Pen and Phone

People are really mad about this letter to Iran.

But to directly communicate with a foreign power in order to undermine ongoing negotiations? That is appalling. And just imagine what those same Republicans would have said if Democratic senators had tried such a thing when George W. Bush was president.

Yeah, good thing nothing like that ever happened.

Bear in mind this was not an official trip to Europe and the Middle East. Kerry was not visiting as a representative of the United States Government. He was in no way commissioned by the executive branch to negotiate alliances with foreign countries. So what was he doing there?

What, never? Well, hardly ever.

[Senator] Obama has built much of his campaign for the Presidency on the fact that he has been against the war in Iraq from the very beginning and would demand an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq were he to be elected President. Yet, on his first trip to Iraq recently, he is alleged to have attempted to negotiate a delay in troop withdrawal from Iraq....

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari reports that Obama made his ‘demands’ the central focus of their talks while he was in Iraq.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops – and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its “state of weakness and political confusion.”

But that's just a tu quoque; to stand on it would be an informal fallacy. So let's give a positive argument.

Article I of the US Constitution gives Congress the following powers related to foreign policy, none of which are subject to checks and balances from Article II.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises...

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States...

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water[.]

In addition to that, Congress has the power to raise and order all the armed forces of the United States, checked by the President's commanding of those powers.

The President's powers to conduct foreign policy are all checked by the Congress. Treaties require the advice and consent of a supermajority of the Senate. Appointing ambassadors requires advice and consent. Commanding the armed forces at war, in theory if less in practice lately, requires Congressional consent to having a war.

I say 'in theory if less in practice lately' with Obama's Libyan adventure especially in mind. The President has frequently acted as if the Constitutional checks on his power did not exist. Similarly, he has ignored his oath to faithfully enforce the laws that Congress has enacted whenever he sees fit to do so, not just in the recent 'executive amnesty' but by directing those under his direct control not to enforce laws nor to defend certain laws in court when they came under challenge.

Why should he not expect the Congress to respond in kind, and to wield its 'pen and phone' authority with as little regard for him as he has shown for them?

If he wants a new atmosphere of comity and cooperation with the Congress, the ball is very much in his court.

Today's Quiz: Are You A Socialist?

It's the Socialist Worker's quiz, so they'd like to convince you that the answer is "yes." But they had to admit that, for me, the answer is "no."

There's a weird throwaway question about the US military being a force for good in the world, which of course it is -- but that's not really a socialism issue, is it? I wondered if it might be a trick question, since some people sometimes argue that the military is the most socialist part of the United States. (It's not a very good argument.)

Partly the problem is that the quiz runs things together that don't belong together. Do I think that schools, clean water, and hospitals should never be run for profit? Well, no; but I also think that there's a huge difference between "schools," "hospitals," and "clean water." To me, that's not a category of things that should be run for the common good instead of private interest; it's an ascending scale. I don't think I'd ever be annoyed at someone for starting a private school, even if they charged a fortune for attendance. We've just seen an argument from Tex that it can make really good sense to run a private hospital business alongside a public one. Even if we agree that we should provide some sort of public access to health care, that doesn't imply that every hospital should be nonprofit.

There are several things about water that make it a stronger case for a public approach. In a city, the infrastructure concerns are going to mean that you'll almost certainly get a monopoly, and monopolies are problematic. We often address them with public regulation. Too, even in rural areas where people have wells, the nature of water means that the water table under your house is the same one your neighbor is pulling from. Let's say that you had a neighbor who came in, dug a well, and began bottling and selling the water to such a degree that everyone began having trouble getting water. Your wells might even go dry, but he can dig a deeper one with the profits from the water he sold after sucking it out of the same water table you were using. When dealing with these kinds of issues, at least some democratic controls on the market activity often make good sense.

Embrace Economic "Degrowth"

Today's novel economic concept to come across my desk: "degrowth."

If you watch the video at the second link, you'll learn that "there's no set script" for degrowth, but there are a lot of really bad ideas he's prepared to spitball. The problem is that none of them work with the laws of economics as I understand them. The first link wants to turn things like Airbnb into a sharing service that provides "the benefits of traditional employment." Nobody's stopping you from setting up such a service now. It just won't go anywhere, because it will provide the same service to the customer as Airbnb but at a higher price. Why shouldn't they prefer to contract the service for less?

