Words and Ideas

A pair of articles by thinking men, and writers, on the dangers of thought and word. The first one is especially reflective on the way in which we can't even express the danger without falling into a kind of contradiction. That doesn't mean the danger isn't real:

Tolkien’s ring of power is a plain gold ring, of course, and embodies a series of quite complex valences to do with binding, with vows and marriage. But at the same time as being a blank surface, the ring is also paradoxically (which is to say, magically) lettered. The ring, in other words, is a book. To be sure it is a short book; its whole text is the one ring charm. But a short book is still a book. Looked at this way, Lord of the Rings becomes a strangely self-destructive fable—a book about the quest to destroy a book, a long string of carefully chosen words positing a world in which words have magical power to huge evil. How few books there are in Middle Earth!... Gandalf scratches his rune at Weathertop; the hobbits misread it. The elven door in Moria, beautifully lettered, commands 'speak friend and enter!' and nobody understands its simple instruction. The fellowship find a dwarfish book in the mines, as scorched and battered as poor old Beowulf; but as they read it aloud ('drums in the deep', 'we cannot get out') it becomes true to them, and they repeat the words as suddenly, horribly, appropriate to their own predicament. The repeated theme is the danger of words; their slipperiness but also the ease with which they can move us directly into the malign world of the text. One ring to bind us all.

...This is not as straightforward as it might be. As both a Christian and a scholar of Old English, Tolkien has a necessary investment in the spoken word, especially as it is passed between a communion of loving friends: the logos, the face-to-face, the speak-friend-and-enter. The Lord’s Prayer (which Tolkien liked to recite in the Gothic language) was conveyed by Christ to his followers verbally, not in written form. Of course, Christ’s whole life is conveyed to us via a written text.... The world of Middle Earth is a raw world compared to the ‘cooked’ world of 20th- and 21st-century urban living. And so for Fantasy more generally: the word is raw in its immediacy and naturalness, its directness and magic. Magic here is spoken aloud; songs are sung directly to an audience; nothing is written down except the everything that is written down to construe the Fantasy realm.

What is the distinction between the 'book' that Tolkien burns, and the one that he made? One difference lies in beauty. The ring is beautiful, but the language inscribed upon it is foul. So is the idea expressed by the words:

Not long ago I was introduced to an audience as an “intellectual.” This was a well-meaning choice of word, and a flattering one, but it was slightly off. An intellectual is a person who is mainly interested in ideas. I am an aesthete—a person who is mainly interested in beauty. Nowadays the word aesthete carries with it the musty reek of high Victoriana. Still, there remains no better word to describe the way certain people—people like me—view the world.

It’s not that aesthetes are hostile to ideas. But it’s part of aesthetic wisdom that there is great danger in allowing ideas alone to take the reins and ride mankind, since too often they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves. Far too many intellectuals have been what Jacob Burckhardt called “terrible simplifiers,” the power-hungry idea-mongers whose utopian visions have inspired the world’s most murderous tyrants. That is reason enough to decline to be counted among their number.

The author follows this up with a long insight on the importance of art to political thinking, in part to leverage against the force of binding ideas. He ends on a note that turns on a highly intellectual distinction, I notice: the distinction between 'making art that moralizes' and 'being alive to the moral force of created art.'

When making art or writing about it, the aesthete tries never to moralize. Nor will he look with favor upon artists who do so, no matter whether their particular brand of moralizing is religious or secular. But he can and must be fully, intensely alive to the moral force of art whose creators aspire merely to make the world around us more beautiful, and in so doing to pierce the veil of the visible and give us a glimpse of the permanently true.

Tolkien said that he hated allegory. I suspect he meant something like the distinction. The world he crafted was very much alive to permanent moral truth. Indeed, its beauty arises chiefly from its truth.


(H/t: Brandywine Books and Arts & Letters Daily.)

Lies, Damned Lies, and Abortion

Tennessee is voting on abortion.

Amendment 1 on the Tennessee ballot in November would strip the right to abortion from the state’s constitution, the first time that any constitution in the U.S. would be amended to remove an established right. It would also be the first time the word abortion is added to any constitution and singled out as the only medical procedure outside the zone of privacy.

Wait, how can both those propositions be true?

Oh, right. There is no right to abortion to be 'stripped' from the Tennessee constitution. Tennessee is just clarifying its constitution in light of Supreme Court meddling. It's not removing an established right: it's clarifying that no such right was ever intended to be established.

Why It Matters More to be Right than to Win

Republics die, as all men do. What matters is the seeds we sow:

I study ancient history, so I know nothing lasts forever: Republics have fallen before.... Cicero... became known, according to his biographer, Plutarch, “as the best orator ... of the Romans.” He was a true republican, dedicated to preserving Rome's representative government. When Julius Caesar invited him to join a backroom political coalition, Cicero refused. He worried that conspiratorial demagogues were undermining the republic.

He was right. The republic was dying.

...

The story of freedom is long; it's written by an author who plans millenniums in advance.

Don't worry if it works today. Worry that it's right.

Worst Videogame Ever

"Car Mechanic Simulator." I kid you not.



Hey, kids! Want to spend several sweaty afternoons cursing and cutting your knuckles up trying to find the right wrench to undo a rusty bolt? Long to spend hours trying to figure out the right order to disassemble, clean, and then reassemble a carburetor? Care to memorize the timing sequences of numerous engines? Do we have a deal for you! For the low, low price of only....

Is there a retirement crisis?

Andrews Biggs and Sylvester Schieber argue that there isn't.  Their figures for retirement income include what workers saved for themselves, as well as what they'll receive from the government-mandated "retirement" program we call Social Security, in which a lot of money is taken from the worker throughout his career, not invested, and partially redistributed to him at below-market interest rates according to whatever Congress decides will garner the most votes.

We'll never know how much the workers could have saved for retirement without these career-long expropriations from their paychecks.  As is usual in this sort of analysis, the answer probably is that the more prudent among them would have saved a ton and invested it in a reasonably diverse portfolio, and had a fine nest-egg upon retirement, while the less prudent would have found that an uncaring and unjust society conspired against them to ensure that they either never saved or lost it all later.

So Social Security continues to redistribute money from ants to the grasshoppers, or (if you prefer) from the lucky to the unlucky, while nevertheless serving as a vehicle to transfer wealth from the needy to the wealthy, which you have to admit is a neat trick.  All it requires is selling the program as forcible retirement savings (which is what it takes to get votes to implement it) but administering it as a current subsidy of old retirees by young workers (which is what it takes to delay the day on which you acknowledge that it's flat broke, so that you'd be forced to discontinue it and take your political lumps).  This rhetorical gambit reminds me of how industrial society is simultaneously causing global warming and global cooling.  The important takeaway is:  the government must always intervene to prevent a catastrophe!  Unless, of course, voters decide to cut it out.

A cop doesn't fit in my pocket

Four against one, one wins.

Priorities

Steyn, reflecting on border security's seizure of bagpipes and other inexplicable dangers to the republic:

Come to that, US border security devotes more time and resources to my kid bringing in a Kinder chocolate egg from Canada than to Thomas Duncan bringing in Ebola. . . .

