Death Threats and the "Sex-Positive" Blogger

So let's say you were to read that a "sex-positive" blogger was forced to go underground and shut down her efforts for a while because she was getting death threats. Who would you suppose would be the most likely candidates to be sending such threats?

The trouble began Friday when Green received a message from Tumblr user doctorswithoutboners accusing her of transphobia:

“Hi Laci. Why do you use the word ‘tranny’ in your video about Haters from 2009? … You really shouldn't be using that word as a cis girl and it's really disappointing for the people who look up to you.”

Green conceded her mistake and apologized (emphasis her own):

“Probably because I was 18 and ignorant. You are totally right and I sincerely apologize for my mistake. Before I educated myself about trans issues I had not the slightest inkling of how the word is used to dehumanize nor its place in the cycle of violence against transfolk. Now I have seen people hurt by it and seen it used as a nasty slur. Words have power, and ‘tranny’ is not a word for anybody but transfolk themselves to use because only they can reclaim it. If I knew that was in a video, it would have been long long ago removed. Consider it banished forever.”

Green took down the video, but some Tumblr users apparently didn’t find this adequate, also citing an apparent opinion Green once made about sexism and Islam.

The blogger tweeted she’d spent the morning on the phone with police and was becoming deeply concerned for her safety.

Good job, Robespierre. That'll teach her to agree with you.

I'm not sure how 'sex-positive' I am, although I certainly approve of sex in its proper and well-reasoned bounds. I'm sure not going to be forced to adhere to anyone's special-snowflake vocabulary about how I allegedly have to refer to them. Her mistake was apparently caring what they thought enough to listen to them and show some sensitivity to their feelings. Once they smelled out that she could be intimidated, it was time to pile on.

Or, as John Wayne put it: "Never apologize. It's a sign of weakness."

What we heard at the People's March

Via Reason Magazine, via HotAir:

“We live in a grotesque era where we have everything we want right now,” one protester told Foster, graciously packaging her entire movement up in one self-hating nutshell.

Getting over the bad boyfriend

Good political ad.  "I'm stuck with him for two more years, I know that.  But I'm not stuck with his friends."

Another reason not to overwithhold taxes

IRS refund checks have never been part of my life, since I go to great lengths never to have too much tax withheld, or to have any withheld at all if I can help it.  This is simple matter, in my case, of not wishing to loan the government money interest-free, but it turns out there's another good reason not to do it.  It's fantastically easy for criminals to file electronic tax returns in your name and claim a fraudulent tax refund.  The con man in the video linked here found that about 40% of the dozens of returns he used to file every week would be paid within 7 days.  When the real taxpayer later files a return seeking a refund, he finds that he will have to spend months standing in line and fighting with the IRS to prove his identity.

Have a Smoke, Brother

The NYT says:

THIS weekend, the singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen is celebrating his 80th birthday — with a cigarette. Last year he announced that he would resume smoking when he turned 80. “It’s the right age to recommence,” he explained.

At any age, taking up smoking is not sensible. Both the smoker and those who breathe his secondhand smoke can suffer not only long-term but acute health problems, including infections and asthma. And yet, Mr. Cohen’s plan presents a provocative question: When should we set aside a life lived for the future and, instead, embrace the pleasures of the present?

I took up smoking cigars when I went to Iraq, and largely -- nearly entirely -- gave it up after coming back. But I figured, how much worse could the cigar be than the polluted, dust-filled air we were breathing anyway? And it was the only pleasure General Order #1 licensed, so we often smoked cigars together in the rare moments of rest. Finally, when the sky drops rockets and mortars and heavy-caliber rounds on you regularly, who gives a damn about the threat of cancer twenty years on?

Now that I'm home, and for as long as I stay, I'll smoke less -- as I said, very nearly not at all. Just once in a while, to remember bold men and brothers. That's worth any tiny risk coming from the rare single smoke, that memory almost like being with them once again.

Most likely I'll be lucky to live long enough for it to threaten me, as has always been the case. Best to live that way, anyhow. Cuts down on the meddlers trying to tell you how you ought to live.

Orpheus In The Underworld

Two armed “polygamist women” dressed like “ninjas” were subdued by a sword-wielding man during a home invasion, according to police in suburban Utah....

The women “violently attacked one of the adult males in the house who came to see who was coming,” Ian Adams of the West Jordan police department told the Guardian.

“Another adult male joined the fray in defense of the first male victim. He was armed with a sword, and using a sword…”

“I went to the bottom of the stairs and saw a couple of ninjas coming down,” the man was quoted as saying. “They were all dark gray or black, and they had black rubber gloves on and masks. All I could see was their eyes.”

Cassandra couldn't dream so well as that.

Attorney-Client Privilege?

So, what happened here?

The FBI wiretapped 2 conversations and one voicemail defense investigators for Mohamed Osman Mohamud had with Khan in June 2011 and then handed those recordings over to the prosecutor who prosecuted Mohamud and is prosecuting Khan.

In a filing in April, Khan’s lawyers moved to obtain information about the government’s minimization procedures. They pointed to 4 different privileged conversations that had been included in discovery...

While all this doesn’t explain what the tie between Khan and Mohamud is — in its response, the government actually claims it is “unrelated” and that it was not handed over to prosecutors until after the conclusion of Mohamud’s case (which would mean it wasn’t provided to the prosecutor before he indicted Khan) — it does make it clear that the government would share the privileged conversations of one defendant with that defendant’s prosecutor via the prosecution of another defendant under FISA.

Transparent rigor

A surprisingly sane take on climate science from a guy who was politically connected enough to serve as Energy Undersecretary in Pres. Obama's first term:

We can and should take steps to make climate projections more useful over time. An international commitment to a sustained global climate observation system would generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations. And increasingly powerful computers can allow a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models, finer model grids and more sophisticated descriptions of the processes that occur within them. The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.

A transparent rigor would also be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, "red team" reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method. But because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.

Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is "settled" (or is a "hoax") demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.

Society's choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.

But climate strategies beyond such "no regrets" efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.

Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about "believing" or "denying" the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity's deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.

Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.

"Who Are You?"

From the Archives, 2008:

The most dangerous question Sen. Obama has ever had to face is, "Who are you?"

Archives, 2010:

From the New York Times, today:

"Who is Barack Obama?"

The danger isn't, though, the one that Bob Herbert expects: that we'll answer the question for him in a way that will be a negative for his agenda.

The danger is that there may be no answer at all.

Today's Wall Street Journal:

At this dramatic time, with a world on fire, we look at the president and ponder again who he is.

It turns out that the question was less dangerous to him than to the rest of us. A pity we didn't take more interest in it.

Tex Likes Quizzes on Saturday

...and it's still Saturday, for a few minutes.

Here's one on Ancient Scotland.

A Scientific Theory of Chess

As part of an article about a major feat in Chess, an introduction to the governing body:

As the tournament began on Aug. 27, Carlsen was mired in an ongoing faceoff with FIDE, the international governing body of chess. There are a few things you should probably know about FIDE—or the Federation Internationale des Echecs, if you’re feeling continental. FIDE is, by all accounts, comically corrupt, in the vein of other fishy global sporting bodies like FIFA and the IOC. Its Russian president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has hunkered in office for nearly two decades now, was once abducted by a group of space aliens dressed in yellow costumes who transported him to a faraway star. Though I am relying here on Ilyumzhinov’s personal attestations, I have no reason to doubt him, as this is something about which he has spoken quite extensively. He is of the firm belief that chess was invented by extraterrestrials, and further “insists that there is ‘some kind of code’ in chess, evidence for which he finds in the fact that there are 64 squares on the chessboard and 64 codons in human DNA.”

