Slow Yule progress

I don't remember taking a week to get my tree up in past years.  I am really slowing down!  Day three, and I've got the lights on and something less than half the ornaments; you can see the rest strewn all over my dining table.

But the hard part is behind me.  The empty boxes are even back upstairs in the closet, always a wearying task, which leaves only reassembling the stacking bookcase that the closet is behind.

This year's tree is a more moderate 9-foot specimen, because I promised I wouldn't do the 11-foot thing again.  It was hard enough dragging this guy upstairs, not to mention reaching the top without killing either of us.  That's a 6-foot ladder on the left, and an 8-foot ladder on the right.

My adorable husband, as always, has my number.  He presented me with several early Christmas presents in the form of extravagantly beautiful ornaments he saw me admiring:

A red truck with a Christmas tree in its bed.

These are probably Asian cranes, but they look just like whooping cranes.

Alligator.

A sea turtle with presents stacked on his back.

All my shopping is done and (I think) even all of my shipping, with the possible exception of some items that I somehow managed to direct to an apartment I briefly kept in Houston seven years ago when I was commuting up there to work on an extended case.  I think those have now been redirected to me here.  It's only December 10th!  This is fabulous progress.

Project Gutenberg has put a dent in my handicrafts, but this time of year a powerful urge comes over me to drop everything else and crochet angels, snowflakes, miniature stockings, and the like.  It also becomes difficult to resist buying little packages of stick-on jewels and beads every time I walk through the aisles of the local WalMart, even though I already have enough craft materials to choke a horse.

So that's enough ornament-hanging for today. Time to crochet.

Design

The most interesting design website I've run across in a while.

Red spread

As predicted, Mary Landrieu (D-Obamacare) has lost her run-off for the Senate seat in Lousiana, about 57-43%.  Her debate strategy of explaining that she really didn't support the President on Obamacare because he wanted single-payer, but she and other courageous Democrats confined him to wrecking our health insurance market, evidently didn't fly with the Louisiana voters.

"Why won't they look at my record?"

Don't stand so close to me

"Jonathan Who?" syndrome strikes again.

Boredom at traffic lights

This is a great idea for entertaining people they wait for the light to change.

This and the next few posts will be from Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Catching fraud with Benford's Law

For reasons I can't imagine, digits between 0 and 9 in financial transactions are not equally likely, even in the later digits.  They follow a distribution described by "Benford's Law," and any deviation from this pattern may signal fraud.  In the linked article, an overabundance of "4s" raised suspicions that operators with the authority issue cash refunds up to $50 without a supervisor's OK were issuing fraudulent refunds to co-conspirators.  But even without the special problem of concentrating on fake numbers just under $50, numbers randomly chosen by fraudsters will produce a pattern unlike that of natural financial digit distribution.

The Chaos

by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité (Netherlands, 1870-1946)

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
 Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Riding to the Center of the World

Setting Up for Failure

Good luck with this latest grand jury decision.



I'll be out of the country for about two weeks. Let me know how it turns out.

Crimes Against Humanity

So the Pope got some good press today.

Religious leaders from a half-dozen faiths have signed on to a new Vatican initiative to end modern-day slavery by 2020, declaring that human trafficking, forced labor and prostitution are crimes against humanity.

Pope Francis and the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, were joined Tuesday by the Hindu guru Mata Amritanandamayi, known as Amma, as well as Buddhist, Jewish and Shiite and Sunni Muslim representatives for a signing ceremony of a joint declaration against modern slavery....

Francis has made eliminating human trafficking and modern-day slavery one of the key priorities of his pontificate, instructing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to focus on it in their academic conferences and studies... . "Here he came into contact with the drug situation, the situation of the excluded — and naturally the most dramatic form of exclusion is slavery, which is forced labor and prostitution," [Bishop] Sanchez Sorondo said in an interview ahead of the ceremony.

I find the inclusion of prostitution very interesting. In both cases it's coupled with forced labor without an Oxford comma, so I'm not sure if the intent is to couple "forced prostitution" with "forced labor," or if it is prostitution per se that is being condemned as a crime against humanity. The Pope's actual remarks suggest it may only be forced prostitution, but it isn't clear there either.

It's an interesting question, because St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine both found that prostitution -- though gravely immoral -- probably ought not to be illegal. I dissent from that particular point of argument, but it is a position supported by thinkers with significant authority.

Something must be wrong

Paterson, N.J., a city of about 150,000 people, had exactly 19 high school students this year who managed to break a 1500 score on the 2400-scale SAT (that's a score of 1000 on the old 1600 scale, for us codgers).  The teacher-student ratio in the Paterson school district is about 13 to 1; annual spending per student is about $17,000.  Alertly discovering that something was badly wrong, school district officials explained that the local school system has been plagued by numerous restructurings in recent years, leading to confusion and dysfunction.  As a result, they've decided to take the obvious step and quit using the SAT to gauge performance.

Advent Continues

D29 writes to say that he likes this version of the chant more than the one I posted.



It does have a substantially different feeling! Sometimes I wonder why the Church no longer celebrates in this manner. It does require substantial effort and training, but surely not much more than the choral and musical performances we do encounter. Beauty and truth and virtue all align. Why should we not, then, align our performances-meant-to-be-beautiful with the truth and virtue they mean to uphold?

Stratosphere

The old world. The new world. Well, it was new two hundred years ago. At that time we thought it was going to disrupt these kinds of elite power structures, so that new men -- men like Andrew Jackson, to the tremendous upset of what turn out to have been his relatives -- could rise.

Well, we didn't get that, then or now. So what did we get?

Spacetime for amateurs

I've been enjoying a Great Courses lecture in my car lately, a highly popularized explanation of special and general relativity with only the most moderate use of math.  The lecturer stresses a popular misconception that the theory of relativity means that "everything is relative."  It would be more accurate to say that the speed of light is absolute, with the consequence that space and time have to be squished to account for things like the fact that two light beams passing each other like trains in the night still have a relative speed of c, not twice-c.  (That's not just a wild idea, by the way, but something than clever guys have proved experimentally.)

I grew up with science fiction stories that grappled with the speed of light, sometimes treating it as an inviolable barrier and sometimes as an inconvenience to be papered over in the interests of advancing the story.  Viewed as a natural law, the inability to exceed the speed of light somehow comes across as a traffic ordinance that's begging to be violated.  We know light can go slower, as it does through glass or water, for instance, so why not faster?  Learning a little bit more about it as an amateur, I now gather it's more a question of light-speed as an inherent quality of a specific thing, like the length of a pencil, that only seems to have maximum and less-than-maximum manifestations because we're looking at it in more or less foreshortened perspectives, so to speak.  So your pencil might look longer or shorter depending on your angle, but it's always as long as it is, and no longer.

My Great Courses lecturer used an analogy that leapt out at me.  Drawn from an excellent 1965 popular textbook by Edwin Taylor and John Wheeler (Spacetime Physics, 1st ed., PDF link to 1st chapter here), the analogy is "the parable of the surveyors."  The king asks his surveyors to figure out how far the smithy is from point "X."  One uses a coordinate system based on true North, while the other uses magnetic North, so they get different recipes for "go so many feet East, then so many feet North."

No matter what N-S-E-W coordinates we choose to measure the distance from "X" to the smithy, the straight-line diagonal distance will be the same.

