Sixty Days Hence

Climate disaster forecasts are very often pushed far enough out that it's hard to believe them -- much like the 1930s claims about how we'd be colonizing Saturn by now. Here's one that is not far out at all: in two months, a city of 20 million people will run out of water.

The city of Sao Paulo is home to 20 million Brazilians, making it the 12th largest mega-city on a planet dominated by shortsighted humans. Shockingly, it has only 60 days of water supply remaining. The city "has about two months of guaranteed water supply remaining as it taps into the second of three emergency reserves," reports Reuters.

Technical reserves have already been released, and as the city enters the heavy water use holiday season, its 20 million residents are riding on a fast-track collision course with severe water rationing and devastating disruptions.

Of course, one city is not 'climate,' just 'weather.' A drought is a drought. Except, the article goes on to say, it really is about a change that affects water-poor regions in general.

Don't expect the government to save you, it goes on to say.

We're often tricked into believing the government will solve all these problems for us. Yep, some Americans foolishly believe the same government which just issued $1 trillion in new debt to pay the interest on its existing debt is somehow really, really good at planning for the future instead of mortgaging it away. [2]

If fresh water were a bank account, the world's spending deficit against that account would be deeply in the red and approaching a tipping point of default. And in precisely the same way the U.S. government borrows money to cover today's expenses with no intention of ever paying it back, human society is also borrowing water to cover today's water demands with no intention or capability of ever paying it back.

Right now in California and around the world, farmers are pumping water out of the ground that should have remained there until the year 2030. As they keep pumping the aquifers dry, they'll be reaching ever more precariously forward into the future, using up water in 2015 that should have lasted until 2050 (or beyond).

In this same way, aquifers that should have lasted 100 - 200 years will be bone dry in the not-too-distant future. Farms that once produced food will instead produce a new Dust Bowl. Populations that depended on cheap food to afford basic living expenses will find themselves starving and bankrupt (and living on government food stamps, with the accompanying loss of freedom that always follows government handouts). The world's governments -- all of which rely on food affordability to keep populations relatively docile -- will find themselves facing mass revolts and social chaos.

You are about to watch a milestone event in the history of our world.

Maybe so. Either way, we only have to wait a couple months to see.

Your program guide for the S. Ct. arguments

This National Review article is the most comprehensive but concise statement I've seen so far on the tangled statement of the arguments to be this week in King v. Burwell.  It even sorts out the confusing state of the many decisions below, most of which are being held in abeyance pending the Supreme Court's decision in the case that is being argued this week.  There is more information than in most articles about the sorry history of the making of the IRS regulation (recall that this lawsuit challenges IRS rules that violate the law; it doesn't challenge the law itself).

The article passes lightly over Congress's intent, as is right in a case where there is no statutory ambiguity, but here is another article that lays out quite clearly how absurd it is to argue that there is any real question that Congress considered versions of the law that did and did not restrict subsidies to states that implemented their own exchanges, and in the end was able to pass only a law that did restrict subsidies in that way.  To the extent the IRS rule has a shred of validity, it can only come from the argument that it has discretion to implement rules consistent with a law's "purpose" even if the statutory language is ambiguous.  If this language is ambiguous, we might as well throw out all of our laws--which, come to think of it, is pretty much what our current administration is up to.

For our Austen Fans

I know we have several! I am not among them, although it sounds like this might be a part of Austen's corpus I could really enjoy.

Edward Bond once wrote, “I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen does about manners”. Bond may be surprised to know that Austen was interested in violence and began her writing career pushing at the boundaries of what was acceptable and tasteful in literary fiction. As Kathryn Sutherland writes in her introduction to a splendid new edition of the “juvenilia”: “Jane Austen’s earliest writings are violent, restless, anarchic and exuberantly expressionistic. Drunkenness, female brawling, sexual misdemeanour and murder run riot across their pages”.

Perhaps it's too bad she grew up! A sad fate for many of us, it could be.

Good Question

'What are you talking about? Bullying the world, or ruling it through civilization?"

H/t: She Who Knows.

How Far We've Fallen

Headline, with bitter irony: "Leader of the free world speaks to joint session of Congress."

Oyster recipes

Some of my favorites:


Sangrita Oyster Shooters

24 oysters, shucked
2 cups tomato juice
4 serrano chilis
2 limes, juiced
1/2 white onion, peeled & chopped
hot sauce

Shuck oysters and keep well chilled.  For the sangrita, combine all other ingredients in a blender and puree well.  Allow this mixture to chill for one hour.  Put each oyster in a shot glass (best to choose very small oysters) and cover each with the sangrita.  Salt the rim of another set of shot glasses, then fill them with a good silver tequila.  Each guest should lick the rim of a tequila shot glass, down the sangrita/oyster mix from the other shot glass, then down the tequila.


Oysters with Cilantro-Chili-Lime Sauce

24 oysters, raw, on the half shell
6 large garlic cloves, minced
3 T cilantro, minced
4 green onions minced
1/2 cup Asian chili paste
2 T sugar
1/2 t lime zest, minced
1/3 cupe lime juice, freshly squeezed
1/3 cup Vietnamese fish sauce
1-1/2 T pickled ginger minced

Line a baking sheet with rock salt and nest the oysters in their shells in the salt.  Refrigerate until ready to use.  Combine the reserved oyster liquor and all the remaining ingredients in a large bowl or food processor.  Whisk vigorously or blend well, then let sit at room temperature for an hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 F.   Spoon sauce over each oyster and bake for 15 minutes or until the sauce is bubbly and the oysters are curled around the edges.  (We often just grill the oysters until they're done enough to pop open easily, then spoon the sauce on top.  It doesn't need to cook.)


Oyster Pan Roast

4 T unsalted butter
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup fresh fennel, finely chopped
1/2 cup leek, finely chopped
1/2 cup celery, finely chopped
1 t thyme, chopped
1 t sage, chopped
2 T white flour
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup oyster liquor
2 cups cream
1 T Worcestershire sauce
1 t Pernod or similar anise-flavored liqueur
1 pint oysters, shucked
salt & pepper to taste
toast points and wilted spinach (optional)

We usually skip the spinach, and bite-sized chunks of any good fresh bread will do instead of toast points.

In a large saucepan, melt the butter and add the onion, fennel, leek, celery, thyme, and sage, stirring, for about 10 minutes.  Stir in the flour and cook for another 2 minutes.  Whisk in the white wine and oyster liquor and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer for about 5 minutes.  Whisk in the cream, Woo sauce, and Pernod.  Allow to simmer for about 10 minutes; season with salt, pepper, and hot sauce to taste.  Stir the drained oysters into the sauce and bring back to a boil.  Cook just until the edges of the oysters curl.  Spoon the sauce over toast or bread and top with spinach, if desired.


Perhaps more later!

Death

Nidal Hasan was sentenced to death by a military court, for the Ft. Hood shootings.  It was a unanimous decision by thirteen senior officers, but it requires approval by the President as commander-in-chief.

Can God Lie?

An interesting article on Medieval and Early Modern inquiries into the question of whether the divine might lie.

There was one problem with these philosophically-minded defences of God’s essentially honest and transparent nature: scripture suggested otherwise. Robert Holkot, a 14th century Dominican theologian, popular in his day, now unjustly neglected, suggested there were any number of places in the Bible where God deceived demons, sinners and even the faithful. He deceived Abraham, father of the Jewish people, when he ordered him to sacrifice his son Isaac, only to revoke that order at the last moment, as Abraham held the knife over his rope-bound and trembling son.

Two centuries later, John Calvin reached the same conclusion while reflecting on the passage in I Kings in which God ‘wills that the false king Ahab be deceived’, sending the Devil to fulfill this wish ‘with a definite command to be a lying spirit in the mouth of all the prophets’.

What do you think? Can God lie? If he can, would God lie? If he would, why?

April 1st, eh?

Ok.

The Cow Joke...

...with only capitalist variations.

I miss the communist and socialist versions, but I suppose those systems are dead and discredited now. Take note, DC.

