Gay's crew, has died. I was glad to read he lived a full life after his service ended, went on to a long career as a chemical engineer, kept his mind sharp, and died peacefully.

The event calls for reflection, of just the kind you've been doing, and that Grim's done before. For World War II was the last U.S. war that ended before the Geneva Conventions of 1948 (the centerpiece of the modern jus in bello) and the U.N. Charter (the centerpiece of the modern jus ad bellum) went into effect. And with it the radical new idea that civilians..."persons taking no active part in the hostilities...no matter what kind of war it was, or between whom...were simply immune as targets. (Jean Pictet's commentary on Common Article 3, which you can get here, describes it as an "almost unhoped-for" extension of common article 2...designed to apply even to civil wars or insurrections, to the savage as well as the civilized.

Islamic radicals sometimes defend 9/11 with a tu quoque...."What about Hiroshima?" There are several answers, but one of them is: "The law changed after that. We wouldn't be allowed to do that now; and by agreement and by custom, neither can anyone else." If you're much younger than VanKirk, older wars feel wrong...punitive expeditions, attacking villages, sacking towns, the jubilation at Marchin' Through Georgia...it feels like something that doesn't belong in war. Yet that is an ancient norm, and it is the modern standard that's in its experimental stage.

Problem is, the experiment may be failing.

Unsurprisingly, John Derbyshire's over a decade ahead of me on that, on the attitude adjustment that a violent people can show when they're well and truly crushed...in this column he takes it further, looking at the different ways a nation can view military defeat, from "total denial" through dolchstosslegende all the way to "full repentance." And then noticing that the more the civilian population suffered in the war, the closer they came to "full repentance"...and, more importantly, to fighting no more wars. It's a decently robust if not perfect model. He notes many examples from the 19th and 20th centuries. I notice it broadly fits the Jewish Wars of the Roman Empire. After the third one was mercilessly crushed, says this, "Jewish messianism was abstracted and spiritualized" -- as well it might be; eternal spiritual truths do have a way of bending to fit the facts on the ground -- and the Jewish leader was vilified in the Talmud. The Scottish suppression was brutal in a lesser way...but also effective. There really was peace tho' Jamie never came hame.

I don't think this comes through a cold calculation (as in the reasoning of Grim's excellent Blackfive post), but more likely through evolved instinct. Every man can talk about fighting to the last...but we're not descended from the men who did. Neither are we descended from the men who caved at the first attack. Thus: a little violence inspires revenge; a lot of it brings submission and peace. It's been made a joke and a funny one...because of the grim truth behind it. Their hands tied by the modern law of war, the Israelis get the worst of all worlds. They get the reputation of Genghis Khan or Tamurlane, and draw as much hatred as they did if not more...but they don't get the security that real brutality might've brought them long ago (and Genghis Khan is a national hero in Mongolia, and got respectful treatment in my elementary school history books; and Tamurlane is still admired at least in some parts of Afghanistan). Israel itself is just as old as the Geneva regime; a citadel of advanced civilization born in the year war was to be civilized, and has suffered ever since from that very fact.

Terrorism lives in that safe space created by the modern order. Terrorism isn't new, as you all know well. The Sicarii were practicing a version in Palestine not too long after Jesus. But the Romans of that era were quite capable of treating a city the way a strategic bombing raid could, only up close and personal, with sword and spear. Hiding behind children only works while the enemy's not willing to target them. And that wasn't a good assumption back then.

Supposing Palestinians continue as a UN-welfare population full of frustrated young men, and the Israelis remain addicted to life, so that the attacks never cease...will Israelis forever hold their hands, if it means dying for their principles?

I don't know. But as I said -- they're not descended from men who did.

Apparently Successfully

So the next challenge is... how to regain respect?

The Wonders of the Internet

Allapundit at Hot Air tagged his recent collection of quotes on a resurgent Anti-Semitism "the socialism of fools," and I had not heard the expression (although it was easy to guess the antecedent, not only from the context but because the two movements made such similar arguments in the 19th century). I searched to see who had said it originally, and from there was drawn to read about Königstein Fortress, where the original socialist was imprisoned for a time. Along the way I discovered that it had held not only state prisoners, but the greatest wine barrel in human history:

From 1722 to 1725, at the behest of August the Strong, coopers under Böttger built the enormous Königstein Wine Barrel (Königsteiner Weinfass), the greatest wine barrel in the world, in the cellar of the Magdalenenburg which had a capacity of 249,838 litres. It cost 8,230 thalers, 18 groschen and 9 pfennigs. The butt, which was once completely filled with country wine from the Meißen vineyards, had to be removed again in 1818 due to its poor condition.