But the two vectors we add to get to the straight-line distance can be nearly anything, depending on how we rotate the frame of reference.  The analogy is to space and time as the elements that make up the speed of light:  from some points of view, the distance will be one thing and the time elapsed another, but those two elements can change.  What will never change is the speed of light.  It's not so much that light isn't "allowed" to go faster; it's more like the fact that the smithy is a certain distance from "X."  Would it be allowed to be farther?  Sure, but that's not where it happens to be.

The way the lecturer puts it is that space and time are aspects of the same thing, and the speed of light, c, is the conversion factor needed to switch back and forth between them.  Similarly, mass and energy are aspects of the same thing, and the speed of light squared is the conversion factor needed to switch back and forth between them.  Why is one just c and the other c-squared?  No idea.

Advent

(H/t: D29).

Bad Day Between the Hedges

Now that just shouldn't have happened. But it did, in overtime.

Congratulations to the victor.

News in spoons

This spoon adjusts instantly to cancel out tremors.

The Deep South

I realize that for some the Deep South is eternally guilty as somehow the source of all racism, radiating it outwards perhaps by its poisonous presence. Nevertheless, Colbert I. King, neither of your stories happened in the Deep South. Neither Oklahoma nor Missouri is plausibly part of the Deep South, nor do they share much with the culture of that produced Sidney Lanier (of Georgia), William Faulkner (Mississippi), or Flannery O'Connor (born in Savannah, Georgia).

Let us atone for our own sins, which are surely serious enough in your eyes, without asking us to carry those of others.

UPDATE: Geingo (Gringo?) points out that my eyes have deceived me, and that the first story is not set in "Oklahoma" but in "Okolona," a town in Mississippi. Mississippi certainly is in the Deep South, though Missouri remains well outside of it.

May both sides lose

As my husband says, time to sit back and watch both sides destroy each other.  This is not a link about Sunnis vs. Shia, but about two arms of the Nanny State:  employers want to use the ACA to nag their employers about smoking and diets, while the EEOC sues because medical testing of employees is prohibited.

Cthurkey

My husband found this, but doesn't remember where, so apologies to the source:

Blues states and black jail rates

In order of the greatest in-state discrepancy in incarceration rates by state:

How Would They Know Where We're Going?

No holiday travel for me this year, thanks to... whatever you call "Scrooges" at Thanksgiving time. But at least I'll be able to watch my favorite Thanksgiving movie:



Hope you have a good day, all.

Thanks

Our neighbor's niece put together a playlist for her to drive home by last week, with a Thanksgiving theme. The first number: Danke schön: Jim Gerraghty advises us today:

You’ll recall that last year Organizing for Action urged its members to talk up Obamacare at the dinner table. My assessment still stands:

Here’s a crazy idea: Treat your family members as people you love and appreciate — or at least tolerate — instead of targets for political conversion. You only get one or two families in this life — the one you’re born into, and the one you marry into. Maybe if you’re lucky, you become “like a son” or “like a sister” to another. There’s a lot to talk about in this world beyond politics, and chances are you’re not going to persuade disagreeing relatives, anyway.

The Media is Evil

When I saw the headline, I totally assumed they meant like the Gettysburg address. The only reason I clicked through was to see what he had to say about all this. Turns out...

Making things up

Our President has admonished us that "Communities of color aren’t just making these problems up." I never thought they were. On the other hand, police officers working in neighborhoods where apparently it's OK to rough up store clerks and get in cops' faces (not to mention loot and burn stores) aren't making up their problems, either. I don't think a police officer is ever obligated to let a furious 300-lb. guy--armed or unarmed--close on him without shooting to protect himself.

Good Speech

The prosecutor took a long time about getting to what he surely knew was the only thing anyone cared to hear him say. Much of that time was devoted to a lecture directed at the news media, at social media, and at the citizenry in general. It was a lecture on the importance of patience and the grand jury process.

It seemed to me that the very structure of these interviews fostered courtesy, a posture of respect, on the part of the person conducting the interrogation. Prosecutors need the cooperation of both witnesses and jurors. They also must do their work in a manner safe from legal challenge. So they are forced to cultivate patience: patience with procedure; patience with witnesses, many of whom are afraid or upset or inarticulate or barely audible; and patience with lay jurors operating on the basis of common sense and whatever bundle of attitudes and information they happen to bring with them into the jury room.

This was apparently a highly unusual grand jury, one conducted with particular patience -- indeed, it sounded from his description almost as if he elected to run it as a second trial, one that would identify which of the witnesses were most credible and how their testimony fit with the physical evidence. That's unusual, although perhaps our system would work better if it were the standard practice.

Will it be as satisfying as an acquittal at trial, which this result strongly suggests would have occurred had the grand jury operated along more standard practices? I expect some will argue that the differential treatment constitutes an unjust preferential treatment for the officer (though if so it seems to me that the way to fix that injustice is to take more time to present a full and fair analysis of the facts at grand juries generally). On the other hand, if the facts are clear, the facts are clear and it is right not to put the public through another year or more of trauma over what was clearly going to be an acquittal.

In any case, the speech strongly conveyed a sense of a governmental authority figure taking pains to make sure that nothing was hidden, that everything was understood, and that the public could see that the system worked in a highly controversial case. Those qualities of competence and transparency we could use a lot more of from government.

UPDATE:

Apparently not everyone was persuaded.

My Guess Is This Means Utah is A Peaceful Paradise

Still, it's really surprising.

In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members.

Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse.

And so far this year, deadly force by police has claimed more lives — 13, including a Saturday shooting in South Jordan — than has violence between spouses and dating partners.

Clearly, those numbers don't hold everywhere. But who thought they'd hold anywhere?

There's a Real Irony Here

Many of us remember the controversy surrounding Elizabeth Warren referring to herself as Native American. A 1997 article from the Fordham Law Review listed the Massachusetts Senator as the “first woman of color” hired by Harvard Law School.

But in spite of her questionable Native heritage, Elizabeth Warren called the Senate police on Greg Grey Cloud who had tried to honor the legislators who voted against polluted water tables within Native and non-Native communities.

Grey Cloud had sang what’s called an “honor song” but Warren and police said it was a “flash mob.”

Instead, Gyasi Ross explained, it was “an earnest and honest expression of Indigenous love and appreciation for these politicians who decided to be leaders instead of politicians for one day.”

I'm Only A Bill

Woah!

Sarah Hoyt continues to say interesting things.

For instance, take Mister Obama. I don’t deny that he has the outward appearance of a minority that was very mistreated historically. However, in his particular case, he is not the descendent of slaves but the descendant of slave dealers on his father’s side, and slave owners on his mother’s.

I don't know if his family owned slaves (on his mother's side), but he is apparently a cousin in that direction of George Washington. Washington owned slaves too, from what I hear. All the great heroes of that era seem to have been associated with the slave trade. Even the great philosophers, if not by owning slaves then by endorsing the practice.

Rites and spontaneity

An old re-post from Maggie's Farm about civil and religious marriage, and more broadly about sacraments and religious dissension, reminded me of the always-reliable views of C.S. Lewis on the ages-old squabbling over high- and low-church traditions, channeling Old Scratch:

“I think I warned you before that if your patient can’t be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don’t mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is, the better. And it isn’t the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say “mass” and those who say “holy communion” when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker’s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas’ in any form which would hold water for five minutes.