Isn't It Time That Competence Returned to the White House?

Secretary Clinton: one savvy character.

Federal law requires government officials to conduct business communications on official media, for lots of good reasons. First, it allows for archival without the officials in question having an opportunity to “sanitize” the record. Second — and this is pretty important for the diplomatic corps — it allows the government to protect against intrusion from other nations and entities. Hillary’s practice of doing business through private servers bypassed both of those key protections....

According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton never used the official e-mail system at all. When the time came to produce e-mails for the Benghazi probe, her aides “found” 300 or so that they chose to reveal years after the event — with no guarantee that these represent the entire record, or even a significant portion of it....

Chances of this being an oversight are nil:

Hacked emails indicate that Clinton used a domain registered the day of her Senate hearings. http://t.co/ZsdTXKQIkS pic.twitter.com/1TlYjrcZ52

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) March 3, 2015

The day of her Senate confirmation hearing? Give her this much credit: her strategy to avoid oversight and transparency may be the most coherent and well-executed strategy from State in the entire Obama era.

I never would have said it that way...

But I think they have a point:
How Walmart Made Liberals Turn Right

The short of it is, Conservatives have long made the argument that a perpetual welfare state is destructive to virtue, and saps the willingness of the otherwise abled to do the right thing and work for a living.  Now the Liberals are making the same claim about Walmart.  If pays too little to its workers, goes the claim, because the welfare safety net allows its workers to live on the meager wages offered by Walmart (i.e. Walmart is therefore subsidized by the welfare state).  And if only those lazy, greedy Walmart fatcats would be forced off of their welfare subsidies, they'd have to actually pay their workers better.

Useless Knowledge

Aristotle said that metaphysics is useless, in the sense that it's not for anything: every other sort of knowledge is for it. It is in metaphysics that we approach ultimate truths, the nature of being as such. Of course we don't pursue that so we can use it to make better pancakes: we make better pancakes so we can have the strength and leisure to reflect on the truth of the reality we encounter daily.

Here is a very pleasant article that makes similar claims about pure math. It's distinct from applied math, which means math that you can use for something. The article gets around to asking the question Aristotle doesn't ask, as he assumed you'd have to make a living doing something useful in order to pursue metaphysics:

Q: So if “applied” means “useful,” doesn’t it follow that “pure” must mean…

A: Useless?

Q: You said it, not me.

A: Well, I prefer the phrase “for its own sake,” but “useless” isn’t far off.

Pure mathematics is not about applications. It’s not about the “real world.” It’s not about creating faster web browsers, or stronger bridges, or investment banks that are less likely to shatter the world economy.

Pure math is about patterns, puzzles, and abstraction. It’s about ideas. It’s about the other ideas that come before, behind, next to, or on top of those initial ones. It’s about asking, “Well, if that’s true, then what else is true?” It’s about digging deeper.

Q: You’re telling me there are people out there, right this instant, doing mathematics that may never, ever be useful to anyone?

A: *glances over at wife working, verifies that she’s not currently watching Grey’s Anatomy*

Yup.

Q: Um… why?

A: Because it’s beautiful! They’re charting the frontiers of human knowledge. They’re no different than philosophers, artists, and researchers in other pure sciences.

Q: Sure, that’s why they’re doing pure math. But why are we paying them?

A: Ah! That’s a trickier question. Let me distract you from it with a rambling story.

Oysters triumph again

Oyster night was smashing fun, as always, even though the drizzle kept us from what is many ways my favorite part of the evening:  retiring downstairs to the firepit and getting lost in the music in an ecstatic haze during my one night of dispensation during Lent.  Though the oyster-tequila shooters were a reliable path to more riotous party territory, it's just not the same indoors with the lights on; the party tends to break up earlier than I'd like.  Still, my husband's oyster magic was right on, and I always love the gathering of clan and neighbors and out-of-town friends to stay the weekend.  Before our houseguests left, they dragged a ladder out to the citrus trees and helped us finally harvest all the rest of the fruit, and just in time, for the new blooms are beginning to set.

A neighbor who celebrated her 94th birthday earlier this week brought a killer grapefruit pie, using fruit from our tree.  Having had it before, I knew to recommend it to unfamiliar and skeptical guests.  All evening I watched them take a bite, get a surprised and delighted look on their faces, and make a beeline to my neighbor's comfortable spot to exclaim over her pie.  This is high praise considering that another neighbor brought her key lime tarts, which are fierce competition in the died-and-gone-to-Heaven dessert category.

We're still trying to finish up the oysters (I'm looking at you, lurking neighbors who didn't come over to help eat them last night--but luckily other neighbors picked up the slack!), so the NPH made oyster nachos per a recipe from Jeffrey's in Austin, and they were if possible better than even the many wonderful offerings from the night before:

If you're going to fry an oyster, I can't recommend a buttermilk/flour dredge too highly.  We didn't use homemade yucca chips, which we've tried before without outstanding success; a good fresh corn tortilla chip with a nice crunchy crumbly feel is all you need.  This dish covers all the hot-sour-salty-sweet bases along with creamy-crunchy-chewy-bite-size thrown in.  The habanero cream and mango salsa can be made ahead of time, leaving not too much last-minute craziness for a dinner party.

Another Glory of Global Warming?

Not only may we be able to grow vines in Vineland the Good again, but we may come to understand evolution as ancient life wakes up in Siberia.

American Sniper

Tonight I finally was able to get a night with my wife where we were both free to go see a movie. American Sniper was released on 16 January. Tonight is 28 February. The local theater is still playing it, and the theater was packed. There were perhaps four empty seats among the crowd. I don't know how many people in the audience had seen it before, but except for two elderly people who began to leave when the credits rolled, everyone else stayed silent in their seats until the screen went black.

I won't say much about the film in case some of you haven't seen it, except that it's a great film. There was a lot to recognize in it. Only a small amount of Hollywood BS was present, mostly for the sake of giving a general audience the kind of story they knew how to hear. Eastwood did a good job.

To Chris Kyle.

He lived long, and prospered.

Those darn smidgens

My husband and I often argue, as Tom does here as well, about the ancient "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" dilemma.  I sure don't know the answer, other than to say that no law is self-enforcing, and words on paper don't protect anyone unless people undertake hardship and risk to insist on the meaning that underlies them.

Meanwhile, most grist for the mill:  Congress grinds toward something like enforcement of the laws against a lawless IRS despite the oft-repeated claim that years of "investigation" have not uncovered a smidgen of corruption.  I appreciated one Washington Post commenter's formulation:  "Smidgens keep popping up all over."

Not getting hung up on words

Thomas Miller at AEI passes on some legislative history shedding light on the plain meaning of the ACA re subsidies, on the assumption that anyone still cares.  Or shall we just let the government do whatever seems best in the moment?

The first Senate version of what was to become the ACA was reported from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (“HELP”) on September 17, 2009, as S. 1679, the Affordable Health Choices Act. In that bill the States were given a 4-year period following enactment to establish a “Gateway”—a Health Insurance Exchange. If a State failed or refused to establish a “Gateway” at the end of that period the Secretary of Health and Human Services was directed to establish and operate a Federal Fallback “Gateway” in that State.

Expressly stated in S. 1679’s Federal Fallback established by the Secretary was a direct stipulation that the residents of that State “shall be eligible for premium credits” to pay for qualified health plans under certain conditions. See S. 1679, proposed Public Health Service Act section 3104(d)(1)(D). The bill explicitly tied the availability of the premium credits to the Federal Fallback “Gateway” and closely expressed then what is now only imagined to be included in the statutory text at issue in King v. Burwell.

That clear and explicit authorization that premium tax credits were also available through a “Gateway” established by the Secretary of Health and Human Services was subsequently not included in the version of the ACA later reported from the Senate Committee on Finance on October 9, 2009, as S. 1796, the America’s Health Future Act. The Senate Finance Committee version only authorized the establishment of Exchanges by a State and the availability of premium tax credits through Exchanges “established by the State”.