If you're wondering why the seizure of my kids' chocolate eggs is in the same book as war and terrorism and all the big-boy stuff, the answer is it's part of the same story. To function, institutions have to be able to prioritize -- even big, bloated, money-no-object SWAT-teams-for-every-penpusher institutions like the US Government. You can't crack down on Kinder eggs, bagpipes and Ebola: At a certain point, you have to choose. My line with the Homeland Security guys is a simple one: every 20 minutes you spend on me, or my kids' chocolate eggs, or Cameron Webster's bagpipe is 20 minutes you're not spending on the guy with Ebola, or Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The price of bagpipe scrutiny is a big hole blown in the lives of American families attending the Boston Marathon, or a bunch of schoolkids in Dallas having to be quarantined for a vicious, ravaging disease with a high fatality rate.

But, of course, giving additional attention to West African visitors would be racist. Not like terrorizing Scotsmen over their bagpipes.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security expands its curious priorities from raiding Boston strip clubs for selling knock-off Red Sox T-shirts to raiding private homes to seize vintage cars that don't meet EPA standards.

"You Got Me. I Ain't Even Married."

1990 was long ago. 24 years, I guess: I wonder if as much changed between 1950 and 1974? Between 1974 and 1998?

Perhaps things did. Perhaps things wither away so quickly now that it is like trying to stand firm on quicksand. Perhaps: but that puts me in mind of an old story.

Cottage Bakers Unite!

Speaking of the way regulations destroy small businesses, a good way to estimate the damage is to repeal a few regulations and see what happens:

Since Texas does not issue permits or licenses for cottage food production operations, the state does not have a precise way to track them. However, anyone who wants to operate a cottage food business is required to become a certified food handler. In Texas, there are at least two organizations that offer courses specifically designed for cottage food: Texas Food Safety Training and Texas A&M AgriLife Extension. Between the two of them, over 1,400 individuals have purchased and completed courses over the past year. Given that cottage food entrepreneurs can also comply with the state’s regulations by taking a general food handler course, the true number of home baking businesses may be even higher.

This makes a huge amount of sense, as many kinds of foods are very safe and don't require tight regulations to ensure consumer health. Breads may have eggs or milk in them, say, but they're going to be baked at several hundred degrees until they are dry and firm. As long as the ingredients were relatively fresh, there's very little danger. If you use powdered milk and eggs, the danger nearly ceases to exist.

The future is dire . . .

. . . and always has been.  From The Age of Global Warming:  a History, by Rupert Darwall, about the "small is beautiful" movement that inspired a lot of environmentalists to abandon not only capitalism but the very idea that an economic system should be evaluated by its ability to produce growth and prosperity:

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) set up a study group chaired by Harvey Brooks, a Harvard engineering professor.  In a 1971 report, the group argued that developed societies were fast approaching a condition of near saturation.  Even in higher education, people were suffering from information overload which risked stifling the production of new knowledge.

Somehow or another, new knowledge was produced after 1971, but perhaps not by this guy and his buddies.

What Ails American Democracy?

Fukuyama writes:

The fundamental problem, he argues, lies in the Madisonian machinery of American constitutional law. The Founders’ separation of powers can generate positive outcomes only when political opponents trust one another sufficiently to approve one another’s nominees, support one another’s bills, and practice the grubby but essential arts of political compromise. When the spirit of trust breaks down, the result is not democracy but vetocracy, a term coined by Fukuyama. Too many political players—courts, congressional committees, special interests like the National Rifle Association and the American Medical Association, independent commissions, regulatory authorities—have acquired the power to veto measures; too few have the power to get things done....

Contemporary American conservatism has no solution to paralysis; “starving the beast” ignores the necessity of capable government regulation for any efficient capitalist economy. The progressive side, Fukuyama argues, is equally at fault: encumbering American government with contradictory and unfunded mandates only reduces public confidence in the state’s capacity to serve its citizens fairly and efficiently.

What separates Fukuyama’s analysis from conservative and progressive polemics alike is his argument that this crisis of government results from “too much law and too much ‘democracy’ relative to American state capacity.”

I'm sure it would be easier to get things done if bureaucrats didn't have to ask the people very often. In recommending a more British system, what he wants is what Sir Humphrey wants: control of the important things taken out of the hands of the barbarians.

But the last time the American political system girded itself up and did what it wanted in spite of clear and robust public opinion, what we got was the ACA -- the worst piece of legislation in the history of the country, the ramifications of which are still not clear years after it passed and which no one had even read at the time they passed it. They could not have read it: it was too long, and passed in too short a time, for a human being to have gotten through it even had it been as easy and light as a romance novel, let alone the technically dense and logically disrupted tangle that it was. What we get when the elite put aside their concern for the 'veto' of public opinion is exactly this.

Another example he raises is infrastructure. But there's no opposition from the American people to repairing infrastructure. The only opposition comes from within the elite class itself:

The president-elect's original plan was designed to stop the hemorrhaging in construction and manufacturing while investing in physical infrastructure that is indispensable for long-term economic growth. It was not a grab bag of gender-correct programs, nor was it a macho plan--the whole idea of economic stimulus is to use government spending to put idle factors of production back to work.

The president-elect responded to the protests by sending Jason Furman, his soon-to-be deputy director at the National Economic Council, along with his senior aides to a meeting organized by Kim Gandy and Feminist Majority president Eleanor Smeal. Gandy described the scene:
I can't resist saying that this meeting didn't look like the other transition meetings I attended. In addition to the presence of more women, the room actually looked different--because Feminist Majority President Ellie Smeal had asked that the chairs be set in a circle, with no table in the center.

The senior economists listened attentively as Gandy and Smeal and other advocates argued for a stimulus package that would add jobs for nurses, social workers, teachers, and librarians in our crumbling "human infrastructure" (they had found their testosterone-free slogan). Did Furman mention that jobs in the "human infrastructure"--health, education, and government--had increased by more than half a million since December 2007?

Now I will admit that our public libraries are looking better these days. Both of the ones within twenty-five miles of here have undergone significant expansion, adding computer rooms and staff (who are not only exclusively female, but the only people in that twenty-five mile radius with Obama bumper stickers). Mission accomplished!

The roads are a little rougher than they used to be, but that's OK: there isn't as much industrial traffic. Or agricultural traffic either: all the local dairies that used to be here have gone out of business due to the cost of increased regulations.

Speaking of milk, have you noticed how steep the price is for a gallon of milk lately? Partially that's from driving farmers out of the market, but partially it's from robust regulation. The USDA congratulates itself on its regulation of that market, as the regulators openly disdain the market as a method for balancing supply and demand.

There's one more thing that is at work, which is that people nationally don't agree on what should be done in many cases. Localities have the kind of agreement about political problems that can produce progress; nationally we are divided, and shouldn't expect or even want "progress." All "progress" of that kind would mean is increasing the tension between Americans.

So from my perspective, the problem isn't that the government can't get anything done. The problem is that it shouldn't be doing at least half the things it's trying to do.

Democracy is like the market in that it takes advantage of local information to make complex decisions. For that reason, its effects work best when they remain local: when townships and school boards and churches and clubs vote on the rules that govern them as bodies. The more power is centralized, and the more it is slowed by the ossification that comes with size and bureaucracy, the more even democratic decisions are bad ones.

Want to fix America? Push power down. Break the Federal government's stranglehold on everything except its few limited, Constitutional roles. Eliminate most of the government, repeal all regulations back to say the first Bush administration, and have state and local governments decide which ones they want.

