Whether Marriage is of Natural Law?

There's a certain amount of talking-past-each-other between secular legal scholars and Christian thinkers on the subject of whether marriage is a natural law concept, or only a positive law concept. The secular scholars don't actually understand the natural law argument, I think; the Christian thinkers don't know how to explain it to them, and think that referring to "nature" in an unsophisticated way will fix the problem.

Fortunately, the very question was treated in the supplemental to Summa Theologicae III, so with a little care we can see what the Thomists thought was the right answer. It's a subtle point, and a problematic one, as we'll see.

Dr. Althouse's objection is actually the very first objection the Summa treats. She puts it this way:

It's not as though marriage exists in nature. Marriage is an "arbitrary boundary created by man." The only boundary in nature is between having sex or not. Nature puts up no boundaries about when or with who (or what) any given animal has sex. Nonprocreativity doesn't set up a boundary.

That's not right, the scholastics argued, because "nature" means more than one thing. You only come to that error by equivocating between the meanings.

Man's nature inclines to a thing in two ways. In one way, because that thing is becoming to the generic nature, and this is common to all animals; in another way because it is becoming to the nature of the difference, whereby the human species in so far as it is rational overflows the genus; such is an act of prudence or temperance. And just as the generic nature, though one in all animals, yet is not in all in the same way, so neither does it incline in the same way in all, but in a way befitting each one. Accordingly man's nature inclines to matrimony on the part of the difference, as regards the second reason given above; wherefore the Philosopher (Ethic. viii, 11,12; Polit. i) gives this reason in men over other animals; but as regards the first reason it inclines on the part of the genus; wherefore he says that the begetting of offspring is common to all animals. Yet nature does not incline thereto in the same way in all animals; since there are animals whose offspring are able to seek food immediately after birth, or are sufficiently fed by their mother; and in these there is no tie between male and female; whereas in those whose offspring needs the support of both parents, although for a short time, there is a certain tie, as may be seen in certain birds. In man, however, since the child needs the parents' care for a long time, there is a very great tie between male and female, to which tie even the generic nature inclines.

The language is a little archaic even in translation, but it can be simplified. "Nature" isn't a simple synonym for "bestial," and making human beings more like beasts was certainly never the Church's point.

Now, there are some ways in which human beings are like other animals, so that (for example) it would be a violation of natural law to pass a law requiring people to forgo food or water. But there are other ways in which human beings are different from other animals, especially in that we naturally have a larger access to reason. One of the things we can reason about is the fact that, also by our nature, male and female produce a child who requires a long upbringing and education. Thus, we can reason that the perfection of our sexual nature is in the successful rearing of the child, which requires a strong union between the parents. This is the institution of marriage, which is therefore of human nature.

If you want another institution that points to a different need, that's fine: humans are also political by nature (a point made in the same article). As we've discussed before, Aristotelian friendship looks a lot like what 'same-sex marriage' advocates really want: unity of property and concern between (usually) two people, to pursue each other's good in a sort of loving friendship. That could have a sexual component or not -- certainly the Greeks would not have been troubled if it did.

It's distinct from the natural law marriage, though, which comes from this reality about how we produce offspring, and what the needs of those offspring are.

There are two points worth thinking about, though:

1) I think the sed contra is confusing on this point: "Further, the Philosopher (Ethic. viii, 12) says that "man is an animal more inclined by nature to connubial than political society." But "man is naturally a political and gregarious animal," as the same author asserts (Polit. i, 2). Therefore he is naturally inclined to connubial union, and thus the conjugal union or matrimony is natural."

Aristotle clearly thinks that the political union is the more natural because it is only in a political union that human beings can fully achieve their rational potential. So the point being made here is not that marriage is more natural than politics, but only that it is natural since we are inclined to it even more than we (naturally) are to politics.