. . . Pertinent to King v. Burwell, the Senate Amendment was a deliberate “merger” of the two committee proposals consisting mostly of the Finance bill and adding the HELP federal fallback but without the premium credit tie-in language.

The issue in King v. Burwell initially is all about whether the Court can read into a law any statutory language that was earlier considered by the Congress but was not adopted in the subsequently enacted final version of that law. The Supreme Court has said in the past that there are few principles of statutory construction that are more compelling than the proposition that Congress does not intend to enact as statutory language provisions that it has earlier discarded in favor of other language. See Doe v. Chao, 540 U.S. 614, 622 (2004).

There's a appealing nostalgia in reading words from the days when the "exchanges" would be openly called "Gateways."  That was when Obamacare proponents were more willing to admit that the point of the exercise was to establish a narrow gate between you and your healthcare insurance, which they would guard assiduously.  An "exchange," now, that summons up all kinds of illusions of choice, almost market-like.  I'm also charmed to be reminded that an earlier version of the bill was called the "Affordable Health Choices Act."  Because it's all about the choice!  Isn't the real freedom being limited to the one right way, because it's good for you?

In a discussion at Megan McArdle's column, the usual complaint was made that evil Republicans won't say what they would replace the ACA with (as if they hadn't published a zillion alternative proposals, but never mind).  One answer given was:  "We'd replace it with the same thing we replaced slavery with:  nothing."

I'm following this statutory interpretation argument with professional interest.  I understand the statutory interpretation arguments on the plaintiffs' side, which are fairly traditional.  I'm less clear about the argument for the defendant, which basically amounts to saying "The language must not say that, because it would contradict overarching principles, which is to say that there might have been explicit trade-offs, and that never happens."  Not even my shaken confidence in the probity of the Supreme Court allows me to entertain the notion that they would adopt such a shoddy argument.  I'm guessing that, if they punt this thing, they'll do it by invoking the lack of standing.  That's a cowardly approach, but one with a more Court-like pedigree.

Oh, oysters, come and walk with us

Our annual Oysterfest is tomorrow, so we are in mad prep mode.

“I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," he resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.”

― Saki

Mystery solved

From Bookworm Room:

Champagne on ice

Christian Schneider on "wage theft" laws:

During Chuck Nevitt's undistinguished NBA playing career, he earned the nickname "The Human Victory Cigar," as he only made it onto the court after his team was ahead by an insurmountable margin. . . .

In Wisconsin politics, the billionaire Koch brothers have now become the Republican human victory cigars. When the left has exhausted every talking point and political strategy, it trots out uncles Charles and David Koch as a last gasp.

Hearing the word "Koch" from a Democrat means something he really doesn't like is about to happen, and he is powerless to stop it. When it is invoked, there is likely a Republican and a bottle of champagne chilling nearby.

Such is the case with this week's right-to-work debate as legislative Republicans are poised to send a bill to Gov. Scott Walker's desk.

A 2-L llama, that's a beast

Llamas being llassoed on the streets of Phoenix, film at 11. As Ace says,

Video of the great llama chase here. Actually, it's just the lassoed llama being led through the streets, like Hector being dragged behind Achilles' chariot. 

Thus all heroes.

What IS the Free Market

I think far too often, we get wrapped up in terminology and concepts and we lose sight of the simple truths of things.  When we discuss supply and demand, we think in very nebulous terms.  We don't think of the simple, natural, human interactions that these terms encompass.  We think of markets, and stocks, and companies, and not of the people that make up these things.  And I think we lose sight of how each item we touch in our day to day lives exists because of, not in spite of, the free market.

As such, I present to you a short video, only about six minutes long (if you don't stay through the credits) which I believe helps show how even the simplest item is the product of a web of humanity that, without considering it, makes everything possible.  I submit to the Hall... the pencil:

Nothing To See Here

The U.S. Department of State slammed the reported Islamic State siege of several Syrian villages and subsequent abduction of 150 Christian men, women and children, calling it an act of “evil” and insisting such violence needs to stop — but that most terror victims have been Muslims.

The department also fell shy of labeling the terror attack and kidnapping as rooted in anti-Christian sentiment, suggesting it was simply one of several that the Islamic State had conducted against those of all faiths — especially Muslims.

If ten men got sent to prison and four of them were black, this same administration would cry racism (as black men don't make up 40% of the population overall, but are 40% of prisoners in this example). Somehow that argument, which seems so clear to them when applied to American society, just isn't available when talking about a society in which the vast majority are Muslims -- but somehow religious minorities seem to suffer disproportionately.

Somehow. But certainly not because of "anti-Christian sentiment" on behalf of the so-called "Islamic State."

We don't need no stinking media

From Jim Gerraghty's email newsletter this morning:

To play the [popular video game "Ingress"], you join a side, either the Enlightened or the Resistance, and walk around to various [real world] landmarks and claiming them for your side. By claiming three landmarks, you create a triangle, and your side “controls” the people within that triangle.

* * *

Maybe you’re one of the folks who have heard of this; the fan base is global. But the game went open to “general release” in December 2013 and I had heard absolutely nothing about this. I asked Flint and a couple other folks involved in the game if I had missed it from media coverage, and they chuckled that Google doesn’t need media coverage for its projects. I felt as if I had asked why they hadn’t chiseled any stone tablets to spread the word.

Think about this; as we on the right argue about the mainstream media’s power over the electorate and how we can counter it, Google -- admittedly, an institution with enormous resources and technical know-how -- is demonstrating that a small team can build something massively popular, with millions of participants, with almost no one in the media noticing.

* * *

Never mind the question, “Are the mainstream media still powerful?” In some corners of our national or global life, are the mainstream media even a factor at all?

Atlanta's James Bond

Lewis Grizzard, mentioned in the comments below, explains a car theft in our capital city. Stop after that if you don't like bawdy humor.

Folsom Prison Blues

The rape scandal in American prisons is a stain on our national honor. Can we address it without being soft on the wicked?

Seems like it's hard to show humane compassion while also recognizing the justice of long judicial sentences. One guy who would imagine himself in the place of a felon, without failing to recognize the justice of the sentence, was the late great Johnny Cash.

Change is Coming

Today I am notified:

Starting March 23, 2015, you won't be able to publicly share images and videos that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity on Blogger.

Note: We’ll still allow nudity if the content offers a substantial public benefit. For example, in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.

Damn. Sorry, kids. All that nudity you've come to expect from the Hall is just going to have to go away.

Don't Be...

...that guy.

H/t: Ranger Up.

Queues

The government of Trinidad and Tobago is offering to swap Venezuela toilet paper for oil.

"The Catholic Pagan"

An interesting interview with Paglia.

You grew up as an Italian-American Catholic, but seemed to identify more strongly with the pagan elements of Catholic art and culture than with the church’s doctrines. What caused you to fall away from the Catholic Church?

Italian Catholicism remains my deepest identity—in the same way that many secular Jews feel a strong cultural bond with Judaism. Over time I realized—and this became a main premise of my first book, Sexual Personae (based on my doctoral dissertation at Yale)—that what had always fascinated me in Italian Catholicism was its pagan residue. I loved the cult of saints, the bejeweled ceremonialism, the eerie litanies of Mary—all the things, in other words, that Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers rightly condemned as medieval Romanist intrusions into primitive Christianity. It's no coincidence that my Halloween costume in first grade was a Roman soldier, modeled on the legionnaires' uniforms I admired in the Stations of the Cross on the church walls. Christ's story had very little interest for me—except for the Magi, whose opulent Babylonian costumes I adored! My baptismal church, St. Anthony of Padua in Endicott, New York, was a dazzling yellow-brick, Italian-style building with gorgeous stained-glass windows and life-size polychrome statues, which were the first works of art I ever saw.