The Federal government can retain its basic role, the one Jefferson thought was important:

With respect to our State and federal governments, I do not think their relations correctly understood by foreigners. They generally suppose the former subordinate to the latter. But this is not the case. They are co-ordinate departments of one simple and integral whole. To the State governments are reserved all legislation and administration, in affairs which concern their own citizens only, and to the federal government is given whatever concerns foreigners, or the citizens of other States; these functions alone being made federal. The one is the domestic, the other the foreign branch of the same government; neither having control over the other, but within its own department. There are one or two exceptions only to this partition of power. But, you may ask, if the two departments should claim each the same subject of power, where is the common umpire to decide ultimately between them? In cases of little importance or urgency, the prudence of both parties will keep them aloof from the questionable ground: but if it can neither be avoided nor compromised, a convention of the States must be called, to ascribe the doubtful power to that department which they may think best.

We've added one more constitutional role to Jefferson's ideal, which is making sure that even within states government does not violate basic rights. Generally the Federal government has done this badly, but at times they've been the only one to do it at all. For now, it might be retained.

But do these few things, and nothing else, at the Federal level. That would radically reduce the power available to the elite, and radically increase democratic forms. It would also improve the nation in every respect.

A Less Democratic Process

Another police department shuttered, this time because their insurance refused to continue to cover them. Too many lawsuits:

According to PEP Executive Vice President JT. Babish, these “variables” are lawsuits stemming from wage disputes, employment harassment, wrongful terminations, allegations of wrongful arrest and violations of civil rights within the departments.

Nine of these lawsuits are currently ongoing which led to PEP dropping the coverage claiming that they could not keep up with the cost of all the suits....

The closure of the Lincoln Heights police department comes just days after a revealing investigation into the overwhelming corruption within the department. The investigation revealed that the department had not only hired, but heavily promoted an officer with a felony background, who was later fired for felony theft on duty.

The investigation also found that one officer was fired and rehired who had a history of harassing female drivers and was an actual member of several biker gangs known for their felonious activity.

I'm surprised by that. Traditional motorcycle clubs either exclude police, or are made up only of police. It's rare to see overlap.

It's a Start

A propos some other discussions we've had.

I could live without the dinner party lessons, though....

Eric Hines

Condescending Political Ads

Cassandra is talking about a Cosmopolitan complaint about political ads from male candidates that are condescending to women.

Well, if it makes you feel any better, there's plenty of this to go around.



I'm not even from Kentucky, and I'm feeling the condescension. So your qualifications for office are (a) you're not Barack Obama, and (b) you can shoot skeet?

On the Workings of the System

A sub-debate between Cass and I has to do with how well the system we have still responds to democratic pressures. The Federal system is problematic, to be sure. Obamacare has been underwater forever, and only gets less popular, and yet no repeal is in sight until perhaps 2017 -- depending on what other issues come up between now and then. Democratic pressures have not been successful at reforming the law, and indeed the system is structurally such that even wave elections in 2010 and possibly this year can't produce reform. Meanwhile, the changes to the insurance landscape in America are going to be so sweeping by 2017 that it's not clear if things can still be undone by that time.

On the other hand, at the local level, things still work sometimes. On the very issue we were discussing -- abusive writing of traffic tickets for revenue -- the little town of Waldo, FL, has had a stunning success at stopping the problem through democratic means.

In August, five Waldo officers rebelled against their superiors and made a presentation to the city council about the malpractices.... After State Attorney Bill Cervone advised that he would bring a case before the Alachua Grand Jury that would be “humiliating,” the city council voted to disband the notoriously corrupt police department.

Now, it took good officers stepping forward to report the abuses to force action, as well as the State Attorney's threat. Still, the system worked: a corrupt department was identified and disbanded by the democratically-elected city council. Well done, all around.

Stand aside, sonny!

As my husband remarked, you have to wonder if the Fed took into account what would happen when "retirees" found the return on their retirement savings had gone to zero?  It might have guessed that they'd go back to work.  It turns out that they're still pretty competitive:

The further one digs into today's "blockbuster" jobs report, the uglier it gets. Because it is not only the participation rate collapse, the slide in average earnings, but, topping it all off, we just learned that the future of the US workforce is bleak. In fact, with the age of the median employed male now in their mid-40's, the US workforce has never been older. Case in point: the September data confimed that the whopping surge in jobs... was thanks to your "grandparents" those in the 55-69 age group, which comprised the vast majority of the job additions in the month, at a whopping 230K.This was the biggest monthly jobs increase in the 55 and over age group since February!

What about the prime worker demographic, those aged 25-54 and whose work output is supposed to propel the US economy forward? They lost 10,000 jobs.

Some thought-provoking charts at that link. Will Affordable-Healthcare-for-All have to kill off Gramma and Grampa before employers break down and hire the youngsters?  And have you checked out the voting patterns among the Grizzled Grumblers?

Don't Mock Daddy

Nice. That's one we haven't heard in a while.

"Why Medieval Logic Matters"

The three greatest centuries for logic were the 4th BC, the 14th AD, and the 19th AD. The philosopher interviewed here suggests that this order is not merely temporal but is also the order of importance, such that if we were to speak of the "two greatest centuries for logic" the 19th century would drop out.

Want to know why? Enjoy wrestling with a thorny paradox or two?

What truly deserves the title ‘paradox’ is the Knower paradox. Consider the proposition, ‘You don’t know this proposition’—call it U, say. Suppose you know U. Then U is true (one can only know truths), so you don’t know U. Contradiction, so (by reductio ad absurdum) you don’t know U. But that is what U says. So U is true, and moreover, you’ve just proved it’s true, so you know U. That really is a contradiction—we can prove both that you know U and that you don’t, that is, that U is both true and false. But surely that’s impossible!

Consider the solutions. Do you like the 14th century solution better than the contemporary ones?

Can You Read English and French? Try Romanian.

It's a bit of work, to be sure, but there's a straight-line connection. Romanian is 20% Latin, and 43% borrowed Romance loan-words. (Don't laugh: English is 75% borrowed Romance loan-words, thanks to William I.)

Istoria creării cerurilor şi a pământului
La început, Dumnezeu[a] a creat cerurile şi pământul. Pământul era pustiu şi gol; peste faţa adâncului era întuneric, iar Duhul lui Dumnezeu plutea peste întinderea apelor.

Atunci Dumnezeu a zis: „Să fie lumină!“; şi a fost lumină. Dumnezeu a văzut că lumina era bună şi a despărţit lumina de întuneric. Dumnezeu a numit lumina „zi“, iar întunericul l-a numit „noapte“. A fost o seară şi a fost o dimineaţă: ziua întâi.

Looks very intimidating, with all those inflections and nonstandard characters. But I'll bet you can work it out.

More Laments, and Beautiful

Pity upon those for whom these speak the truer.



'Great sweetheart... they poured your blood yesterday.'



'The prophecy was nigh... ride fifty miles, and not hear the crow of a cock...'

Service

Today I did my feudal service in return for another year of holding, in fee simple, this land from our Great State of Georgia. I also paid all my automobile taxes and tag fees to pay for another year's excitement on the highway.

What happens when that fee is no more paid, because the one who held in fee simple has died and another cannot stand good? We've made it seem so small a matter -- just taxes and accounting -- but it is not that. The world falls apart: the world of a people. Enemies come rushing in to tear apart the world you held for yourself and your family, and it vanishes forever. That is the story at the end of the Beowulf when the king dies who could hold a place in the world for the Geats to live free, and likewise at the end of the Iliad with the mourning for Hector of Troy. Both poems end in lament for the one who held it together, so that for a while a life and a people could flourish.