Maybe you can make them feel guilty about it, but I doubt it.

Price transparency in medicine

Guess what happens when a single-payer system is unsatisfactory enough to allow a vibrant cash-only market to spring up next to it.

Crowdsourcing

From Cafe Hayek:

Under such rules (along, of course, with basic laws of property, contract, and tort) – and in a culture that honors bourgeois virtues and applauds innovators – there will be lots of entrepreneurs striving to earn profit (and respect) by creating new goods and services. These entrepreneurs will compete with each other, as well as with producers of older, established goods and services. The goods and services that yield profits today for their producers will be the ones that consumers, spending their own money and only their own money, today choose above all others. No finer, more objective, or more accurate test is available for determining how scarce resources should be used.

Tomorrow, of course, entrepreneurs will introduce newer products and newer production processes. Some of these, tested by market competition, will succeed. Others will fail. Some older goods and services, once profitable to produce, will become unprofitable to produce. Resources, including human labor, will shift from these older to the newer lines of production.

And so it goes in a free, prosperous, and growing market economy, day-in and day-out; year-in, year-out; decade-in, decade-out. Such an economy is controlled or guided by no one, yet it serves everyone remarkable well – if, though, with the requirement that everyone abide by the rules of the game. These rules are those listed above. These rules imply that no one has a right to any one else’s property – a rule that, in turn, implies that no producer has a right either to prevent other producers (even those in foreign countries) from competing for the patronage of her customers, or to obstruct her customers from shifting their expenditures away from her product offerings.

No one guarantees that the choices won't be intensely annoying, of course. I often observe that rich people would spend their money much better if they consulted me about their choices. But on the whole, the choices made by free crowds vastly outperform those mandated by wise leaders. Why this should be so is a mystery to me, but I can't dispute it, and therefore discount all economic theories that depend on confidence in the unfettered choice of the single person who is advocating them.

Racist Republicans

The NYT cropped former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush out of a picture of the Selma march.  All that remains now is to photoshop Hillary Clinton in.

ISIS fraying?

If any of this is true, it seems a hopeful sign.  The article has two helpful maps.  One shows areas controlled by ISIS and others by some combination of "government and other rebels," which is an interesting way of having to put it.  The other shows the origins of foreign supporters traveling to ISIS.  Much of the article concerns tensions between locals and these new arrivals, some of whom don't particularly want to fight and all of whom, no matter how dreary a situation they left in their home countries, are accustomed to a higher standard of living than the locals.  Many apparently are drawn by the idea of a culture in which rabid Islam is in the ascendancy, but had little notion what that might look like close up, especially if their clique isn't in charge.

I have slowly been reading "In the Shadow of the Sword," about the roots of Islam.  I was skeptical of the author's thesis, that Islam developed in Syria, in a hotbed of conflict among Jewish and Christian sects over monotheism, and only later became associated with Mecca and Medina.  But he makes a good case.

If ISIS did collapse, of course, it's not as though sane people would take over; Iran, more likely.  Yesterday almost 50 Republican senators signed a letter helpfully explaining to Iran how treaties work in this country.  Which Republican senators refused to sign? Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Dan Coats, Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, and Rob Portman.

Defense

From a Gutenberg project about natural disasters, in the flood section, a story about a man-made flood:

Leyden [the Netherlands] was besieged [by Spanish forces in 1574]. The town was well fortified. The Spaniards endeavored to starve the city into surrender. They swarmed about the outworks and taunted the famished people as "beggars." The contest grew daily more hopeless for the besieged. Hundreds were dead of starvation. But the survivors hurled defiance at the Spaniards. They were digging up every green thing, devouring roots of grass, old leather, offal, anything that could in the least aid to sustain life. But "so long as a dog barked in the city, the Spaniards might know they held out." A few faint-hearted ones pleaded with the burgomaster to yield. But the brave Van der Werff, gaunt, pale, wearied with care and watching, told them they could only surrender when they had eaten him; so long as he lived, the city should not yield.

It was a terrible time. Scores crept into out-of-the-way places to die, that their misery might not be seen by their friends. The Dutch without wished to help their friends within--but the lines of the enemy were too strong. As the last resort, the "Silent Man" ordered the dykes cut. It was done. The country folk abandoned their homes. A fleet of two hundred vessels sailed in over the land fifteen miles. They reached the Landscheiding, a great dyke five miles from the city. Three quarters of a mile nearer the town was a second dyke, the Greenway; within that was the Kirkway.