After my parents moved to Syracuse, however, I was progressively stuck with far blander churches and less ethnic congregations. Irish Catholicism began to dominate—a completely different brand, with its lesser visual sense and its tendency toward brooding guilt and ranting fanaticism. I suspect that the nun who finally alienated me from the church must have been Irish! It was in religious education class (for which Catholic students were released from public school on Thursday afternoons), held on that occasion in the back pews of the church. I asked the nun what still seems to me a perfectly reasonable and intriguing question: if God is all-forgiving, will he ever forgive Satan? The nun's reaction was stunning: she turned beet red and began screaming at me in front of everyone. That was when I concluded there was no room in the Catholic Church of that time for an inquiring mind.

I was brought to the Church as much by King Arthur as by Jesus. I remember a book of mythology I had as a boy, which had myths from many cultures illustrated by drawings in the style of the culture which gave rise to the myth. It was Beowulf whose drawings I immediately recognized as my own, not any of the ones from the Middle East or Asia.

It doesn't matter, I think, whether you came for Arthur or Beowulf or some pagan residue. What matters is that you come.

Poll: Does the President Love America?

Survey says... less than half of Americans think he does.

You can't know what's in a man's heart, but it says something that a majority aren't convinced that he harbors love for the country he leads. Only 35% outright said he doesn't love America, but 53% wouldn't say he did.

Invisible Dams

Those wicked Jews are at it again.

Finishing school

Mercy, how can we even consider electing a President without a sheepskin?

[G]raduating from college is what makes you a “gentleman.” . . . If you don’t have a college degree, by contrast, you are looked down upon as a vulgar commoner who is presumptuously attempting to rise above his station. Which is pretty much what they’re saying about Scott Walker. This prejudice is particularly strong when applied to anyone from the right, whose retrograde views are easily attributed to his lack of attendance at the gentleman’s finishing school that is the university.

That brings us to the heart of the matter. I have observed before that left-leaning politics has become “part of the cultural class identity of college-educated people,” a prejudice that lingers long after they have graduated. You can see how this goes the other way, too. If to be college-educated is to have left-leaning views—then to have the “correct” political values, one must be college-educated.

You can see now what is fueling the reaction on the left. If Scott Walker can run for president, he is challenging the basic cultural class identity of the mainstream left. He is more than a threat to the Democrats’ hold on political power. He is a threat to the existing social order.

Zoos

I have friends and neighbors--nice, caring, responsible people--who openly look forward to the chance to travel to Cuba now that relations are thawing, because it's so unspoiled, and there are all those charming cars from the 1950s.  The New York Times sounds the warning bell, however:  as Cuba opens its doors ever so slightly, there already are appearing signs of rising inequality.

The fashion lately has been to decry inequality because it supposedly inhibits growth.  At the same time, if Cuba is any guide, the concern is that growth spurs inequality.  Assuming equality is the most important goal, what if the only solution is to prevent growth?  What if both inequality and equality could with equal (if minimal) rationality be said to inhibit growth, and in fact both are completely irrelevant to prosperity?  That's assuming we should actually care about prosperity, considering how evil materialism is.  My head is spinning lately.

"From Sweden"

So the band I cited the other day is much more impressive than I thought it was. I thought it was a pleasant bluegrass band, and it is: but it's apparently a foreign band, "from Sweden," which has managed to master the genre so well that I didn't notice that they weren't Southerners. Successfully adapting to a foreign culture is really an accomplishment for an artist! (Although I suppose I'm supposed to be angry for 'cultural appropriation,' I have to say that I think that concept is bull.)

Here they are doing "John Henry."

All Is Well

“CPD [Chicago police department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied.

“There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square,” it continued....

When a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name....

“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”

Probably these are mostly bad people. Nevertheless, a chilling report from an American city -- even one as notorious as Chicago.

The Day After Tomorrow

...we will be killing these children.

This summer, in his hometown of Raqqa, 13-year-old Mohammad was forced to attend a children's training camp established by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). When his father opposed his son's conscription, ISIS fighters threatened to kill him. Mohammad left for camp, which his father describes as a form of “brainwashing the children.” After his return, his mother says she was surprised to find in his bag a blond, blue-eyed doll – along with a large knife given to her son by his ISIS supervisors.When she confronted Mohammad, he told her that the camp manager had distributed the dolls and asked that the children decapitate them using the knife, and that they were asked to cover the dolls' faces when they performed the decapitation. It was his homework: practice beheading a toy likeness of a blond, white Westerner.

Love your enemies. Even these, who teach children to murder. Just why, though? Because they serve to justify the wielding of the sword, and the sword properly used is glorious.

Education is an Unalloyed Good

Right?

Groaning under the weight of all those pesky sanctions, career-oriented nerds from Teheran or Isfahan eager to learn how to enrich uranium, say, or supervise reactor systems operations—all highly prized vocations in their bomb-happy theocracy—had very slim pickings when it came to increasing their nuclear-related knowledge stateside. No more: The University of Massachusetts Amherst announced last week that it was revising its approach to admissions and will no longer bar Iranian students from admission to nuclear science and engineering programs.

Ethics

More from SlateStarCodex, this time on cheap thinking about medical ethics and prescription drugs.

Deep thoughts

We've all run across comments that make you go "What the . . . ?"  But commenter Ken M is a master. Here he is in one of the best circular definitions I've ever run across:

The word onomatopoeia is also an onomatopoeia because it's derived from the sound produced when the word is spoken aloud.

Defensive peace

From SlateStarCodex--a very interesting site--a link to a piece about Mozi, a Chinese philosopher from the Warring States Period whose recipe for universal peace was to teach city-states how better to withstand sieges.

And they said Reagan's SDI program was destabilizing, because people who don't fear being attacked won't refrain from attacking.  Sometimes a good defense just discourages the bullies.

Dungeons & Dragons

It's true: sometimes, I'm not all that nice.

This week's Tex-amusing quiz is "What Dungeons & Dragons Class Are You?"

What's the rush?

The President had no choice but to veto the Keystone XL pipeline bill. Congress's action would have cut short a six-year review of the impact on important national policy and whatnot, which undermines the separation of powers he holds dear.

Nothing More

Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school — Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. — have been grating on him, and it shows.

It's the "nothing more" that's the problem. Almost every accomplishment of my life has come from finding ways to stretch what was authorized into what really needed to be done.

Also, Democrats were the party in power in "Selma."

"I think the vote for the attorney general is a vote for the attorney general," said South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the upper house's only black Republican. "One beautiful thing that history has taught us is that we want to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. So for this to somehow be a racial conversation seems to be wrong -- this is a conversation about competence, and qualifications. This is a question about who's best to serve our country. Whether that's in May or Christmas time, it's important for us to move forward and do the right thing."

I mean, maybe it's a minor point.

Ten Thousand Lies

Just a little song for a girl who will never get to heaven. A lovely song, and as wrong as it can possibly be.

A Good Question

From a medieval studies group I follow: "Who was the first King of England?"

Trapped In Lies They Tell Themselves

In this exclusive video interview with The Daily Caller, Coughlin says our allies in the war of terror “watched us change sides” in 2010 and 2011, but “the scariest thing” to him “is that our senior national security leaders seem to have no comprehension that they did.”

Example?

His greatest fear is that “we may be put to sleep, like the frog that boils to death, mired in the pollution of our own politically correct narratives that has created a complete inability for us to understand and further the truth, so much so, that we have to treat the truth as propaganda just to be heard.”

Discussing the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, Coughlin says this is a clear example that when you commit to a narrative, you can suppress the truth and undermine our national security. He says Hasan told us “at the Walter Reed and the Pentagon, over 20 times” to military officers that, “I am a Muslim. If you send me to war, I will become a jihadi.”

And thus an infamous episode of... um... ah... "workplace violence."

Fellow-Feeling

Dr. Reynolds has a good point.

[I]ronically, it's not rational to be too rational.

Imagine that you're thinking of getting married. Would you want a spouse who sticks with you for purely rational reasons, or one who forms an irrational attachment — let's call it "love" — that doesn't depend on rational factors?