What Science Is, and Is Not

Though apparently a conservative on the right side of many things, when Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is no Aristotle.

A little history: The first proto-scientist was the Greek intellectual Aristotle, who wrote many manuals of his observations of the natural world and who also was the first person to propose a systematic epistemology, i.e., a philosophy of what science is and how people should go about it. Aristotle's definition of science became famous in its Latin translation as: rerum cognoscere causas, or, "knowledge of the ultimate causes of things." For this, you can often see in manuals Aristotle described as the Father of Science.

The problem with that is that it's absolutely not true. Aristotelian "science" was a major setback for all of human civilization.

The first 'proto-scientist' represented a setback? A setback to what? A tradition that didn't exist?

It turns out that Gobry is wrong about almost everything he says about Aristotle, starting with what Aristotelian science is about and how it connects to the search for what Gobry calls "capital-T Truth." One of the distinguishing features of Aristotelian sciences is that they are separate. There is a science for every genus. Where there is not a proper genus to unify a field of human endeavor, no science is possible. This is why dialectical logic and rhetoric are not sciences, Aristotle says: they aren't restricted to one genus, so we can't have scientific knowledge of them. We use logic in many fields of inquiry, and rhetoric in political and ethical problems. We can't separate them cleanly enough for scientific knowledge, we can just study them as a kind of art.

This is why Aristotle spends so much time asking whether it is proper to have a science of different fields of knowledge. If you read the Metaphysics, which is the part of Aristotle's work most closely connected to anything like "capital-T Truth," the very first question he treats is whether there is a subject matter for this science. You can have a science of biology, because it treats living things. You can have a science of physics, because it treats motion. What sense would it make, Aristotle asks, to have a science of everything? Each has its own separate science, after all, so what point is there to trying to unify them? What's the subject matter that makes this a sensible project?

The answer is that Metaphysics is the study of existence itself, not of anything that exists. The idea is not to put it all together and get to a knowledge of the ultimate causes of, say, your horse in the pasture. It's to try to understand what is necessary for existence of the sort we observe to be possible.

Now as for all this being a setback, the slightest acquaintance with history would disprove the remark. (As, also, the remark about Aristotle being the first among these -- even if you only read Aristotle, you would discover the names of dozens of men whose work he references and considers.) The boom in Islamic civilization in the early Middle Ages came as they encountered and translated Aristotle, which is what changed them from a merely warlike collection of conquerors into a civilization proper. When their translations in Arabic were recovered by the Spanish during the reconquista, it produced a scientific and technical revolution that was revolutionary in the West. Without it, there would have been no development of the kind of science we do today at all. The foundations were laid by the recovery of Greek thought.

Further, it is not Aristotelian but modern science that believes you can unify the fields of knowledge. That is why you hear talk of 'unified field theories.' Aristotle thought you should study animals under one science, and motions of things under another, and chemical reactions under another. Modern science thinks that motions are produced by physics, which at a higher level of organization is chemistry, and certain kinds of chemicals become biochemistry, which ultimately leads to biology. Many Determinists have argued that everything, including the fields we call psychology or sociology, will prove to be reducible to physics -- with adequate knowledge, we would get to the ultimate causes of everything.

Well, sort of. The problem of existence, Metaphysics, isn't solvable that way. Commonly physicists respond that this means it is a non-problem, one we should ignore as not very interesting. Of course things exist; we can observe them. Why ask how it could be possible for there to be something rather than nothing? Obviously it is possible, and as far as we know it's not possible for there to be nothing (indeed, the laws of conservation suggest something like that).

By the way, who knows the story of how Einstein came to his revolutionary theories? It turns out it wasn't by careful, systematic observation. Gobry's picture of how modern science work doesn't even apply there: what Einstein did was philosophy, starting with a return to the Greeks and the problems they raised.

The other thing that he's wrong about is the idea that we could do 'scientific' studies of things like welfare issues. You can't, because you can't control and repeat in what are called 'social sciences,' but which are properly arts and not science at all (as Aristotle would have told you). That means your theories about what would have happened if you'd done something else instead are non-falsifiable. This is a problem raised by Karl Popper.

The other problem is that you can't control for variables in these very complex fields. To do a truly scientific experiment, you should hold everything constant except one variable. There is no potential to do that in a study involving human beings, especially human beings who are going about their lives in an uncontrolled fashion.

What we get in these artistic studies of human behavior and thought is only an analogy to science. It is characteristic of analogies that they always break at some point, because the only way to have an analogy that doesn't break is for the analogs to be identical (in which case you don't have an analogy at all, you have an identity). It may be worth doing -- we learn a lot from analogies. All our political and ethical reasoning is ultimately based on analogies, and those projects are worthwhile. But they are not, and cannot be, sciences.

History is not a science; if you try to do history as a science, your efforts are only analogous to science. Sociology and psychology and 'political science' are often conducted in analogical ways to science, but they don't offer control of variables nor can their theories be falsified.

That's why there are still all those Marxists in all those fields.

I'm sympathetic to a lot of Gobry's project, but he needs to go back to school and rethink his basic understanding of science -- and learn some history.

Friday Night MV

Ain't it a shame.
(Sung, appropriately enough, by Bon Scott)

(sorry, couldn't resist)

"Westminster vows never to allow vote on anything that matters ever again"

House of Commons Speaker, John Bercow, said: “An 84 per cent turnout, rallies in the streets, and intelligent, informed debates are all the stuff of nightmares.

“By some dreadful miscalculation the future of this nation was, for a brief time, in the hands of the people who live in it.

“Never, ever again.”

You know what happens if the right people don't have the power.

Bomb Threat at UGA

So today Athens, Georgia was turned upside down for a little while in the middle of the afternoon by an old-fashioned bomb threat. Actually, the threat wasn't super specific about just what was going to happen, just that 'if you want to live' you should 'stay away' from a particular building 'at 12:15.' Said building, named after former lieutenant-governor, Governor, and Senator Zell Miller, is a rather large and cavernous brick building that probably took an hour or more to clear once they got the dogs up there to do it.

I mention all this because I've been a little amused by some friends who are foreign-born but teaching at UGA. They are acting exactly like soldiers in Iraq after their first IED or mortar strike. Nothing happened, just an empty anonymous threat, but you'd think they'll be needing PTSD counseling.

It's all this media coverage of school shootings and whatnot. It's got people scared out of their minds. Crime and violence are actually down across the board, but you can't say "boo" without terrifying people. It's not healthy to be this heavily swayed by images on TV.

The Challenge of Authority

One of the most damning facts about Rotherdam was the ways in which the police departments not only did not stop the abuses, but lost evidence and suppressed reports that might have compelled an earlier settlement.

There's always a general problem of 'who watches the watchmen?' How much bigger is the problem when you discover that the watchmen have an especially troubling record compared to the general population?