That's just over 66,000 gallons, which at a quart per person per day would last a family of four for 180 years -- longer than the barrel itself lasted.

Moral non-relativism

From Sam Harris via Bookworm Room:

Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. . . . The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants.

Hamas is not just a rogue terrorist organization.  It was elected.

Keep it simple

Gavin McInnes advises hewing to tradition unless you've got a much better idea.  In marriage, we're allowed to alter the gender-role rules slightly to take reality into account, as long as we don't go too crazy:

If a woman is conservative in some duties, she should be liberal in others. To the non-married much of this talk will sound like rape. There is no such thing in marriage. It’s more like if your sibling was a vampire. If things got really bad, you’d cut yourself so he could eat.

100 Years ago today...

...the middle ages ended. The Empire of Austria-Hungary, with a pedigree stretching back nearly 1000 years, (remember that the Duchy of Austria was created by Emperor Otto III in AD 996, the Kingdom of Hungary in AD1000), declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia (established AD1217, conquered by the Ottomans in AD1459, and reestablished in AD1882), and starting the first world war.

By 1918, Three of the 4 big monarchies in Europe, Austria, Russia, and Germany, were gone. The British survived, but began to yield it's global supremacy to the USA.

The old European civilization, and it's notions of societal order, hierarchy, and supremacy,  were all overthrown.

And while it took another world war to completely settle the matter (and get rid of even more of the remaining monarchies in Europe), the die had been cast, and there was no going back.

The war's effects are still being felt today, most obviously in the middle east and the Ukraine.

There's A Small Problem With This Idea...

Let's see if we can spot it.

“Radical regulations strangle small business and increase the costs for hard-working taxpayers,” said Congressman Scalise. “This much-needed legislation makes unelected bureaucrats think twice before proposing job-killing rules and regulations by increasing transparency and accountability. If our economy is ever to recover from six years of the president’s failed economic policies, we must rein in the out of control costs of this Administration’s radical regulations. I applaud Congressman Collins for joining me in introducing this bill and for being a leader in the House on holding this Administration accountable.”

“Our federal budget tells Americans how much money the government spends. The national Regulatory Budget would tell them how much the government is really costing them,” Congressman Collins said. “Too many regulations, however they were intended, cost hardworking Americans in money and in opportunity. We can’t bring about reform and relief if we can’t identify the roots of the regulatory burden, and this is a straightforward and transparent way to do that. Congressman Scalise is a trusted leader on regulatory reform and I know with his leadership, we can get this moving.”

“Regulations are another impediment to investment. For free enterprise to work, it needs a reasonable regulatory system that ensures safety, protects consumers and achieves fair competition,” said U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Putting the federal government on a National Regulatory Budget will help restrain the job-killing impulses of regulators and reduce obstacles to innovation that creates jobs."

So far, so good. What's your plan for addressing it?

Specifically, the National Regulatory Budget Act would establish the Office of Regulatory Analysis (OAR), which would be required to provide an annual regulatory analysis of federal rules for the upcoming fiscal year and their estimated cost on the economy. The legislation also creates a National Regulatory Budget, which allows Congress to set a cap on the total economic cost of new federal regulations to be implemented in the coming fiscal year. Congress would also set caps on the regulatory cost allowed by individual agencies.

The legislation requires that all newly proposed regulations receive an OAR estimate before being implemented. Agencies that fail to comply with the OAR will be subject to a 0.5 percent reduction in their appropriation based on their previous budget amount.

The solution you propose is to establish yet another Federal agency?

Failure to comply with which means a half-percent cut in appropriations?

Back to the drawing board, boys.

Perhaps You Have Never Heard of John Kerry

The Times of Israel has a piece called "John Kerry: The Betrayal."

It seemed inconceivable that the secretary’s initiative would specify the need to address Hamas’s demands for a lifting of the siege of Gaza, as though Hamas were a legitimate injured party acting in the interests of the people of Gaza — rather than the terror group that violently seized control of the Strip in 2007, diverted Gaza’s resources to its war effort against Israel, and could be relied upon to exploit any lifting of the “siege” in order to import yet more devastating weaponry with which to kill Israelis.