Most people would say the latter. A purely rational attachment is nice, but if things change — say, if you become sick, or unattractive, or broke — a rationally attached person might rationally choose to leave. A person who loves you, on the other hand, might stick around anyway, because being parted from you, even if some of your charms have vanished, would cause emotional pain, while helping you feels good.

Likewise, you'd like to hire an honest employee, one who will feel guilty about stealing from you. A rational employee won't steal if there's a danger of being caught, but an honest one won't steal even when he can get away with it, because if he does he will feel guilty, while if he resists temptation he will feel virtuous.

A person who is perfectly rational about costs and benefits, with no irrational constraints like loyalty or honesty (or patriotism), is a person who will lie, cheat and steal whenever he or she can get away with it. A sociopath, basically.

This is a position that the Enlightenment tried to do away with, but it's worth noting that even Kant came around to it. While maintaining that ethics was an exercise of practical reason, in the Doctrine of Virtue he ends up describing a number of "moral feelings" that are the ground of caring about doing the right thing at all (Ak. 6:399-403). This was published late in his life, many years after his more famous Groundwork that appears to downplay the role of feelings in morality to an extreme degree.

On careful and long consideration, a certain set of feelings are presupposed in caring about doing the right thing. A purely rational being just might not care about going above and beyond the demands of law for the benefit of other people.

Dr. Althouse is a Walker Fan

She has a number of pieces up lately that all, as far as I can tell in a brief reading, are in his corner.

This quote was fun:

Hillary Clinton, you even saw with this story, with her book tour, the statements about her and Bill being broke when they came out of the White House. …You see the size of the fees she’s asking universities and colleges to pay, when you look at some of the other things, when she talks about not having driven a car in all those years, I get why that’s true, but it’s why I like to get on my Harley Davidson… every once in a while to drive myself and not have someone else do it for me. I just think those are all things that penetrate this out of touch persona.

The Best Poetry Is the Strictest

This is an article that didn't turn out to be anything like what I thought it would be about given the title: "Where The Pen Meets The Sword: The Role Of Poetry In The Study Of International Affairs."

A few years ago I proposed to DARPA via a Minerva grant application to put together a team that would study the poetry of various countries in the Islamic world, in order to identify weapons for psychological operations. (They were not interested.) We know that poetry is hugely important to the cultures of Iran and Iraq, for example: but the poetry is in different languages, and employs different traditional symbolism, and carries different currents of meaning arising from poets and poems of its past. We would be able to create much more effective messages if we understood that in greater detail, especially if we could find among the exile communities skilled poets who could help us craft poems of quality.

So that's what I thought the article would be about. What it turns out to be about is a Georgetown professor who composes international affairs work in the form of poems.

The reception his poems are met with today is a far cry from the silence his first poem received, with students since expressing their allegiance to and fondness of the poetry. In the evaluation Douglas distributes to his students halfway through his course, he asks students whether they think the poems should continue, or if they feel that poetry is out of place in a selective graduate program. “And they all say ‘Keep the poems!,’ so that settles that,” Douglas said. In fact, students have so embraced the poetry that they have even integrated it into their papers, sometimes citing excerpts from his poems. “If there’s something in a poem that’s applicable to the topic on which they’re writing their paper, every once in a while they quote me to myself… which I like, of course,” Douglas joked. “But the good aspect of the poetry,” he continued, “is that it helps you parse out and focus on the most important issues, and the fact that it’s in rhyme somehow brings out the emotional aspect instead of just being a flat statement of certain positions.”

To that end, all of Douglas’s poems rhyme, for he believes that rhyme and meter are quintessential to a poem’s impact. As such, Douglas was surprised to learn that he is actually in the minority of poets who still employ rhyme. Describing how he made this discovery, Douglas said, “A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon an Annapolis Poet’s Club that meets every Friday night down at Barnes & Nobles coffee shop. One night I went down there and took a couple of my poems with me. The idea was that people would read the poems they’d been working on and get feedback from the rest of the group. So I read one of my poems, and it was followed by this dumbfounded silence. Finally, the president of the club said, ‘Well, Bill, poems these days don’t rhyme.’” Douglas’s retort? “Well, it worked for Longfellow.”

Poems these days aren't usually any good, either, so "it worked for Longfellow" is a good retort. Rhyming isn't necessary, though: you can do alliterative poetry in the fashion of the Anglo-Saxons and Old Norse that is also very strict. Some of the Old Norse forms are quite difficult to master, requiring you to think very carefully about how to speak in the form that the poem permits.

It's in wrestling with the form that you come up with novel -- often beautiful -- ways of expressing meaning. What "poets" today often do is just string words on a page in a weird way, and the words thus often end up being banal as well as ugly. They take themselves to be doing something wonderfully radical, doing poetry in a non-aesthetic way, but they're really just making trash. The proof of that is that we still read Longfellow, whereas there's little chance that our descendants won't just throw their trash away.

Also, point of parliamentary procedure: to say that 'poems today don't rhyme' is to dismiss the most successful poets of the moment, whose poems do rhyme. The musical genre of hip-hop is characterized by rhyming poetry, and it's the only sort of poetry that is widely attended to by the ordinary American. To dismiss that from the field of poetry is a kind of unwarranted elitism by people no one cares about. The truth is not that "poems today don't rhyme," but that "only successful poems rhyme."

At home with the proton

What we see when we bounce things off of whatever is going on inside a proton.

The anti-gotcha candidate

More from the Washington Post:

In light of his comments about whether the president loves America, [Scott Walker] was asked in an interview whether he believes Obama, who recently talked about his Christian faith at the National Prayer Breakfast, is a Christian.

“I don’t know,” Walker replied. “I’ve never asked him that either.” Pressed on his answer, he explained, “I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that.”

Walker was sharply critical of the question, just as he was critical of the repeated questions he’s been asked in the past few days about what Giuliani said. He called it “silly stuff” and a “classic example of why people hate Washington and increasingly dislike the press.”

Changing times

The new atmosphere in Wisconsin, per the Washington Post:

Another teacher, Linda Zauner, 58, said she was working to build a case that teachers wanted to keep benefits the same, but she had struggled to get teachers to respond to a survey. She said she wanted to emphasize that teachers still thought of health care as a “bargained right.”

“This is the closest thing we’re going to get to negotiations,” Zauner said.

Fish remained incredulous.

“You have to be mean,” she said. “We never got anything by being nice. We’ve had to walk out. We got things when we banged our fists on tables.”

Brey jumped into the conversation.

“Sometimes I think,” she stopped to collect the words delicately.

“Sometimes, I think, . . . that’s . . . why they came after us, Jenny. Because they thought these teachers were too demanding.”

“No, we have to fight,” Fish responded. “It’s for our students.”

I Prefer To Be Addressed By My First Name: "Sir."

A column in the Washington Post entitled "Please Address me as Mister" amusingly has a cover photo of Angela Merkel.

The author is nevertheless quite right.

Oil & budgets

This is an old BBC article from November 2014, but it contains an amazing chart of the crude oil prices that would be necessary to permit a number of oil-producing states to balance their budgets.  And I thought Venezuela was behind the eight ball.

Honor and Relationships

A concept that occurred to me this morning as I was shaving my head arises from this exchange between myself and Cass:

Cass:

People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor.

What does that even mean? It's one of those wonderfully vague statements that people love, because of course whatever they want to do is right and honorable.

Reminds me of Newt Gingrich's list of incredibly vague statements that 90+% of Americans were supposed to agree with... so long as no one tried to figure out what they actually meant.

Grim:

What does that even mean? ...

I have given a definition of honor (which is linked on the sidebar). It ultimately means that you may do whatever you want, provided you give due consideration to the duties you owe to those to whom you stand in certain relationships. Different relationships have different duties -- you owe more to your father than to a stranger, more to your countrymen than to foreigners, more to friends than to those who have proven to be your enemies (but even something to them -- perfidy is always a violation of honor)....

