Justice is Not Blind

There have been two recent cases in which no-knock SWAT-style drug raids have led to the death of raiding police officers. Both men who killed raiding officers had prior run-ins with the law. In one case, no drugs found in the raid. In the other, drugs were found. One of these men is going to be tried for capital murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. The other one the grand jury refused to indict.

One is black, one is white. Guess which one?

Guy is black, Magee white. And while Magee was found to have acted in self-defense, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Guy. He remains in jail while he awaits trial.

Historically, police serving warrants were required to knock on a door, announce their presence, and wait for an answer. But in SWAT raids, this is often no longer the case. Police aren't required to announce themselves if they believe the circumstances present a threat of physical violence, or if they believe evidence would be destroyed. According to a study by the American Civil Liberties Union, no-knock warrants are used in around 60 percent of drug searches.

Like Guy, Magee was initially charged with capital murder, which is punishable by death. But before Magee's trial, a grand jury found there was not enough evidence for him to stand trial on that charge. "In essence it was a ruling in self-defense," DeGuerin said. Guy has been through the grand jury process as well, his attorney said, but in his case, the grand jury allowed prosecutors to move ahead with capital murder charges. So while Magee awaits trial for felony possession of marijuana, Guy awaits potential execution.

Aristotle says that justice is treating relevantly similar cases similarly. That's helpful in a way, but it's purely formal: we still end up having to use judgment and rhetoric to reason about what constitutes relevant similarity. We can't go into justice with a blindfold on, because if we do we'll end up unable to do the work of justice at all.

These cases look a lot a like, at first, and we might be tempted to say that the grand jury is probably informed by racism in electing to prosecute the one and not the other. But there are differences, too, which we have to consider.

The first difference is the presence of drugs. But that, if anything, seems to mitigate in favor of Guy: he was the one who didn't have any drugs! On the other hand, "drug paraphernalia" was found, so the police and prosecutors may simply believe they were unlucky in the date of the raid. Still, you can't prosecute the guy for what you didn't catch him doing, and as far as the raid is concerned, no drugs were found.

The second difference is in the kind of prior trouble the men encountered with the law. Magee had two prior DUIs and two prior marijuana possession: and even though we take DUI very seriously as a society now, it's still an offense without violent intent (though it may, by sad accident, have violent result). Guy's priors were a little different: robbery, theft, burglary, and possessing a firearm while a felon (itself against the law).

Now you might say that we should judge their guilt or innocence based on the current facts of the current case, not on their priors. Even if we grant that point for argument's sake, though, we can't ignore the priors insofar as they are directly relevant to the current case. To whit, Magee was entitled to defend his home with a firearm, whereas Guy was committing a crime by even making arrangements to do so.

In that light, the grand juries' differential behavior begins to make a kind of sense. Magee could be said to be making a very honest and understandable mistake in defending his home with his rifle; Guy cannot be held to have been innocent of plotting to commit a crime with his firearm, because arming himself in that manner was itself a crime.

All that said, capital murder strikes me as an excessive charge for defending your home against violent intrusion by attackers who do not even bother to identify themselves as police with a lawful warrant. Such actors take their lives in their hands, and citizens should not be put on trial for their lives if the police's choice to run this risk ends up with them getting shot. Reason magazine notes a similar case that ended up with the man in prison for ten years. That's an injustice, when the police purposefully elect to raid your home at an hour when they expect to rouse you out of a sound sleep, dazzle you with a flash-bang grenade, and then storm your home before you can think. They must be held to be assuming the risks of such a rash course of action.

Even so, we don't have to appeal to racism to explain the difference in these cases. The cases are relevantly similar in some respects, but relevantly different in very important ones. A different outcome is not proof of injustice.

Monte Carlo

A point I think about often, as a motorcycle rider:

One lesson of New Guinea life Diamond takes personally concerns small, recurring dangers – “hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently”. Once, on a field trip, he proposed setting up camp under a beautiful old tree, but his New Guinean colleagues refused. It was dead, they explained, and might kill them in the night. The chances were tiny – but if you sleep under trees many nights a year, they add up. The biggest dangers in his LA life today, Diamond believes, are slipping in the shower, tripping on uneven paving stones and car accidents. Even if the chance of serious injury or death in the bathroom is one in 1,000, that is far too big for something you do every day.

Is that right? Do the chances 'add up'? Not according to probability theory; and yet it seems plausible to say that if you run against 1,000-1 odds a thousand times...

I rode in Tampa's rush-hour traffic, day in and day out, hours a day during the summer a few years ago. In retrospect, that may not have been the best idea I ever had.

The odds drop a lot, though, on these country backroads. They're more fun to ride on anyway.

"The Bell Curve" +20

Joseph W. sometimes refers to this book by names like 'Mephistopheles' Handbook of Evil,' but the authors say that their intent was to make a very limited, modest claim. The explosion results from the fact that even a modest amount of antimatter doesn't mix:

Fifty years from now, I bet those claims about “The Bell Curve” will be used as a textbook case of the hysteria that has surrounded the possibility that black-white differences in IQ are genetic. Here is the paragraph in which Dick Herrnstein and I stated our conclusion:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. (p. 311)

That’s it. The whole thing. The entire hateful Herrnstein-Murray pseudoscientific racist diatribe about the role of genes in creating the black-white IQ difference. We followed that paragraph with a couple pages explaining why it really doesn’t make any difference whether the differences are caused by genes or the environment. But nothing we wrote could have made any difference.

The solution set doesn't sound like the hardest-right radicalism either. He proposes a guaranteed basic income for all Americans, for one thing.

Something For Everyone

Really, how could you do better than "The Anglo-Saxon War-Culture and The Lord of the Rings: Legacy and Reappraisal"?

Considering the scarcity of the Anglo-Saxon influence in modern war-literature in general, one may wonder and stop by a work like The Lord of the Rings or Silmarillion, which few would be willing to categorise as serious war-literature. The fictional writings of J.R.R. Tolkien are said to have revived the genre of fantasy and magic-realism, and they have been readily assimilated into the new genre of popular literature. What seems to have been forgotten in this process is Tolkien’s own passionate and critical engagement with the war-literature of the Anglo-Saxons, which has gone into the making of his otherwise ‘fantastic’ creation of the ‘Middle Earth’.

Tolkien's description of the fight between the Rohirric cavalry and the Uruk-Hai is as good a picture of a disciplined medieval infantry-cavalry skirmish as exists.

Quarantine quarrels

Congress took testimony on the controversy over whether travel bans or quarantines might impede efforts to contain Ebola at its source:

Rabih Torbay, senior vice president at International Medical Corps, testified that imposing quarantines would strongly discourage volunteer healthcare workers from assisting in the relief effort. 