There is no more damaging perpetrator of domestic violence than a police officer, who harms his partner as profoundly as any abuser, and is then particularly ill-suited to helping victims of abuse in a culture where they are often afraid of coming forward. The evidence of a domestic-abuse problem in police departments around the United States is overwhelming. The situation is significantly bigger than what the NFL faces, orders of magnitude more damaging to society, and yet far less known to the public, which hasn't demanded changes.

That's a substantial charge. What backs it up?

As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general." Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety," the summary continues. "This 'informal' method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes." Finally, "even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution."

Florida adopted an automatic reporting scheme for police domestic violence in 2008, and found that the number of incidents on record doubled. Police Chief Magazine, taking the problem seriously and trying to study it as you would expect a group that is both law-enforcement and journalist in its makeup, tracked all the news reports they could find.

Data on final organizational outcomes were available for 233 of the cases. About one-third of those cases involved officers who were separated from their jobs either through resignation or termination. The majority of cases in which the final employment outcome was known resulted in a suspension without job separation (n = 152). Of those cases where there was a conviction on at least one offense charged, officers are known to have lost their jobs through either termination or resignation in less than half of those cases (n = 52).

There's a lot more at the link.

So, what to do about this kind of thing? I've seen a lot of suggestions that police wear videocameras on duty at all times -- I noticed some police wearing them just the other day, actually -- and the automatic reporting seems wise. Automatic firing based on a conviction? Increased legal penalties for those who engage in these acts 'under color of law,' as we used to say in civil rights legislation?

Ejjimacashun

AEI reports that there's a move afoot to ensure that schoolkids learn some basic civics facts:

[On September 17,] the Civics Education Initiative announced its intentions to introduce legislation in seven states—Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah—to require students to take and pass the same exam required for immigrants to become US Citizens before receiving their high school diploma or a general equivalency degree.

The article also mentions a sense among civics teachers that they feel overshadowed by the emphasis of STEM. That's understandable, perhaps, but surely it would be helpful to the knowledge of civics for students to learn, via STEM studies, that the way to answer a number of questions is to consult the unambiguous facts, so far as they may be available to us, in an initial inquiry. Lots of civics questions may be imponderable matters of opinion, but not questions like "how many votes does it take to override a veto" or "which party holds a majority in the Senate at the present moment."

War for the Greater Middle East

If you follow Andrew Bacevich's writing, you probably can guess that this online course is not going to be very complimentary to the United States or its policies. Still, if you want to hear in detail how his argument is put together, looking back several decades, the course is free.

Megamix

As Long As There's One Hundred

Since we're doing Scottish songs of independence, here's a folk tune about William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. The chorus is from the Declaration of Arbroath.

Little wat ye wha's comin

This "Highland Muster Roll" is said to date from the Fifteen, the first of the two disastrous Jacobite Rebellions, one in 1715 and the other in 1745.

The Stuarts were less than impressive as a royal house, though hard to beat from the point of tragic romance and inspiration for centuries of really good novels and music.  The memorable Mary Queen of Scots wasn't easy to take seriously as a monarch.  After she languished in prison for years and was beheaded by Elizabeth I, her son became James I of England (and VI of Scotland) in 1603, when Elizabeth died without issue.  We'll cut James I some slack because of the Bible.  After his death in 1625, however, his moderately useless son and successor Charles I channeled his grandmother by contriving to get himself executed by Parliament in 1649.  Then, after an Interregnum of eleven years, in 1660, Charles I's son Charles II was ecstatically welcomed back in the Restoration, but the honeymoon didn't last long.

On his death without legitimate issue in 1685 (his impressive list of little FitzRoys notwithstanding), Charles II was succeeded by his younger brother James II (and VII of Scotland).  James II got everyone's knickers in a twist with his crypto-Catholicism and other unpopular traits.  After producing two reasonably solid Protestant daughters, he terrified everyone in 1688, in only the third year of his reign, by producing a male Catholic heir, the man who would have been James III but instead comes down to history as James "the Old Pretender."

Upon the birth of the Old Pretender, James II's elder daughter Mary had to be asked to come over from Holland with her husband William of Orange, who was also a Stuart of sorts.  James II, having fled to the Continent in 1688, was conveniently considered to have abdicated.  (He made an abortive attempt at recapturing his throne in 1689, then took shelter with Louis XIV of France until his death in 1701.)  William and Mary assumed the throne jointly in 1688 as Mary II and William II (and III of Scotland).  They produced no heirs.  After Mary's death in 1694 and William's in 1702, Mary's younger sister Anne reigned until her death in 1714, leaving no surviving issue despite 17 pregnancies.  At this point, the succession becomes hopelessly confused, because James II and his son and grandson were still pressing their noses against the windowpane from exile, but when the dust settled everyone had agreed that the great point was never to let anyone associated with James II get near the crown again.  In 1707, planning ahead, Parliament had passed an Act awarding the throne in advance to a second cousin from Germany called George, who was maternally descended from James I.  George I ruled from 1714 through 1727 and was succeeded by George II.

Meanwhile, James II's son, the Old Pretender, entertained designs on the English and Scottish thrones in a more or less serious fashion for his entire life (he died in exile 1766), of which the Fifteen, in the first year of George I's reign, was the most serious example.  The Old Pretender's son Charles (a/k/a the Young Pretender or Bonnie Prince Charlie) carried on the family tradition in the equally disastrous '45 Uprising, during the reign of George II, after which the whole Stuart business was more or less thoroughly crushed.  The Young Pretender died in exile 1788.

The Georges may have been Stuarts of a sort, but they associated themselves more strongly with the name of Hanover.  The name George lives on in a series of infuriated Jacobite Rebellion songs about little German nitwits names Geordie.

Game Time

The Loom of History

Bill Whittle closes with an urging to "get sensible people behind the loom of history." I'm surprised a man of his education does not know who weaves on that loom. The poem is in Njal's Saga.

Blood rains from the cloudy web
On the broad loom of slaughter.
The web of man, grey as armour, is now being woven;
The Valkyries will cross it with a crimson weft.

The warp is made of human entrail;
Human heads are used a weights;
The heddle-rods are blood-wet spears;
the shafts are iron-bound, and arrows are the shuttles.
With swords we will weave this web of battle.

The Valkyries go weaving with drawn swords
Hild and Hjorthrimul, Sanngrid and Svipul,
Spears will shatter, Shields will splinter,
Swords will gnaw like wolves through armour.

Let us now wind the web of war
which the young king once waged
let us advance and wade through the ranks
where friends of ours are exchanging blows.

Let us now wind the web of war
and then follow the king to battle
Gunn and Gondul can see there
the blood-spattered shields that guarded the king.

Let us now wind the web of war
where the warrior banners are forging foreward
let his life not be taken;
Only the Valkyries can choose the slain.

Lands will be ruled by new peoples
who once inhabited the headlands,
We pronounce a great king destined to die;
Now an earl is felled by spears.

The men of Ireland will suffer a grief
that will never grow old in the minds of men.
The web is now woven and the battlefield reddened;
The news of disaster will spread through lands.

It is horrible now to look around,
As a blood-red cloud darkens the sky.
The heavens are stained with the blood of men,
As the Valkyries sing their song.

We sang well victory songs for the young king,
Hail to our singing!
Let him who listens to our Valkyrie song
Learn it well and tell it to others.

Let us ride our horses hard on the bare backs
With swords unsheathed away from here.

It has something of the ring of Kipling's poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings, doesn't it? Except it was written before the copybooks, long before.