And all the purely indifferent things – candles and clothes and whatnot – are an admirable ground for our activities. We have quite removed from men’s minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials – namely, that the human without scruples should always give in to the human with scruples.

You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the “low” churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his “high” brother should be moved to irreverence, and the “high” one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his “low” brother into idolatry. And so it would have been but for our ceaseless labour. Without that, the variety of usage within the Church of England might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility.”

Yesterday was my dear husband's birthday. Since 1963, he's had to share his birthday with the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It turns out it's also the anniversary of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Martin Luther. I have been reading a biography of Luther at Project Gutenberg lately and have been surprised to find that his personality so often gave way to an almost hysterical vituperation, equating Catholic adherence to various doctrines and rites as the worst sort of devil-worship.  (What kind of man thinks that celibacy is inherently evil?  And what was with the obsession with calling his enemies pigs and donkeys?)

In Luther's time people were ready to fight to the death over distinctions that make little or no sense to me today. As Lewis notes, from the Devil's point of view, the more lukewarm I am on points of real doctrine the better, and I no doubt have a lot to learn from people for whom the questions of eternity were daily matters of life and death. Nevertheless, I'm not sorry to be able to regard with indifference quarrels over the precise meaning of sacraments. I have never noticed that questions of this sort much occupied Jesus's thinking. My impression is that He thought sacraments were beside the point except as they brought our devoted attention back to what was always important, which was God.  Nevertheless, I am probably more easily tempted to irreverence than idolatry, so a sect like Episcopalianism, with its emphasis on rites, is a good one for me.

Gutenberg has been full in recent months of works furiously condemning the Reformation. It's a perspective that is fairly unfamiliar to me, so I am reading about it with interest. The common theme is that Protestants (and pseudo-Protestants like Episcopalians) erred in believing we could turn loose hundreds of millions of Christians to decide for themselves what the Bible means and what God wants from us. How, they wondered, will anyone know what to believe if no one can agree on an authoritative source?  I acknowledge the danger of sectarianism, but I'm unable to see how reposing our faith in a single infallible human interpreter helps matters.  As a people, as a body of worshippers, we're always going to have to confront the problems of dissension and error.  Nevertheless, again, because of my strong tendency to contrariness, disobedience, and iconoclasm, it's probably just as well for me to be connected to some kind of apostolic tradition, to keep me somewhat in the straight and narrow.

I always come back to the Sadducees and the Pharisees.  The Sadducees got the rap for a mindless adherence to ritual, as if they were performing magic tricks to force God's hand.  The Pharisees at least understood that our hearts have got to be in the right place, but they were still far too hung up on legalism and formality.  Christ blew all that away, not by abolishing forms but by refusing to be distracted by them into trivialities.  He was forever responding to picky demands to rule in favor of this or that technical rule with parables showing why both rules completely missed the point.  Even with this example, we spent next two thousand years fighting out the question of form over substance.  I don't think we can be all about substance; most of us need form as a reminder and a discipline.  But with form always comes the temptation to obsess on the dead container instead of the living Content.

Priorities

This Golden Retriever performed brilliantly, but his goals were not well aligned with those of his human.  Clearly, he appreciated his human's good judgment in bringing him to such an interesting playground.



There's no question how my dogs would perform in this contest.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Thanks, neighbors

When Nashville was playing hockey in Canada this week, a professional singer was belting out the "Star Spangled Banner" before the game when her mike cut out. The mostly Canadian crowd didn't miss a beat, but finished the song for her.

Do they have better music training in Canada or something? That crowd didn't even hesitate about what key to sing it in, totally together. Every time I hear a bunch of Americans try to sing "Happy Birthday," they are in as many keys as there are singers present.

Cellular computers

More via Rocket Science:

A new DNA-based recorder allows bioengineers to create cell cultures that detect information in their environment and store it for later use. Such 'designer' cells might in the future be used to monitor water quality in a village, or measure the amount of sugar a person eats.

Emission spectra of the elements

This is kind of cool.

The fun never stops

If you like your plan . . . .

Cold Days Coming

Gonna need more firewood. Seems like that's all I did this summer, though in fact of course I did a few other things. But I'd have been happy to have done too much: indeed, doing 'too much' was my goal. Instead, it's 18 degrees a month before winter, and NASA says it's just going to get worse.

Friday Night...Commercial?

Saxon and Anglo-Saxon. You can tell the Germans are Saxons by the green and white cockade on the red band of the field cap and the regimental number 104 on the helmet. I think the cap badge on the British soldier is of the Cheshire regiment. Somebody did their homework.

I knew I had seen a picture before:

They were all more alike than they were different in 1914. I'm not sure one could say that anymore.

Curious way to sell chocolate. From the comments for the video, people either love it or hate it.

Of course, it has been done before:
Clever, I like the mud:


And in deadly earnestness.

The Next Wave

Obamacare supporters seem to think that, since the website is mostly working now, and we got past that whole 'you can keep your plan' thing, if they can just get past this next SCOTUS case it'll be clear sailing.

Nope.

If you can do basic math, you can probably figure out that many small businesses are about to get hit with a penalty of $36,500 per employee through no fault of their own. If you have any familiarity with small businesses, you know that the overwhelming majority of them are simply not going to be able to pay an unforeseen penalty of $36,500 per employee and are going to be forced to simply shut their doors.

Small businesses aren't the last problem either. They pieced out the consequences of this law past 2016 in the hope of avoiding the blowback from the really bad stuff. For that reason, the hits are just going to keep coming. For years.

You Are What You Would Do

In the Science Fiction film Total Recall, Arnold Schwartzenegger's character has his memories replaced. Meeting with a mutant who can restore his memory, he is asked why he wants it back. "To be myself again," he answers. "You are what you do," the mutant replies.

There's a philosophical assumption there that goes back to Locke that suggests our identity comes from our memories. Nina Strohminger argues that this is not plausible. When people suffer radical memory loss, their sense of self generally remains the same -- and their personalities are often quite stable.

If you are what you do, it isn't what you have done, in other words. It's what you would do.

Which claim seems right to you?

Motte and Bailey

A great piece by Nicholas Shackel got linked in passing by Charles C. W. Cooke writing in the National Review. The piece is from Metaphilosophy, and describes in clear terms a mode of argument characteristic of many postmodern thinkers. To help you understand the way the argument works, he suggests you compare it to a motte and bailey castle.

A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.

For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed. I think it is evident that Troll’s Truisms have the Motte and Bailey property, since the exciting falsehoods constitute the desired but indefensible region within the ditch whilst the trivial truth constitutes the defensible but dank Motte to which one may retreat when pressed.You see this everywhere.

There's a great example in this piece by CounterPunch on FBI surveillance.

We’re constantly told that “criminals” are the dregs of human history. Yet “criminal” is an ideological term. Only some forms of behavior of criminalized—and those doing that criminalizing, given the barriers to entry in such professional fields, tend to come from powerful, privileged parts of society who often do not engage or need to engage in such behavior. Structural forms of oppression shield powerful and privileged classes from the consequences of their ill actions.