Formality

Quarantine

I'm confused again.  The UN thinks travel restrictions on Ebola-ravaged countries are misguided, because they don't reflect the way the disease is transmitted, which is (apparently usually) by direct contact during an overtly symptomatic period.  It's as if the UN spokesman thought the only concern was that fellow passengers in an airplane might be infected; if the passenger has no fever when he boards, everything is in all likelihood going to be fine.  But that's not really the only issue, is it?  We just had a rather graphic example of what happens when someone still feels fine when he lands, but becomes symptomatic later, and wanders all over the place throwing up on the public for a few days before someone puts a net over him and gets him into isolation.

It's hard for me to understand why we wouldn't, at a minimum, quarantine for 21 days everyone who presents himself at our borders direct from an Ebola hotspot.  Yes, people will be able to get around this restriction by taking an indirect route, and there is that problem of the completely porous southern border, but it would at least help.

I'm sorry, I just realized I'm taking up digital space criticizing a policy advocated by a UN representative.  On the other hand, the CDC seems to be on the same page, so maybe it's worth talking about after all.

Methodist Brain Hospital? My Brain Hurts

A local activist sent me a link yesterday to a smoothly produced video, undertaking to discredit the Common Core curriculum.  I have no idea what it was about, except that there were a lot of shots of gently waving tree limbs, and a lot of parents who senses that their kids are unhappy, not at the usual level of thinking school is boring and stupid, but something new and special.  Also, when parents try to talk to schools or legislators, they get a big runaround.  So far, nothing much to argue with, but the Common Core controversy remains almost completely opaque.

This might help a bit to give a picture of what's being presented to children.  I can't say that some or all of these somewhat weird approaches couldn't be conceptually helpful for some kids at some stages, but I hope they're going to be only an introduction, followed by a little help in applying a fast, easy algorithm of the despised old "Granny Method" variety.  And, you know, some drill.

Would it be too much to ask someone to try teaching a couple of different groups of kids both ways for a while, then test the kids and see which group can most quickly, easily, and reliably answer simple questions about the addition or subtraction of multi-digit numbers?  Or wouldn't that be suitably aimed at inculcating "critical thinking skills"?  Because if that's the problem, I recommend letting the kids try it both ways, offer their opinions about which is easiest, and then hone their critical thinking skills by doing a little research into who's imposing which system on them and why.  "Can you say 'shadowy forces,' children?  I knew you could.  Now let's try 'fuzzy thinking.'  By the way, can anyone tell me what's wrong with that graphic about all the parts working together?"

Better shut it down

Blood tests available without going through a doctor's office that are quick, cheap, and accurate, and the results go straight to the patient.  For a healthcare bureaucrat, where's the opportunity for graft in that?  Besides, how dare the founder get rich on the backs of the people?

Problem Solved

"White House Security Replaced By Ugandan Contractors."

The Goal of Virtue is Perfecting Human Nature

...but there's only so much you can ask, as 'perfecting' does not imply 'perfectible.'

Actually, you probably couldn't get away with looking at her 'countenance' without offense either.

When Rowena perceived the Knight Templar's eyes bent on her with an ardour, that, compared with the dark caverns under which they moved, gave them the effect of lighted charcoal, she drew with dignity the veil around her face, as an intimation that the determined freedom of his glance was disagreeable. Cedric saw the motion and its cause. "Sir Templar," said he, "the cheeks of our Saxon maidens have seen too little of the sun to enable them to bear the fixed glance of a crusader."

"If I have offended," replied Sir Brian, "I crave your pardon,—that is, I crave the Lady Rowena's pardon,—for my humility will carry me no lower."

I'll bet they are

I don't care who you are, that's funny, right there.  Diners at a rubber-chicken Food Safety Summit Baltimore came down with raw-rubber-chicken disease, a/k/a perfringens:

The outbreak was the first in the 16-year history of the Food Safety Summit. “When we learned that attendees to the Food Safety Summit were ill after attending the 2014 event we fully cooperated with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene regarding this matter and assisted them with their investigation as requested,” the organization said in a statement distributed by spokesperson Amy Riemer. “We have continued to do so in the past six months while the investigation was conducted and the final report was being prepared.”

The statement adds that the Food Safety Summit is working with the convention center and its catering company prior to its 2015 event “to insure that an outbreak of this nature does not happen again.”

That had to be an uncomfortable conversation.  Maybe not as uncomfortable as the internal discussions that preceded the CDC's decision to break down and issue Ebola guidelines for U.S. funeral homes, though.

Social Progress

Walmart is now selling swords of a decent quality.

That's Montgomery Clift, Honey

Is he all right?  Can he still feel?

Another Problem About Whistleblowers

A long-serving police sergeant -- who claims that he is speaking for the majority of police officers nationwide -- explains how to destroy the entire traffic-fine system via perfectly lawful mechanisms.

This is very simple and very basic. The idea is to clog up the system in the traffic camera office and the courts by drivers exercising their rights to remain innocent until proven guilty.

SIMPLE BASIC LEGAL STEPS TO FOLLOW…………….

1. Do not accept the alleged offence. There are numerous valid reasons to dispute every single alleged offence. Often the charges are incorrect or the evidence is illegally or incorrectly gathered.

2. Challenge it, tell them that you are going to defend the matter. Make them earn their miserable $150 or $200 or whatever. They have to prepare evidence and witnesses. Just the wages for the camera operator or the Policeman on the day of the court, will be more than the actual fine. You are also taking a camera operator or a member of the Police Force off the street for the day. But it won’t get to that point…..read on….

3. If a court date is ever set, and it does not suit you, do not accept it, ask for a delay to a time and place that suits you.

4. When they re set the date, delay it as often as possible. keep pleading not guilty all through the process. You have every right to be sick, or go for an adjournment if the day does not suit for any legitimate reason. For example you may have pressing family or work commitments which prevent you from attending a particular court on a particular day.

5. If it ever actually gets to court, (which is unlikely if everyone does this) and if you are unwell that day, ring the court in the morning and tell them that you cannot make it as you are sick. The camera operator, and a police prosecutor will already be at court, and will be greatly inconvenienced, by having to come back another day. The whole time this is going on, the amount of paperwork involved at the traffic camera office is huge. Several staff are involved, and it rapidly becomes very costly, probably running into thousands. …..with me so far…..keep reading…….

6. The court system is then placed under such a massive load by people who wanted “their day in court” that it simply will not be able to cope unless they open up about another 50 magistrates courts, and this is obviously going to cost the government a lot more than any revenue raised. If all the above fails, which is highly unlikely….and you actually go to court and get convicted……you have a right of appeal. Make sure you appeal the conviction. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see what happens. They are not going to spend millions chasing hundreds.

7 Tell everyone you know to challenge their alleged offences, and the entire system will crash within a few weeks.

8. Please pass this on. AND ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY AND THAT THERE IS A VERY HIGH PROBABILITY THAT THE EVIDENCE USED AGAINST YOU IS WRONG. YOU HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO CHALLENGE ANY ALLEGED OFFENCE. THIS IS WHY COURTS EXIST….SO USE THEM……A LOT.

I find this interesting, given the problem we were thinking about recently regarding Goldman-Sachs and the Fed, compared with the similar case of Snowden and the NSA. Here the officer is revealing what aren't really secrets, for a similar purpose of forcing reform by expanding public knowledge of how the system works. There's no violation of any oath of secrecy. There's no violation of the law suggested: he's just trying to help you understand what rights you have under the law that can help you resist charges of traffic offenses.