Israel and the US are meant to be allies; the US is meant to be committed to the protection of Israel in this most ruthless of neighborhoods; together, the US and Israel are meant to be trying to marginalize the murderous Islamic extremism that threatens the free world. Yet....

I can understand your confusion. The Secretary of State is the position of highest honor in the United States government, the highest-ranking position that is appointed instead of elected. Now any demagogue can get elected; but to be appointed the head diplomat, whose word speaks for the nation, is to be entrusted with a position of extraordinary honor.

Nevertheless, you must understand, this is John Kerry. This is a man who swore he had seen and participated in great crimes of war in Vietnam, which he was obligated to report to his chain of command: but he made no such reports. So he is either a criminal of the worst kind, a murderer most foul who broke his nation's most sacred laws against his sworn oath as an officer; or he is a liar who has slandered his brothers in arms, for personal advantage.

Either way, by his own words he deserves a scoundrel's death. Instead he has been elevated to the position of highest honor in our nation's government. That is our fault. I can understand your confusion. I can. It should never have been this way.

The military-industrial complex

In 1798, we scarcely had one, or even an ordinary industrial complex.  Something I didn't know about Eli Whitney was that his famous cotton-engine, or "gin," was a bit of a financial bust; patent protection was hit-or-miss back then, and the idea was easily appropriated by an enthusiastic public.  Broke, he managed to finagle a defense contract with an uneasy young U.S. government for 10,000 muskets.  He used the progress payments to set up a new kind of factory from scratch, not yet owning so much as the mill he intended to use to power it.  He held off his nervous government contact for years, until four months after the original due date, with reports of how he was assembling a team of workers and first building the tools that would facilitate the new steam-powered assembly process.  Then he blew his client away with a demonstration of interchangeable parts:

[In January 1801,] Whitney made his entry into a room of dignitaries in blue coats, knee breeches and silk hose, assembled most likely in the newly occupied president's mansion. He took a large box with him and laid out its contents on a table. It was not a musket but all sorts of anticlimactic bits and pieces--or so it seemed for a few moments. Then he surprised the observers, including [his original mentor's] more skeptical successor, by quickly assembling the bits into fine new muskets. He picked apparently at random among ten different firelocks and with a screwdriver fitted them to ten muskets. On the testimony of Thomas Jefferson, he also assembled the actual firelock mechanism from a random selection of the internal pieces (tumbler, sear, hammer, lock plate, etc.), a far more impressive accomplishment, since it was the most delicately calibrated part of the weapon. In a letter introducing "Mr. Whitney of Connecticut, a mechanic of the first order of ingenuity," Jefferson told Virginia's governor, James Monroe: "He has invented molds and machines for making all the pieces of his locks so exactly equal that take 100 locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first piece that comes to hand. This is of importance in repairing, because out of ten locks e.g. disabled for want of different pieces, 9 good locks may be put together without employing a smith."

"They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators," by Harold Evans, Gail Buckland, and David Lefer.

X-ray vision

It's not a matter of making things transparent, just of routing the information from cameras to a helmet.  Pilots will be able to look around, even straight down through the aircraft, and "see" what the skin of the aircraft "sees."

The cost of going bare

This is the first article I've ever found with hard numbers and analysis of the real cost of medical care, including how it's borne by a combination of consumers, taxpayers, and providers in the absence of health insurance.  I know you'll be shocked to learn that the ACA's solution of universal expensive subsidized coverage makes absolutely no sense, regardless of whether you're concerned about medical bankruptcy, erosion of life expectancy among the uninsured, the profit margin of doctors and hospitals, or the burden on taxpayers.  On the subject of life expectancy, by the way, we'd all do better to stay married, go to college, lose weight, and quit smoking--all of which are at least as effective as being insured, if not much more so.

There's an idea

From a Korean history I'm proofreading:

One of this king's most interesting edicts was in connection with the census. Having ordered a numbering of the people, he found that objections were raised, because it would mean a more systematic and thorough collection of taxes. So he put forth the edict that whenever murder occurred, if the murdered man's name was not on the list of tax payers, the murderer would be immediately pardoned. Of course everybody hastened to get their names on the books and to let it be known.