The motte claim here is that 'only some forms of behavior are crimialized, and those doing that... tend to come from powerful, privileged positions." It's obviously and absolutely true that not all forms of human behavior are criminal, and it's true by definition that those who write the laws and those who enforce them are in positions of power.

The bailey claim is that all laws are mere exercises in ideology. There are thus no objective standards for what ought to be a crime that we can arrive at through human reason. There is no natural law, there are no objective virtues, there is nothing but a pure exercise of power by the privileged to advance their own interests.

The latter claim is garbage, and would be easy to disprove. The motte claim can be defended forever, because it's true by definition.

An Uber for Education

Jim Gerraghty caught flak this week for proposing that, as long as we're going to let the federal government take over our lives, why don't we have a federal mandate requiring states to give parents school choice?  I take to heart his readers' objections that he was indulging in the same fascist tactics that we so deplore in his opponents, but I don't see why we couldn't make federal education dollars contingent on support for vouchers, home-schooling, and other forms of school choice.  I'd rather see the federal education dollars dry up, anyway, so if states decided to start refusing them, that wouldn't bother me.

The Renaissance of the Middle Ages

...part whatever.

Citizen's Arrest

Now this is rather inspiring.

Kirk Allen and John Kraft — two military veterans — live in Edgar County which just might be the most corrupt county in the country. For a couple of watchdogs, it’s a target rich environment.... Considering the fact that, according to Forbes, their home county’s government has racked up over $79 million in debt all on its own while serving only 18,000 residents, Kraft and Allen have their work cut out for them....

In what was one of their most epic displays of political crime-fighting, which was captured on video, Allen and Kraft held the entire Clark County Park District Board under citizen’s arrest on May 13, 2014, for violating the Illinois Open Meetings Act, a Class C misdemeanor.

When asked if there would be public comment, one of the board members said, “I vote no.” Followed by five other board members.

Board attorney, Kate Yargus, could be heard on video saying there would be no public comment that night, and told the board members they were “free to go,” even after Kraft’s citizen’s arrest announcement. She tried to cite statute to Kraft, but before she could finish, he said, “Just sit down, you are making yourself look like a fool.”

Deputies were dispatched to the scene, but instead, Clark County Sheriff, Jerry Parsley, personally responded that night. Parsley said he knew it was a heated situation and felt it would be best if he handled it. He said that Kraft handled the citizen’s arrest responsibly, and the board was definitely in violation of the Open Meetings Act by not allowing the public to speak.

“It’s not that they should have. They’re mandated to,” Parsley said. “The people need to have their voice. It’s not a dictatorship. It’s a democracy.”

The sheriff arrested six of the board members. The seventh board member was not arrested because he voted against the other members. As they were escorted out of the building, the crowd cheered.

That's citizenship.

Price Signals Work

At least, they work if they aren't entirely hidden from the consumer.

Prices for common medical tests like mammograms and MRIs are notoriously opaque. Negotiated rates between insurance companies and doctors or hospitals are sealed tight by contract. We know there's price variation, but comparing what one insurance company pays versus another is virtually impossible. That's why we here at KQED in San Francisco turned to members of our audience to help us find out what medical tests and devices cost....

We thought we would find variation, and indeed we did. In California, commercial insurers paid from $128 to $694 for a screening mammogram. In Los Angeles, one woman's insurer paid $600 more than the lowest-cost screening mammogram reported in the area. "I'm sure every woman who's had a mammogram had the exact same experience I did," this woman said. "It was a friendly technician, but I don't think that's worth maybe 600 extra dollars."

In lower-back MRIs, we found that for CPT code 72148, insurers paid from $467 to $1,567. But when we looked beyond commercial insurers, we found even greater variation — from a low of $255 to a self-pay price of $6,221 at an academic medical center. That $255 MRI was paid by Medicare, and was just a fraction of the facility's charge of $2,450.

How can market functions hold costs down if we have no way of comparing the costs? Competition doesn't work at all in an environment like this.

At Risk

H. R. McMaster's speech at Georgetown included the following charges:

The warrior ethos is at risk because fewer and fewer Americans are connected to our professional military. Separation from our society is consequential because warriors depend on respect for what they do to maintain their self-respect.

The warrior ethos is at risk because fewer and fewer Americans understand what is at stake in the wars in which we are engaged. How many Americans could, for example, name the three main Taliban organizations we are fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

The warrior ethos is at risk because some argue that victory over an enemy or winning in war is an old idea that is no longer relevant in today’s complex world.

The warrior ethos is at risk because some continue to advocate simple, mainly technologically based solutions to the problem of future war, ignoring war’s very nature as a human and political activity that is fundamentally a contest of wills.

The warrior ethos is at risk because popular culture waters down and coarsens the warrior ethos. Warriors are most often portrayed as fragile traumatized human beings. Hollywood tells us little about the warrior’s calling or commitment to his or her fellow warriors or what compels him or her to act courageously, endure hardships, take risks, or make sacrifices.

It was not always thus.

Somebody Broke Cass

Possibly me. If so, I've done myself a great harm, because her place has been one of the first things I've read each day for years.

Since she's disabled comments, I'll say here: I'll miss you. Fighting with you was one of my very favorite things. I'm guessing it wasn't always fun, but you asked for it, and it was always meant as a mark of respect. I'd rather fight with you than agree with almost anyone. That's why I kept doing it.

Pax tecum.

The Reverend Horton Heat

I mentioned this band in conversation at Cass' place, and it occurs to me that some of you might appreciate them.

Good one, Glen

Prof. Reynolds paraphrases the President:  I did not mislead the American public with that man, Jonathan Gruber.

Double Heh

I know not everyone here is a fan of Anonymous, but surely we can all enjoy this little tale of the time the Klan decided to declare a cyber war on the hackers.


As Jayne Cobb would say, "Saw that comin'."

Heh

This plays into the point I was making last week about business suits. The only function they serve is to signal that you are of a man of a certain class and status. Though men who don't wear them professionally may own one to wear to funerals, they are chiefly worn as a kind of costume that signals a professional purpose. It is possible to 'keep up with the styles' in suits, but it is also possible to purchase simple, classic cuts that don't go in or out of fashion especially. There were very limited rules governing the wearing of such suits even when etiquette was much more binding and universal than it is today. You don't wear a brown suit in the city, or once upon a time you didn't; but you can wear a charcoal suit pretty much anywhere but a truly formal occasion and expect to be well-received.

So we don't really look at the suit. It's not an outfit, it's not a fashion, it's a signal. Once we've received the signal, we don't really even see the suit itself. It doesn't matter what it looks like. Of course no one noticed. No one even looked at it.

He asks a really interesting question about halfway through the video about whether the differential treatment of men and women with regard to professional clothing is sexism, which he suggests -- and the female anchor agrees -- it may not be.

I would say that's right: it's differential treatment, but it's something particular about the business suit for men. If a man wears something besides a suit on a professional occasion, he certainly may be noticed! Lucy Steigerwald can take comfort in being right about this:

Dear feminists, I may be more contrarian than average. But I strongly suspect I am not the only person completely repulsed by your petty myopia. I am not of the right, but you’re certainly not making liberalism or feminism anything I wish to be affiliated with.

I have heard the same opinion expressed by four very different people I know, one of them an extremely left-leaning academic of tremendous age. He did not ascribe the dustup to "feminism" but to "political correctness," for which he has no use regardless of who is involved. In his opinion, the shirt was tasteless, but the reaction was entirely out of proportion, especially given the occasion.