And yet, of course, the intent is destructive of a basic element of our system of law and order. It's not my favorite part of the system, to be sure! Still, the intent is destructive. He explains why he doesn't feel guilty:

I am so annoyed at what is happening these days, in what I call “Indiscriminate revenue gathering” It is absolutely disgusting. The government and the Police Force need to hang their heads in shame. If you did a survey of current serving members of the police forces in this country, you would be hard pushed to find many who disagree with me.... I do not feel guilty about coming out with this information, as I think it’s about time someone stood up for hard working, civil minded, law abiding taxpayers in this country, who are being screwed.

Taking him at his word that he believes all that completely, what do you think of his method? Is it wrong to use the rules of the legal system to destroy an aspect of it? It's the kind of thing Alinsky suggests. But it would be an ad hominem fallacy to suggest that Alinsky's offering of similar advice means that the advice should be rejected.

Is he violating a required loyalty? As a former police officer? More basically, as a citizen, to use the system to destroy itself? Or is this a legitimate form of resistance that we should encourage if we share his opinions?

Update on the nightmare

We got a year's reprieve, but we're back where we were a year ago:  at the mercy of Obamacare.  This week it occurred to me that a catastrophic plan might be the way out.  It turns out to be devilishly difficult to find any information about catastrophic coverage, because they're so bad for you, so you shouldn't find out about them, even though they had to stick them in the law to quiet some nervous senators down or something, but they weren't serious about them, I mean, come on.

Here's scoop as far as I can make out:  Originally, the ACA provided that you couldn't get catastrophic coverage unless you were under 30.  By "you can't get it," I don't just mean you'll be fined (or taxed, or whatever) for not having eligible coverage, I mean an insurance company can't or won't (hard to tell) offer it to you.  Late last year, however, when the Obama administration was feeling heat from the millions of Americans who had their coverage terminated because it was too affordable, they announced a special exception:  you can be under 30, or you can prove you had your insurance terminated and you "believe" the available replacement insurance is too expensive.  They couldn't bring themselves to say it actually was more expensive, just that you had some kind of irrational right-wing belief that it was.  Whatever:  my irrational right-wing belief apparently qualifies, so that's all good.

But now comes the tricky part.  Who offers such insurance, what are its terms (especially its network), and what does it cost?  Ah, that's not information anyone is prepared to share with us just yet.  Wouldn't you like a nice metallic plan instead?  No?  Well, we don't offer catastrophic plans, anyway.  Who does?  No one does.  Nope, not anywhere in the country.  OK, that's not quite true, because occasionally a broker does find one; Humana offers a rather cheap one right here in my county.  Unfortunately, it's an HMO, a spectacularly useless form of catastrophic insurance, because if we hit that sky-high deductible we're going to want a real doctor, thank you.  But it's a start:  if there's one, there may be others.  They're not entirely mythical.

Now comes the really hard part.  Most agents and insurers insist that the only way to find out about catastrophic coverage options is to go to healthcare.gov and fill out an official application.  Not only is that a monumental pain, but we've heard horror stories all year about people who started the application process, hated the options, and tried to withdraw, only to find the spider web wasn't prepared to let them fly away.  Some even found they'd been signed up for a plan, or for Medicaid, despite never having clicked on any "options."  Too bad:  if you even want to find out who offers a catastrophic plan, or what it might cost, this is your only route.  Eventually, it's unavoidable, because you won't be able to finalize any purchase of catastrophic coverage without a note from Healthcare.gov giving you a special hardship exemption code, anyway.  As best I can tell, the website won't even generate the options until you have the approval code.  The website's information page does explain helpfully that, if you qualify, you'll still have to go to the insurers to get the real scoop on the plans.  The insurers, on the other hand, refer you back to the website.

While I was making up my mind whether to break down and file a formal application with the government, I discovered a little squib on a Cigna site.  Cigna doesn't offer any catastrophic coverage (big surprise), but they were kind enough to provide a better explanation than "you really wouldn't like this; go log onto Healthcare.gov and leave us alone."  They explained the special December 2014 expansion of the hardship exemption that I mentioned above, and they added one more piece of information that kills the whole deal for us:  pre-existing conditions are excluded from catastrophic coverage by a special exemption from both HIPPA and ACA requirements.  We have semi-affordable catastrophic coverage now with no pre-existing condition exclusion, because we bought it a long time ago when we were healthy, the way you're supposed to.  But now that it's being taken away because it's not good for us, the only way to replace it with catastrophic coverage is to lose coverage for the pre-existing conditions we've thoughtlessly developed in the meantime.  Because, you know, the whole point of the ACA was that pre-existing condition exclusions are a crime against humanity.

What's more, even if we didn't have pre-existing conditions, there's an admirable Catch-22:  despite the President's December 2014 announcement, the bureaucrats insist that you have to establish a "hardship."  If your income is too low, you may have a hardship, but it doesn't count because you can get a subsidy.  If your income is too high, you can't get a subsidy, but they'll insist you don't have a hardship, and you can't get permission to buy a catastrophic plan.

I have to tip my hat to these people.  When they write a Kafkaesque law, they put serious effort into making it nightmarish.

California's New Affirmative Consent Standard

So, Gov. Brown signed a new Affirmative Consent Standard into law on Sunday, which makes actual positive consent required in any interaction of sexual relations.  In all cases.  And unconscious, sleeping, drunk or drugged people cannot give this consent.  That's good right?  Think it through.  Have you ever had sex with someone who had a blood alcohol level over .08?  Are you sure?  And I'm not just talking drunk, hook-up sex... I mean this for people in committed, long term relationships.  Like married people.  Ever have a bottle of wine or two with the spouse to celebrate an anniversary?  How about on your wedding night?  Then it's likely you are a rapist.  Or a rape victim.  Indeed, according to this law, you are likely both.  Are you comfortable with that?  Are you comfortable with your spouse being a rapist in the eyes of this law?  I'm certainly not.

Contrary to what supporters of this law have been saying in internet comments, it's possible to disagree with the language of this law, and still be against rape.  I know I am.  In many ways, I'm far harsher on the crime than most people who support this law tend to be (I fully support the death penalty for rapists).  But listening to the other side, you're either 100% on board with this, or you want people to be raped.

"But, it's just common sense that it will only be an issue if the victim complains to the police!"  One, the law has nothing to do (and never has) with common sense.  It has everything to do with the letter of the law.  And what prosecute will ever want to be painted as "pro-rape".  Two, and this is the important part, unable to give consent means that even someone with no regrets was still a rape victim.  And if cops happened to stumble upon a couple in the act, and decide to breathalyzer both parties, it's entirely possible to have one or both to them arrested on a charge of rape.

Now, contrary to what supporters of this law say, the alternative is NOT "do nothing".  It's "craft a law that doesn't criminalize otherwise consensual sex between two people who may be over the legal limit."  This really should be a no brainer, and if it's really difficult to write the law in such a way, then perhaps it's a law that shouldn't be written?

Edit: citation here

Tax ☠

Now that you mention it, there does seem to be a hole in this plan:

These plans allow borrowers to reduce monthly payments to just 10% of discretionary income. The loans can then be forgiven after ten years if borrowers work in government or for a non-profit—basically any job as long as it doesn't involve a profit-seeking business.

...So the government is spending taxpayer dollars to encourage young people to avoid repaying loans to taxpayers, while at the same time encouraging these young people to work for outfits that don't pay taxes.

Well, and places that don't generate profits! It's a huge incentive, too, since it cuts the time you have to pay by ten full years.