The rising water frightened the Spaniards. But at ten inches, it stopped. The Spaniards renewed their taunts. Again it rose two feet; the vessels drew nearer: then they lay aground in sight of the famished citizens. Then arose a strong southwest wind--and after days of weary waiting, the fleet was close on the last line of fortifications. It was the first of October. In the morning the "beggars" of the sea would make a desperate attack upon the Spanish hordes.

In the night there came a terrible crash. The sea had undermined the wall. The citizens were filled with panic, fearing an immediate irruption of the enemy. They stood under arms through the weary night.

The morning came. Not a Spaniard was in sight. Fearing a sortie of the hunger-maddened people, they had fled in the darkness. The city was saved by the drowning of the land.

A story is told of Frederick the Great, illustrative of the same indomitable spirit. After establishing the supremacy of Prussia, he was suspected of designs upon the independence of the Netherlands. The Dutch envoy at his court, newly appointed, Frederick endeavored to overawe by a display of his power. A great military review was held; and Frederick, who took a peculiar delight in tall men, caused troop after troop of his gigantic grenadiers to file before the weazened little Dutchman, and asked his opinion. Of each one the envoy said: "Very good, but not tall enough." Frederick, much nettled at this oft repeated criticism, asked the ambassador what he meant by it. "I mean," he retorted, "that we can flood our country twelve feet deep!" Frederick left the Dutch in peace.

Entropy

The Belmont Club:

A striking aspect of this phenomenon of capture is its anonymity, at least as far as most commentary is concerned. PJMedia ran a series called Every Single One documenting the radical takeover of the Department of Justice, and describing the individual attorneys and their resumes, close connections between EPA and environmental groups have been documented, the names and faces of the IRS people have been publicized, and one can dig some names out of government notices and letters. But this information is largely ignored, and as far as the general media is concerned decisions are made by offices or bureaus, not by people....

Deference to agency interpretation of law becomes an invitation to the staff to play games with the language, finding and exploiting ambiguities where none should exist. Judicial reliance on agency expertise triggers skewed analyses; staff knows how things are supposed to come out, and knows that no judge will contradict it technical conclusions. To the informed, EPA science and risk assessments have been jokes for a generation.

“Every once in a while, the Supreme Court will rebel against fictions,” DeLong writes, but most of the time we just accept the diktat of the downloaded code — and accept the fictions. Administrative law is just one mechanism. The media, academy, the entertainment industry — everybody — is selling you their narrow agenda. Suppose the president says there are only “lone wolves”. Then by gum, there are only lone wolves. Shouldn’t we in rational ignorance trust the president of the United States?

People who wonder how marriage went from an institution involving men and women to almost any combination conceivable in the blink of an eye, wonder at record winters in an age of ”Global Warming”, who ask themselves why their “Affordable Care” is so expensive and why the “free and open internet” has 300 pages of secret regulations; who puzzle over the identity of the masked attackers who attack centers of population every day are basically watching the effects of industrial scale entropy. They are watching knowledge — indeed common sense — being erased or obfuscated; destroyed at a rate that would defy the understanding of few guys wielding hammers.

A Confluence of Posts About Women

A number of friends from outside the United States sent me women-oriented stuff this morning. I was surprised by the alignment until I came to understand that today is apparently "International Women's Day." Americans don't do "international" things, no more this than the metric system: in America the whole month of March is "Women's History Month," though we tend to forget that if we don't belong to institutions that remind us (as we do "Black History Month," which falls in February).

Nevertheless, there were some good pieces! Here are the three best.

A brief piece on Phillipa of Hainault (see also the sidebar, as she has a permanent reference here at the Hall).

On Marozia, the woman who was the power behind three Popes.

A paper on the ways in which women in the Medieval Islamic world wielded power and influence.

By the way, Ranger Up has a new Joan of Arc shirt that some of you might like for a brave woman in your life.

Happy International Women's Day! I think I'll go have lunch with my mother -- she lives on the other side of the state, but my sister is visiting from Wyoming, so it's a good day to catch them both.

UPDATE: Here's a good one: Betty McIntosh, one of the few women to work in the OSS during WWII, a pioneer in psychological warfare, turns 100 years old.