He also made a point I've heard several times from Glenn Reynolds, which is that the enforcers of political correctness have no real talents or accomplishments to balance against this man's, who helped land a spaceship on a comet hundreds of millions of miles away, the first time it's ever been done. It's a good point, which Eric Blair usually expresses: "Deeds, not words."

An Ally of a Sort

The British navy is so famous in history that no one may have recently asked just how potent it remains today.

When the Royal Navy has 38 admirals for 29 warships, the problem is not the 38 admirals, unless you are a British taxpayer (God help you). The problem, for the rest of us, is that one of the West’s great fighting forces only has 29 warships.... The Brits have no aircraft carriers, no cruisers, and a flawed and failing force of destroyers and submarines....

This is not just a problem of too few ships for the heirs of Nelson. The British Army and RAF also faced cuts in personnel and capabilities following the 2010 Strategic Defense and Security Review—and the security review of 2003, and that of 1998, and of 1990. As a result, the British Army is now about half the size of the U.S. Marine Corps.

The thing about the Marine Corps is that it is a corps in size: that is, a force that comes from combining divisions and some separates. Thus, the total force available to defend the realm is only half a corps: a division or two, at most. The article estimates they could currently deploy only one brigade.

Reaper

The Deep Army speaks:

A video posted online claims to show that ISIS militants have killed the captured US aid worker and former Army Ranger - Peter Kassig...

USAWTFM: To those responsible, maybe tomorrow, next month, maybe twenty years from now someone wearing an arrowhead patch will cut your heart out while you are watching.

It's a debt of honor. Be sure we will pay it.

I Never Cared For You

A very young Willie Nelson never liked you much.



Boy can play guitar, though.

Net Neutrality

For.

Against.

For (this one is our own Mike D, so scroll to his comments).

Against.

Discuss.

UPDATE: Nice.

Touché, you little viper

John Roberts unfairly tries to force a redistricting lawyer to explain how race-based policies can be implemented without making race the predominant consideration.

That time of year

This looks worth trying:  flourless expresso chocolate cake.  (Maggie's Farm.)

Do You Sometimes Use A Chainsaw to Fell Trees?

If the answer to this question is "yes," you're entitled to the respect that deserves (which is substantial -- it's a dangerous bit of work if the tree is of any size). If you're a man and the answer to this question is "no," you may be mocked by women on the internet. Don't expect any sympathy from me, though.

Instead, go learn to use a chainsaw.

The FBI and Mortal Sin

Somehow, although I am as historically aware as most Americans can be expected to be, I never knew until this morning that the FBI tried to get MLK to kill himself. The intense surveillance they deployed against him gave them a wealth of knowledge about his actions that they used to assemble this letter, which is disturbing but not surprising. That a police agency would attempt to fool one of its citizens into committing suicide is both horrible and shocking.

Of course, the FBI is only partially a police agency; they also think of themselves as a counterintelligence service. That is an inadequate excuse.

(H/t: InstaPundit.)

What would we do without Washington

AT&T pointed out that it would need to pause on $18 billion of fiber it intended to lay next year, while the FCC figures out whether it wants to demonize Internet profits to make the President happy. This provoked cries of "extortion," which is what we call it when someone says he's not going to provide a valuable service unless he's got a pretty good idea he can do it at a profit.

Only in Washington could a delay to seek regulatory clarity before spending $18 billion in shareholder money be called extortion. Even after six years of slow growth, the Obama crowd hasn’t figured out that punitive regulation reduces the incentive to invest.

Well, we'll just force them to invest! And if that doesn't work, we'll confiscate their money and let the public sector do a great job instead, with their proven track record of achieving miracles by avoiding the evil profit motive, which is how socialist countries get so rich and ensure that all their citizens have a decent standard of living.

Stirring up the hairstyle

Not much ever happens to my hair.  It's reached a certain length at which entropy just keeps pace with growth.  If I'm not asleep, it's tied back in a ponytail.  It gets washed from time to time.  If I were looking for some high-maintenance options for generating a little drama, though, I couldn't do much better than these.  Dang.

Dress and modesty

From "Kit and Kitty," a 1890 novel by R.D. Blackmore, who had no affection for ostentatious dress:

When I opened the door, I saw a very pretty girl, but no more to be compared with my darling Kitty, than a tulip with a lily of the valley. Although it was close upon winter now, she had a striped parasol, which I detest; and her velvet hat (turned down over one ear, and turned up at the other) had two kingfisher's wings stuck crosswise, and between them a gorgeous topaz humming-bird. You might look at my Kitty fifty times; and if any one asked you how she was dressed, you would have to say, "I have not the least idea," if you happened not to be a woman. But this young lady's attire compelled attention, and perhaps deserved it.

All of Blackmore's works but 1869's "Lorna Doone" have gone out of print, says Wikipedia, which is a shame, because they're delightful.  He was a great favorite of Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and James Barrie.  Luckily, Project Gutenberg has quite a few of Blackmore's works and soon will have more, including "Kit and Kitty."

The Gutenberg work continues to engross me.  I've done about 30,000 pages.

There's "Colonel."

Also "Sergeant," "Captain," and "Doctor."

For all my marriage has given me, all it has allowed me to be and to experience, there is no title to recognize that. It’s just ‘mister,’ for every man.

I prefer to be addressed by my first name: "Sir."

SWF (Sperm Whale Fishery)

Thus did Melville suggest whalers signify their profession on their calling cards.

I wonder if we're seeing the end of fishing entirely, as we have already seen the end of sperm-whale fishing.

"This isn't predicted to happen. This is happening now," study researcher Nicola Beaumont... "If biodiversity continues to decline, the marine environment will not be able to sustain our way of life. Indeed, it may not be able to sustain our lives at all," Beaumont adds.

Already, 29% of edible fish and seafood species have declined by 90% -- a drop that means the collapse of these fisheries.

Silent Beach Spring

This environmental scare piece about sand depletion reminded us of the old joke about what would happen if the USSR took over the Sahara Desert:  "For five years, nothing, and then a sand shortage."

Sine Qua Non

What would America be without men like these?

A few months later, Nate's battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Seely, traveling the country to visit the parents of his fallen Marines, came to see the Krissoff family. Bill and Austin took him for a hike around Lake Tahoe's Emerald Bay, and Bill asked Seely about medical care for Marines in Iraq. Seely told him that every Marine battalion deploys with a surgeon and numerous medics, all from the Navy. As Seely described the role of the battalion surgeon, the penny dropped for Bill.

That's what I want to do, he thought. I want to be a battalion surgeon.

Bill was as lean as his boys. He stayed fit by biking, hiking, kayaking, and skiing. He figured he could meet the military's physical requirements, so he called up a Navy recruiter in San Francisco and offered up his services. The recruiter posed a series of questions. Finally, he asked how old Bill was.

"Sixty," Bill said.

"Um, that's a problem," the recruiter replied. "You're too old." Anyone over forty-two who wants to join the Navy Reserve medical corps needs an age waiver, the recruiter explained. He wasn't optimistic about the possibility of a sixty-year-old obtaining one.

So a little while later...