Looking familiar

Demagogues have no trouble employing the ideology of identity politics to stir up a sense of grievance against the festering injustice that is Amerika. What's odd is that they're comfortable doing so in support of people who want to get to Amerika because their own cultures have failed, and that they're using the favorite tropes of fascism to do it:

Does Representative Gutierrez have any notion that the reason why tens of thousands of what he refers to as “our people” are risking their lives to enter the U.S. is that because, unlike their home nations, America’s prosperity is ultimately based on the sanctity of racially-blind and politically-blind laws, laws that cannot be simply created or dismissed for particular interest groups by someone shouting to an assembly, convening under the banner of “The Race”?

Strip away the very thin leftist veneer of all this and we can see the old demagogic and ethnic fascism of the European 1930s.

Ein Volk, ein Land.

Community & isolation

Via some sort of link I was following from (probably) Maggie's Farm (which I don't want to omit, in light of discouraging recent stories about plagiarists who don't understand what's wrong with pretending their ideas are original):

Stella Morabito wrote the other day here at The Federalist about how personal relationships threaten the power of the state – and they do, because in their absence, the state inevitably seizes more power. We have a good example of this from the experience of Mexican society, as described in Jorge Castañeda’s book “Mañana Forever”:

“In the United States, there are approximately 2 million civil society organizations, or one for every 150 inhabitants; in Chile there are 35,000, or one for every 428 Chileans; in Mexico there are only 8,500, or one for every 12,000, according to Mexican public intellectual Federico Reyes Heroles. Eighty-five percent of all Americans belong to five or more organizations; in Mexico 85% belong to no organization and, according to Reyes Heroles, the largest type, by far, is religious. In the United States, one out of every ten jobs is located in the so-called third sector (or civil society); in Mexico the equivalent figure is one out of every 210 jobs. [internal citation omitted] In polls taken in 2001, 2003, and 2005 on political culture in Mexico, a constant 82% of those surveyed stated they had never worked formally or informally with others to address their community’s problems.”

Castañeda is describing a nation with nothing resembling the “little platoons” of Burke or the network of free associations that de Tocqueville credited with American democracy’s vitality. It is a nation which lacks lateral social bonds. Instead, it encourages a patronage society where the force of government surges in response to the clamor of the masses. [Rick] Santorum seems to think that is the American destiny in the wake of the current societal shifts, or barring some series of the enactment of pro-family policies. But that’s not necessarily the case, in part because American individualism in the modern sense is not what Santorum thinks it is.

The number of true individualists is still relatively small – they are the people who spend holidays staring vacantly into space. If you buy or sell things, consume popular culture, or have anyone in your life you say “I love you” to, you’re not a true individualist. [Abortion selfie-ist] Emily Letts is the furthest thing from an individualist – her confused expression of the destruction of the life growing inside her comes across as something between a struggling actress craving an audience and a human being craving someone to hold her hand through a difficult time.

The Morabito piece linked within the link is a fascinating look at how progressives fear families as the primary source of inequality in our society, and the primary competition for government influence.

Unexpectedly

Faced with food price inflation, Panama's new president has a brainstorm:  "I know!  Let's try price controls!"  Because no one's ever tried that one before, and experienced empty shelves.  Must be those hoarders.

That business with printing money like crazy in order to create prosperity with a magic wand is working like a charm, too.  Anything to take the focus off of production and free exchange, I guess.

Friday Night AMV

Every movie trailer you've ever seen.

Congress Banned from Editing Wikipedia

Again.

Also, apparently Donald Rumsfeld is not an alien lizard.

New math

No matter how it's taught, it's still too hard.

Dangerous childhoods

I didn't write about the woman who was arrested for letting her kid play alone in the park because the story was too exasperating.  Now, however, I feel compelled to warn all you parents out there of the new looming threat: rubber bands.

Ah, For A Muse of Fire...

On the news I saw the extremists replaced the cross on our church in Mosul with the black flag of the Islamic State. They are doing a call of Islamic prayer from our church. They have turned it into a mosque.

I can't believe it. I wanted to cry when I saw this on the news.

Much is being asked of these. Joy without a cause. Faith without a hope.

Banhus Gebrocen

Later, when Beowulf’s corpse burns on the funeral pyre, it doesn’t gently disappear. He is cooked until the “banhus gebrocen”—the bonehouse was broken. A great hero is reduced to a bunch of bones snapping in a bonfire. A solitary woman sings over his burning body, her lament mixing with the smoke (just as Grendel’s screams had drifted up on the air, “sweg up astag”) as it is swallowed by heaven—“heofon rece swealg.”