On Rare Expressions

A very nice piece on the use of unusual points of reference, ending in a great example from a piece on Wimbledon.

I do remember what Kretchmer eventually said. He said, “Maybe one reader in ten thousand would get that.”

I said, “Look: you have bought thirteen thousand words about Wimbledon with no other complaint. I beg you to keep it as it is for that one reader.”

He said, “Sold!"

Sprezzatura is a term of art in what are sometimes called "Historical European Martial Arts," or sometimes "Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe." That's because -- as the article points out -- it turns up in Castiglione’s “The Courtier" from 1528.

It's a wider ethic, though. The guy who first taught me to ride motorcycles put it this way: "Do you want to know what the Holy Grail is for motorcycle riding?" he asked. "It's to be smooth. Everything, smooth."

I Doubt The Validity Of This Premise

"This film points to ways in which we can say what's on our minds without being accused of being bigots," says Trevor Phillips, former chief of equality measures in the UK, of his new documentary "Things We Won't Say About Race That Are True."

Valley Forge & Palace Coups

Sarah Hoyt wants to urge Republicans to stick it out, in spite of the problems resulting from a bad elite that seems to be committed to service to corporate donors against the good of the nation.

This week has been a tough one. And the reason it’s been a tough one is not just the Republicans funding the Obama amnesty nor the “net neutrality” boondoggle where apparently even passing it won’t tell us what’s in it...

Our current administration has brought us far closer to nuclear war than we’ve been since the Soviet Union collapsed in on its corrupt self. And worse, it will be a multiparty war that will leave at best 1/3 of the world in ruins. And what they’re doing to the new generation, between indoctrination, unemployment and setting the sexes against each other doesn’t bear thinking too deeply about, lest the black pit yawns beneath our feet.

One way or another, we already have two more years of this. And that’s enough to make that snow-laden wind of despair howl around our flimsy tents.

If the world were just the US. If we didn’t have to factor on anything from outside, I’d still say “yeah, let it burn is an option.”

But is it?

Like it or not, the Pax Americana is AMERICANA. If we collapse, the world falls in on itself, and more importantly, we get truly overrun. Because we’re still relatively stable. The 7 million of Obama’s imperial amnesty won’t be but a drop in the bucket.

On the Left, though, the mood is not any better. They are also concerned that corporate mastery of their political class is so complete that there may simply be no hope at the national level -- perhaps in a few cities, a few states:

The devolution of the political system through the infusion of corporate money, the rewriting of laws and regulations to remove checks on corporate power, the seizure of the press, especially the electronic press, by a handful of corporations to silence dissent, and the rise of the wholesale security and surveillance state have led to “the death of the party system” and the emergence of what Ali called “an extreme center.”...

“This extreme center, it does not matter which party it is, effectively acts in collusion with the giant corporations, sorts out their interests and makes wars all over the world,” Ali said. “This extreme center extends throughout the Western world. This is why more and more young people are washing their hands of the democratic system as it exists....”

Ali said he was “shocked and angry about all the hopes that were invested in Obama by the left.” He lambasted what he called the American “obsession with identity.” Barack Obama, he said, “is an imperial president and behaves like one, regardless of the color of his skin.” Ali despaired of the gender politics that are fueling a possible run for the White House by Hillary Clinton, who would be the first woman president.

“My reply is, ‘So bloody what?’ ” he said. “If she is going to bomb countries and put drones over whole continents, what difference does her gender make if her politics are the same? That is the key. The political has been devalued and debased under neoliberalism. People retreat into religion or identity. It’s disastrous. I wonder if it is even possible to create something on a national scale in the United States.”

I'm attentive enough to recognize that there's a common theme here, outside of the 'center' (extreme or otherwise). There's a great deal of extra-national power that's come to dominate the governments of all major nations, our own included. Both the hard right and the hard left almost despair at its wealth and power.

Perhaps the real enemy isn't the left at all.

UPDATE: More on the mutiny.

Two History Quizzes

The first one prompts you to put historical events in order. I scored 98% as I got Catherine the Great wrong. I knew dates for the others, but I was just trying to guess based on her clothing where she fit into it.

The second one just asks you which of two things is older. The name of the quiz gives away the game, so it's really not hard at all. Kind of fun, though.

In Deference to Tex's Point

A conversation between a concealed carry instructor and a veteran police officer about how to handle a traffic stop.