Three days after meeting Bush, Krissoff received a phone call from the same Navy recruiter who had scoffed at his request to join a few months earlier. "I have orders to meet with you by the end of the day," the recruiter said. When Krissoff replied that he was trailering a horse with his wife and could not immediately drive down to San Francisco -- three hours away by car -- the recruiter was undeterred. "I'm coming up to see you," he said.

Drive On

Very late getting to it today, due to computer problems. I'll try to make it up with this piece from none other than Johnny Cash. It's not one of his more famous pieces, so it may even be new to some of you.



Drive on, warriors.

UPDATE: How about one from Hank Williams, Sr?

American Warrior

A Veteran's Day ... Tribute?

Differential Treatment

One of the cases Cass and I have tangled over a few times back in 2012 is the case of Rick Santorum's children going to a Pennsylvania public school though he spent most of the year living in Leesburg, VA. I thought Santorum's point was valid -- he owned a house in the appropriate district, paid the taxes on that home which funded the school system, and the fact that his official duties as a senator from Pennsylvania kept him near Washington most of the time shouldn't imply that he ceases to be a citizen of the state (and city) which elected him to represent them in Washington. Cass thinks it's a violation of the rules, and breaking the rules for your personal advantage is dishonest and dishonorable.

The saga ended with the Santorums withdrawing their children and homeschooling them. The state of Pennsylvania tried to get them to pay its estimate of what it cost to have those students in the school, but failed to collect. (It is unclear to me why the Santorums should be asked to pay in any case: they'd already paid their taxes, both there and in Leesburg. At most the one school district should have billed the other, not asked for a third payment on top of the two sets of property taxes already paid, either of which should have guaranteed access to education. But I digress)

I bring it up today not to tug at Cassandra's braids, but to inquire after the very different treatment encountered in a similar case.

A mother who pleaded guilty to fraudulently enrolling her six-year-old son in the wrong school district has been sentenced to five years in prison. Tonya McDowell sent her son to an elementary school in Norwalk, Connecticut, instead of her home city of Bridgeport. The 34-year-old, who was homeless when she was charged with felony larceny last year, said she wanted the best education possible for the boy.

There are differences in the cases.

1) McDowell is black, Santorum white. It is not clear that this difference is relevant, but a great deal of internet commentary has focused on the fact that she is black, so it's necessary to mention it.

2) She is poor, and he is rich. Rich enough to afford good lawyers, for example, who could keep the matter at bay. She seems to have plead largely because of the stress of the process (as Mark Steyn often says, when it comes to American law, the process is often the punishment).

3) She was homeless, and so paid no property taxes anywhere. Santorum paid property taxes in both school districts. Her child's right to a free education does not actually depend on her paying any taxes, or owning any homes, but the fact that she paid nothing to anyone does create a differential with the Senator, who had in fact paid everything he would have been asked to pay.

4) It is difficult to say where a homeless person's district properly is. The state elected to proceed with this method presumably out of a desire to keep homeless people from living in vans parked in the districts of richer citizens -- a kind of anti-vagrancy method. In the Santorum case, they did actually own property in both districts, paid the taxes on both, and lived in both places during different parts of the year. So the difficulty came not from them not having a home, but from interpreting the rules governing someone who owns more than one home.

5) She is a nobody, and he is a sitting Senator.

6) Different state laws are relevant: her case happened in Connecticut, not in Pennsylvania or Virginia.

In any case, the different outcomes are noteworthy. In the case of Santorum, the punishment was a lot of news stories that tarnished (for some) his standing as a candidate for President. Even if they'd gotten what they wanted out of him, it would have been a repayment of costs. In the case of McDowell, she also didn't repay the costs -- because she couldn't possibly, not because she won the argument. But nobody seems to have even suggested that the Senator should go to jail for fraud over the matter, whereas McDowell is going down for five years.

That last fact strikes me as madness, even given all the differentials in the cases. What is it going to benefit the state of Connecticut to pay to feed and house and guard her for five years? Clearly she is no danger to anyone, and the motive for her crime -- if crime it really ought to be -- was merely to seek what any mother ought to want for her child.

We don't have a very good answer to homelessness, especially not to trying to help the children of the homeless escape a similar fate. Even so this is a terrible stab at an answer, separating a mother who loves her child from that child, sending the mother to prison for half a decade, and sending the child to whatever the state's uncaring institutions devise.

Perhaps Senator Santorum ought to lobby for a pardon for her. It would be just for him to do so.

Hmm

From a long article attacking conservative ideas about poverty, some thoughts on the collapse of marriage among the lower and middle class:

Next Edin took up the question of why low-income mothers so often put childbearing before marriage. Far from eschewing marriage as an institution, she found, poor women idealized it to such an extent that it became unattainable. They didn't believe that a marriage born in poverty could survive.

In a society that increasingly saw marriage as a choice, not a requirement, low-income women were embracing the same preconditions as middle-class women. They wanted to be "set" before marrying, with economic independence to ensure a more equitable partnership and a fallback should things go bad. They also wanted men who were mature, stable, and who had mortgages and other signs of adulthood, not just jobs.

"People were embracing higher and higher standards for marriage," Edin explains. From a financial standpoint alone, "the men that would have been marriageable [in the 1950s] are no longer marriageable now. That's a cultural change." The low-income women in Edin's study reported that decent, trustworthy, available men were in short supply in their communities, where there were often major sex imbalances thanks to high incarceration rates....

Marriage was so taboo among her subjects that Edin discovered two couples in her sample who claimed they were unmarried at the time of their babies' birth but were actually not. One of the women had even been chewed out by her grandmother for marrying the father of one of her children.

Emphasis added.

The author got around to studying men in poor communities too, though it took some effort. "Edin [says] she'd never been interested in studying men. 'It's fun to write about people with a strong heroic element to the story,' she says. 'Women have that. Men don't have that.'"

But the men she talked to had yet another surprising attitude: they thought having kids out of wedlock was a good thing they were doing in the world. It was a way of adding something hopeful and promising to an otherwise bleak landscape.

A whole lot of the thinking going on in the article will not be what you expect, both from the authors and from their subjects.

Happy Birthday

Drinks at Tun Tavern.

Listen to the Experts

In the event our civilization ever does follow Grim's ideas (which I partly share) and reintroduces corporal punishment as an alternative to prison...it will be important to consider the testimony of expert floggers from the past in deciding "what for" and "how much." One of the all-time experts was doubtless the Duke of Wellington himself, in his testimony before the Commission on Military Punishments, and part of it is given here.

There is no punishment which makes an impression upon anybody except corporal punishment. You send a man into solitary confinement; nobody sees him in solitary confinement, and nobody knows what he is suffering while he is in solitary confinement, and therefore this punishment is no example to the thousand men who are there upon the parade at the same time. The man may suffer so much in solitary confinement as that he will not be guilty of the offence again; but that is not the principle of punishment—that is not the intention oepunishment. The real meaning of punishment, if it means any thing, is example—it is to prevent others, by the example of what they see the criminal suffer, from committing the same or a similar offence...I am aware that lately, in the gaols of this country in general, a system of solitary confinemeat has been adopted and silence enforced. I do not know how far this has answered...but I understand that in America, for instance, at Sing Sing, and at some other places, the resource is corporal punishment...

Here are a few other quotes from testimony before the commission, including a couple of exchanges with Wellington.