However, there is one big drawback to opting into these plans. When you reach the point at which the rest of the loan is forgiven, you have to pay taxes on that as income that year. So, let's say you owed $100,000 in student loans at 3.4% as a grad student entering the workforce. You go to work at a non-profit, earning $40,000 a year -- that will seem like a huge increase in your standard of living after the hardships of grad school. You're married, and your spouse and child stay at home. According to the calculator the Federal Student Loan people provide, IBR will result in your monthly payments dropping from nearly a thousand dollars a month to perhaps as low as $124 a month. The estimate is that you'll be forgiven more than $63,000 of your loans.

(This isn't the best plan for you! The "Pay as You Earn" plan saves you $117,980 over the ten years -- almost the full amount of your loans.)

Sounds great, until you reach the end of the plan and suddenly have a tax bill not on the $27,000 or so that is your gross income minus your standard deduction, but on a $90,000 "income" of which you actually received only $27,000. The IRS withholding calculator suggests that you'll owe $11,000+ in taxes that year.

Still a win, since it saves you over fifty grand for the life of the loan. But there's a big hit you take all at once at the end in return for that. Of course, you have ten years to plan and save for that hit -- but if you were good at long-term life planning, you'd never have gone to grad school.

Speaking of Great American Authors

A piece on Jack London, pirate:

He was a child labourer in Oakland at 14, a Bay Area pirate at 15, a transcontinental hobo at 16, an able-bodied seaman at 17, a New York State prisoner at 18, a California ‘work beast’ at 20 and a Yukon prospector at 21. He escaped penury at 23, when after a frantic apprenticeship he began selling short stories. The bulk of them were set in the Yukon or in the South Pacific and drew on the life he’d left behind. The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, made him a celebrity at 27, and subsequent additions to his CV – candidate for mayor of Oakland, no-good husband, doomed sea captain and arthritic debauchee – were a matter of public record. London’s life had a mythic quality in the eyes of his contemporaries....

At the age of 14, London went to work at a cannery because his parents couldn’t afford to send him to high school. He was paid two dollars a day and hated it. Not having a normal job became his life’s work. He got a loan from the Prentisses, bought a skiff, and became an oyster pirate on the North California coast. ‘Every dark night’s raid,’ Labor writes, ‘was an invitation to get shot or arrested.’

I don't think I've ever heard of "oyster piracy" before.

Which is the Freest Country on Earth?

An interesting index, which allows you to assign how much a given freedom matters to you. If you don't care about freedoms at all, the rankings are purely alphabetical. If you set all indicators to maximum -- you demand the greatest of all freedoms! -- the United States comes in 10th place.

If I set the indicators as seems right to me we rise to 5th place, which isn't so bad given the company (Switzerland, the Bahamas, Chile). The one I'd object to is Hong Kong, because they clearly don't appreciate how much Hong Kong is under the thumb of a much more oppressive state (China, #158 by my scale). But we still come in well above a number of places I'd be happy to consider living (like Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, the UK...).

So if you accept the tradeoffs I am prepared to accept, we're in good shape judging by the company we keep. Of course, this assumes the accuracy of their ratings: the United States gets a corruption rating of 73% (higher is better), which may be doubtful given other recent conversations. The limited government rating for the USA is 48, which is shameful even if it is true -- and it might be over-generous after the ACA.

Your mileage may vary -- try it out.

The Advocate

Having just finished a very large undertaking, months or perhaps more than a year in the making, I am rewarding myself with a week or so to read things I just wish to read. The first thing that came to mind was Moby Dick, which I first read in China. I might not have ever read it, except for the wonderful censorship policy they had there at the time. Western literature was thought to probably contain some sort of suspect messaging, so the only English-language books you could find for sale were classics of approximately 100 years age. (The youngest I found, which I certainly read, was The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle by John Buchan, the latter of which is a surprisingly relevant treatment of an Islamic radical dated 1916, and also dated by its openly racist language).

A moment of praise for Chinese censors! They did me a world of good; in my time there, I read a host of classics of literature that I don't know I would have found time to read otherwise. Their motives were impure, but the effect on me can hardly be disputed: it was wholly positive.

In any case, in rereading Moby Dick I encountered this chapter with pleasure because it reminds me so much of several of you. It is praise for the capital, honest, workmanlike business of whaling -- horrifying to many, I suppose, in the way that fracking (and indeed whaling) are horrifying today.

CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.

As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.

In the first place...

Whistleblowing at the Fed

Should we think differently about this Goldman-Sachs case than the Snowden case? Both involve a kind of basic disloyalty, a thieving of secrets not one's own, a revealing of them to the world in violation of trust and given word. Both were done (at least allegedly) out of a basic patriotism: the one because the government's spying apparatus had been turned on Americans in overwhelming ways and the violator thought the public ought to know; the other because the government had proven to be captured by the banks it was allegedly supposed to regulate, with the effect that both key institutions had become corrupt to the core. In both cases, the idea was that revealing it all to the public was the way to begin to right the ship.

If we think differently about it, it is because we think a primal loyalty is owed to the political system -- the nation state -- that is not owed to one's employer. That's a plausible distinction. We ordinarily hope that people who discover that their company is violating the state's laws will come forward and report them. Perhaps we should also hope that people who discover that their company is violating the country's basic system of beliefs, and is not violating the laws only because it has corrupted the laws, will also come forward and report it. The reporting agency is then the citizenry, because the government can't be trusted. It is implicated in the corruption.

Does that distinction hold up? Is there another valid difference? Or should we condemn or spare them as equivalent cases?

Changing life

This is a fascinating account of a stroke that affected a young woman's thalamus.  Don't worry; she seems to have come out pretty well in the end.

Handedness

Earlier today when I was looking for background materials on gravity waves, I stumbled on a Wiki page listing some prominent unsolved problems in various fields of science, and very interesting they were, too:  most of them not purely armchair curiosities but specific examples of theoretical predictions that annoyingly fail to match the best experimental data we have so far.  Anyway, one of them was "homochirality," or the puzzling tendency of life on Earth to settle on either the right-handed or the left-handed version of various prominent biological molecules.  DNA helices, for instance, always twist in the same direction.  Was it a primordial accident that simply got copied and spread in the case of each molecule?

By coincidence, Not Exactly Rocket Science linked today to an article about a new idea on the subject: electrons are unusual elementary particles in that they have a consistent spin.  Electrons that are spit out in various reactions, such as beta decay (in which a neutron leaves a nucleus and decays into a proton, a neutrino, and an electron, previously bound together by the nuclear "weak force"), appear to exert a consistent, predictable twisting action on some biological molecules.

The researchers found that left-handed bromocamphor was just slightly more likely to react with right-handed electrons than with left-handed ones. The converse was true when they used right-handed bromocamphor molecules. At the lowest energies, the direction of the preference flipped, causing an opposite asymmetry.

In all cases the asymmetry was tiny, but consistent, like flipping a not-quite-fair coin. “The scale of the asymmetry is as though we flip 20,000 coins again and again, and on average, 10,003 of them land on heads while 9,997 land on tails,” says Dreiling.

Over evolutionary periods of time, even tiny assymmetries can add up.

Such a bad idea

I completely understand the desperate temptation to buy the blood of Ebola survivors, to get the advantage of their antibodies.  Hospitals have been using survivor serum, with some success, since the first Ebola cases in the 1970s.  But talk about procedures that won't "scale up"!  It's one thing for a first-world hospital to do transfusions with blood that's been subjected to tests for other diseases, especially when at most one patient, already in grave danger, will be exposed.  I hardly like to think what will happen if a large third-world population starts trading blood products willy-nilly.  Despite my preference for free markets, there are a few areas where I've always felt strong central controls make sense, and epidemiology is right up there.