As an example, he said, the IMC requires a six-week minimum commitment to treat Ebola patients. Adding a 21-day quarantine would stretch doctors' furloughs to nine weeks, a period of leave that few hospitals would allow. 

"We cannot recruit staff from the U.S. or anywhere else in the world if there is not a chance they could come back to their families and their [jobs]" quickly, Torbay told lawmakers. 

"Putting people in quarantine goes against our ability to recruit and retain [staff], and therefore, it will go against our ability to fight against the virus in West Africa."

Wait, so the problem with quarantine is that travelers from Africa who have been treating large numbers of Ebola patients under primitive conditions need to be able to go right back to work at their American hospitals as soon as they return, without waiting 21 days to see whether they're unlikely to have contracted the disease?

I thought the bowling doctor in New York was a little complacent, but at least he didn't (as far as I know) go back to work at his ER while he was self-monitoring for 21 days.

Do Police Kill Blacks At The Same Rate as Lynching?

So, I encountered the following badge on Facebook:

That is a shocking claim, isn't it? I decided to try and see if it was true.

The source for the claim seems to be this article in the UK Guardian. Here's the fuller version of the claim:

Not terribly long ago in a country that many people misremember, if they knew it at all, a black person was killed in public every four days for often the most mundane of infractions, or rather accusation of infractions – for taking a hog, making boastful remarks, for stealing 75 cents. For the most banal of missteps, the penalty could be an hours-long spectacle of torture and lynching. No trial, no jury, no judge, no appeal. Now, well into a new century, as a family in Ferguson, Missouri, buries yet another American teenager killed at the hands of authorities, the rate of police killings of black Americans is nearly the same as the rate of lynchings in the early decades of the 20th century.

About twice a week, or every three or four days, an African American has been killed by a white police officer in the seven years ending in 2012, according to studies of the latest data compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That number is incomplete and likely an undercount, as only a fraction of local police jurisdictions even report such deaths – and those reported are the ones deemed somehow “justifiable”. That means that despite the attention given the deaths of teenagers Trayvon Martin (killed by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman) and Jordan Davis (killed by a white man for playing his music too loud), their cases would not have been included in that already grim statistic – not only because they were not killed by police but because the state of Florida, for example, is not included in the limited data compiled by the FBI.

So the "rate" that she's talking about is "once every three or four days."

However, there's an ambiguity at work. The American black population in 1900 was 8.8 million; today, it is over 38 million. Thus, the "rate" in the statistical sense is only 0.231 the rate of lynchings in 1900 (assuming that 1900 is a good proxy for her claim about when lynchings were once-every-four-days, and that all her numbers are right).

So is the claim true? Yes, and at the same time also no.

Religious Tests

Matt Walsh writes:

The answer is clear. We object to the baker or the photographer refusing to service gay weddings because we’ve deemed that expression to be anti-gay. And anti-gay expression is always wrong. Remember what we’ve said time after time: it has no place in our society. Churches are in our society, aren’t they?...

We force chapels to marry gays and bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings because we find Christianity abhorrent and detest the very thought of anyone attempting to live by its tenets.

That’s all. That’s it. That’s what everything comes down to. Nothing more, nothing less.

If we have banned people from practicing their faith in their private lives because we disagree with it, why wouldn’t we try and eradicate the hive itself?

If Christians are barred from running their private businesses according to their religious convictions, then haven’t we made a statement about those convictions? They’re unwelcome. Illegitimate. There’s no place in a civilized society for them.

Spurious Connections

The correlations are legitimate, but...

No Common Ground

This is a fairly basic principle, and it's hard to see how you can work around the disagreement.

During an National Rifle Association event in Iowa in 2012, state Sen. Joni Ernst, now the Republican nominee for Senate in the state, said she carries a 9-millimeter gun around everywhere and believes in the right to use it even if it’s against the government if they disregard her rights.

“I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere,” Ernst said during a speech at the NRA’s Iowa Firearms Coalition Second Amendment Rally in Searsboro, Iowa, as flagged by The Huffington Post on Thursday. “But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”

As opposed to what exactly? The opposite of this statement is the following:

“I do not believe in the right to carry, and I do not believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”

Is there any free person anywhere that doesn’t reserve the right to defend himself against a person who would do him harm, or who believes that, should the government turn, he would be better off going quietly into the night?

The alternative positions are pretty hostile. Really, some of the ones linked by Memeorandum are so hostile and vile that I won't link to them. But here's Ed Kilgore, at least:

Now this is a guaranteed applause line among Con Con audiences, for reasons that have relatively little to do with gun regulation. The idea here is to intimidate liberals, and “looters” and secular socialists, and those people, that there are limits to what the good virtuous folk of the country will put up with in the way of interference with their property rights and their religious convictions and their sense of how the world ought to work. If push comes to shove, they’re heavily armed, and bullets outweigh ballots. It’s a reminder that if politics fails in protecting their very broad notion of their “rights,” then revolutionary violence—which after all, made this great country possible in the first place—is always an option. And if that sounds “anti-democratic,” well, as the John Birch Society has always maintained, this is a Republic, not a democracy.

I can understand not appreciating what you are reading as an attempt to intimidate you, personally. Still, the principle sounds reasonable to me. In fact, if I were going to articulate it, I'd not focus as she does on a right to defend. The right -- the one the Founders asserted -- is not limited to defense from the government's depredations. It is a right "to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Is there any American who doesn't believe that? Is it possible to be an American, in the spiritual sense, without believing it? The 14th Amendment makes citizens of everyone born here, but perhaps that isn't wise: perhaps it isn't birth but faith that makes Americans.

Smart, Smart Diplomacy

Secretary of State John Kerry:

We've said from day one that if North Korea wants to rejoin the community of nations, it knows how to do it. It can come to the talks prepared to discuss denuclearization. And the United States is fully prepared -- if they do that and begin that process, we are prepared to begin the process of reducing the need for American force and presence in the region because the threat itself would then be reduced.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, a few hours later:

We the United States do not intend to change our policy on deployment of our forces in the Republic of Korea. In fact, I think it's just the opposite. We continue to strengthen and advance that policy we've had for over 60 years. We are upgrading it, adjusting on deployments, on rotational deployments. We think there is more stability, more security, more continuity in those deployments.

Bowling with Ebola

If you've been wondering how thoroughly an Ebola case in New York City would convulse the nation's media outlets, wonder no more.  Just turn on any cable new show or google "New York Ebola doctor."  It's going to be wall-to-wall for the duration.

Who Doesn't Benefit From A New Racial Slur?