2) The family nevertheless has a kind of independent status under this reading. It's pre-political. It is (Politics I) different in kind from the state, and Aristotle rejects Plato's idea from the Republic that families should be structured by the state for its own purposes. It's one thing that the political should not intrude upon. Aristotle's clear assumption is that the political union is made up of pre-existing families. These families can unify in friendship in other ways too, as for example in a unity of the sort described above as "Aristotelian friendship." In terms of politics, though, the role of politics is to provide a kind of security among non-family members. It's assumed that you will treat your own kin with favoritism, and in order for a political union to be stable that tendency has to be resisted. So, for example, a single family should not dominate the leadership of a country or a political faction: but of course a father will care more about his son than a stranger.

Where our current debate is most dangerous, it strikes me, is in destroying that natural independence of the family and bringing everything under the rule of the state. That's the gravest danger in this debate: not that some men will go off and do whatever they were going to do anyway, somewhat more easily than before, but that the natural love of parents and children shall be ever more tightly bound by the intrusion of the political and the state. That was Plato's ideal for his guardians, but it is an impossibly tyrannical scheme. Just because it is such a violation of human nature, no state could pursue it and remain legitimate.

That is what must be resisted above all.

Bit O' Rain This Morning

Don't do rock music much here at the Hall, but I'll make an exception this morning.

NY fires a teacher

Clearly a rush to judgment.

NYT insults the Middle Ages

Tell me again what's wrong with a quarantine? Not an inflexible travel ban, just a hold on incoming traffic while we either run a rapid-turnaround PCR test, or hold travelers for 21 days to see if they develop symptoms. I know it could get expensive, but compared to what?

Comparative linguistics

From Gerard Vanderleun:

An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. … But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.” A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”

That's some low

Check out the wind map.  It looks like a hurricane over Oklahoma City.

After the front passes through this evening, we're supposed to get 3-4 days of lovely, cool weather.  Time to get out and attack some weeds that are as tall as I am.

We're on an all-eggplant, all the time diet this week, even after driving around and handing out bags of eggplants to our neighbors.  Eggplant is one of the few crops, besides peppers, that do well here in the dog days of summer.

Poverty in America

Twenty-nine myths about it, and some fact-checking.

Roadblocks and workarounds

Stalling the Keystone XL pipeline may not keep all that Canadian tar-sand oil under the ground after all.

Freaky overtone singing

Watch this.

Oops

The European version of our CDC reports on some Ebola outbreaks, and mentions that someone at GlaxSmithKline accidentally dumped 45 liters of live polio virus solution into the Belgian water supply.

Update:  link fixed.

Economics comics

From Zero Hedge:  Subversive materials for the schoolkids.

You're a Thousand Years Late

PBS wants you to consider suicide.... er, well, end-of-life care short of lifesaving.  We may still yet avoid the Death Panels if we can get enough of you to volunteer of your own good will!

The better way is to live otherwise from the beginning, as we were told in the Havamal.

The coward believes he will live forever

If he holds back in the battle,

But in old age he shall have no peace

Though spears have spared his limbs

...

Cattle die, kindred die,

Every man is mortal:

But the good name never dies

Of one who has done well

Cattle die, kindred die,

Every man is mortal:

But I know one thing that never dies,

The glory of the great dead.

Some of you, perhaps the ones with less Viking blood, may prefer the Irish version of the sentiment.

Herodotus

Whatever bad things anyone has said about Herodotus -- aye, even Aristotle -- the histories he wrote are among the most interesting things you will ever read. Yet among scholars he has a respect he didn't used to enjoy:

Cicero called Herodotus the “father of history.” Yet Arnaldo Momigliano, the great 20th-century historiographer of the ancient world, ends his brilliant essay on Herodotus by noting, “It is a strange truth that Herodotus has really become the father of history only in modern times.” History, or, more precisely, historical methods, Momigliano explains, finally caught up with Herodotus. Ethnographic research brought a new respect for Herodotus’ own early interest in ethnography. Those who did archaeological exploration in Egypt and Mesopotamia found Herodotus’ writings on these subjects useful. His writings also became valuable to biblical scholars in their study of Oriental history. Oral history, on which he drew heavily, became a standard tool of modern social science and history. Herodotus was also the first serious historian to give due attention to women. In his Histories, he devotes several pages to Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus, who commanded the Asian Dorian fleet during Xerxes’ attack on Greece. As for his accuracy, Momigliano writes, “We have now collected enough evidence to be able to say that he can be trusted.”