Facing Death From a Place of Safety

Boswell did, over and over:

Here we find the practising barrister, who regularly defended individuals against capital charges, reporting executions. Boswell had an unsavoury reputation as an inveterate execution goer in an age when such activity was considered prurient for a gentleman. He was not only a lawyer and man of letters; he was also a journalist in an age when reports of executions were hard news. During this period, public executions in London were carried out at Tyburn and Newgate, with as many as 15 convicts meeting their fate at the same time. Boswell diligently noted the names and crimes of the condemned: robbery, theft, escaping a prison hulk, forgery and murder. He describes a brother and sister convicted of burglary who met their deaths holding hands, only to be separated when they were cut down from the gallows.

The deaths were not always quick and Boswell confessed in his diary that executions gave him nightmares for nights afterwards and plunged him into bouts of depression. So why did he attend at least 21 public hangings? He explained it thus: ‘Dying publicly at Tyburn, and dying privately in one’s Bed, are only different Modes of the same Thing. They are both Death; they are both that wondrous, that alarming Scene of quitting all that we have ever seen, heard and known, and at once passing into a State of being totally unknown to us, and in which we cannot tell what may be our Situation: Therefore it is that I feel an irresistible Impulse to be present at every Execution, as I there behold the various Effects of the near Approach of Death, according to the various Tempers of the unhappy Sufferers: and by studying them, I learn to quiet and fortify my own Mind.’

Aside from the salutary nature of the experience, executions held an almost pornographic appeal for Boswell. He promised not to attend more executions but ultimately always gave in to his morbid compulsion. Boswell’s frequenting of executions despite foreswearing them, his philandering and his heavy drinking – along with myriad minor faults, such as impulsive acquisitiveness and chronic laziness – all indicate an underlying weakness of will (or ‘weakness of character’, as it would have been put in the past).

Is there really no difference between weakness of character, and weakness of will?

(H/t: Arts & Letters Daily)

Saltire and Slander

Are the 'neck and neck' polls in Scotland on independence wrong? We saw something like that happen in the Eric Cantor race here, so it certainly does come up once in a while. In addition to the other potential errors the newspaper identifies the samples I've seen have been very small, so it could be we don't really know what people are thinking.

There is another problem, reports The Guardian: journalists are committed to rooting against independence.

Perhaps the most arresting fact about the Scottish referendum is this: that there is no newspaper – local, regional or national, English or Scottish – that supports independence except the Sunday Herald. The Scots who will vote yes have been almost without representation in the media.

There is nothing unusual about this. Change in any direction... requires the defiance of almost the entire battery of salaried opinion.

There's a lot of that here at home, too. The TEA Party did so badly in the press in part because, in its early days when it was a genuinely popular movement, it really wanted to make some major changes -- and the press' bills are paid by relationships with existing powers. The huge defense of then-Senator Obama, which is similar to the huge defense being put on for the 'Better Together' campaign in the UK, was motivated not by a desire for "Change!" but out of a sense that he was a committed member of their own class. The movement represented change for the rest of us, but for the elite press it was the most soothing and constant of opinions that he forwarded.

Well, that all-hands-on-deck approach worked here in 2008. Maybe they'll carry the fight for their friends in the United Kingdom, too.

We'll see soon enough.

And lemme have a package of those Corn Nuts

Evidence of reverent funerals is often taken as a sign of cognitive function in early man.

What, I'm supposed to be an executive or something?

The buck may or may not stop moving somewhere between here and there:

One comes away from Baker’s account with the sense what what really offends Obama about ISIS is that the terrorist group has forced him to make a decision:

Mr. Haass said attention to nuance was a double-edged attribute. “This is someone who, more than most in the political world, is comfortable in the gray rather than the black and white,” he said. “So many other people in the political world do operate in the black and white and are more quote-unquote decisive, and that’s a mixed blessing. He clearly falls on the side of those who are slow or reluctant to decide because deciding often forces you into a more one-sided position than you’re comfortable with.”

I don't know. Someone who's more quote-unquote decisive might not be so terrible.  I mean, we don't want him to be "decisive" decisive, but he could at least make a multi-sided decision, provisionally.

Milestones in diplomacy

We've gone beyond "WRDC and are CMTS" and are solidly into "there's going to be some kind of coalition at some point."

Disturbing the Peace

"The woman was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated public order offences."

Teddy Bears and Turrets

The school district's got itself an RV.

Checking off the boxes

This pedagogical rant hits all the high spots about the Man keeping us down in Math:  culturally responsive, gatekeeper, internalized deep anxiety, old white men, role models, motivation, activating voices, self-advocation for communities, equity, rote, drill, high-stakes testing, and meaningful dialogue.

The Founding Adolescents

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.

In suggesting that patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming that sexism is finished, that men are obsolete or that the triumph of feminism is at hand. I may be a middle-aged white man, but I’m not an idiot. . . . This slow unwinding has been the work of generations. For the most part, it has been understood — rightly in my view, and this is not really an argument I want to have right now — as a narrative of progress. A society that was exclusive and repressive is now freer and more open. But there may be other less unequivocally happy consequences. It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.

* * *

From the start, American culture was notably resistant to the claims of parental authority and the imperatives of adulthood. Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Love and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, more than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of the library.” Musing on the legacy of Rip Van Winkle and Huckleberry Finn, he broadened this observation into a sweeping (and still very much relevant) diagnosis of the national personality: “The typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in our great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly ‘boyish.’”

Pakistan with exposed knees

P.J. O'Rourke delivers a nuanced appeal for intercultural respect, drawing on his mellow days as a foreign correspondent to speculate on future coverage of an independent Scotland.  The comments thread is a little excitable.

The peaceful savage

From Before the Dawn:  Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade:

Both [Lawrence H.] Keeley and [Steven] LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies.  "While my purpose here is not to rail against my colleagues, it is impossible to ignore the fact that academia has missed what I consider to be some of the essence of human history," writes LeBlanc. "I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially 'pacified the past' and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare," says Keeley.

Keeley suggests that warfare and conquest fell out of favor as subjects of academic study after Europeans' experiences of the Nazis, who treat them, also in the name of might makes right, as badly as they were accustomed to treating their colonial subjects.  Be that as it may, there does seem a certain reluctance among archaeologists to recognize the full extent of ancient warfare.  Keeley reports that his grant application to study a nine-foot-deep Neolithic ditch and palisade was rejected until he changed his description of the structure of "fortification" to "enclosure."  Most archaeologists, says LeBlanc, ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered.  Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.

Archaeologists have described caches of large round stones as being designed for use in boiling water, ignoring the commonsense possibility that they were slingshots.  When spears, swords, shields, parts of a chariot and a male corpse dressed in armor emerged from a burial, archaeologists asserted that these were status symbols and not, heaven forbid, weapons for actual military use.  The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money.  The spectacularly intact 5,000-year-old man discovered in a melting glacier in 1991, named Ötzi by researchers, carried just such a copper axe.  He was found, Keeley writes dryly, "with one of these moneys mischievously hafted as an ax.  He also had with him a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change."

It was a peaceful religion, as they say.

A Point of Commonality

I don't know if it's true, as Charles Barkley says, that every black parent in the South whips their children with willow switches. I do know it's true that my grandmother, who was Southern but quite white, certainly made use of them as she felt appropriate. I only received such a lesson from her once, and at the time I thought it was unfair because she was angry that we were playing ball near the street -- but we hadn't even gone into the street. I later discovered that my great-grandfather was killed by a car, walking across the street to get the mail from his mailbox. The woman driving the car that killed him never saw him, apparently.