So apparently in the confines of academia, there's a sense that it would be really nice if we could come up with a good racial slur to use against whites. Well, non-Southern whites, that is: everyone already knows a mess of slurs for uppity Southerners.

I cajole a few of them into “Cracker” and “Red Neck.” We can usually get to “Hillbilly” or “Trailer Trash” or “White Trash,” possibly even “Peckerwood,” before folks recognize the “Cletus the slack-jawed yokel” pattern of class discrimination here. And being that we are at a top ranked west coast university, not only do we all share basic middle class aspirations, but we can feel pretty safe in the fact that there are no “Red Necks” here to insult.

There probably are quite few. Southern poor whites are as underprivileged -- and as poor -- as almost any minority group. So naturally, of course, they're the one the culture is readiest to insult should they break out of their hills and come down into town where they don't belong.

What is really wanted is a good way to insult the rest of the white community. The first author takes a stab at it -- given that he's looking for a good way to insult white, left-leaning college students at his own university, I was amused to see that we'd gotten there first.

Still, it's not good enough, argues a second thinker. The problem is that it's possible to avoid being slandered by changing behavior, which is not how racial slurs are supposed to work. They're supposed to taint you forever, no matter what you do:

It is a label that denies the individuality of the target and forces him to into a set of predefined stereotypes. And there is nothing the target to can do to exempt himself. It is beyond achievement, effort, or choice. You just *are* are Black or Latino or Jewish or “white privileged”. Definitively, a person of Euro-Caucasian descent can never stop being white privileged.

And just like those other racial slurs, being white privileged undercuts anything a person individually accomplishes. Maybe he can be the nicest of the White Privileged that his Black and Latino friends know. Maybe he can be “one of the good ones” who “knows his place” as the beneficiary of American institutional racism. But he can never be other than white privileged. White privileged is the Bizarro-world version of the presumption that a Black student was accepted to an exclusive university because of his skin-color. If you are white privileged, it means that — although you might have never treated anyone inequitably based on their race, creed, or national origin, although you might have even shown a degree of favoritism to races different than your own, although you might have had no valuable socio-economic connections when starting out, although you might have worked very hard and risked much to achieve whatever you have — but still you vicariously share in the sin of every cop (white or black or brown) who stops and tickets a black man in an expensive car because he stood out on the highway. And it asserts you have even reaped unspecified rewards from those encounters—rewards not shared by other categories.

White privileged is the true white racial slur, and no one has been slow to throw it around. It is used the same as any other racial slurs: To deny the target his individuality, to brand him with the failures of the worst member of his category and with the stereotypes in the minds of others, to disparage the quality of his achievements and potential, and to implicitly demand more from him than others.

There's some merit to this suggestion. No one should be expected to take seriously an argument framed around a racial slur, which would dismiss 'privilege' arguments on the same terms. Further, it justifies a response exactly similar to the response we expect should we call someone of a given race by a slur. If that ends badly for you, most people will agree that you brought it on yourself.

So, motion carried. Good to know that our fine academic minds are still working on solving the hard problems bedeviling the nation! Thanks to their tireless efforts, we've devised a new racial slur. Surely there's nothing America needed more.

Better microscopes

I heard recently that a Nobel Prize had been given for advances in light microscopy, and wondered why we would be fooling around with light after determining some time back that really detailed pictures required electromagnetic radiation with smaller wavelengths.  The answer turns out to be that those smaller wavelengths really tear up whatever we're trying to look at, particularly living cells.  The new microscopy uses some kind of system of multiple passes that makes possible fantastic videos of living processes such as cell division, as you can see in the remarkable videos here.

Travel monitors

This actually strikes me as a pretty sane measure:  state health officials will be trying to monitor all incoming travelers from the Ebola-stricken countries for 21 days.  It's not airtight, obviously, and I have real doubts about whether the health officials will have the resources or the determination to follow through instead of treating this like a public-relations box to check off, but it's a step.  All our experience, including our good luck with the families of Thomas Duncan, Nina Pham, Amber Vinson, and the Spanish nurse, points to the probability that Ebola doesn't spread very readily early on.  If we keep a sharp eye on the people most likely to be developing symptoms in the next few weeks, we increase our chances of getting them into isolation before they're most dangerous.  At least, I'd like to hope that no one on this "watch list" could be turned away unthinkingly from an ER.

The Beggar's Opera - in Italian!

And a very good production, too (outside of Mrs. Peachum).

Sergeant at Arms, Do Your Office

The Sergeant at Arms is an ancient office that, for quite some time, has been chiefly ceremonial. Not today.

According to reports, most of downtown Ottawa has been locked down as at least one suspect is still reportedly on the loose. The gunman reportedly first attacked the soldier at the National War Memorial and then went into the Canadian parliament building. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is safe. Harper reportedly was to meet with Malala Yousefzai, who was recently named a co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize....

Media reports now indicate that police are searching for multiple gunmen, and are also trying to block bridges into Quebec. One gunman who entered the Canadian parliament building was reportedly killed by Parliament's sergeant at arms.

Well done, brother.

UPDATE: Confirmation.

Fantino said parliament's head of security, Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, a former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), had shot a suspect dead.

"All the details are not in, but the sergeant-at-arms, a former Mountie, is the one that engaged the gunman, or one of them at least, and stopped this," Fantino said. "He did a great job and, from what I know, shot the gunman and he is now deceased."

UPDATE: "Sergeant at Arms gets standing ovation after shooting terrorist while wearing tails."

Why Would Any Man Vote Democrat?

So asks Dr. Gordon Finley, via Dr. Helen, via Dr. Glen Reynolds. Since such a well-educated consort wants to know, allow me to answer.

As a citizen of the Great State of Georgia, allow me to say that I am seriously considering voting for Michelle Nunn. My reasons are the same reasons she is doing very well across the state.

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.'

For that matter, I am considering voting for Jason Carter, Jimmy Carter's grandson. This is not because I am enthusiastic about him as a candidate. It is because Nathan Deal, the Republican incumbent, has been a terrible governor. Longtime readers of the page will remember that I supported his candidacy in 2010, on the strength of his having been a perfectly decent congressman (in my district) for a long time. His performance as governor ought to be disqualifying for a second term.

Partly I think the length of his service in Washington is responsible, as it detached him from his state for so long and attached him to powerful national interests instead. A man who had spent more time at home would not have bungled last year's blizzard so badly, because any native son of Georgia should have known how huge a disaster even a few inches of snow and ice would be for the state.

Setting all that aside, however, how can you excuse the worst unemployment rate in the entire nation? This isn't Detroit! A Republican governor with a Republican legislature, if he accomplishes nothing else, ought at least to be a spur to the economy. If he can't do that -- and very manifestly he cannot -- how can he possibly put himself forward for a second term?