Well, it's not a one-off thing; Herodotus writes about the women of almost every civilization he discusses. And I say "almost" only because I don't want to go back through a long and detailed book to make sure it's fully 100% of them; but I can't recall one where he didn't.

Herodotus’ philosophy arises out of the plentitude of his details. This philosophy holds men to be perpetually in peril of overstepping their bounds—bounds set by good sense and reinforced by the gods. Those who do not understand this go under. But even those who understand may not necessarily come to a good end. Herodotus provides story after story proving that human justice is not the first order of the gods.

So it seems.

Doorbells

Megan McArdle posted about the California law requiring affirmative consent for sexual encounters. She objected to the strange tone of a Jezebel post responding to an argument that intrusive consent requirements might ruin sex, where I found this interesting comment:

Funny how I've never had anyone tell me that doorbells have ruined inviting friends over.

Clever, but I'm not convinced it works. Doorbells are for strangers, aren't they?--or for friends who are being at least a bit formal. Is that a good model for lovers, or should we assume that communication in that context is a lot more tacit?

I expect friends to drop by unannounced sometimes.  They know they can count on me to speak up if there's some reason they can't come in.  Don't we expect a lover to make a few presumptions, too, as long as he keeps his eyes and ears open for our response, which won't always be signed, sealed, and notarized?  There are always people who can't take a hint, and you gradually ease them out of your life, without making a federal case out of it.

Card-carrying non-infidels

ISIS is issuing certificates, good for three months, showing that persons unlucky enough to be caught in their territory are provisionally considered non-infidels:

To whom it may concern,

We hereby notify you that the one named Na’il Salu bin Basaam of the people of the al-Raqa emirate took and satisfactorily passed a course on Repentance.

Based on this, we hereby grant him this certificate confirming that he is not an infidel [kafir] and that it is impermissible to lash, crucify, or rape him, unless a legitimate reason arises for the soldiers of the caliphate or if it’s been established that he has returned to apostasy and wants his freedom.

That's almost as bad as requiring a voter i.d., which is just like a poll tax.

A & ~A: It's the Law

News from the Pacific Northwest:

Two competing measures on the Washington state ballot this fall ask voters to take a stance on expanded background checks for gun sales. One is seeking universal checks for all sales and transfers, including private transactions. The other would prevent any such expansion... What happens if both pass on Nov. 4 is anyone's guess, though the Washington secretary of state's office has said that either the Legislature or the courts would have to sort it out.

Well, the Legislature could sort it out by passing a new law that superseded both measures. How would a court sort it out, though? It's a logical contradiction, passed by majorities of voters in the same way at the same time via the same method. The stronger majority wins? Both laws are null and void?

Restless urges

U.S. oil producers have begun to export their product for the first time in almost 40 years, and imports are dropping.  (The two don't match exactly, because there are different levels of crude with different markets, much of the variance having to do with what product our expensive refineries were designed to handle.)

The current administration is uneasily going along with an export-restriction loophole for now.  As usual, politicians can't decide whether the problem is that resulting fuel prices will be too high or too low, but they're gearing up to interfere somehow, once the midterms are over.  For one thing, if you let people sell their product, they'll just frack more, and we can't have that.

Snooping through Private Things

Samuel Beckett was very clear on the subject of whether he wanted his letters published after his death. Most of them were to a lover, and in addition to being private, were on the subjects he thought divorced from his art.