Q: "Must not a certain time elapse before corporal punishment can be inflicted, on account of the proceedings of the court martial?"

A: "There was a very summary proceeding, which is now discontinued, which is called a drum-head court martial; but the man is brought to a court martial as soon as possible. A court martial is ordered; the forms take a certain time, but the man is sure of being tried, and, if convicted, of being punished. But, besides this punishment by court martial, there is in all [British] Armies the provost. I do not mean to say that the provost could be used for the purpose of enforcing an order of that description, but the provost is always liable to be used to prevent any irregularity: for instance, if there is a system of plunder going on, the provost is ordered to prevent it, and he punishes those taken in fact on the spot."

Q: "Towards the latter time of your service in the Peninsula, was corporal punishment very frequent in the Army, or more frequent than it had been in the beginning?"

A: "I cannot say that I know exactly how it was in the regiments. I rather believe it was not so frequent. I am positively certain that crime had most enormously diminished; that there was not one crime for one hundred that there were in the beginning of the time. I think my orders shew it. There was a man convicted of robbery; and I pardoned him, because the crime had become so rare...

Q: "Do you conceive that the Army, when it left France from the Pyrenees, was in as efficient state for service as an Army can well be brought to?"

A: "I always thought that I could have gone anywhere and done anything with that Army. It was impossible to have a machine more highly mounted and in better order, and in a better state of discipline than that Army was. When I quitted that Army upon the Garonne, I do not think it was possible to see anything at a higher state of discipline; and I believe there was total discontinuance of all punishment."

If the Good Old Duke was right, deterrence works, and speed is of the essence. Lieutenant-Colonel Fane, at the second link, seemed to agree:

Q: "Have you seen cases in which the infliction of corporal punishment has failed in reforming the individuals punished, but, on the contrary, has rather hardened their feelings, and made them more reckless?"

A: "I think, in the course of my military life, I have seen one or two desperate characters that nothing would have reclaimed; and that very severe punishment in their cases tended more to harden than reclaim them."

Q: "Though such men are generally repeatedly punished in that way?"

A: "They have been; but I have also seen men when on service, who, knowing that the punishment of death would be awarded to them for the crime, which was plunder, persevere in it, until they heard or saw the provost-marshal was coming up in the rear of the division. I mean to say, by that, that I think the fear of immediate corporal punishment had more effect upon them than the chance of being tried and hanged."

Long Live the Queen

We will never forget how she sang the Star Spangled Banner after 9/11. Today, as we approach what the British call "Remembrance Day," England's gentlemen stopped a knife attack against her person.

The Sun reported that four men who had planned a savage knife attack on the Queen were arrested yesterday.... Threats on British troops and in the London streets have accelerated since the U.K. joined in the mission to take out ISIS in August, but terror activities had been ongoing. 69 suspected terrorists have been arrested in 2014. 13 of those were after the announcement that British Special Forces were to hunt the members of ISIS, among them radicalized Brits in Iraq who executed two Brits among other Extremists members.

Repeal the 17th!

About ten years ago, then Senator Zell Miller introduced legislation to repeal the 17th Amendment. At the time it was a new idea to me, and I was unprepared to take sides on it in spite of the endorsement of the idea by the one man in Washington I most respected. Here's what he said at the time.

[N]o matter who you send to Washington -- for the most part smart and decent people -- it is not going to change much.

The individuals are not so much at fault as the rotten and decaying foundation of what is no longer a republic.

It is the system that stinks. And it's only going to get worse because that perfect balance our brilliant Founding Fathers put in place in 1787 no longer exists.

Perhaps then the answer is a return to the original thinking of those wisest of all men, and how they intended for this government to function.

Federalism, for all practical purposes, has become to this generation of leaders some vague philosophy of the past that is dead, dead, dead. It isn't even on life support. That line on the monitor went flat sometime ago.

You see, the reformers of the early 1900's killed it dead and cremated the body when they allowed for the direct election of U.S. senators.

Up until then, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures, as Madison and Hamilton had so carefully crafted.

Direct elections of senators, as good as that sounds, allowed Washington's special interests to call the shots, whether it's filling judicial vacancies or issuing regulations.

The state governments aided in their own collective suicide by going along with the popular fad of the time.... As designed by that brilliant and very practical group of Founding Fathers, the two governments would be in competition with each other and neither could abuse or threaten the other.

The election of U.S. senators by the state legislatures was the linchpin that guaranteed the interests of the states would be protected.

Bill Whittle has a new piece on the subject, putting it in the context of the whole set of amendments that came out of the Progressive Era of American politics. The 16th was all about income taxes, to give the Federal government new wealth and power to act; the 18th about Prohibition, to give the Federal government new power to reach into the lives of every American and restrain their personal choice about what to drink with dinner. And the 17th, well...



It ends on a happy note. The 18th Amendment was repealed. Why not the other two?

Coitado de quem só pensa o mal

I just returned from a little vacation in Portugal and Spain. (And discovered that Google doesn't trust me to log into applications like Blogger or even the comments...it wanted to confirm with text messages I couldn't receive, or by my having set up code numbers I didn't know about before.) But this tale has waited centuries for you to hear it and is no worse for a week or two more.

We visited the National Palace of Sintra, in Portugal, supposedly the westernmost palace in Europe. It started as a Moorish fortress but passed to the kings of Portugal in the old, familiar way.

I particularly enjoyed the legend of the Magpie Chamber, whose ceiling is painted with over a hundred magpies:

Each of those magpies is carrying a rose in one claw, and a scroll in its beak that says Por Beme (“for the good”).

The legend is that Queen Philippa walked in on King João I of Portugal when he was kissing one of her ladies-in-waiting, and the flustered monarch stammered out the words “Por Bem”…as if to say, this was perfectly innocent; a kiss is just a kiss.

The queen accepted it, but talk went around, as talk will…and the story is that the king had the ceiling painted to spite the chatterboxes. Each magpie carries a red rose in its claw, as a symbol of the King’s loyalty to his queen (a daughter of John of Gaunt, and thus a member of the House of Lancaster ). And each carries a scroll in its beak reading POR BEM.

True or not, I liked the story because it reminded me of Edward III and the Knights of the Garter. Thus the title of my post, courtesy of Mrs. W. In Portuguese: “Poor of him who only thinks of evil.”

And if that “coitado” made you think it was something naughty, well, then, Honi soit qui mal y pense.

She Might Be Right About This One

CampusReform is calling attention to the writings of a feminist professor who wants to eliminate prison for women. The argument she's forwarding is better than the soundbite version of it, though. "Essentially, the case for closing women’s prisons is the same as the case for imprisoning fewer men. It is the case against the prison industrial complex and for community-based treatment where it works better than incarceration."

If you formalize what she is calling that essential argument, it sounds reasonable:

1) (Fact) The majority of offenders are nonviolent but poorly educated persons who have suffered abuse in their lives.

2) (Assumption) Offenders of this kind should be rehabilitated rather than destroyed or permanently removed from society.

3) (Fact) Prison is very expensive, involves significant harm to persons, and shows poor outcomes in rehabilitation.

4) (Fact) Community intervention centers show a much better rate of success at rehabilitation. ("The program coordinator has told me that 68 percent of the women who completed the program had no further involvement with the criminal justice system.")