Well, I know the arguments against voting Democratic, because they are helpfully mailed to me by various interest groups. Presumably a Democratic governor and Senator cannot be trusted on gun rights, and will try to drive Georgia against its grain on social issues. A Democratic Senate is harmful in terms of court appointments, including to the Supreme Court in the event that a vacancy should occur. It is also harmful in terms of oversight, and there is perhaps even a positive national program that a unified Congress could push on a reluctant, lame-duck President.

The issues Dr. Helen and her cohort raise frankly don't rise to the same level of consideration. I don't dismiss them, but they pale beside the issues of national destiny and character we face.

Why might a man vote Democratic? I have not decided that I will, because the national concerns especially are very pressing. But now you know why I might: because the Democrats have recruited better candidates, and the Republicans currently serving at the state level have done a disgraceful job.

Excellent News

A paralyzed man is able to walk again, thanks to cells taken from an adult's nose.

It may even be possible for this to be replicated, "if funding can be raised." A comment on the story says:

"Raisman, who hopes to see at least three more patients treated in Poland over the next three to five years if the funding can be raised, said"

Wait - what? "if the funding can be raised"? If this report is accurate, there should be no question of funding. The procedure surely should be repeated in a careful study of 30 to 50 people, with funding from the NHS.

The cost is trivial - if we have (as we do) fixed budgets, then cut back on varicose vein surgery and gender-reassignment surgery to cover the costs of this research, No brainer.

You would think.

Tolerance

People have been arguing for a long time about what tolerance means. I admire this 19th-century attempt to sort out religious vs. civil tolerance and, in the civil sphere, individual vs. government tolerance:

For the purpose of clearing up ideas on toleration as far as lay in my power, I have presented this matter in a point of view but little known; in order to throw still more light upon it, I will say a few words on religious and civil intolerance,--things which are entirely different, although Rousseau absolutely affirms the contrary. Religious or theological intolerance consists in the conviction, that the only true religion is the Catholic, a conviction common to all Catholics. Civil intolerance consists in not allowing in society any other religions than the Catholic. These two definitions are sufficient to make every man of common sense understand that the two kinds of intolerance are not inseparable; indeed, we may very easily conceive that men firmly convinced of the truth of Catholicity may tolerate those who profess another religion, or none at all. Religious intolerance is an act of the mind, an act inseparable from faith; indeed, whoever has a firm belief that his own religion is true, must necessarily be convinced that it is the only true one; for the truth is one. Civil intolerance is an act whereby the will rejects those who do not profess the same religion; this act has different results, according as the intolerance is in the individuals or in the government. On the other hand, religious tolerance consists in believing that all religions are true; which, when rightly understood, means that none are true, since it is impossible for contradictory things to be true at the same time. Civil tolerance is, to allow men who entertain a different religion to live in peace. This tolerance, as well as the co-relative intolerance, produces different effects, according as it exists in individuals or in the government.

from Protestantism and Catholicity compared in their effects on the civilization of Europe, by the Rev. J. Balmes, 1851, p.57.

Prudence and cowardice

A good article in The Federalist about John Adams, including his thoughts on arbitrary government, why laws can never be amoral, and this analysis of prudence:

Fellow revolutionary Benjamin Rush noted to Adams that their friend Charles Lee dismissed prudence as a “rascally virtue.” Adams replied that “his meaning was good. He meant the spirit which evades danger when duty requires us to face it. This is cowardice, not prudence.” That was not prudence properly understood.

By prudence I mean that deliberation and caution, which aims at no ends but good ones, and good ones by none but fair means, and then carefully adjusts and proportions its good means to its good ends. Without this virtue there can be no other. Justice itself cannot exist without it. A disposition to render to every one his right is of no use without prudence to judge what is his right and skill to perform it.

Prudence divorced from the other virtues would become amoral pragmatism.

Stone

This weekend I was camped at Stone Mountain for the Highland Games. It's been a long time I've been going. After dark I walked by the lake, and looked at the mountain by night. From the campground the mountain blocks Atlanta. The sky behind that black granite bulk is orange. Look far away to the east, and at last you can see a rebel pair of stars.

As a boy I lived in a land full of stars, but I can remember the first time I saw the orange glow. It was on the horizon to the south, when I was a teenager. Atlanta was advancing into the county, a bit at a time, and it was eating up the stars. Now it is hard to see the stars from that place by night.

Since then I've lived in China, where the sky can be viewed in gradations. Walk up a hill as tall as Stone, and looking back down you can see the sky divided like a sand sculpture into a half-dozen stacking fields of increasing dark. Of course, you lived down there where it was worst.

I've also lived in Iraq, where the natural sky was clear and weatherless by day as by night: but once in a while, when a dust storm would come up, it would all turn as red as Mars.

Currently I live in a place where I can see the stars again, as they were when I was a boy. I don't know how long I can stay in such places. What a luxury it is, and how strange that it should be one. How sad, too, to think of all the boys growing up in all the cities -- most of humanity, now -- who never see the stars.

2LT Grigsby, 10th Indiana Cav.

A man after Ymar's very heart.

The adults step in

In a really satisfying courtroom/scandal thriller, after our heroes struggle seemingly in vain against the shadowy forces of conspiracy, Wilford Brimley shows up in the last scene to drag everyone into a conference room, dress them down, and announce how this stinking corruption is going to be shut down once and for all.  Sadly, it doesn't happen that often in real life, but it sure seems to have happened recently in California, where corrupt DOJ officials got caught extorting $55 million out of Sierra Pacific on trumped-up charges that it started a 2007 wildfire.  The grown-ups in the federal judiciary, instead of closing ranks, stepped up and did their jobs.  The Chief Judge for the Eastern District of California took the unheard-of step of recusing all Eastern District judges from the case and asking his bosses in the Ninth Circuit to appoint a new judge from outside his district.

I admit this is not a case I've been following closely, so I won't claim to have sifted the evidence or to possess any inside information supporting Sierra Pacific's claims.  It would be fair to suspect me of being quick to believe accusations of corruption against Eric Holder's agency.  The fact remains that the California federal district judges are not known for their hostility to the DOJ, so if the Chief Judge for the Eastern District  smells a rat, and is enthusiastically backed up by the Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit, I imagine there's real fire underneath all that smoke.