The new same old anti-Semitism

From Protein Wisdom:

We thought the Cold War was over, but Hillary’s reset button has rekindled that. Turns out Obama’s policies and attitude may just be rekindling the Second World War, as well.

We can't have that

Merit-based New York high schools are vilified for providing an escape route for poor, hard-working immigrants of the wrong color:

There is no dispute that black and Latino enrollment at the specialized schools, while always low, has steadily declined since the 1970s. Blacks constituted 13 percent of the student body at Stuyvesant in 1979, 5 percent in 1994, and just 1 percent the last few years, while Hispanics dropped from a high of 4 percent to 2 percent today. Similarly, at Bronx Science, black enrollment has fallen from 12 percent in 1994 to 3 percent currently, and Hispanic enrollment has leveled off, from about 10 percent to 6 percent. The figures are even more striking at the less selective Brooklyn Tech, where blacks made up 37 percent of the student body in 1994 but only 8 percent today, while Hispanic numbers plunged from about 15 percent to 8 percent.

These declining minority numbers have not been matched by a corresponding increase in whites, however. In fact, white enrollment at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech has plummeted as well, dropping from 79 percent, 81 percent, and 77 percent, respectively, in 1971 to just 22 percent, 23 percent, and 20 percent today. Rather, it is New York City’s fastest-growing racial minority group, Asian-Americans, who have come to dominate these schools. Asians, while always a presence in New York, didn’t begin arriving in the city in large numbers until immigration restrictions were lifted with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Senator Edward Kennedy. Since then, their proportion of the city’s population has increased from less than 1 percent to about 13 percent, and their share of the specialized school population has skyrocketed. Asian students constituted 6 percent of the enrollment at Stuyvesant in 1970 and 50 percent in 1994; they make up an incredible 73 percent of the student body this year. The story is similar at Bronx Science, where the Asian population has exploded from 5 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 1994 to 62 percent today, and at Brooklyn Tech, where their presence increased from 6 percent to 33 percent to 61 percent.

. . . All this once would have been the stuff of liberal dreams: a racial minority group historically victimized by discrimination begins coming to America in greater numbers because of an immigration reform sponsored by Ted Kennedy. Though many in the group remain in poverty, they take advantage of free public schools established by progressive New York City governments. By dint of their own hard work, they earn admission in increasing numbers to merit-based schools that offer smart working-class kids the kind of education once available only at Andover or Choate.

To modern “progressive” elites, though, the story is intolerable, starting with the hard work. As Charles Murray has observed, while affluent liberals themselves tend to work hard, they seem embarrassed by their own lifestyles and refuse to preach what they practice in an age that frowns on anything bourgeois, self-denying, or judgmental. These liberal elites seem particularly troubled by the Asian-American work ethic and the difficult questions that it raises about the role of culture in group success. While the advancement of Asian students has come overwhelmingly at the expense of more affluent whites, it has also had an undeniable impact on black and Latino students, whose foothold at these schools, small to begin with, has all but vanished.

"Someone already had"

Via Protein Wisdom by way of Maggie's Farm, a former leftist describes a change of heart:

Peace Corps did not focus on the "small beginnings" necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. "Only intolerant oppressors judge others' cultures."

I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people's clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love." Delousing homeless people's clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.

Later, the author became a teacher in depressed Paterson, N.J.:

My students know -- because they have been drilled in this -- that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

And to close, a quotation from a commenter:

"You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me."--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Life in public

The young woman who needed the courts to step in and regulate her relationship with her parents now needs the courts to step in and regulate her relationship with her boyfriend--the same unsuitable boyfriend her parents disapproved of, which was the source of her quarrel with them in the first place.  I'll bet she can't understand why people keep trying to interfere in her private life.

"Iron and the Soul"

This is a fantastic piece by Henry Rollins, all the more amazing when you realize that the adviser who saved him and made him whole would today be fired. He knew, though. He saw, and he acted out of love and mercy: with punches to the solar plexus.

Escape

I can't say anyone's ever zip-tied me, but this looks like a handy guide for addressing that contingency.

Riddle: What Can Be Divided Without Being Lessened?

A young Jew travels to Israel on a trip sponsored by a group called Birthright Israel. While there, for reasons that are not hard to understand, he comes to believe that it is a place he wants to defend. So he joins the IDF, to devote his life to its defense. Sunday he was killed in the fighting. He was 24.