Ebola very probably got a foothold in Africa in the first place, way back in the 20th century, because people didn't know any better than to initiate vaccination campaigns with not-particularly-sterilized reusable needles.  The first documented Ebola outbreak, in the 70s, was hugely amplified by the same problem:  Belgian nuns doing the best they could with reusable needles, only indifferently sterilized.  Direct blood-to-blood contact on a large scale could create an amazing Ebola nightmare, to say nothing of the other diseases it might inadvertently amplify.

Family Civil War, 2014 Edition

That was an amazing game. In the end, it was the Mighty Bulldogs.


Certain cousins, aunts, and uncles are just going to have to deal with it this year.

Fuel alternatives

It'll never work!  The infrastructure challenges are insurmountable! . . . OK, maybe they're not so bad, but fracking is evil.

We can confidently predict a concerted effort to prevent the development of a clean, reliable natural gas fuel for cars.

No Big Bang?

It hasn't been a good month for the Big Bang Theory.  First, a much-ballyhooed interpretation of data that was supposed, in March of this year, to demonstrate left-over gravity waves from the primordial explosion now turns out to have been premature.  Now, a respectable mathematician claims to have demonstrated that the usual explanation for the formation of a black hole is internally inconsistent, thus potentially calling into question another assumption critical to standard Big Bang mechanisms.

It's not at all clear I'll live long enough to see results from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), whose "projected" 2034 launch date can't inspire much confidence, but that's the sort of detection device that may be needed before we can clarify the business of whether gravity waves can be detected and, if so, what they show about events almost impossibly distant in space and time.  Work proceeds apace, but the project presents some staggering challenges.  For one thing, the interferometer array is intended to follow a trailing-Earth solar orbit, which means it will be seriously out there, and not amenable to casual repair like the Hubble telescope.

As for black holes and "Hawking radiation," I've never known what to think; it's another area in which I'm curious whether things will get cleared up in my lifetime.  By "cleared up," of course, I mean nailed down to the point where the explanations can penetrate even to laymen such as myself.  In the meantime, the events of this month are generating spirited discussions about the human temptation to cling to elegant theories when, as one commenter put it, sometimes Nature makes us erase the blackboard.

Credit is not a substitute for progress

This Weekly Standard article ostensibly is about Neil deGrasse Tyson's dishonesty, but on that subject it's a mere re-hash of a sordid record and a banal career.  The fresher material is this quotation from Peter Thiel:

Like technology, credit also makes claims on the future. "I will gladly pay you a dollar on Tuesday for a hamburger today" works only if a dollar gets earned byTuesday. A credit crisis happens when earnings disappoint and the present does not live up to past expectations of the future.

The current crisis of housing and financial leverage contains many hidden links to broader questions concerning long-term progress in science and technology. On one hand, the lack of easy progress makes leverage more dangerous, because when something goes wrong, macroeconomic growth cannot offer a salve; time will not cure liquidity or solvency problems in a world where little grows or improves with time. On the other hand, the lack of easy progress also makes leverage far more tempting, as unleveraged real returns fall below the expectations of pension funds and other investors.

This analysis suggests an explanation for the strange way the technology bubble of the 1990s gave rise to the real-estate bubble of the 2000s. After betting heavily on technology growth that did not materialize, investors tried to achieve the needed double-digit returns through massive leverage in seemingly safe real-estate investments. This did not work either, because a major reason for the bubble in real estate turned out to be the same as the reason for the bubble in technology: a mistaken but nearly universal background assumption about easy progress. Without fundamental gains in productivity (presumably driven by technology), real-estate values could not go up forever. Leverage is not a substitute for scientific progress.

Handcuffs

Common Core remains a mystery, but there's no mystery about how disturbing it is to see two parents arrested and led out of school board meetings, or to see the rest of the crowd put up with it.





I may have mentioned before that I support vouchers and home schooling, not to mention casting an informed ballot in school board elections.

End Jedi Privilege

A heartfelt plea.

Beheaded in Oklahoma

No link to terror groups say the authorities, which is plausible given some definitions of what it means to be "linked to terror groups."

Good shooting by the COO, though.

Privacy

Should we be outraged that Apple is making virtually unbreakable encryption a default option on iPhones?  I'm not seeing it.  Allahpundit argues that law enforcement should be able to get into your phone with a warrant.  I'm content to let people expose themselves to penalties for contempt if they refuse to unlock an encrypted phone and a warrant holds up on appeal.  Also, it's a little hard to take seriously claims that an encryption technique will stay unbreakable for long.

Sheep & Horses

Especially for Tex, but also anyone interested in her course on the history of English, some a tale from the Proto-Indo-European.

Cop shootings no one cares about

Some weeks back I posted about a fishy shooting of a black man by cops in a WalMart, which got practically zero coverage or comment.  Every time I found a brief update in the news, the story got a little uglier for the cops, but for some reason the event didn't resonate with the American public and now has dropped into a deep, dark hole.

This week videotape has surfaced of a white cop shooting a black guy in South Carolina about three weeks ago under nearly inexplicable circumstances.  Again, little apparent interest.

What in the world makes a murky case like Ferguson fertile ground for race riots and national posturing while these other two shootings fall right off the radar?  A cynical view might be that the Ferguson cop wasn't immediately disciplined, while the South Carolina cop was promptly fired and may face 20 years in prison, but that theory doesn't quite work:  as far as I could tell no one has suggested any disciplinary action in the WalMart shooting, which seems hunky-dory with both Al Sharpton and Eric Holder.

It's pretty clear no one should put me in charge of propaganda.  I lack the touch.

So That's How They Do It!

If, like me, you've been wondering how smugglers so easily pass by the US Border Patrol, at last there is video exposing their methods!

Three Hundred Percent

One of my old Iraq comrades used to be a big fan of a play called "Avenue Q." It was a kind of parody of Sesame Street. This was his favorite song:



I was thinking about this because of a headline I saw that suggests that 'Every man's a little bit rapist.'

To say that a frat boy is 300% more likely than other men on campus to rape a woman is to say that your control group is at least a little bit likely to rape a woman. After all, if a frat boy is 300% more likely than I am to rape a woman -- or even if he were three hundred times more likely -- nevertheless there's no problem. Zero multiplied by anything yields zero, which is the appropriate number of rapes.

It's only if any given man in the control group can be assigned a 'little rapist' factor that you can get the multiple to work. So, in pushing these numbers, we really need to conceptualize every man in college as having at least some rapist in his constitution.

How much? Well, according to the study you can read if you track back a couple of links, the figure for frat boys who admitted to rape or attempted rape is nine percent. Now one way of expressing that is that 91% of frat boys are not rapists. That means that 97% of the general population of college men are not rapists. That's a pretty substantial percentage. We may not be all the way to where we want to be, but we've still established that the overwhelming majority of these men don't commit rape.

But if we express it the way the headline expresses it, we can condemn all frat boys -- including the 91% who haven't raped anyone -- for being more rapist than the general population of men. By the same logic, we can condemn the whole population of college men -- 97% non-rapist -- as being part of a group that includes a statistical number of rapists.

Alternatively, you could say that your 97% of college men who never rape women are the norm. Then, of course, you can't make a statistical claim about how much more likely frat boys are to rape than normal college men -- presumably you would have to say that they are infinitely more likely to do so!

Fun with statistics. But there's a serious consequence to the way we end up conceptualizing college. Is it a place of tremendous sexual danger, with college men who are as a class statistically likely to rape young women? Or is it a place where, actually, almost every man you meet is the kind of man who doesn't rape? A lot hangs on that answer.