Home

I've been reading Atul Gawande's fine new book, "Being Mortal," about that perennial favorite topic of mine, our insanely inadequate approach to end-of-life care.  When my aunt was enduring her final years in an assisted-living facility and, after she become bedridden with an inoperable broken hip, a nursing home, my cousins were mystified and exasperated by her unhappiness.  She had not been safe alone in her home in East Texas.  The assisted-living facility was a very nice one of its kind.  The family was reasonably attentive and generous.  Why was she always unhappy?  In describing the experience of his wife's grandmother, he almost exactly captures my aunt's woe:

Giving up her home on Greencastle Street meant giving up the life she had built for herself over decades. The things that made Longwood House so much safer and more manageable than the house were precisely what made it hard for her to endure. Her apartment might have been called "independent living," but it involved the imposition of more structure and supervision than she'd ever had to deal with before. Aides watched her diet. Nurse monitored her health. They observed her growing unsteadiness and made her use a walker. This was reassuring for Alice's children, but she didn't like being nannied or controlled. And the regulation of her life only increased with time. When the staff became concerned that she was missing doses of her medications, they informed her that unless she kept her medications with the nurses and came down to their station twice a day to take them under direct supervision, she would have to move out of independent living to the nursing home wing. [Her son and daughter-in-law] hired a part-time aide named Mary to help Alice comply, to give her some company, and to stave off the day she would have to transfer. She liked Mary. But having her hanging around the apartment for hours on end, often with little to do, only made the situation more depressing.

For Alice, it must have felt as if she had crossed into an alien land that she would never be allowed to leave. The border guards were friendly and cheerful enough. They promised her a nice place to live where she'd be well taken care of. But she didn't really want anyone to take care of her; she just wanted to live a life of her own. And those cheerful border guards had taken her keys and her passport. With her home went her control.

Gawande traces the treatment of the destitute elderly from  the disgraceful poorhouses of the early 20th century.  The first change, meant to be an improvement, was to hospitalize them.  At the time, medicine had little to offer beyond a clean, warm bed, adequate food and water, and kind nursing for those unlucky enough not to be able to find such things at home, with family.  Starting with the World War II era, the ability to treat infections with antibiotics suddenly converted hospitals from convalescent nursing homes to places of rapid, expert, intensive intervention and frequent cure.  Between 1946 and 1966 the U.S. built 9,000 new hospitals.  For a while, we emptied the poorhouses and placed their residents in hospitals.

We were disappointed to find, however, that the poorhouse problem hadn't gone away, despite the implementation of Social Security.  The problem was that the poorhouses weren't only for the poor:  they were also for those too frail to look after themselves alone. For those without family to care for them, it takes more than the ordinary pension to solve that problem.  Hospitals couldn't handle the burden, and in any case were ill-suited to long-term custodial care.  In 1954 Congress allocated funding for a wave of new "nursing homes":  13,000 were built by 1970.

If Gawande's wife's grandmother was uneasy about the loss of control in assisted living, she was devastated when she broke a hips and had to move into a nursing home, where she had no control over when to wake, sleep, bathe, or eat, or with whom she'd share a room; like my aunt, she was subjected to a series of abrupt changes in roommate, many of them delirious enough to keep her awake all night shouting.  "She felt incarcerated, like she was in prison for being old."  The home was not deliberately punitive, but it was an involuntary institutionalization, devoid of purpose or privacy.

Is it not possible, Gawande wonders, to maintain a life of freedom and worth when one has lost physical independence?  Are nursing homes and their inmates doomed to fight each other for control?

In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications. In the nice ones, a staff member cracks a joke, wags an affectionate finger, and takes your brownie stash away. In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible.

This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals--from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly--but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore.

 I haven't finished the book.  I'm hoping he has some ideas.  One of them certainly is going to be for elderly relatives to move in with the younger generation, an idea we've been wrestling with regarding my mother-in-law for some time.  I know that she'd hate leaving her home, even to live with us.  I have only to imagine leaving my home to move in with her to get an inkling of the horrifying prospect.  The only thing good that could be said about the plan is that it would beat a nursing home.

We should all be so lucky as to die relatively abruptly, at home.  My mother, stepmother, and father all died at home, not--unfortunately--abruptly, but at least without institutionalization.

Beyond red v. blue

Enough about political leanings.  Here are the important distinctions among states.

Our household is split 50/50 on this critical metric.

Not rendering unto Caesar

Russell Moore on the City of Houston's subpoena of anti-gay sermons:

Every authority, under God, is limited. Daniel is obedient to King Nebuchadnezzar, until the king decreed the way prayers should be offered. Peter and John are obedient to the authorities, until they are told how to preach, in which case they defy this authority (Acts 4:19-20).

Moreover, the issue is even clearer when we recognize that the City of Houston, and beyond that the broader American governing system, is, unlike in the case of Caesar, not the rule of one man (or one woman). There were all sorts of governing officials up and down the chain in the Roman Empire, but the ultimate accountability was Caesar himself. In our system of government, the ultimate “king” is the people. As citizens, we bear responsibility for electing officials, for speaking to laws that are made in our name, and for setting precedents by our actions. Shrugging this off is not the equivalent of Jesus standing silently before Pilate. It’s the equivalent of Pilate washing his hands, so as not to bear accountability for our own decisions and precedents set.

How would people react to a subpoena of Reverend Wright's sermons?

Repeal and replace

Gillespie's plan sounds like an improvement to me, even when reviewed in relentlessly hostile terms.

What's the federal government for?

It gets harder and harder to tell:

The shocking competence gap and the cavernous honesty gap — brought to you by the “most transparent administration in history” — make our heads spin as we careen from debacle to government-induced debacle. In the tumult, we can miss the main point: Why do we have a federal government?

Its purpose is to safeguard the American people and pursue our interests in the world, not to solve the world’s problems on our dime and, occasionally, by using us as laboratory mice. As free people, we can try to save the planet. The federal government, however, was not created to do it for us, much less to coerce us into implausible “humanitarian” schemes that always manage to line some crony’s pocket. National interest is our government’s only reliable compass, yet it has been discarded.

Friday Night MV

I think Fred and Ginger would have approved.

Why a travel ban wouldn't work

. . . and other hogwash from Politico.

1. It would choke off aid and could worsen the outbreak. Politico argues that a charter flight could cost $200,000 per person, and would stifle the inflow of health supplies to West Africa. But suppose we let commercial flights fly in, but not take any people out who hadn't been quarantined first? Sure, airlines would be reluctant to sell one-way tickets for $1,200 and take a loss on an empty return flight, but they could charge double for all one-way tickets. $2,400 a seat still beats $200,000. In any case, we've already got the military sending in supplies. What's more, every time we treat a case of Ebola here we spend a minimum of $500,000 in direct medical costs, not to mention the cost of all the after-the-fact tracking and isolation efforts.  Letting Duncan in has resulted in three such bills so far.  I don't see the good sense in economizing on charter-flight expenses.  What do you think it's cost Frontier Airlines for word to get out that one of its aircraft may have been contaminated?  How much money will Texas Health Presbyterian lose?  Would you schedule surgery there now?