Writing in January 1958 to his American publisher Barney Rosset, he declared, “I dislike the ventilation of private documents. These throw no light on my work,” and the next day, to the theatre director and long-time Beckett collaborator Alan Schneider, “I do not like publication of letters.”

In the last days of his life, under pressure from many whose meal ticket depended in part on having continued material from him to publish (or analyze, in the case of the academics), he relented -- a little. He agreed that only those letters that had bearing on his work might be published for study.

So, of course:

Surely there is nothing in a writer’s life or letters that does not have a bearing on his work, as life and work inextricably commingle.

This problem was more acute in the first two volumes. In the period of his life that they covered, from 1929 to 1956, Beckett was virtually unknown to the public, and the majority of his letters were, inevitably, personal. However, the thing was managed, and those first two volumes are substantial indeed, and seem destined to be the most interesting of the projected four.

The first two volumes! Irrelevant, private material now published in two thick, academic volumes for your pleasant consideration in direct violation of the author's wishes -- even that small exception extorted at his deathbed.

Honor is without price.

The special burden of being me

Gwynneth Paltrow explains how the lack of a routine in her life made it unusually hard to hold her marriage together.

New wine in old skins

Richard Fernandez on paradigm shifts:

But Obama’s not without ideas. He’s full of ideas, all of them out of date. All of them from the last century’s paradigms. He wanted to become like European social democracy at the very moment when it finally collapsed into the dust-bin of history. He hankered after the ideals of ‘progressivism’ when it had already become reactionary. He is like a man who has saved all his life to buy a pair of bell-bottomed pants only to reach the required sum just when they were 40 years out of style. He’s at the store looking to buy them and can’t find them on the rack.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Hope Ya'll Have Enjoyed Georgia's Excellent Season...

...because it's apparently over.

If this guy had just asked around campus, people would have given him $400. Heck, season he's had, some of them would have given him $400 each.

UPDATE:  After a convincing 34-0 win, I suppose the winning season is not completely over.

Riding in the Rain

Good ride today. Dodged the thunderheads as well as I could, as long as I could, but rode back in it. It's a good idea to stay out of the stuff because it isn't safe, but it is invigorating.



It's a good time of year. The firewood was laid in during the summer, and needs no more attention until it's time to start bringing it in during the cold. Need to clear some weeds now that the cool weather will slow them growing back, weed-and-seed that pasture. Clear the gutters, a few other tasks, but mostly the autumn season is relaxing. It is full of beautiful days, when there's 'no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.'

What do women want?

If they're female voters in Kentucky, and they're interested in a functioning economy, it turns out they may want a candidate who's not anti-coal, even if she's a card-carrying member of the no-war-on-women party:

Simply having the correct set of genitals does not mean that one is going to fall in line with the predicted talking points of the day. The women voters of Kentucky seem to have more on their minds than just how much contraception costs. They have families to raise and bills to pay like anyone else. When the Democrats run a candidate who is anti-coal and so many jobs in the local economy depend on that industry, that resonates more than hours of glam commercials. Bluegrass values tend to be fairly old school, and I’m guessing that a lot of these Southern Belles don’t spend their days glued to the latest talking points from Debbie Wassermann-Schultz.

Maybe … just maybe … you have to really talk to – and listen to – the voters and look beyond their gender, their skin color or which church they attend. What a novel concept.

Where y'all from?

This is a dialect quiz from a year or so ago.  It places me somewhere between Jackson, Mississippi, and my actual hometown, Houston.  I tried to choose the answers that seemed most natural from my childhood, though sometimes two answers seemed equally valid, perhaps from listening to other people's conversation over the years.  For instance, I'm pretty sure we said "pillbug" at home, but "doodlebug" seems right, too.  I might call an 18-wheeler a semi or a tractor-trailer, interchangeably.  I was taught to say "feeder road," but I also say "frontage road."  I say "crawfish" and "crawdad" without much preference.  I say "cray-ahn" and can't remember ever hearing anyone say anything different.  I say "cair-ah-mel" not "car-mel." For "aunt," I say "ant," not "awwwnt."  Do people really say "loy-yer" instead of "law-yer"?  Yankees, please advise.