That's why Zell Miller came down so hard on John Kerry. It wasn't the policy disagreements that provoked such a powerful response. It was Kerry's constant betrayal of people whom he owed duties of honor. Every time he had a duty -- to fellow sailors, soldiers, countrymen -- he would elect self-interest instead.

So all that the Jacksonian is saying is that doing what Kerry does is wrong. You're free to follow your self interest -- subject to the demands of honor.

So here's the concept that occurred to me. A whole lot of digital ink has been spilled lately on men and relationships, and how contemporary men -- especially the youngest generations -- don't take their duties to those relationships seriously enough. Young men don't treat their girlfriends right, they don't want to get married to them and undertake those responsibilities, you hear even middle-aged men talking about the joys of prostitutes and so forth.

What if honor is the way men think about relationships? It's far from meaningless: Jackson himself suffered two broken ribs in a duel over an insult to his wife (a man called her a 'bigamist,' because she had married Jackson without realizing her previous husband had not properly filed for divorce when he abandoned her), and its concerns provoked Zell Miller into one of the greatest political speeches of my lifetime.

There are a lot of cultural forces that have reasons to want to destroy honor as a concept at the core of American life. I am not an ally to any of them, but some of you are. There are not a lot of clear exponents of honor to stand against those forces: it's hard to think of any cultural figure since the death of John Wayne who has stood up for it reliably and without exception as something to which men should aspire. As a consequence, the concept has been weakened in our culture over the last generation.

Perhaps it has costs from some perspectives -- a sense of an honor-bound duty to fellow American citizens probably accounts for close to 100% of my disagreements with Tex's libertarian view of economics and politics, so from her perspective those might be costs because they keep me from joining her in advocacy of those positions. If I'm right that honor is the way that men take relationships seriously, though, it strikes me that there are opposing costs even if you are an advocate of one or another of those forces that have an interest in dismissing the concept.

Comments Policy

We've had an uptick in traffic, and with it some new folks commenting. I'm going to repost the comments policy. This version is nine years old, and is I think the most recent version. It's served us well in keeping the discussion interesting.

Please be welcome, so long as you will adhere to this form.

I adopted [this policy] from the sadly-defunct Texas Mercury, a fringe publication but one whose bold assertion of well considered and unusual ideas I always enjoyed:

As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. The Texas Mercury is founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.

Comments failing to uphold those principles run the risk of being deleted without warning. In the year and some months since I adopted that as the policy here, I've added one additional point: hit-and-run comments, as well as anonymous comments, will generally be deleted. If you're a regular here, and willing to stand up and fight for what you believe, you can say pretty much anything that isn't a personal attack on a fellow reader. If you're just wandering through, or unwilling to leave your name (even a false name you'll stand by will do, e.g., "Grim"), pass on. This is a hall, and regular readers are honored guests not to be troubled by cowards.

Fair enough? Well, fair or unfair, those are the rules.

I haven't had to delete anything, as everyone's been polite and have usually said interesting things. I do want to emphasize that, while anonymous comments are fine, standing policy here is that you should pick a pseudonym to sign them with so we can keep straight who is saying what, and to assert both ownership and responsibility for what you say.

On Justice Thomas

Scalia remains my favorite, but here's the piece Cass mentioned on her favorite Supreme Court Justice.

Honesty Per Se

Author at "happyplace" writes:

Instances of enormous dogs getting freaked out by tiny, helpless creatures is probably the best evidence I've come across for a benevolent architect of the universe. I'm surprised that YouTube videos—such as this one, featuring a 14-month-old Great Dane's nerve-wracked reaction to a fluffy, little gosling—don't factor more often into theological debates.

Well, the reason they don't is just what this competing article is mocking.

As humans, we are so quick to default to preconceptions, but these mental shortcuts often harm our way of thinking. In many cases, preconceived notions blind us from approaching situations in new ways. To challenge that idea, we put a falcon and a rabbit in the same room. You’re probably thinking, “Oh, the falcon immediately killed the rabbit,” because that’s what you’ve been taught to think.

And in this particular case, yes, that is exactly what happened. Almost instantly. Your preconceptions were 100 percent spot-on.

It’s so beautiful when the animal kingdom surprises us, when predators don’t act like senseless killing machines. Unfortunately, this was not one of those times.

This room was way too small for the bunny to have any chance. It took about an eighth of a second for the falcon to completely disembowel the rabbit and begin feasting on its entrails...

Honesty in Physics

The mouseover text is the most honest part.

"Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand."
"Is it the weak force or the strong--"
"It's gravity."

OPSEC, Public Affairs, Same Thing Right?

Headline: "Disclosures of Battle Plan by Pentagon Startle Many."

The Obama administration has been eager to show momentum against the Islamic State after a conference last week dramatized the hurdles to countering the terrorist group’s propaganda. But the Pentagon may have gone too far in sharing its military planning.

Let me guess what happened.

UPDATE: The Washington Post asked Central Command why they went public with a detailed war plan, and are being told by an unnamed "senior" official -- military officials have ranks, guys -- that it's an intentional information operation designed to get ISIS to flee.

I imagine this senior official is covering some administration butts with this story, but if it's a true story then (a) you just blew it by telling them that's what you're hoping to accomplish, and (b) it didn't work in Second Fallujah, when we were facing many of the same people and they were facing American Marines and Cavalry and not Iraqi Army units as their primary opposition. It's the Iraqi Army that has the tradition of fleeing or surrendering at the first sign of the stars and stripes, not the Islamic State.

I mean, if it's important

I think we were just discussing this:  (1) What Court Order? and (2) Plurality of Dems believe the President should ignore court rulings if it's important.

Jacksonian America

After reading Tex's last link, I came across this quote in the next article down.

[Jacksonians] have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.” And he (or she) means it. If you want to hear an eloquent version, listen to Sen. Zell Miller’s speech endorsing George W. Bush at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

That sounds like a good paraphrase of what I believe.

President Caulfield

From Kevin Williamson on whether President Obama really doesn't much like his country:

There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield. He is adolescent, perpetually disappointed, and ever on the lookout for phoniness and hypocrisy. His is the sort of personality inclined to believe in his heart the declaration that “behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” (He also believes that this is a quotation from Honoré de Balzac, whose works he has not read, when it fact it comes from Richard O’Connor’s The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur.) He believes with Elizabeth Warren that the economy is a rigged game based on exploitation and deceit rather than on innovation, productivity, and competition. He believes with Barack Obama that the only reason (e.g.) Staples does not pay its part-time associates more or schedule them for more hours is so that it can pad its executive pay and protect its “billions” in annual profits. (He believes that Staples, whose financials he has not read, makes “billions,” when in fact it does no such thing.) Say an admiring word about Steve Jobs and he’ll swear that there are four-year-olds working 169 hours a week in Chinese sweatshops producing iPods at the point of a bayonet. He believes that most people get into Harvard and Yale because they have influential parents (that’s the University of Texas, unfortunately), that rich Americans mostly inherit their money (in reality, about 15 percent of their assets are inherited, less than for middle-class families), that the U.S. goes to war abroad to enrich contractors at home, and that the entire history of Latin America must be understood through the prism of the United Fruit Company’s maneuverings in 1954. 

Give Holden Caulfield a television show and you’ve got Chris Hayes.

Faith and credit

Spengler on markets, trust, and democracy:

Something other than mere trading skills was required for an investment-driven economy, and that was long-term credit, a concept that derives from the Latin credere, “to believe”. It is not an exchange of one peasant’s eggs for another peasant’s barley, or Mexican silver for Chinese silk, but rather a commitment of the savings of whole populations to grand ventures that would pay interest because they drove growth.

Capital markets, moreover, create a kind of democracy. If the whole of society relies on the public debt as a store of value, the value all the savings of society is gauged directly or indirectly against the benchmark of public debt. But that also puts power in the hands of the market: the market has the power to tell the government whether it is doing well or badly, by selling or buying the public debt. It is not simply that the government creates a market that provides convenience and advantages to the people: it becomes dependent on the people’s faith in its policies. When that faith is shaken, as in southern Europe two years ago, and confidence flees the government debt market, the result can be catastrophic. Free capital markets require governments to win the faith of the people.