2. It would make it harder to track infected people. Because they would lie and hide. None of that happening now, I guess.

3. Lawmakers are long on opinions, short on practical ideas. This is the usual "but Republicans won't get specific about alternatives" complaint, which works only when you're determined not to read a word Republicans publish on whatever the subject is, from healthcare to Ebola. What's the mystery about the practical way to make a travel ban work? We do it with communicable diseases in plants and animals all the time. More than a dozen countries already have imposed a travel ban on West Africa. Are their bans imprecise, impractical, or confusing in some way?

4. The math doesn't add up. The argument here seems to be that airport temperature screenings don't often turn up a problem. What to make of such a bizarre objection? Who's proposing airport temperature screenings that they're already supposedly doing anyway? We're talking about either an outright ban until the epidemic abates in West Africa, or a strict 21-day quarantine. We'd hope that a quarantine wouldn't identify many infected people, either, but the point isn't all the people who breathe a sigh of relief after 21 days and keep traveling: it's the occasional person who comes down with symptoms in that time and immediately goes into super-isolation and treatment. Politico's other argument is the vague "best to treat the problem at its source" business that I've been hearing everywhere. I agree it's a really good idea to treat the problem at its source, but that obviously entails keeping the problem largely at its source while we try to treat it. Ebola is not going to get any easier to stamp out if we let it swamp all the first-world hospitals, too.

Sense and Nonsense

I'm going to talk about this case that Instapundit mentions, about a transgender student who is now disqualified from serving in elected office because 'she's now a white male,' and we all know (and the student agrees!) that white males in power is a terrible thing.

The philosopher Wittgenstein was worried that a lot of things we say are nonsense. He meant something specific by that. Suppose I tell you: "I have parked my zonk in the garage." Now you might be thinking that you have almost understood what I said. If only you could learn what a zonk is, you'd have a complete picture of the sense of my sentence. But in fact, there is no such thing as a zonk (except the beloved military expression): my alleged sentence is nonsense.

The danger of nonsense is that I have confused your vision of the world. You now believe in something that doesn't exist. Possibly I will find you snooping around my garage later, attempting to locate this mysterious object that you believe exists, but which in fact does not and never has existed.

Wittgenstein extended this concept in a very famous argument called 'the private language argument.' Briefly, he suggests you imagine that you are having a feeling now that you've never had before. You decide to name it with a private word. Later, you have another feeling, and try to decide if you should call it by the same name. What standard is there to judge if the feeling is the same? Well, we can't really bring back the original feeling and compare it: as everyone knows (and as is a great blessing), remembering grief is wholly different from grieving. So all you have to go on is your own sense that the two things are the same: but that is just what you wanted to check. There is no objective standard against which you can test the sense you have right now that the two feelings are the same feeling. You therefore have no objective reason to say "I feel X," where X is the private name you gave to your original feeling.

So what do you do with the biological adult female who doesn't want to be called a woman, but instead wishes to be called by a male name and referred to with male pronouns? She says she is 'masculine of center,' but what's the objective standard for judging that? She has never experienced being a man. How is she going to check her experience objectively against the experience of being a man? How can she say it is the same experience? There's no objective standard.

There are three sensible ways of dealing with this.

1) We can follow Wittgenstein's general recommendation, and stick to what we can talk about objectively. Then, she is a woman, and that's that. However, we can still respect that she is a woman with unusual tastes and sensibilities and -- if we want to -- elect to respect her wish to be referred to as "him" instead of "her" and so forth. This is not done out of justice, if we are sticking to Wittgenstein's love of the objective, because nothing objective exists to convince of the validity of the claim. Rather, it is being done out of the milk of human kindness. We're doing it because we want her to feel more comfortable, and less stressed, and that's fine. We all know we're talking about a woman, but we agree to talk in the way this person prefers.

2) We can meet Wittgenstein halfway. We can sever sex and gender, as is very popular in the academy just now. Then there is an objective standard for the claim: what our student is saying is not that 'she is really a man,' but that of the observable behaviors typical of males and females, the male behaviors are more comfortable. Because we can all observe and compare them, these genders are objective. So the claim that 'this is a white male' is objective fact, although good luck getting him to father your children. So we have to keep these categories in mind, and never forget that sex really exists and gender really exists, and a person has one of the first and at least one of the second. And the reason to go to all this trouble is the same as the reason in (1), which is that we want to make this person more comfortable out of human sympathy.

3) We can accept the peril of speaking nonsense, and talk about things that we experience in non-objective ways. We do this all the time. Strictly speaking, Wittgenstein's private language argument ends up making nonsense out of all talk of emotions. After all, every emotion we experience is like this; and if we call it 'sadness' or 'joy' or by some private word isn't the real point. I have no way of knowing if the word you use that means 'joy' refers to the same emotion that I refer to by that name, no more than I can be sure that today's "joy" is really the same thing as last week's. All talk of emotions is nonsense.

Now I said something that ought to call that proposition into question. I said that we all know that experiencing grief is not like remembering it. That's not an objective claim, but it is one to which we will all assent. We can come up with a lot of these agreements: this thing I call 'grief' is the emotion I experienced after a damaging loss of a loved one; it seemed to strip meaning from the world; etc. We can't be perfectly sure that the experience was exactly the same, but we can talk around it a lot and discover that it is sort-of the same.

We have strong reasons, then, to think that many things Wittgenstein would have to classify as nonsense really are ontological facts. Grief exists. We might wish it didn't, but it does.

So we can say, on this model, that the claim that 'she is really a man' doesn't refer to anything objective, but to something immediate and subjective: perhaps the spirit. This commits us to a belief in the reality of the spirit, and furthermore to the idea that it carries a kind of sex: there are spirits of men and spirits of women. Even severed from a physical body, the spirit retains this essential quality. And that is a very ordinary way of speaking for Christians, who don't think their grandmother ceased to be a woman when she passed on to the realm of waiting for the Resurrection; certainly not that St. Mary did!

On this model, we are really accepting the claim of the transgendered person at face value. They really are in the wrong kind of body, somehow. But that's not so surprising: people are often born in bodies that are imperfect, and imperfectable. They are born blind, or without limbs, or in other similar ways. We don't believe that they are deformed essentially, not in spirit. Indeed it is a point of doctrine that their body will be perfected according to the nature of their spirit in the end times.

-----

The choice of roads is up to you. I am not offering a prescription on this one, just a sketch of the philosophical problems it raises.