He raises a good point about the rookie officer who is probably bracketing you, and who has been tasked with killing you if you prove dangerous. Frequently when a deer hunter accidentally kills another hunter in the forest, it's because he's there to shoot a deer, he's expecting a deer, he's thinking about a deer, and when there's sudden movement the first thing his brain says is: "DEER!"

You have to assume the same thing about the nervous rookie sweating it out back there. His brain is in a totally different place, and he may well kill you on the occasion of any stimulus that falls in on the internal monologue screaming through his head.

H/t: SOF.

Sensitivity Abounds

The US military's own court system has ordered the Army to be sensitive when it refers to an individual who admitted betraying his oaths towards the Army and the nation it defends.

The Army now must refer to incarcerated soldier Chelsea Manning as "she," or in gender-neutral terms, a military appeals court says.

The 27-year old Manning, a former intelligence analyst, is undergoing gender reassignment from male to female while serving a 35-year sentence in the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for leaking classified material to the website WikiLeaks. Previously known as Bradley Manning, the young private first class legally changed her name last April to Chelsea.

Apparently they must also issue "female undergarments" for "her" use in the male prison unit at Leavenworth. Special snowflakes must be handled with extreme care.

Mommies and states

Anna Mussmann on our culture's discomfort with the clash between moral relativism and the demands of motherhood:

To varying degrees, our ancestors tended to believe that correct beliefs and behavior should be enforced for the good of the group. Religious heresy should be curbed, political unrest removed, and destabilizing immorality punished. Nowadays, we value diversity and individual expression more than the strength and security of a monolithic culture. As long as no one is obviously hurting others with their beliefs, choices, or actions, we argue for live-and-let live morality in most spheres. It is not our job, we think, to judge the guy who dumped his wife, critique the “open marriage” of the couple down the street, or even to tell our transcendental brother-in-law that his potted plants don’t hear when he talks to them. We are not our brothers’ keepers.

However, as new parents quickly discover, children who do not experience parental judgment become intolerable, unhappy people. Mothers are forced to become authorities for the sake of their families. They must frequently overcome the will of a child (sometimes by force) and say things like, “No, you may not run into the street, no matter how devastatingly disappointing this is,” “No, you are not allowed to use the toothbrushes and toothpaste to create art on the walls,” “No, you may not attend that sleepover at your friend’s house while his parents are out-of-town.”

One way to resolve this conflict is to relieve mothers other their duties to keep their children perfectly safe 24 hours a day and to teach them right from wrong. The government is standing by to take over these obligations, and it is not troubled by any discomfort when it acts judgmental or punishes heresy.

No Privileges for Flags

UC Irvine votes to de-privilege the American flag, putting it on a par with flags in general, all of which are banned.

You might wonder how it helps freedom of expression to suppress the... ah, freedom... to express... um, political sentiments via flag displays.

But take heart! Now the flag of the nation that pays for the existence of this university shall enjoy no privilege over, say, Nazi or Soviet flags. We've become broad minded indeed out there in California. The nation that supports the greatest university system on earth is now on par with this:



No differences there worth... expressing.

Frank J on Science

Really, science is a great tool for using logic to find the answer to absolutely any question — as long as the question isn’t particularly important.

Against Spock

Not everyone loved the character all that much. Oddly, this review is focused on the movies and later series.

Ferguson Update

In the wake of its report on the Ferguson PD, Eric Holder says the Federal government is prepared to take any steps necessary to enforce compliance with reforms up to and including dismantling the department entirely. The President has suggested that, while he doesn't view Ferguson as "typical," he thinks it's not all that uncommon across the country.

Community Standards Differ

...but they're supposed to differ from one community to another.

Is diversity valuable because the attachments we bring -- 'a wise Latina' -- alter our perspectives? Or is it to be feared, precisely because it makes it hard to detach yourself from the interests of your particular group? Apparently for UCLA, the answer is, "it depends on the question of to what groups you belong." Wise Latinas are welcome. Jews, not so much.

Christians of the wrong stripe probably don't come out all that well either.

Profit & Externalities

We were talking about externalities the other day, because libertarians like the concept as a way of talking about the costs your activities impose on others. The economic concept can be widely applied, but it really is an economic concept originally:

The notion of “externalities” has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.