1st ID HQ to Deploy to Iraq for a Year

This is a really interesting deployment decision. In a way they're pushing the command down, since currently the ARCENT Deputy Commander is doing what the 1st ID CG will now be doing. In another way, although they're falling in on some existing structures and duties, it's very odd to split the headquarters the way they're going to do.

A serious commitment, though, and one that could very easily expand outward. Once you have a division headquarters in place, you have everything you need to insert several Brigade Combat Teams. 1/1 ID is in Kuwait already.

Cory Gardner goes too far

The DSCC has strong words to say about this vicious attack ad from Cory Gardner, the republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Colorado, who is running against Democratic incumbent Mark Udall.

It’s clear Congressman Cory Gardner’s campaign is struggling to overcome the damage done by his support for laws that could block a woman’s access to common forms of birth control, take away women’s personal health care decisions even in cases of rape or incest, and roll women’s health care rights back decades. It’s disgusting that Congressman Gardner would stoop as low as attacking Senator Mark Udall’s late father and it is beneath a candidate running for the U.S. Senate. Congressman Gardner should apologize to Senator Udall and his family and pull the ad off the air.

And yet if you watch the actual ad, you'll see that Gardner says his opponent, Mark Udall, is a nice guy who will never change the Senate, that he comes from a political family, and that his father ran for President.  Did you ever hear such a scurrilous attack?

Holder is out

I won't miss him, but this NPR article is a little valentine to his career.

Sound the Pibroch

Since we were talking about the Clancy firm, and lately have spoken much of Scotland, here is their retelling of Culloden:



The Highland Clearances were the great betrayal of the late 1700s, to which we owe a kind of debt for the good we got from those who came here. They were a grave betrayal, all the same.

'America & The Cycle of Neverending War'

I was kind of disappointed by the article, which I had hoped would refer to something a little more like this:

Finding out what's in it

Obamacare's been around for more than four years now, and I should have thought the many, many people who hate it like death would by now have discovered everything incredibly stupid that's written right into it.  But it turns out that massive new insanities are surfacing as the tens of thousands of pages of implementary regulations gradually come to light.  Here's a fabulous one:  all new plans must be Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum, defined by their actuarial valuation.  Bronze means the average plan pays 60% of bills, Silver pays 70%, Gold 80%, and Platinum 90%.  I'll bet you would have assumed that Bronze was really 60-69% and so on.  Nope!  The "safe zone" is only 2% in either direction.  If your plan turns out to pay 65% on average, it's neither Bronze nor Silver and must be cancelled at the end of the year.  No problem, you'll just sign up for a new one, right?  Sure, but it will have all new terms to learn, and there's no guarantee that you'll keep your doctor or your hospital.  Not that there was any guarantee of that anyway, since we can all expect our networks to degrade steadily.

I really have to ask myself:  what kind of moron thought it was a good idea to make all plans fit within four bands and outlaw big chunks of actuarial rating that fall between them?

Speaking of things that aren't science

Never liked Tyson.  Liking him less and less, and shame on Wikipedia.

Cracks in ivy walls

There's getting to be so much education available on the Internet that I don't feel there are enough hours in the day to stuff into my head even the things I'm most interested in.  It's a shame how much time I wasted in school.

I'm interested to see what kind of market can be developed in selling education now, with so much of it free.  Of course the credentials are irrelevant to me, but not to a big potential market, so it should be feasible to charge for those.

Cupcake outlaws

Good to know I could start selling bread without breaking the law here in Texas.

Nine lives

Just as the main facade of this hotel is starting to tip over into the street, at 0:17, you can see a cat appear in an opening about halfway up, to the left of the "S" in "Towers."

The Strangest Civil War Argument I've Ever Heard

At the end of this piece on that pro-secession poll, the author posits a cause of the war that I've never heard anyone float.

Much of the fervor for war in 1860 was driven by a moral crusade against slavery. Some of it was fueled by patriotism, and some by state, local, and even just family affinities.

At the highest level, however, Lincoln recognized that the cosmopolitan North—teeming with immigrants, churning with class conflict, surging into the prairie and mountain west—would have lacked a logic of unity if the South were permitted to break off in peace. The Southerners had history, ethnicity, culture, slavery, religion, and a quasi-aristocratic honor society to hold them together.

What did the North have?

Not much more than we have today. Although the spell of American superpower and an almighty government is in some ways more dominant than ever, the moment that spell is broken, many will find themselves in a kind of freefall of political principle.

So Lincoln fought the war because the North lacked any other organizing principle?

I understand the argument for slavery as cause. I understand the argument for economics as cause. I understand the argument for culture as cause. My own sense is that all of those things were factors in the tension that led to the conflict, but that the proximate cause -- the thing that made a war necessary, and a peaceful secession impossible -- was the union of technology and geography. No President of the United States in 1860 could accept control of the port city at the mouth of the Mississippi river passing to the hands of a foreign power. Before the proliferation of railroads, before trucks and interstates, before airplanes, there was no alternative to the Mississippi to move the wealth of the middle of the country to market. It was as critical a national interest of the United States then as access to warm-water ports has always been to Russia.

Quite possibly it still is.

It would never have occurred to me, though, that the North couldn't have held itself together except on the principle that the Constitution was a suicide pact. Nobody gets out alive, because then the whole thing would fall apart!

Carry a Sharp Stick but Then Speak Softly

This Ain't Hell links to a heartwarming tale of a Texas homeowner who defended his (small) home with a spear. Probably took the Havamal literally: "Unsure is the knowing when need shall arise / Of a spear on the way without." Or within, either. But he should've paid attention to another part: "The hasty tongue sings its own mishap / If it be not bridled in."

In the TV interview he handled himself well but admitted that the intruder appeared to be unarmed. Now I'm convinced he was still in the right -- just looking at the invader's size, I'd say the homeowner was properly in fear of life and limb; and he stopped stabbing when the intruder retreated, which looks good on him (it shows he was after "defense" and not "revenge"). But intimate facts like that don't need to be spoken out in the open air which is full of police and prosecutors too. If someone wants to make an issue out of it (and in some places, the difference in races alone would make that likely), better to make the prosecution prove what did or didn't appear, rather than to offer it as a gift to the public.

I wouldn't wish a home invasion on anyone, but if I were faced with that situation and the press came 'round for an interview, I'd take my advice from the firm of Clancy and Makem.

Is Oklahoma next?

The shale boom that has transformed the economies of Texas and North Dakota may be about to hit Oklahoma.

The Autumn King

Hail the Equinox, and the coming of Autumn! No day of the year is more welcome in Georgia. This has been a difficult, but productive, summer. I am glad to bring it to a close, and complete its work.

Since Cassandra was reminding us of him, some of you might wonder how King Arthur Pendragon is celebrating the Equinox. He's celebrating at Stonehenge, of course. Would I could join him -- I imagine it's quite a party.

Horns of a dilemma

An interesting perspective on the Scottish independence vote at Protein Wisdom, starting with the reflection that Scotland can't have a socialist paradise if it continues to belong to the UK, or the funds to pay for it if it doesn't.  Beyond that, though, the votes didn't break down quite the way everyone expected.  Generally, for instance, my impression was that older voters said "no" while young ones said "yes," but it turns out that the very youngest voters said "no" by 57%.  Also, the Labour Party was officially against independence, possibly because the UK Parliament stood to lose so many Labour members if it lost the Scottish contingent, but the rank and file tended to vote "yes."

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.