If you took the first road, you would never think of running a campaign against this student for 'being a white male.' On the first road, you'd be keenly aware that she was a woman, and the fiction that she was a male was being maintained merely out of human kindness. If the only reason to maintain the fiction is human kindness, it won't do to slap her around. The whole point was to make her feel better in your community.

If you take the second road, you might speak and even think that there is a real sense in which this is a white male: but it is a sense separate from sex. Thus, there are no reasons to be concerned that 'a white male' in the sexual sense would be being elected. You have failed to maintain clarity about your categories. This is a male only in the gender sense, not at all in the sexual sense. If you are a sexist who believes sexual-males should not hold power, be at ease. I would be willing to wager heavily that this gender-male does not hold three values that I do, and is apparently the first one to line up and agree that people like me shouldn't hold power. We're dangerous and scary. (True facts, actually! From where I sit that's just why we're the right ones to elect to exercise certain kinds of power. Separate conversation.)

Only if you take the third road is this really a man, in the same sense that I am a man: essentially. If you take that road, you are committing to an ontology that includes the spiritual. Good if you do, but beware: there are many consequences that follow from that choice.

Ramps to nowhere

What better way to induce the economy to misallocate resources than to use federal dollars and/or regulations to bribe and/or extort people to do crazy things?

This summer, Detroit spent tens of thousands of dollars replacing sidewalk wheelchair ramps in little traveled areas.

The bankrupt city put in ramps, costing about $10,000 per intersection, along crumbling sidewalks along Warren near Conner. In one half-mile stretch, from St. Jean to Cadillac, there are 52 new sets of ramps.

Some face brick walls. Others provide access to an empty lot where Helen Joy Middle School stood until it was razed in 2009. On many corners, sidewalks end after the ramps.

"You drive down some of these streets and there are blocks of no houses, but pretty new curbs," said Sherman Hayes, 84, a retired nurse who lives nearby on Lakewood Street. "Look at all these ramps to nowhere. It makes my blood boil."

Detroit officials say they have no choice. The work is the latest in a decade-long, court-imposed effort to force Detroit into compliance with federal handicapped accessible laws.

The whole city of Detroit should become a museum exhibit. It reminds me of the old joke about the service evaluation: "His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity."

One size doesn't fit all

Here's what I think we're missing about how vigilant we need to be about Ebola contagion:  the low level of common-sense concern that's appropriate early in the disease is a world away from the fanatical measures that are absolutely necessary late in the disease.  This, for instance, is insane:

Two schools in the Solon School District in suburban Cleveland are closed Thursday as a precaution because a staffer "traveled home from Dallas on Frontier Airlines Tuesday on a different flight, but perhaps the same aircraft," as [Dallas Ebola nurse No. 2] Vinson . . . .

That's a tremendous over-reaction.  In contrast, we're under-reacting to patients when they get wildly contagious:  Texas Health Presbyterian workers who dealt closely with Patient Zero in last day or two of his life probably shouldn't have touched any other patients until they'd burned their clothing and submerged themselves in pure bleach for an hour. I'm not sure they shouldn't dust off and nuke the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure. I kid, I kid, the hospital probably doesn't need to be decommissioned, but failing that, at least they should have implemented Level 4 precautions, which have proven their efficacy at Emory and elsewhere.  Instead, it took a doctor a couple of days to muse mildly in some medical charts that they might want to consider wearing disposable shoe covers rather than track contamination all over the hospital.  I imagine they're trying to clean the whole hospital up now, but it's not where I would choose to be admitted just now, frankly.  So I was very encouraged to hear that the second infected Dallas nurse has been transferred to Emory.  Now we just have to wait and see who else was infected in Dallas.  More nurses?  Other patients?  The pizza delivery guy?

If public officials are hoping that there's a single workable protocol for dealing with a potential Ebola patient that can be implemented on the first day suspicion arises and maintained unchanged until the patient either recovers or is interred, they need to rethink their strategies.  A difficult and expensive fanatical level of care is both feasible and non-negotiable for very small numbers of patients during brief, critical periods.  It's neither necessary nor feasible for the general public on a permanent basis.  On the other hand, we're going to have to exercise a minimum of ordinary care on a permanent basis--including appropriate quarantine for high-risk travelers--if we don't want to have to exercise the fanatical level of care for more people than even a rich country can handle at one time.  If we keep out ahead of this disease, it will be a blip on the radar.  If we let it get out ahead of us, we're going to do some serious damage.  Do I feel personally at risk?  No, I can't say I do, but that doesn't mean this is anything to be criminally negligent about.  Panic is serious business, and we seem to be doing our level best to induce a fairly well-justified one.

This really doesn't look good

Ace has up a handful of new posts about the steady trickle of disquieting Ebola reports. HotAir has others. For instance, are you thrilled to hear that high-risk tissue samples were sent through the Dallas hospital's pneumatic tube delivery system? Or that nurses who treated Patient Zero also went on to treat other patients at the hospital rather than working in strict isolation?

I'm inclined to cut the bumbling expert bureaucrats some slack on certain issues, such as the continuing confusion over when and how intensely contagious Ebola sufferers are. The answer seems to be that they're not noticeably infectious at all early on, then they become moderately infectious when they develop symptoms, though only if there is considerable direct contact with body fluids. Finally, they become crazily off-the-charts infectious when they reach the crisis stage: so infectious, at that point, that Level 2 biocontainment protocols apparently are ridiculously inadequate and only Level 4 protocols (such as those used at Emory Hospital in Atlanta) will do. This means that the CDC probably is not nuts to advise us that there is quite limited risk to riding on an aircraft with someone who is infected but not yet showing symptoms, perhaps even someone, like Dallas nurse No. 2, who's knows she's been exposed and is running a low-grade fever but for some reason nevertheless decides to hop on a plane, because, hey, it's not like she's a health professional who should know better. But it also means that the CDC's "we got this" attitude is less than reassuring when it comes to the likelihood that your regular corner hospital is prepared to deal safely with a full-on blowout crisis-stage Ebola case.  On that subject, the record is not looking so great so far.

For every news article that tempts us to think everyone's getting hysterical, there's another that suggests we're not taking some risks seriously enough. Ebola is a manageable disease in very small numbers in highly qualified clinical settings. If we adopt slapdash procedures in enough hospitals, we may quickly find that the outbreak becomes very, very difficult to contain.

Meantime, all is well: the President has cancelled a fundraising trip so he can get all over this.

Fusion at the Skunk Works

Stories about workable fusion reactors are a dime a dozen, but this one actually seems to be on the level, though--obviously--preliminary.