A Silly Question

Cass was schooling me on the equal protection clause recently and a random, silly question popped into my squirrelly brain.

First, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

And now, the silly question:

Tangentially, if we apply the equal protection clause as it's written, doesn't it eliminate any limits on marriage or age or ability? Polygamy should certainly be allowed for every reason same-sex marriage is, but not only that, what about all the age discrimination?

Wouldn't any drinking age above 18 be unconstitutional under this clause? Clearly, we are depriving citizens of a privilege w/o due process of law. Could we even have a legal age of majority at all? Are 2-year-olds not citizens?

Just thinking out loud. Anyone know?

I should have said, "... as it's written and the courts have interpreted it" given that the courts have interpreted it to preclude state bans on same-sex marriage.

Yeah, I fully expect to get slapped, but hopefully it will be an educational slap.

In Honor of Cass' Repost...

...of an old discussion, with new discussion.

Let's Talk about Government Control of Our Bodies

So there I was, trying to slip an argument in on another thread, when the Big Guy busts me and tells me to put up my own post. Well, clearly I'm not pulling my blogging weight around here lately, but I thought I could slide by one more time. Dang.

Without further introduction or transition, over in the Lies, Damned Lies, and Abortion thread, Cass and Grim got into a discussion of government control over a woman's body in the case of pregnancy.

The pro-choice / pro-life debate is an active one, so we hear about it and about a woman's right to control her body. However, in the context of government control over the body, we don't hear much about conscription, probably because we haven't conscripted for about 40 years, though also probably because it's about men's rights and that's just evil and misogynistic.

Hater that I am, I'm curious about how the Hall sees this. Are these two issues similar in any way? If you are uncomfortable with any level of government control over a pregnant woman's body, are you also uncomfortable with government control over a man's body? Or are they completely different matters?

There Are Ways To Defy An Order Short of Disobeying It

For example, conduct honest and dispassionate tests.

Faced with a January 2016 deadline for introducing women to combat units, the U.S. Marines have discovered that for every man who fails a simulated artillery lift-and-carry test, 28 women fail.

And for a test simulating moving over a seven-foot high wall, less than 1.2 percent of the men could not get over, compared to 21.32 percent of women.

The results were found in Marine Corps documentation by the Center for Military Readiness, which issued a report called “U.S. Marine Corps Research Findings: Where is the Case for Co-Ed Ground Combat?”

According to CMR, a non-profit think tank, the Obama administration expects the Marine Corps to find a way to assign women to ground combat units without lowering standards.

“In the independent view of CMR, quantitative research done so far indicates that these expectations cannot be met,” the group said....

In a pull-up test, women averaged 3.59 while men averaged 15.69 – more than four times as many.

A “clean and press” event involved single lifts of 70, 80, 95 and 115 pounds plus six repetitions of a 65 pound lift.

Eighty percent of the men passed the 115 pound test but only 8.7 percent of the women.

In the 120 mm tank loading simulation, participants were asked to lift a simulated round weighing 55 pounds five times in 35 seconds or less. Men failed at a less than 1 percent rate while women failed at a rate of 18.68 percent.

The Marines said nearly one in five women “could not complete the tank loading drill in the allotted time.”

“It would be very likely that failure rates would increase in a more confined space [such as a tank].”

The artillery lift and carry had volunteers pick up a 95 pound artillery round and carry it 50 meters in under two minutes. Again, less than 1 percent of the men failed but 28.2 percent of women.

The obstacle involved a seven-foot wall with a 20-inch box, simulating a fellow soldier’s helping hand. Less than 1.2 percent of the men failed and 21.3 percent of the women.