* * *

That is the Jewish genius: to be able to inspire faith (or what is usually called “confidence” in markets) to make possible long-term investments in capital markets involving millions of participants. The investors in a bond or stock issue are not linked by ties of family or personal loyalty, but rather by contract, law and custom. Their obligations extend beyond the ancient loyalties of family and clan. That may seem obvious on first reflection. But most countries in the world lack functioning capital markets, because faith is absent. The public does not trust the government to enforce contracts, or the management of a company not to steal money. That is emphatically true in China, which is struggling to create modern capital markets rather than depend on state banks and shadow financing. In backward countries, trust is inconceivable outside the narrow circle of blood relations. Firms remain small because trust is restricted to family members.

. . . In the absence of faith, there never will be enough lawyers to enforce contracts, or policemen to arrest embezzlers, or watchdogs to extirpate government corruption. Something more fundamental is required: a sense that the law is sacred, and if any of us breaks the public trust, all of us are damaged. Our rabbis of antiquity said, “All of Israel stands surety for each other.”

Adam Smith’s invisible hand isn’t enough. Capital markets require more than the interaction of self-interested individuals: they require a common sense of the sanctity of covenant, of mutual obligations between government and people, and between one individual and the next. That is why the United States of America is the most successful nation in economic history. It was founded by devout Christians who hoped to construct a new nation in emulation of ancient Israel.

Like reading Anne Frank's diary

This piece about life in Mosul under ISIS has been linked all over the place lately.  It's chilling.  There's an interesting discussion of the crisis in faith that some of Mosul's Moslems are now facing, as they ask the question, "Is this really what my religion is about?"

Automatic delete feature

I read the other day about some kind of Mission-Impossible-style self-destruct mechanism, to be triggered by a possible invasion of Tea Partiers in 2017,  that had been built into the New York City ID program for otherly-documented individuals who, through no fault of their own, had suddenly found themselves in a country not their own without proof of having complied with any tiresome and unjust immigration procedures.  I didn't pay much attention, assuming it was the kind of thing we saw at the end of the Clinton administration, with spiteful outgoing administration staff trashing computers so that life would be as unpleasant as possible for the incoming administration.  Gateway Pundit posted about it today, and I now realize that the purpose of the destruct button was that some bright soul realized that the IDs-for-future-Democratic-voters program involved a formal registration, in which people with, shall we say, questionable legal status had supplied government workers with their names and contact information, and the government workers were so indiscreet as to have filed it with official and permanent government records.  It brings to mind the classic scene in "Red Dawn" when the invading Russian/Cuban forces round up all the trouble-makers by pulling out the county gun-registration files.  Or perhaps a sea captain burning his secret orders when his ship is boarded.

The Rule of Law?

One of Cassandra's evergreen complaints is that people on the right complain about certain wicked tactics from the left, but then turn around and do the same things when they are in power. Today's example appears to me to be a clear-cut reversal on the duty of an executive to enforce the law, rather than declining to do so when he doesn't care for the law.

I believe the antecedent act was the President's refusal to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, which went so far as to refuse to defend it in court when people sued to overturn it. Turnabout: fair play?

Democrats who controlled the Legislature in 2009 changed the law so that same-sex couples could sign up for domestic partnership registries with county clerks to secure some – but not all – of the rights afforded married couples.

Wisconsin Family Action sued last year in Dane County circuit court, arguing that the registries violated a 2006 amendment to the state constitution that bans gay marriage and any arrangement that is substantially similar.

Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen refused to defend the lawsuit, saying he agreed the new law violated the state constitution. Then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, hired Madison attorney Lester Pines to defend the state.

Walker, a Republican, replaced Doyle in January and fired Pines in March. On Friday, Walker filed a motion to stop defending the case.

“Governor Walker, in deference to the legal opinion of the attorney general that the domestic partner registry…is unconstitutional, does not believe the public interest requires a continued defense of this law,” says the brief, filed by Walker’s chief counsel, Brian Hagedorn.

Now, in fairness, this is an occasion where I think the Democrats are on the right side. I favor the Alabama approach to the question of whether gay unions are "marriage," but this exact approach in how to resolve the question of dealing with just what those unions are. This is exactly what we should do: create a separate institution for non-marriage partnerships that can be judged by its own standards. Thus, if for example adultery should prove to be less of a concern in partnerships containing only men -- as many "same sex marriage" supporters openly proclaim -- we don't end up with a watering-down of the protections against adultery in traditional marriages. (If anything, those are far too watery already.) Let them do the things they want, just keep a distinction so we aren't forced to collapse the categories when we come before courts of law. It's only sensible to believe that the needs of these kinds of unions might come apart, so we ought to have the ability to address that in the law.

Still, whether you're for this or against it, what I want to point out is that it is the same refusal to defend a law that we (rightly, I think) railed about as a failure of duty on behalf of any executive. If you're the chief executive and your oath includes enforcing the laws faithfully, you ought to do that. If you don't like the law, you could always resign and run for the legislature -- or just use the bully pulpit to suggest changes from the legislature. Making law is not your department.

The same issue is about to come around again, regarding this 'executive amnesty,' so it's a good time to decide if there's a principle worth defending here or not.

Once More, With Feeling

That Atlantic piece on Daesh/ISIS that Mike linked is getting sustained criticism from the academic left. They want you to know that it's really wrong to suggest that Daesh has any sort of Islamic legitimacy, and that suggesting otherwise is dangerous.

What? He Said It Was A Scheme.

George Monbiot suggests a... well, he himself calls it a "maverick currency scheme," so let's go with that.

A presidential theory of voting

Government is the thing we do together when we want to push each other around.

I prefer Scott Rasmussen's formulation.

The Case Against Scott Walker

Argued in the expected fashion at Daily Kos.

It strikes me that Republicans will only even possibly care about the claims under point two. If he's tied to significant local corruption, that's a problem. The other three points are not of interest except to his opponents, but even many of his supporters might be persuaded if there is truth to the corruption claims.

Socio-cultural revolutions

Pascal Emmanuel Gobry challenges the assumption that time has a one-way arrow when it comes to revolutionary progress.

Now, it's important for me to make clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that today's progressives are "the real racists." I am not saying that same-sex marriage or any other progressive social movement is the equivalent of racism. Today's progressives have at best a fuzzy lineage with yesteryear's, and all of us are implicated in this civilizational enormity; as one who is "conservative" by today's political standards but firmly in the camp of Enlightenment liberalism, i.e., a "progressive" on the scale of millennia, I don't exculpate myself from this legacy. Not all racists were progressives and not all progressives were racists (it was the French Revolutionaries who banned slavery in the French colonies, for example). No group — ideological, religious, or otherwise — comes out of that complex history looking good (which itself should warn us off easy narratives of Progress vs. the Dark Ages).

The Best Hole is a Fighting Hole

So we're in one. Let's cut it into the right kind.

Semper Paratus

A group of Norwegian Muslims will be forming a circle around Oslo synagogue after the celebration of Shabat this Saturday in a solidarity gesture called the Ring of Peace.

"If the Jihadists want to use violence in the name of Islam, they must go through us Muslims first," said one of the event's initiators.

That's awesome and deeply honorable, but be ready for them to come right through you. They're ready to do that. What's your plan when they do?

Suckers Abound

As incarceration numbers have topped out in recent years thanks to what looks like the beginning of the end of the war on drugs, women have gained a stronger foothold in the prison industry, getting jobs that—like so many others in America—have traditionally been dominated by men.

So many others. Chiefly unpleasant jobs, like being a prison guard. But this is a real step forward, having more women as prison guards... er, for some reason that will come to me.

But along with that progressive change has come a steady drip of lurid tales about sex between guards and inmates.

Ah, so you're on the side of progress! That means you must be a good guy we can trust.