I'm of the opinion that it did me no harm, even if the particular incident was in a sense unjust. My father, who was on the receiving end of far more whippings from her as a boy, is one of the best men I've ever known. He is generous, gentle, and -- far from being a 'child abuser,' as the overwrought discussion suggests of any parent raised as he was -- my sister would always try to arrange to be punished by him instead of my mother, because he was too scared of hurting her to paddle with any strength.

Ecclesiasticus gives advice on raising children that begins "Whoever loves his son will beat him frequently," and of course Proverbs 13:24 holds that "whoever spares the rod hates his son."

Certainly you shouldn't abuse children. But can we stop painting people like my grandmother as monsters, 'child abusers,' and the like? Is it too much to ask that we express our culture's desire to move away from spanking children in terms that don't require us to despise and hate so many who were doing what they thought was best, and had been taught was right, even by the wise of their communities and cultures?

'Your Dossier Is Fat With The Blood Of Kittens'

Apparently Sergeant Shlock and my dog have something in common.

He's a great dog, really. It's just that he's a country dog, and there's just no explaining to him the difference between squirrels and cats. Everybody's happy when you catch the squirrel!

"Can't tame woild rabbit"

...says the girl's father in Watership Down...explaining why she can't keep Hazel (whom she's rescued from her cat), so that he ends up being released at a critical point in the story. Adams put a lot of trouble into researching rabbits for his story, and now I see evidence of why he was right.

According to this story, the genetic code of domestic rabbits (who've been living with humans for 1400 years or so) is different from their wild cousins' in about a hundred places...some of those important for development of behavior.

"Selection during domestication might have focused on tameness and lack of fear," says Pat Heslop-Harrison of the University of Leicester in the UK. "As a farmer, you neither want the animal to hurt you, nor for the animal to die from stress." Keeping lookout and fleeing from potential predators uses up lots of an animal's energy, which humans would rather see turned into meat. Because rabbits were only domesticated relatively recently, the new sequences are not all present in all domestic rabbits. As a result, Andersson says escaped domestic rabbits could revert to wild-like forms over just a few generations - assuming they survived in the wild.

It's unsurprising when you know about the famous Russian fur fox experiment...which took under 50 years to breed the wild foxes into something far more doglike (down to the floppy ears the breeders weren't expecting...they were just looking for tameness). The wiki on domestication gives estimated dates for various creatures that live with us...at least some of that based on genetic evidence.

Aye or Die!

We gotcher veto, right here

Nothing says "You're on the unpopular side of an issue" like a legislative veto override.

How to reduce federal spending

Michelle Obama came up with it, and it's brilliant:  impose unpopular regulations on the programs funded with the federal spending until the public rejects their products or services, to the point where it becomes more cost-effective for the programs to decline the federal subsidies.  Bonus:  less regulation.

Here's another effective response to dumb, intrusive regulations.  The Bank Street Brewhouse in New Albany, Indiana, wanted to serve only beer to customers, and to encourage them to complete their meals by patronizing nearby street-food vendors.  Indiana liquor laws, however, permit a business to maintain a retail liquor license only if it operates a restaurant on the premises, defined as the ability to serve hot sandwiches, hot soup, coffee with milk, and soft drinks in a sanitary manner.  Thus was born the "Bank Street Brewhouse Indiana Statutory Compliance Restaurant Menu":

Our Famous Hotdog Sandwich
Microwaved to perfection, including both weenie
and bun, sans condiments.
$10.00

Chef Campbell's Soup of the Day
Served in a bowl.  Your choice of whichever can is
on top of the stack.
$10.00

Instant Coffee
Caffeinated only.  Available black, or black.
$5.00

Powdered Milk
With or without water.
$5.00

Sprecher Craft Soft Drinks
Different flavors . . . market pricing.

H/t AEI.

The prisoner's lament

King Richard I of England (the Lion-Hearted) composed this song at the end of the 12th century, while imprisoned by the Duke of Austria during the Third Crusade.  He wrote it in his first language, an Old French dialect, with another version in a related Romance dialect that still maintains a precarious existence in Provençe and the Catalan areas of Spain.  Richard's enemies claimed he didn't even know English, but he probably did, though it's true that he exhibited almost no attachment to the country that revered him, preferring instead to live in France.

No prisoner can tell his tale well without expressing his pain,
But to console himself he can write a song. 

I've many friends, but all their gifts are poor;
They'd be ashamed to know how for two winters I've been held for ransom.

My men-at-arms and barons know full well:
The English, Normans, Poitevins, Gascons. 

I would not abandon the poorest companion in prison,
And I don't say this merely to reproach, but still, I am a prisoner.

Richard did finally win his release, through the help of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, despite the connivances to the contrary by his brother John and King Phillip II of France, the son (by a later wife) of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII.

Friday Night AMV

Learning to fly.
I was a pilot once, I wish I'd had one of these. At least I can still enjoy listening to Tom.

Fun with Venn

From AEI:

Stormy weather

Over the last hour my internet (wifi) connection got wonkier than usual, and we noticed that we kept losing the satellite TV as we tried to watch the news over lunch.  It may an effect of the second and more powerful wave of this week's predicted solar storm, which apparently arrived at midday today.

Building a self

Steven Pinker, via Maggie's Farm, on "What's Wrong with Harvard":

I submit that if “building a self” is the goal of a university education, you’re going to be reading anguished articles about how the universities are failing at it for a long, long time.

I think we can be more specific. It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.

On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.

I believe (and believe I can persuade you) that the more deeply a society cultivates this knowledge and mindset, the more it will flourish. The conviction that they are teachable gets me out of bed in the morning. Laying the foundations in just four years is a formidable challenge. If on top of all this, students want to build a self, they can do it on their own time.

A New Day

That's when it happened. Someone said, "I can't believe it will be nine years this week since 9/11". And one by one we began to remember where we were, what we were doing, how it felt. It was this generation's "Where were you when they shot JFK?" moment and for a brief shining moment the shared memory pulled us back from the brink and made us one again.

But like everything that seems impossibly perfect, that moment wasn't meant to last.

In retrospect, 9/11 divides my life more clearly and cleanly than when I married or when my child was born. Before, I was committed to a life that was organized around the pursuit of knowledge. After, I was a man of war. I remember the day well, unlike the other momentous days: the hours spent watching the towers fall I recall far better than the hours in the delivery room, helping with a difficult birth. Though it was a dry wedding due to it being Sunday in rural Georgia, I barely remember my wedding day at all.

I don't object. I have the sense that I was sent, to live in this hour and place for a reason I'm not given to wholly understand. So be it.

Sounds like we are going to war again, against a foe not so very terrible. I think we can take them. The hard part won't be defeating them, or breaking their armies; the armies of the region are fragile, structurally, when on defense. The hard part will be not beating them until we've developed something better, and organic to the region, to step in and take our enemy's place.

Because it's organic, we can't make it happen faster than it naturally happens. That means we can't win this war by pushing too fast. We can break and destroy the enemy as fast as we wish, but we must be patient, to let the enemy develop its own opposition so we can nurture it. This is war as gardening.