This is the sort of story with which we are all well-familiar. So what is the moral of the story?

There are many people to blame for Steinberg’s death. There is the Hamas fighter behind the weapon that actually killed him. There are the leaders, on both sides, who put him in Gaza, and the leaders behind all of the wars between Israel and the Palestinians. I can trace it back to 1948, or 1917, or whatever date suits you and still never find all the parties who are responsible. But I have no doubt in my mind that along with all of them, Birthright shares some measure of the blame.

Blame?

Classics in cartoons

It had to happen

The University of Wisconsin pushes distributional equity in grades.  Seems fair enough.  Why should the smart kids get the good grades?  They already have enough advantages.

Why grade at all, since we have lost all confidence in our ability to make judgments about whether students know more at the end of the year than at the beginning?

Riddling With Dragons

A quiz featuring historic Anglo-Saxon riddles, just the kind Tolkien loved. Unfortunately the quiz is multiple-choice, which makes it far easier than it would be if you had to come up with the answer out of your head! But save them in your mind to delight children of the right age who are encountering The Hobbit for the first time, or others you may know in whom the joy of the book has not faded with age.

Washington and sanity

Speaking of sanity breaking out in unexpected places, the D.C. Court of Appeals just struck down the Obamacare subsidies in states that did not establish exchanges.  The very idea of allowing statutory language to decide a case!  In D.C., yet!

H/t HotAir.  Also h/t to Ace, with the helpful comment, "It's not a subsidy, it's a tax refund."

Semitism and sanity

The Kurds are on track to become the second sane culture in the Middle East.

Second Nature

As the world burns around us, perhaps it is worth revisiting an old post.

UPDATE:  This morning's statement on the situation in Ukraine is on point.  It has the tone of a child complaining to his parents that his brother is being unfair.  'Putin isn't making his friends behave and play by the rules!'

But there are no parents in the "International Community" or the "Community of Nations."  It's just you.  If Putin isn't behaving, you're the one who has to make him.  What are you going to do about it?

Close up

Butterfly and moth wings.

Feral 3-D Printers

Relax.  It's not meant to be taken seriously.

Looking Glass

Google, which owns Blogger as well as Picasa, apparently decided to automatically edit my last photo to show off Picasa's tricks.  They uploaded the "effects version" to my photo album, for my consideration I suppose.

Not bad, really.

Anaximander

An excellent piece by a theoretical physicist on the proper structure of scientific thought (and philosophy).

This takes me to another point, which is, Should a scientist think about philosophy or not? It’s the fashion today to discard philosophy, to say now that we have science, we don’t need philosophy. I find this attitude naïve, for two reasons. One is historical. Just look back. Heisenberg would have never done quantum mechanics without being full of philosophy. Einstein would have never done relativity without having read all the philosophers and having a head full of philosophy. Galileo would never have done what he did without having a head full of Plato. Newton thought of himself as a philosopher and started by discussing this with Descartes and had strong philosophical ideas.

Even Maxwell, Boltzmann—all the major steps of science in the past were done by people who were very aware of methodological, fundamental, even metaphysical questions being posed. When Heisenberg does quantum mechanics, he is in a completely philosophical frame of mind. He says that in classical mechanics there’s something philosophically wrong, there’s not enough emphasis on empiricism. It is exactly this philosophical reading that allows him to construct that fantastically new physical theory, quantum mechanics.

Inegalitarianism

Tyler Cowan proposes an interesting take on global income inequality.  Is it more important that members of a particular nation resemble each other in wealth, or that poverty is decreasing globally at the same time that differences in average wealth among nations are shrinking?  It's possible that the process of raising a country's standard of living (the average standard as well as the standard for its poorest citizens) also results in a large new group of extraordinary winners in that same country.  The gap in wealth between close neighbors increases, but the poorest neighbors are less threatened with poverty and untreatable disease, while whole areas of the globe previously left out of the explosion in material prosperity over the last few centuries begin to catch up.

How much harm are we willing to do globally in order to eliminate the gap between rich and poor in a series of individual countries?  It gets back to the old question:  is this about compassion or outraged envy?

A Glimpse of the Wild

Approach from the South

Smoking guns

At least they had the grace to be appalled at what they'd done.  Sort of.

The future of air travel

Israel equips its domestic aircraft with anti-missile defenses, the only country to do so.

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.