CMR’s report said while the tests don’t replicate combat, “they do constitute empirical data based on reality, not theories about gender equality.”

We've all been following these USMC efforts, and I don't think there's anything to suggest they've been stacked against the women who have volunteered. Anyone disagree?

No, Georgia's Not Turning Blue

Has anyone at the New York Times ever been to Georgia?

No other plausibly competitive state has seen a more favorable shift for Democrats in the racial composition of eligible voters over the last decade. The pace of demographic change is so fast that Michelle Nunn, a Democrat, is locked in a tight race against the Republican David Perdue for an open Senate seat — even with an off-year electorate that is favorable for the G.O.P....

According to data from the Georgia secretary of state, the 2010 electorate was 66.3 percent white and 28.2 percent black.... I expect the 2014 electorate to be about 64.2 percent white and 28.8 percent black. (Ms. Nunn is expected to win at least 90 percent of the black vote.) Yet the last four nonpartisan polls that released demographic data showed an electorate that’s 65.7 percent white and 25.7 percent black. Those polls show Mr. Perdue ahead by 3.3 points, but they would show something closer to a dead heat if the likely electorate matched my estimates....

Georgia is perhaps the single state where [demographic change] would make a noticeable difference, because of the degree of racial polarization and the pace of demographic change.

Emphasis added.

The reason Michelle Nunn is running more-or-less even with Perdue is that she comes from a family famous in the state for excellent service in the Senate. Her father is almost a watchword for what a good Senator should look like. In addition, she's made her career working with the Bush family ever since the first Bush administration. So Republicans can look at her and see a woman who can reach across the aisle, has plenty of respect from their own party, and has a kind of life-long apprenticeship from the man whose Senate career Georgia voters already most respect.

David Perdue comes from the same family as Sonny Perdue, a recent governor who broke key election promises to base voters, and was unimpressive as governor. David Perdue has no experience in politics from which to judge, but he made his career on Wall Street, a place whose name normally turns up in Georgia elections as a curse: e.g., 'If elected, I will defend the values of Main Street against Wall Street.'

Of course he's running weak. That doesn't mean the state is turning blue. It means he's running from a very weak position, against the best candidate the Democratic party has fielded in more than a decade.

A "racial" analysis of this election is neither helpful nor wise. For that matter, it's wrong. The reason Nunn is doing well is that the Georgia electorate is less polarized by race -- whether or not black voters have moved off their traditional support for the Democratic party, more white Georgians are willing to vote for this Democrat.

Pushing Costs Onto Taxpayers

Vox is very happy that Walmart workers are going to lose their health insurance thanks to the ACA.

Namely, anybody who gets access to affordable coverage at work is barred from getting subsidies through the new exchanges. This is even true for people who don't buy insurance at work; just the act of getting offered employer coverage blocks individuals from using getting financial help.

That financial help can be a big deal for those with lower incomes. Think of the 36-year-old Walmart employee here in Washington, D.C. who works 29 hours per week at the company's average wage of $12.73 per hour. She earns just about $19,000 annually if she works every week of the year.

If Walmart doesn't offer her insurance, the Kaiser Family Foundation's subsidy calculator shows that she qualifies for a $1,751 subsidy from the federal government to help buy coverage on the exchange. With that financial help, she can buy insurance for as little as an $7 per month. As a low-wage worker, she gets some of the most generous financial help.

But if Walmart does offer her coverage, it becomes her only option. She doesn't qualify for federal help and the $7 plan disappears. Walmart's plan, meanwhile, is way more expensive. The average premium there works out to $111 per month.

They do kind of get around to mentioning, at the end, that "the loser in the Walmart decision is the Federal budget." What that means is that the loser is the taxpayer, i.e., you and me and everyone we know. Walmart is saving money at our expense.

Great news! Good job, progressives. You've managed to enrich the Walton family.