Why doesn't that bother me? Shouldn't we rush to destroy the enemy and restore peace as fast as possible, especially given the brutality of the foe?

Perhaps it is because this is what works, and -- finally -- I believe that the rules of the world are not our fault. Things are as they are not because I wish it that way, but because that's how it is. We play the game that was put in front of us.

Could we refuse? Should we? Those are harder questions, really at the juncture of why someone might elect to be a Christian and not a Hindu or -- more radically -- a Buddhist. You have that choice. It is important to think about what is entailed in making that decision.

I am going to Jerusalem in December. The old tradition held that it is the center of the world. Perhaps it is the place for clarity.

We shall see.

Enid & Geraint

By custom and tradition of the Hall, today there are no posts except this poem.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Civilization v. Celebrity

Foul language warning, though nothing you won't expect if you know who Mike Tyson is.

I have never seen a celebrity called out like that before. Not just any celebrity, either, but a former heavyweight champion of the world who is a demonstrated violent felon.

This host has some guts.

More Richard Thompson

A version of a Child ballad, King Henry V's Conquest of France, making a little fast and loose with history:



A version of another Child ballad, the ubiquitous "Cruel Mother" ballad; this one fills out most of each verse with "Edinburgh; Stirling for aye; the Bonnie St. Johnstone lies fair upon Tay":

Super-Henge

Dragging earth-penetrating radar around Stonehenge has some interesting results.

More on Trash

Skip ahead a few minutes, and you can hear an Oxford scholar talking about a hundred-year old find of trash that includes, among other things, lost sayings attributed to Jesus in the early period.

In a hundred years of work, they've gotten through a very small percentage of the trash. Old copies of the Iliad, tempting fragments...

The author's top three finds:

#3: A copy of the Book of Revelations' passage with the Number of the Beast, the earliest known copy we have... which gives a different number.

#2: A non-Homeric version of the story of the Iliad in which the Greeks lose the Trojan war.

#1: Turns out one document that they found in the trash mounds over, and over, and over, and over... well, let's call it a "romance novel."

28 weeks later

The Ebola epidemic, as expected, is getting worse:  about 3,600 infected and 2,000 dead so far.  More ominous is the even more complete breakdown of a medical system that could only have been described a rudimentary even before 79 healthcare workers died of the disease.  Hysterical rage is setting in:

“A US federal air marshal has been quarantined after being attacked by a man with a syringe, suspected to be containing an Ebola-spreading substance, at the Lagos international airport,” read a report out of Nigeria in the International Business Times on Tuesday.

Today's outrage in education

A young piano prodigy's parents would prefer to leave her in public school in Washington, D.C., but then she'd have to give up the piano competitions she keeps traveling to--while maintaining stellar grades--in order to avoid exposing her parents to truancy charges.  So now she's home schooling, a solution that suits no one involved.

Retirement and satisfaction

Statistics about Americans' retirement planning have a tendency to be a bit alarming.  This AEI article by Andrew Biggs and Sylvester Schieber takes an interesting approach, which is to examine the effect of children on retirement savings.  Apparently there was some recent scare-mongering about a discrepancy between the savings of families with children and those without.  Biggs and Schieber note that families with children spend a lot while the kids are at home or in college, then cut way back.  They don't drop their standard of living, though, so much as keep consuming what they always did, not counting what the kids consumed.  Parents save, therefore, not to permit themselves to adopt the standard of living common among childless people with equal income, but to preserve roughly the same standard of living they were used to, which of course makes sense.

The childless Texan99 household always adopted a standard of living significantly below that of my colleagues, even those with children.  Apparently they weren't as fanatically focused on retirement as I was; many of them seemed terrified of the idea of retirement, to be truthful.  In any case, if we get along in our working years at about the level we'd like to preserve in our retirement years, we'll be able to save a lot more than most people think is ordinarily prudent for whatever income we have.  It's not about the income, anyway, it's about getting used to whatever standard of living the income permits.  People are remarkably flexible that way.  The big thing is to be uninterested in how other people live; even if their incomes are comparable, their circumstances often are not, depending on how large a family they choose to raise and how prudent they are about emergencies and the future.

1,000 years of pop music

Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing, cuccu.  Here, summer is on its way out, finally, and we're looking forward to the first day we can open the windows with about the same enthusiasm that our forbears in England looked forward to the warm season.



"Sing it loud, Cuckoo."  That word lhude, according to the linguistic podcasts I'm enjoying this week, is related to the one found in Ludwig and Ludovicus (a/k/a Louis, or Clovis), and in that context means not so much "loud" as "famous."  All those names mean "famous leader," but were transformed from a title to a proper name, much as though we started to name kids "Boss."

These linguistic lectures adopt a leisurely pace.  I came in at around lecture 28, by which point the topic had advanced only to 5th-century Roman Britain, when the locals were still speaking some form of Celtic or Latin, and Old English was merely a glimmer in the eye of some European shore-hugging Anglo-Saxon-Jute-Frisian types between modern-day Denmark and Holland who were beginning to feel pressure to relocate somewhere across the water.  Now I think I'll go back and start with Lecture One.

"Sumer Is Icumen In" is not Old English.  Though it's one of the oldest preserved pieces of English music, it dates from the 13th century, post-Norman Conquest, and therefore features Middle English. If there's already a French influence in there, though, I can't see it; I'll have to await that lecture in the series.  Maybe it was a traditional song and therefore something of a linguistic throwback.

Ezra Pound parodied the song in a winter version:  "Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, An ague hath my ham." In his Grand Oratorio "The Seasonings," P.D.Q. Bach rendered it as "Summer is a cumin seed."

YouTube has the whole Richard Thompson concert, which looks worth a try.  I may spend all of today listening to things and hardly getting anything read at all.  Update:  Oh, yeah!  This is long, but well worth listening to, if only for the verison of "Oops, I Did It Again," madrigal style.

What Are The Chances?

Racketeering charges?

Perhaps there is some strange computer virus that selectively trashes records inconvenient to incumbents, like the “glitch” that erased part of Nixon’s tapes. How else to explain the fact that this is the fourth announcement of an ever-expanding computer calamity connected to Lois Lerner to emerge from the IRS? First it was just Lerner’s computer that was affected, then those of her closest co-conspirators, then “no more than twenty” computers, and now an ever larger batch of burned out workstations.

Even more interesting, the IRS has apparently not yet shared this newest tidbit with Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, the distinguished and courageous jurist presiding over Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Here was Remy singing about it when it was just seven hard drives...

How They Count Time in The Mountains of North Carolina

Two minutes, forty seconds.

Not All of Us

I won't be looking up any such stolen naked images, and I don't expect any of you to do it either.

A Spirited Woman

I've slapped a boyfriend across the face, hard, and more than once, and shoved and struck too. Now, you might say these were extraordinary circumstances, or that because I'm a fairly small woman striking a much larger man it's not so bad, but the fact remains that if the tables were turned, such behavior would be considered appalling.

When I sounded out some friends, several of them admitted to lashing out physically at a boyfriend, and while no one was exactly pleased with themselves over it, it also didn't seem like the Big Deal it obviously would be were a boyfriend doing the same thing. I can't speak for others, but in some ways, I feel like violence was encouraged in me; people always found my temper, with its foot-stomping, drink-tossing, vase-smashing theatrics, to be hilarious, largely because I am so small and because it comes out so rarely. Like my grandmother, I was "a spitfire," my grandpa always said approvingly. As a result, I didn't work to curb it as I should have, probably feeling in some way that it even denoted "spunk" or something, and doubtless there was some half-baked, unacknowledged idea of "lady's prerogative" at work, a double-standard I'd consciously have mocked.