5) (Conclusion) Therefore, for the class of nonviolent offenders, community intervention centers are better options than prisons.

I've marked as "facts" those assertions that can be empirically verified. Facts, for this purpose, are statements that could be true or false. If the facts she asserts are true, and you share the moral principle she is assuming in premise (2), the conclusion seems to follow.

You get to "no women should ever go to prison" only by the magic of clever headlines designed to draw eyes. However, it is true that this would largely eliminate women from prisons; there aren't that many women in prisons to start with, and she estimates this kind of program could remove 80% of those few.

I would argue that prisons are such a bad option that we should eliminate them generally, replacing them with a three-tiered system of financial, corporal and capital punishments. That would involve a significant expansion of capital punishment, though, to deal with the kind of un-reformable cases we currently pay vast fortunes to keep in prisons. Corporal punishment likewise is often a reasonable alternative: for example, English law in the 15th century held that rapists should be castrated or executed, understanding that the castration often was adequate. We tend to argue that corporal punishment is too great a violation of human dignity to employ, but the truth is that prison involves substantial informal capital punishment and ongoing violations of human dignity: exposure to rape and beatings, periodic strip searches by authorities, etc. If we are honest with ourselves about that, we see that we aren't choosing not to violate human dignity, but choosing between options that violate dignity. Of these, corporal punishment may often be the lesser violation.

Both the increase in capital punishment and the re-introduction of corporal punishment are very much against the current mood of the American people. I'm not expecting Congress to pass a law in the next few years pursuing this set of options; I just think, philosophically, that it's a better set of options. Prisons create people who are permanently unemployable and dangerous, and they require prison guards who are also at risk of significant moral harm from their duty to act in ways that violate human dignity in a regular and ongoing basis. We'd be better off if we could move towards a nation in which we did not have so many prisoners, nor so many prisons.

In the meanwhile, this professor's proposal might be a reasonable place to start.

UPDATE: The comment crew at Hot Air responds to the proposal 'America should stop putting women in jail for anything' with:

"+1. Front line combat duty instead."

We had to lie

Yeah, we lied and we played hide the ball, but that's what it took to get the bill passed, so what choice did we have?  And now, what, the Supreme Court is going to enforce the stuff that we wrote that way on purpose to induce people to misunderstand us?  How fair is that?

"This All Comes Down To Nine Words In The Law..."

"...where arguably the government was unclear."

So says Ezra Klein about the new dagger at the throat of Obamacare, either because of a lack of understanding or because that is what he has been asked to say.

Still, if you watch his video, at exactly the 1:00 mark you can see that the highlighted section goes on a little bit longer: something about "under 1311"? What's that all about?

There are three key sections of the bill: 1311 establishes state exchanges; 1321 establishes federal exchange; 1401 establishes premium assistance through subsidies. Sections 1311 and 1401 are tied together to show how to funnel subsidies through state exchanges. However, there is no parallel language to tie Section 1321 into a way to funnel subsidies through the federal exchange. Thus, the federal subsidy to states’ exchanges, according to Max Baucus one of the originators of the bill, was an incentive for states to comply with the law.

So, in other words, even if you wipe out the "established by a State" language -- the way SCOTUS decided to re-author the individual mandate as a tax -- you still have the problem that the Federal exchanges were not established under section 1311. Their legal authority to exist does not come from that section of the law. Thus, the law does not support their receiving Federal subsidies.

Now Klein has spoken to all manner of politicians who swear up and down that this was some sort of drafting error. All of us who remember the actual debate probably remember that this was an intentional plan to try to force the hands of the states.

Leave that aside, though. Pretend the words "established by the States" aren't present. Grant them their rewrite of the entire highlighted section of the law -- the 'nine words.'

Section 1311 isn't what authorizes these other exchanges to exist. Thus, if this 'all comes down to nine words,' we should win on the merits. You can take the nine words back, and it won't make any difference.

Overtreatment

Even without a concerted effort to promote screening, thyroid cancer incidence in the United States is up threefold since 1975. To reverse this trend, we need to actively discourage early thyroid cancer detection.

Sometimes early diagnosis just means treating people who would have been fine, and for whom the risks of treatment are greater than the risks of the "disease."

Employer mandates

The Washington Examiner is sorting through what it might mean if the Supreme Court enforces the letter of the ObamaCare law and disallows federal subsidies in states that refused to set up their own insurance exchanges.  Some consequences are fairly obvious, but this is one I hadn't thought about:

The (currently delayed) requirement for larger businesses to purchase insurance for their workers or pay penalties is triggered in cases in which at least one employee obtains government subsidies to purchase insurance. In states where subsidies cannot be distributed, the penalties won't apply. Therefore, a ruling against the government could set up a scenario in which businesses want to flock to states with federal exchanges as a way of getting around the employer mandate.

Mandate for moats

RedState is not feeling conciliatory:

Republicans ran this year on very little of substance. Their brand ID is still very underwater with the American public. There is no program right now that the American public is clamoring for the Republicans to undertake with one exception: they hate what President Obama is doing and they want Republicans to stop it. Exit poll after exit poll last night showed that the single most important thing in the minds of the voters this year was the looming shadow of death Obama cast on all his Democrat allies.

If voters really wanted people who would work closely with Obama and other Democrats to “get things done,” they would have just voted for more Democrats. After all, virtually every elected Democrat has “worked with” Obama (in the sense of doing exactly everything he asked) for the last six solid years. Say what you want about the information level of the average voter, but absolutely no one was confused into thinking that they were replacing a Democrat with a Republican in the hopes that the Republican would be more friendly to the Democrat agenda.

Friday Night AMV

Seems appropriate, given the elections this week.

Common ground

There are Republicans--even conservatives!--with agendas, even if they're not in the leadership.  Mike Lee is a coherent kind of guy:

We should find common ground that advances our agenda, rather than let the idea of common ground substitute for our agenda.

. . . In 2015, this “low-hanging fruit” we’ll hear about will be items like corporate tax reform, Obamacare’s medical device tax, patent reform, and perhaps the Keystone XL pipeline approval.

. . . Insofar as the pent-up K Street agenda includes good ideas, then by all means let’s pass those pieces by huge margins and send them to the president. But a new Republican majority must also make clear that our support for free enterprise cuts both ways—we’re pro-free market, not simply pro-business. To prove that point, we must target the crony capitalist policies that rig our economy for large corporations and special interests at the expense of everyone else—especially small and new businesses.

. . . Republicans should seek common ground between conservative principles and the interests and needs of the general public, not just between Washington Republicans and Washington Democrats. And the search for that genuinely common ground will point to a lot of low-hanging fruit too, even when it comes to the proper relationship between government and business. We could pass legislation winding down the Export-Import Bank or the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. We could—and really, must—eliminate the taxpayer bailouts for big insurance companies in Obamacare’s “risk corridors” program. Or we could start to break up taxpayer subsidies for the energy industry or large agribusinesses.

Anti-cronyism legislation is win-win for the GOP. It is good policy, restoring growth and fairness to an economy that Big Government and Big Business have rigged against the little guy. And it’s even better politics, standing up for the middle class while pinning hypocritical Democrats between their egalitarian talking points and their elitist agenda.

Wymyn of color

I was told, as Cassandra so often says, that there would be no math in this election.