We can think of a time when the American West seemed boundless, not just unspoiled but unspoilable. Remember Clint Eastwood's film Pale Rider:



So the claim this article is making is this:

Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. Zero.

The author thinks this makes the global economy a fraud, but that's too strong. Two things occur to me reading it through:

1) A lot of these economic costs are 'greenhouse gases,' about the effects of which there is still some debate.

2) On the other hand, there's a sense to it. The law of conservation of energy and matter suggests you shouldn't be able to get more out of a thing than you take from it. That applies to systems as well as objects. If we consider the Earth as a system, of course there's no profit to be made from re-ordering the parts of the system in various ways.

What really matters is the order. If I take gold out of the ground and turn it into wire, and then put that wire into a computer, I can do sorts of work I couldn't do before. If I take the uranium in the ground, use power from burning coal to refine it, and then use the refined uranium to run a reactor, I can capture lots of energy that was otherwise existing as a kind of potential in the earth.

Putting things in the right order is therefore very helpful. It's good to provide incentives for people to do the work necessary to get that done. What we call "profit" is or ought to be a sort of incentive to do work of this kind. It's good work, because it's good for people to have things put in the right order.

God creates. We are merely re-ordering things, bringing to actuality what already exists in potency. There are wise and foolish ways to alter the order of the things in the world. We should take some care to be wise.

High horses

Fr. de Souza on disgraced IPCC Rajendra Pachauri's elevation of global warming into a religion:

Religion is not an ideology, though it can be corrupted to become one. Religion treats as fixed those points of revelation that have as their object that which is unchanging, namely God. Yet their application to the social order precisely requires a response to changing circumstances, including the insights of other disciplines, including economics, politics, history and the environmental sciences. That’s why there is no such thing as Christian tax policy, or trade policy or climate policy. For example, Christians have it as a matter of divine revelation that concern for the poor is not optional, but essential. How to best assist the poor remains a matter of differing circumstances and consequently competing policy choices.

H/t comments section at Chicago Boyz.

Not looking at words

"We don't look at four words," Justice Kagan declared during the Supreme Court arguments this week on ACA subsidies in federal-exchange states.  Not if they're inconvenient words, we don't!  If these four words on the specific subject under dispute supported the White House's position, though, we'd sure be looking at them, wouldn't we?  In further discussion it developed that the four words were being taken out of context.  As we've learned in the last four or five years, that's a glaring signal for "We're straight-up lying to you."

The ghost of Willie Horton

Politico argues that politicians on both sides of the aisle have been hagridden by the drubbing Michael Dukakis took with the Willie Horton ads.  When combined with his flaccid response to a law-and-order question during the 1988 presidential campaign, the Horton ads rightfully pegged Dukakis as confused and ineffectual on violent crime.  Almost 30 years later, however, there is growing sentiment that law and order has stopped being about violent crime and drifting into obsessive microcontrol--so much so that the dreaded Charles Koch is teaming up with people like George Soros and Corey Booker to spend oceans of money on a libertarian anti-criminalization campaign.  Sometimes odd bedfellows can agree that government is too big.

I'd like to see the criminal justice system continue to come down like a big hammer on people who think other people's pockets are their natural fishing grounds.  It's bad enough when they use the voting booth to satisfy their avarice, but if they're prepared to knock people on the head over it, they need to be put away.  Still, I wouldn't lift a finger to help convict someone of violations of 3/4 of the nonsense that's ended up on the criminal statute books.  I'd be some prosecutor's nightmare of a juror.  Someone's upset that Martha Stewart may have misspoken during an interrogation about insider trading that no one ever was able to prove?  Civil court, please.  Tsarnaev?  Shoot him, the sooner the better.

Email Insecurity

Maybe the answer is that she wanted China and Russia to read her mail. It's just an expansive head-fake to help them feel comfortable with American diplomacy, because they think they know what you think, but you really know that you said what you wanted them to think you thought on a server they could easily hack into and read.

I mean, that's what I'd have been doing if I'd done this. It's key, though, that they don't think she's smart enough to out-think them. And I think she's got that part of the play down.

"This needs to stop, and now."

When did sports journalism start hectoring its audience to show more sensitivity? I don't read a lot of it, so maybe I missed it.