Also, though they won't do it all at once, you've managed to depress the wages of Walmart workers and other workers in similar industries. That's because right now Walmart has been paying them enough that they could afford that $111 a month if it was important to them. Now, raises can slim and come fewer and further between, as Walmart has $111/month cushion in its workers' paycheck that it can play with. Since Walmart competes for workers with many other similar companies, all of those companies will also be able to pay less over time and still draw the workers they need.

Especially if they get that comprehensive immigration reform you'd like, right? Imagine when we can vastly inflate the labor supply at that level of competition, and with people who are accustomed to living the lifestyle of an undocumented immigrant.

Yes sir, you're really helping out the working man. Morons.

Does Your Dog Love You?

Science can't say! Who knows what the experience is like for a dog? But we can say that the dog experiences excitement in a certain region of the brain associated with reward:

Greg Berns, an Emory neuroscientist, has found that when dogs sniff a rag soaked in their owner's scent, activity spikes in their caudate nucleus — a reward center involved in emotional attachment. It doesn't when they smell a stranger's scent. He's also found that the same activity occurs when these dogs' owners walk into the room, but not when strangers do.

Also, turns out dogs can learn hundreds of words. Not just "dinnertime" and "no!"

UPDATE: Do you love your dog?

Tenure

Katharine Stevens argues that eroding tenure rights will help, not hurt, the effort to retain the best teachers.  Even more than they want ironclad job security, good teachers want to be able to depend on their colleagues, especially the colleagues who had charge last year of this year's class.

Military Strength

RangerUp has a video with Mark Rippletoe that proposes a very significant change to the military's physical fitness test.

[M]ilitary fitness operates under a 100-year-old paradigm that places endurance training above strength. I think the realities of modern mechanization have made endurance testing for military people obsolete, and it ignores the physical reality of the Soldier in 2014. Soldiers in 2014, as opposed to 1914, come from a completely different background. In 1914, people worked on a farm – they bailed hay, they picked heavy things up, they were stronger. You can get people in endurance condition pretty quickly. Endurance for people who are not endurance specialists comes on pretty quickly. Strength, on the other hand, takes years to develop. If it is not trained, it never develops. Having talked to lots of people who have occupied a combat role, it is my studied opinion, and theirs, that strength contributes more to combat readiness in 2014 than endurance does....

[E]verybody in the military ought to be able to deadlift twice their bodyweight. And that does not represent a powerlifting specialization. For a 165-pound Soldier, a 330-pound deadlift is not a remarkable feat of strength. But it at least ensures that there is a minimum standard. Next, we would have an overhead press test that would be 75% bodyweight... I would also test chin-ups and 400-meter sprint. I think a Soldier should be able to do 12 chin-ups and run 400 meters in 75 seconds or less. The additional benefit of having the press, chin-up, and 400 meter run tests is that they do away with the need to do body composition testing, which takes up a lot of time and can be a problem for muscular Soldiers.

"Everybody in the military" includes general officers nearing 30 years of service, as well as grizzled sergeants who have piled on a certain amount of battle damage. Likewise, as he says, it takes years to develop strength: you can't expect to deadlift twice your bodyweight tomorrow if you've never done it before.

As an aspirational standard, though, it sounds good to me. If we said that everyone in the military should be able to do this by the end of their first four-year enlistment period, it might make sense. We'd have to combine a sense of what is reasonable to ask given natural aging and also service-related injuries, but it's otherwise not a bad idea at all.

UPDATE: I suppose I should add that I think he's on his best ground in arguing that we should move from endurance-based to strength-based testing as the minimum standard for military personnel. Endurance is nevertheless of critical importance for some specific jobs in the military -- loading artillery, for example, as well as many special operations missions. That's the reason to have a tough, endurance-based course as an additional layer of selection for those especially onerous jobs. This is a function performed by, for example, the USSF Q-course, or the Marine Infantry Officers' course.

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.