Your grandpa was right. Sometimes the only way to get a man to listen to you is to knock him upside the head. That's true for other men, too: once in a while, a man just needs a good knock on his door.

The double-standard is wise and proper, though, because if he knocks you back he could kill you.

Separate but what?

If anyone was hoping that the WaPo editorial page would get more respectable with the advent of Jeff Bezos, this article is bound to prove a disappointment.  Andre Perry argues that it is an important function of the public schools, at least on a par with the task of educating children, to provide jobs to disadvantaged teachers.  Thus, movements to limit teacher tenure are a stab in the heart of black professionals.

This argument has always seemed implicit in the attitudes of many progressives, but I believe this is the first time I've seen it made openly.

Canto

Via AEI:

Lending and spending with burning ire
The people cannot control the government
Ex-Im! Fall apart! The center must not hold;
Set anarchy loose upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide be loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence be drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of cronyist intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely de-authorization is at hand.
Kartoffelsalat! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of Irish sand;
A plate with potatoes, red onion and chive,
Bacon bits and warm vegetable broth,
Prepared in Germany, while all about it
Wind shadows of shameless export subsidies.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of scarcity
Will come to haunt my people in a faraway land,
As yam and tater, taxpayer-financed,
Slouch toward Munich, never to return.

A Reliable Alternative Energy Source

Trash.

“A good number to remember is that three tons of waste contains as much energy as one ton of fuel oil… so there is a lot of energy in waste,” Göran Skoglund, spokesperson for Öresundskraft, one of the country’s leading energy companies, explains in the short video below. That means that the two million tons of waste incinerated each year produces around 670,000 tons worth of fuel oil energy. Sweden even helps to clean up other countries in the EU by importing their trash and burning it.

Thanks again, Lord Keynes

Japan struggles with the stubborn refusal of its citizens to agree with the approved economic theories:

The world's third-largest economy contracted at an annualized rate of 7.1 percent in the April-June quarter, according to updated government figures Monday. The initial estimate released earlier this month said the economy contracted 6.8 percent. Business investment fell more than twice as much as first estimated.

The economy's contraction was expected after Japan increased its sales tax from 5 percent to 8 percent on April 1.

* * *

Surveys show the public opposes a further tax increase, though increases are needed to counter ballooning public debt, which now is more than twice the size of the economy.

The revised data Monday show business investment fell more than twice as much as estimated before, or 5.1 percent, while private residential spending sank 10.4 percent in annual terms.

"Theoretically, there should be no impact from the consumption tax increase on corporate spending or long-term corporate planning, but a large number of Japanese corporations seemed to see a large impact from the hike on final demand," said Junko Nishioka, an economist at RBS Japan Securities in Tokyo.

Can fish think?

Another post from the consistently interesting Phenomena site (the source of Not Exactly Rocket Science weekly updates), about fish send signals to eels about tunnels where prey may be hiding and can be flushed out, to the mutual advantage of the fish and the eels.  It's charmingly entitled "When Your Prey's in a Hole and You Don't Have a Pole, Use a Moray."

The judicious mind

Phenomenon blogger Virginia Hughes, facing jury duty, has done some research into the role of stress in making us excessively judgmental.  She concludes that a prospective juror would do well to embrace relaxation techniques, which seems sensible.  It also occurs to me, however, that if we want people to judge us with calmness and temperance, we would do well not to put them under stress.  Many of civilization's proudest achievements are the ways we signal to strangers that we are not necessarily an immediate threat.

Grid parity

That's the PC term for comparing the cost of conventional electrical power and PV (that's the PC term for what we troglodytes call solar power).  A new study cited at Greenbuilders claims that a handful of states, including Texas, my Texas, already have reached grid parity, with more on the way.  The calculation includes heavy federal subsidies set to expire in 2016.

Casa Texan99 is interested in solar, notwithstanding our climate skeptic character flaws, because we enjoy independence and because there are more reasons to favor renewable energy sources than mixed-up anxieties about carbon poisoning.  That is, I don't consider CO₂ a toxin, but that doesn't mean mining and burning fossil fuels produce no unpleasant effects of any kind.  On the whole, I believe they produce benefits far outweighing the costs, but I'd move to solar power for my home in a heartbeat if I thought it made economic sense.

As my husband points out, though, this study, like most, glosses over durability and the time it takes to recoup upfront capital costs.   From what he hears the solar panels are getting cheaper, but they aren't lasting the advertised 20 years, either.  In some states, the upfront capital investment is addressed by leasing arrangements, but a few states, like Florida and South Carolina, have outlawed these.  In South Carolina, for instance, public utilities so far have succeeded in arguing that a company that installs solar panels on a homeowner's roof and then charges them for the power produced is a utility that must jump through all the usual monopolistic hoops.

This Grist article points out that our society can be unpredictable about which emerging industries get the red carpet treatment, in ways that don't necessarily line up with our usual assumptions about libertarian trends:

It’s been interesting to watch this play out in light of the Wild West atmosphere that so often surrounds technological breakthroughs.  I’ve been reading American Odyssey, Robert Conot’s history of Detroit, and I’m continually surprised at how easy cars had it in the first few decades of their creation.  They killed people left and right, but it was was years before “drivers’ licenses,” “insurance,” or “parking tickets” came on the scene.  Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft were able to muscle into long-established monopolies and get comfortable before facing any major pushback, and the first major online retailer, Amazon, was able to go nearly two decades without charging the sales taxes that brick and mortar stores had to.

It’s not that this kind of preferential treatment for new technology is fair.  And to be sure, solar has gotten some breaks over the years as well, particularly at the federal level.  Solar may have widespread appeal to everyone from hippies to libertarians.  Yet it’s still having to fight to claw its way into a surprising number of markets, while other industries get to zoom ahead.

I wouldn't want to minimize the headaches the "distributed power" causes for electric utility companies. I've been involved in a dozen or more power utility bankruptcies, and the administrative nightmares caused by allowing people to force utilities to run their meters backwards when their co-gen power was being produced were always a big part of the intractable disputes.  But it does seem as though we make it unnecessarily difficult for people to generate some of their own power.  I was pleased to see that South Carolina appears to have taken some steps recently to reduce the barriers to solar leasing.

Ghostbusters

It's the 30th anniversary right now. For a week or so, you can see it in theaters.

I took the family today. I hadn't seen it in ages. It's a surprisingly good movie. Almost everything that happens on screen is beautifully wrapped up in building out the plot and its universe. Well worth a few minutes, if you happen to have some time in the next little while.

Choice

Some promising news:

"This year, 2014, we saw the largest single-year growth in enrollment in programs in the history of school choice," he says. The fastest-growing state is Indiana, which is expected to award 30,000 scholarships this year, up from 590 in 2010. "And the momentum's not going to stop."

"Freedom!"