My first exposure to Ms. Rousey was in Expendables III. I don't watch television, let alone Pay Per View, so I had no idea who she was when she showed up as the bouncer-turned-mercenary in that movie. Now, movies are fantasy, but she beat the crap out of not just one but a whole horde of men in that film. And, I gather, she does have a dominant record in her sport -- really, quite impressive.

So when the guy said, "that Rousey could beat 50 percent of the male bantamweights in the UFC," I'd take that less as an expression of her superlative glory and more as an empirical claim. Can she? Can she beat any of them?

The author apparently feels the answer is definitely not, and having to admit that takes away from all she's accomplished.

But why don't we ask her? Does she want to try?

In related news, the Army announced this week that it's opening 4,100 new Special Operations jobs to women, including 18 Bravo (Special Forces Weapons Sergeant) and other positions long considered the last redoubt of men. I presume women will have to compete for these jobs in some manner. If we agree that it's insulting even to suggest an equal competition with men to the finest female fighter America has ever produced, doesn't that say something about what will be necessary to fill these positions with women?

I'm told I need to stop talking about this. And now.

UPDATE: Ms. Rousey says she thinks it's at least possible that she could beat every male bantamweight. That's admirable self-confidence, and given her record she's earned the right to some self-confidence. Let her try.

Isn't That Illegal?

So, a friend of mine on the Left -- a gentleman scholar, holds a Master's Degree -- responded to my incredulity about claims that the Speaker of the House might be guilty of near-treason for inviting the Prime Minister of Israel to speak before Congress by asking, "Wasn't the invitation against the law?"

Why, no. In fact, why would it be? Congress has Article I powers related to foreign policy including -- not to put too fine a point on it -- the power to declare war! Why shouldn't they be able to invite, say, heads of state from the region where they might be thinking about possibly declaring war to give an opinion relevant to the discussion? I mean, they can order me or you to come testify about whatever they want. Why shouldn't they be able to invite pretty much anyone who has cause to be in the United States legally?

Give credit where credit is due: the propaganda has apparently been extremely strong on this occasion.

New York City Schools to Close for Muslim Holidays

That's interesting.

The official announcement by de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina came four hours later at PS/IS 30 in Brooklyn, where officials said 36 percent of students were absent the last time Eid al-Adha fell on a school day, according to WCBS.... Official estimates of the number of Muslims living in New York City vary from 600,000 to 1 million, with Columbia University estimating that 95 percent of Muslim children attended the city’s public schools in 2008, composing 10 percent of the public education population.

So, 90% of the children are not Muslims, but nearly four in ten didn't bother to come on Eid al-Adha?

On More Important, If Less Urgent, Business

A new argument that King Arthur fought out of Strathclyde.

I've always thought the "northern Arthur" arguments were stronger than the "southern Arthur" arguments, though the latter have historically been much more popular among historians. I suspect some part of that is the outsized influence that England and English sentiment play on the development of history as a discipline, though: where Oxford and Cambridge lead, it's hard not to follow.

Still, I take 'the City of Legions' to be much more plausibly Chester than Caerleon. The center of resistance to the invading Anglo-Saxons may well have been the Christian kingdoms in the north, Strathclyde and Dal Riada, which are likely centers because they had logistical support from areas the Anglo-Saxons never penetrated, and a proven naval trade relationship with Ireland that would have remained undisturbed during the Saxon invasions. Since the evidence of graves suggests a reverse-migration of Saxons back to the mainland during the latter part of the Arthurian period, we have reason to think that the campaign was broadly successful for a couple of decades. That implies a powerful resistance, which is also in line with the legends, not a rag-tag band of guerrillas. Such a resistance needs a strong logistical base.

Après Hillary, le déluge

Ugly news always follows the Clintons, but rarely derails them.  This has been an especially trying week, though, with reports of Secretary Clinton's using official State Department travel as donor-maintenance junkets to the foreign governments with whom she supposedly was negotiating on behalf of the United States, and conducting most if not all of her official State Department business on a private email account, for the apparent purpose of avoiding the need to respond to FOIA requests and in an equally apparent disregard for the continued security of classified information.

Bill Scher at Politico is beginning to entertain the unthinkable:  what will happen to the 2016 race if Hillary Clinton drops out?  The assumption is that at some point this press will become so disabling that Ms. Clinton's hand will be forced.  Will it, though?  Imagine what would have happened if John Ehrlichman had been in charge of the U.S. press in the early 1970s.

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.