As contrasted with the bad guys:

We probably shouldn't be too shocked, though. There is no rule, regulation, or state of affairs a savvy prisoner cannot subvert. This has been proven many times over and is confirmed when you talk to long-time inmates.

"I love when I see a new, young, and naive female working in prison," says a convict we'll call Mack.

Mack has spent the better part of the last 20 years in and out of state and federal prison. He's in his 40s, a born-and-bred criminal who is all about what others can do for him in the here and now.

Damned hardened criminals. We shouldn't trust them, because they can subvert almost anyone. Hey, by the way, how'd you come to know Mack?

I met many people like Mack during my 21 years of incarceration[.]

Ha! I have the sudden suspicion that Vice has been suckered too.

Category Error

If you ask people, how many of you support raping people who rape, you would find it very hard to find anyone that would support that... The reason why we would be hesitant to endorse it is that – what normal person would be paid to do something so compromising as raping a human being? But yet we have this idea that we can kill someone in a way that doesn’t implicate us. If it’s not right to torture someone for torture, abuse someone for abuse, rape someone for rape, then how can we think we can kill someone for killing?

First of all, don't bet you won't get volunteers for the raping-rapists thing. This isn't the country it used to be.

Second, the answer to your question is that rape is always wrong, whereas killing is sometimes right and praiseworthy. I'm good with being "implicated" in something honorable and worthy of praise. The problem isn't killing, it's the structure of executions. What's wrong with the execution is that there's no honor in it, because there's no risk in it. It's like taking out the garbage. Sometimes you have to, but that doesn't make it glorious.

Start By Speaking the Truth

Belmont Club author Richard Fernandez:

Both the Obama administration and the Franco-Germans are as trapped as the Ukrainians in Debaltseve. The Ukrainian troops are surrounded by the Russian troops, while the Western leaders are imprisoned by their own lies. The soldiers are invested by encroaching lines. The statesmen are trapped in a high wall of political bricks comprised of their own falsehoods. Having led their nations forward with false assurances of safety, both the EU leaders and the Obama administration are struggling to find an escape without admitting error.

They will not find it easy. Both cornered groups are hoping the cavalry will arrive before the last cup of water runs out. The soldiers are hoping for the European monitors to ride to the rescue, while Merkel and Hollande for their part must also be looking for a miracle. Maybe Putin will relent. As for Obama, he must be praying as he has never prayed before that ISIS will have a change of heart.

Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

As funny as it is, it also feels a bit unsporting to pick on Harf like this. After all, she’s just doing her job, which is to act as a mouthpiece for an administration whose guiding principle seems to be that political correctness—which is to say, a thoroughgoing dishonesty—is the best weapon for dealing with Islamic terrorism.

Sometimes they even admit it.

After a discussion of religion

The Washington Post, tortured by a fear of backlash, struggles to find the words to describe today's story of a Detroit muslim who asked some fellow bus passengers whether they were Muslim, and on hearing that they were not, stabbed them.  Per Ace, the first try was:

Police: Man stabs two after asking if they are Muslim.

followed by (after protests):

Police: Muslim man stabs two after discussion about religious beliefs.

Ace's commenters suggested the following alternatives:

Conversation Over Islam Leads to Stabbing, Police Baffled.

Hate Crime Charges Likely After Muslim Man Survives Knife Attack During Religious Argument.

1938: Trains begin transporting Europe's Jewry to unknown locations to the east, after a discussion of religion.

What do they want?

I don't think it's that much of a mystery to the Hall, but apparently it's finally sunk in, even for those on the Left.

The linked article from the Atlantic lays out in massive, I'd say scholarly, detail where Daesh came from, their goals, their plans to achieve those goals, and possible ways to thwart them.  Most of it was already known to me, but there were some pieces that I did not know as well.  It's long, but very much worth it.

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat

It is shocking to realize that her citation of Revelations 20:4 is not in any way altered.

Then I saw thrones, and those seated on them were given authority to judge. I also saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” — Revelation 20:4

She has a very generous soul. My own desire, I confess, is to say with Isaiah: "Here I am: send me."

Life Begins

...in unexpected ways.

Jeffrey Kieft, PhD, professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics and corresponding author of the article in Nature, said scientists have long thought that the molecular signals that initiate protein synthesis in bacteria and eukaryotes are mutually exclusive. Scientists in Kieft's lab explored whether a structured RNA molecule from a virus that infects eukaryotic cells could function in bacteria. Surprisingly, they found that it could initiate protein syntheses, a process necessary for life.

"What we found bridges billions of years of evolutionary divergence," said Kieft, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist.

We often talk about viruses about being a kind of quasi-life. Maybe they are also pre-life.

Climate Change

Power is out. The trees are sheeted in ice. Stand outside on the porch, and you will hear a near constant set of crashes from breaking limbs and falling trees.

No problem. We have firewood and all we need.

May not post much for a day or two. Supposed to get record breaking cold tomorrow. But there is plenty of wood yet.

Message Received

The Islamic State’s Al Hayat Media, the group that has published the previous beheading videos in the Middle East, produced the Libya video titled, “A Message Signed With Blood To The Nation Of The Cross.”

“All praise is due to Allah the strong and mighty,” said an ISIS jihadist dressed in military fatigues in American-accented English. “And may blessings and peace be upon the ones sent by the sword as a mercy to all the worlds,” he added.

The masked ISIS member continues:

Oh people, recently you have seen us on the hills of Al-Sham and Dabiq’s plain, chopping off the heads that have been carrying the cross for a long time, and today, we are on the south of Rome, on the land of Islam, Libya, sending another message.

All crusaders: safety for you will be only wishes especially if you are fighting us all together. Therefore we will fight you all together. The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama bin Laden’s body in, we swear to Allah we will mix it with your blood.

After the ISIS leader finishes speaking, his fellow terrorists then commence the beheading of the 21 Egyptian Christians. “And we will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission, the promise of our Prophet, peace be upon him,” The militant leader says after his comrades slaughter the Christian hostages.

Censorship is Damage

We have this thing called "the Internet" that routes around it.

Death to the Iran Deal

There is a general rule of thumb that if you have to make a deal, you often have to make a bad one.

The problems raised by authorities ranging from Henry Kissinger, the country’s most senior former secretary of state, to Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia’s junior senator, can be summed up in three points:

●First, a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and temporarily restrict that capability.

●Second, in the course of the negotiations, the Obama administration has declined to counter increasingly aggressive efforts by Iran to extend its influence across the Middle East and seems ready to concede Tehran a place as a regional power at the expense of Israel and other U.S. allies.

●Finally, the Obama administration is signaling that it will seek to implement any deal it strikes with Iran — including the suspension of sanctions that were originally imposed by Congress — without a vote by either chamber. Instead, an accord that would have far-reaching implications for nuclear proliferation and U.S. national security would be imposed unilaterally by a president with less than two years left in his term.

We don't have to make this deal.

"Bush Lied."

Well, at least, he demonstrated substantial self-control in disseminating secret information that could have helped his cause in 2006.

Cause and effect

For a good look at how hard it is to make sense when discussing cause and effect in complex systems with ill-understood dynamics, try this article and the associated discussion in the comments.  I'm not sure most of us ever get beyond the magic stage.

The Wind Under the Stars

I don't think I've ever heard wind like tonight.

The wind was on the withered heath,
but in the forest stirred no leaf:
there shadows lay by night and day,
and dark things silent crept beneath.

The wind came down from mountains cold,
and like a tide it roared and rolled;
the branches groaned, the forest moaned,
and leaves were laid upon the mould.

The wind went on from West to East;
all movement in the forest ceased,
but shrill and harsh across the marsh
its whistling voices were released.

The grasses hissed, their tassels bent,
the reeds were rattling—on it went
o'er shaken pool under heavens cool
where racing clouds were torn and rent.

It passed the lonely Mountain bare
and swept above the dragon's lair:
there black and dark lay boulders stark
and flying smoke was in the air.

It left the world and took its flight
over the wide seas of the night.
The moon set sail upon the gale,
and stars were fanned to leaping light.