I had nearly forgotten that the Scots are about to vote on independence.  I know nothing about the problems they face today, of course; my head is entirely full of claptrap from Braveheart and songs of the Jacobite rebellion and movie versions of Mary, Queen of Scots (the Glenda Jackson/Vanessa Redgrave production is terrific, by the way).  I had a vague notion that romantic old ideals of freedom and independence were bursting forth, so it was disappointing to read this analysis from Andrew Stuttaford at HotAir:

The problem with an independent Scotland is not that the economics are dodgy (although they are), but it is that that is in the grip of an authoritarian leftist political class, a grasping, thuggish vulture class that should be wished on no people. There is also the little matter of the EU. If an independent Scotland wished to join the EU (the membership it “enjoys” through membership of the UK would probably not survive) its (enthusiastically europhile) leaders would have to commit to joining the single currency as soon as Scotland satisfied the necessary tests. They deny that, but the EU’s rules are clear. The euro would ruin what’s left of the Scottish economy and make a mockery of “independence.”

The polls are actually looking as though the vote might go for independence.

"My son, the . . . ."

I've been listening to a series of lectures about the history of 20th-century science, which has now reached the career of Niels Bohr.  The lecturer claimed that Bohr was the only person ever to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Olympic Gold Medal.  Alas, the wonderful factoid is not quite true.  His brother Harald was on a team that took a silver medal in soccer, and apparently Niels sometimes played with the same team, but not in the Olympics.  Still, it suggests an impressive well-roundedness.  If nothing else, you have to imagine that Mrs. Bohr had plenty of tidbits to drop into conversations with her friends about what her sons were up to these days.

It turns out that Nobel laureates who won other prestigious prizes generally have received Nobel Peace Prizes or literary prizes rather than straight science prizes.  George Bernard Shaw, for instance, had to find room on his mantel for a Nobel Prize in literature as well as an Oscar (1938, Pygmalion, best adapted screenplay). Philip Noel-Baker, a British diplomat, won both the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize and a 1920 Olympic silver medal in track. Charles Gates Dawes, who was vice-president to Calvin Coolidge, won a 1925 Nobel Peace Prize after writing a tune in 1912 that ultimately was recorded as a number-one pop hit in the U.S., "It’s All In The Game.” George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics after winning $1 million on TV's "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader," but that's not cross-training, strictly speaking.

The dawn of English

For those of you with an interest in linguistics, here are some very enjoyable podcasts on the development of English.  Someone in a ChicagoBoyz comments thread, I think, referred me to Episodes 28-30 for the incidental political history that was included in them, concerning the time we usually associate with King Arthur.

I've been watching the Starz series "Outlander," a time-travel yarn about an woman who leaves post-WWII England, via a McGuffin that doesn't matter, and lands in Scotland just before the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.  As I get older I find it more and more difficult to follow movie dialogue, especially BBC productions with regional accents, but for some reason I never have trouble with thick old-fashioned Scots accents, maybe because I've listened to so many old ballads.  I could listen to that accent all day.  (The show throws in a lot of Gaelic, too, of which I don't speak a word beyond "slainte," but it sounds incredibly romantic.)  Anyway, the point is that the Frisian described in Episode 28 of the linguistic podcasts sounds an awful lot like a mashup between Cockney- and Scots-flavored English.

Song of Brynhild

So, among Viking-oriented friends this week (of whom I have a surprising number), the big news was a study that showed that half of the Viking invaders of England were female. This contradicts long held beliefs among scholars of the graves of early Viking invaders, because the grave goods are only very rarely female brooches and dresses, and almost always are swords or other weapons. Scholars assumed that this meant that the person in the grave was a man.

On studying the bones themselves, however, it turns out that lots of those buried with weapons turn out to have been women.

I see that our old friend Lars Walker is not impressed with the study. He cites a rebuttal, and comments:

But, this paper essentially uses the presence of six female migrants and seven male as evidence that women and children most likely accompanied the Norse armies with the intent of settling the land once it was conquered, rather than migrating in a second wave once the fighting was over. It is, sadly, not at all about female Viking warriors, and not some Earth-shattering evidence that Norse armies were evenly split among women and men.

They'll still have to prove to me that there were any female Viking warriors at all, but the point is made.

The importance of the finding goes beyond that there were women among the earliest settlers, though. It is that women were not restricted to the roles that our scholars assumed they were restricted to filling.

We have plenty of reason to doubt that women fought in the field as part of Viking armies, both in terms of the written evidence from the early sagas, absence of mention of it from the surviving Anglo-Saxon records, and of course the physical facts of Viking-age combat. On the other hand, there is ample evidence in the sources of women who were trusted with the defense of homes, and homes being established in an invaded land will of course need especial defense. For that matter, the prominent role of women in the population of Northern Europe, and their affection for weapons even as wedding gifts, was remarked as far back as Tacitus' Germania.

What I think is important to take away from this study is that what scholars were certain about for generations about the rigidity of female gender roles simply wasn't so. Many women built their lives around an image of themselves with a sword, not a brooch, and their contemporaries accepted this so much that they honored them in death with the marks of the life they had chosen. We are the ones who assumed they wouldn't, or couldn't, do that. Best not to repeat the mistake, which was more a relic of 19th-century attitudes than a careful reading of the writings of our ancestors.

War Dogs

Seriously?  We don't make it a point to bring home military dogs when they're retired from active duty?

Culture and freedom

David Foster's site, ChicagoBoyz, linked me to a site called askblog, including this quotation:

[T]he cultural margin is more important than the institutional margin. … [T]here are no societies in which anarchy will work well but government would work poorly, or vice-versa.  Instead, on the one hand there are well-developed cultures, which could have good government or good anarchy, while on the other hand there are poorly-developed cultures, which could have only bad government or bad anarchy.

Another interesting post at the same site described a conservative tendency to arrange issues along a civilization/barbarism axis, while progressives tend to think in terms of an oppressor/oppressed axis.

I Imagine This Works Well

"Soldierfit," a workout plan based not on boot camp -- that's been done, and never very successfully -- but on the military life post boot camp. Assigning you an "NCO" to check on you every 30 days and chew you out for bad habits is probably somewhat effective, if you stay with the program.

Of course, it's a gimmick. You could always walk away, unlike the real military. Nevertheless, the structure probably would help a lot of people. One of the things I try to do for a few of my closest friends, not here on the internet but the ones I have in the physical world, is to keep in touch with them about their priorities and check on their progress regularly. Obviously I wouldn't impose myself if they did not wish it, but several of them have said that they like knowing they will have to account for their progress on a regular basis. It sometimes gives them that push to go to the gym, to write an extra chapter on their novel or dissertation, or whatever else they may be working on that is important to them.

That said, talking about what you're trying to do feels like accomplishing something -- and it's not, it's just talking. You have to hit that balance where what we are going to talk about is your accomplishment, so there'd better be one!

Baby steps in medicine

Twenty-five years ago there was great hope that advances in the understanding of the genetic underpinnings of cystic fibrosis heralded a cure in the near future.  That early hope was dashed, but medical researchers keep making small, concrete advances, many of which can hugely open up the life of teenagers and young adults suffering from this disease.  It may not be too long before we can refer to middle-aged people suffering from it.  It was not so many years ago that only a lucky child could survive it to the age of six.

Boys really are different.

Science says so.

The week in pictures

From Powerline:

Apple-shaming

Umberto Eco on Charlie Brown

An unlikely review, recently made available by the New York Review of Books. (H/t: The Paris Review.)

His review is harmed, I think, by his omission of Marcie.