Chemical Weapons in Iraq

This is a pretty substantial piece on chemical weapons encountered by US forces in Iraq. There are a number of charges that 'the military' hid or suppressed evidence, including from Congress. For some reason, they decided to print the location of a set of bunkers filled with such weapons by American and Iraqi forces that is now controlled by ISIS.

Iraq took initial steps to fulfill its obligations. It drafted a plan to entomb the contaminated bunkers on Al Muthanna, which still held remnant chemical stocks, in concrete.

When three journalists from The Times visited Al Muthanna in 2013, a knot of Iraqi police officers and soldiers guarded the entrance. Two contaminated bunkers — one containing cyanide precursors and old sarin rockets — loomed behind. The area where Marines had found mustard shells in 2008 was out of sight, shielded by scrub and shimmering heat.

The Iraqi troops who stood at that entrance are no longer there. The compound, never entombed, is now controlled by the Islamic State.

In another era, I'd have hoped that they intentionally misdirected ISIS' efforts by printing a piece of US military deception (MILDEC) that might lead to misdirected resources or wasted time by anyone in ISIS interested in recovering chemical weapons. I wonder if the Times would do that now, or if they'd think to ask for one.

UPDATE: Mr. Wolf at BLACKFIVE has a piece on the subject.

Some Criticisms

One of the lessons I've learned in my long and valued correspondence with Cassandra is that men must sometimes criticize women on moral grounds. To refuse is to refuse to take women seriously as moral actors. I generally still avoid it as much as possible, but today I am going to make a very rare exception and do just that.

The occasion is Hanna Rosin's article called "Abortion is Great." Abortion is the intentional destruction of an innocent human life. There are cases, such as when it is absolutely necessary to save the life of the mother and the child is too young to be capable of survival, when it is not morally problematic to kill such an innocent human life. It is nearly morally obligatory in that particular example, though I think one can accept the choice of a mother who prefers not to even though it means her life.

There are also cases where the mother or the child might live, as perhaps in the case of chemotherapy, and someone must choose. This case is highly morally problematic, as any case when you are choosing who shall live and who shall die, but it is a case on which honorable people might disagree. I will say that a woman who elects to run the risk herself, to save her child, is someone whom I respect to the uttermost degree. Motherhood itself is honorable because it necessarily entails significant sacrifice, but it is never more honorable than that. Yet I do not see how any law could compel her to make the choice.

In our last discussion on the topic, though, we saw evidence that these cases are a tiny fraction of the statistics. Risk of maternal life accounted for 0.1% of reasons given; risk to maternal health at any level, one percent. This is not what we are generally talking about when we talk about American abortions. We are talking about elective abortions.

And that is what Rosin has come to defend. "They are not generally victims of rape or incest, or in any pitiable situation from which they need to be rescued. They are making a reasonable and even admirable decision that they can’t raise a child at the moment. Is that so hard to say? As Pollitt puts it, 'This is not the right time for me' should be reason enough. And saying that aloud would help push back against the lingering notion that it’s unnatural for a woman to choose herself over others."

That is wrong. 'This is not the right time for me' is not even a fully satisfactory reason to cancel your dentist appointment. After all, your dentist has set aside time for you to show up then, and has thus not taken on other business. Your 'choosing yourself over others' is not without cost to the others: indeed, some medical practitioners have found it necessary to introduce cancellation fees in order to recoup some of the lost income.

Nor is the argument that 'men aren't doing this' persuasive, since in fact men are held to the standard she denies we hold: if a man sires a child, not only I but the law will hold him to supporting it for eighteen years at least. That is what we believe, and what we will enforce with our courts if we can.

The cost it imposes upon the reckless young parent is already a debt they owe their child. The cost they would be imposing on the child by electing to kill instead is the child's whole life.

I am not surprised at the way the culture has turned on this issue. The very frequency of the practice makes it difficult to criticize, and tempting to celebrate. Rosin cites a source that says that thirty percent of American women have an abortion (almost all elective); my source says forty percent. The percentages are large enough that there must be tremendous social pressure to say that it is OK, that it's fine, that it's understandable: Rosin goes so far as to say that it is "admirable."

It is not. If you choose to kill an innocent human being out of preference for some personal advantage, you are doing a great moral wrong. If you choose to kill an innocent human being to give advantages to others -- perhaps other children of yours -- you are still wrong, because it is not necessary in America to kill any one of your children in order to ensure the others have a reasonable chance at success. In either case, you are doing wrong and it will not be possible to fully respect you until you admit it to yourself and try to reform your heart.

If you are arguing that it is admirable to do these things, you are doing evil.

Can we still bring ourselves, Americans, to criticize so large a percentage of our population? I wonder. Another case that brings it to my mind is today's announcement by her lawyer that the artist who bills herself as Ke$ha is suing her producer. No one probably doubts her story. Her lawyer said, "The facts presented in our lawsuit paint a picture of a man who is controlling and willing to commit horrible acts of abuse in an attempt to intimidate an impressionable, talented, young female artist into submission for his personal gain."

I've already seen adequate evidence to believe that. I've had occasion to see two of her videos.

That's not a joke: I would never laugh about such a thing. The most "harrowing" charge, according to the article is that after a night of partying and some sort of pills he gave her, she "woke up the following afternoon, naked in Dr. Luke's bed, sore and sick, with no memory of how she got there."

The first video I saw from this pair started with her being depicted as waking up in a bathtub, and then shortly thereafter proclaiming that she was going to 'brush her teeth with a bottle of Jack' before heading back out for another all-night party. I saw the second one a few years later, and remember that the chorus went something like, "Let's have a night we don't remember."

So I already believe, based on his artistic output, that he's a man whose character and values are despicable and who is willing to use not just the one woman, but millions of others, for his personal gain. He's willing to sell them a vision of the good life that is poisonous, and he was willing to use one particular woman to craft it and pitch it to them. Our culture is worse because of his work.

But how can I criticize him without criticizing her? If I say that the work is poison, what do I say about its chief saleswoman?

Nothing, apparently: read the comments at the Billboard article, and you will see that any criticism is off limits. We have developed a whole vocabulary to explain our objections to criticizing her here. But if he is damnable for having sold this to thousands of young people, if the reason to believe her lies partly in the fact that she is only accusing him of living up to his own frequently-portrayed values, what must we say of her?

Cassandra was right, and not only about me. Our society has gone a long way toward refusing to take women seriously as moral actors by protecting them from criticism. Indeed, we have built a culture that insists on celebrating them even when they are wrong. That does not create respect, but mockery.

Can We Get A Similar Waiver for US Citizens?

Volunteers are willing to go, but getting through the legal red tape on our side of the Atlantic is proving daunting.

UPDATE: Related.

Reliable, renewable power

Or maybe not.

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.'