Blowing one's mind
I subscribe to Quora, which sometimes sends me interesting emails with questions and surprising crowd-sourced answers. In this morning's inbox was a request for recommendations of books to expand the mind. Two surprising results: I had read very, very few of the recommended books, and Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" was the hands-down consensus winner. Now I suppose I'll have to read it.
The recommendations were about 10-1 in favor of non-fiction, also surprising. After Kahneman, some of the biggest hits were Richard Feynmann's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyman" (also a favorite of mine) and various Jared Diamond works, usually "Collapse" or "Guns, Germs and Steel." Only one person suggested "Lolita," and no one seemed to care for "The Tin Drum" or "Absalom, Absalom" or "The Abolition of Man." The science fiction recommendations mostly were things I wouldn't read on a bet. "Atlas Shrugged" made a fairly frequent appearance. Lots of Malcolm Gladwell and Richard Dawkins. I expected a higher profile for "1984."
"Take wine and bullocks’ gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel..."
Turns out this Old English potion works.
The researchers tested the concoction on cultures of MRSA bacteria in synthetic wounds as well as in rats. No individual ingredient had no effect on the cultures, but the combined liquid killed almost all the cells; only about one in 1,000 bacteria survived. At more dilute concentrations, the salve didn’t kill the bacteria, but still interrupted their communication, preventing them from damaging tissues.
"The Century of the Self"
Here is a fascinating BBC documentary about the use of Freud and psychoanalysis, especially by government, during the 20th Century. It's about four hours long, but it's well worth watching. Set aside an hour a night for a few days.
Schiarazula Marazula by Giorgio Mainerio
Three variations. First, on simple guitar so you can get the sense of the piece.
Second, in a traditional style with traditional instruments.
Third, rewritten in the Romantic style with a modern orchestra.
Second, in a traditional style with traditional instruments.
Third, rewritten in the Romantic style with a modern orchestra.
"Authority and Freedom"
The roots of every good thing...
Some regard religious freedom as a product of the Enlightenment. However, the roots of a later understanding of religious freedom as articulated in Dignitatis Humanae of the Second Vatican Council lie in the Middle Ages. These roots are threefold: first, the relative academic freedom of the period together with the scholastic theological method of doubting, secondly, the rise of constitutional government and the dualism of the Church and the State in medieval society and thirdly, the theological speculation on the freedom of conscience all eventually contributed to the idea that everyone has the right to live his or her relationship with God in a freedom that is constitutionally and judicially protected against any form of coercion.
Education and Climate Change
The more you know, the more strongly you believe your side.
I'm inclined to think that this field is much like physics: there's a broad consensus that we're close to understanding what's going on, but a small minority of stubborn scientists who persistently poke holes in the proposed consensual theory that are hard to close again. I think that means that, most likely and in both cases, the overarching theory is analogous to Newtonian physics, and Aristotelian physics before that: it's going to give way fundamentally at a point we haven't quite identified yet.
That's still no reason to avoid being concerned about many conservationist issues, such as the excess of plastic wastes in the oceans. Those are clear and persuasive problems that we ought to try to fix.
In Gallup’s view, “These opposing trends by party suggest that higher levels of education reinforce core partisan positions; in this case, Republicans’ strong tendency to question or deny global warming and Democrats’ inclination to affirm it. The trends also suggest that partisanship rather than education is a main lens through which Americans view global warming and its effects, particularly for those who claim allegiance to one of the two major political parties.”I think the explanation is simpler. It's probable that they aren't being educated in the same way. The late founder of Arts & Letters Daily was chided for setting up a parallel site, Climate Debate Daily, that provides a constant feed of good arguments from both sides of the discussion. That's not how the academy operates, especially not when teaching undergrads. Those who are inclined to skepticism will look for the skeptical arguments, and educate themselves in them; those who are not will not otherwise encounter them.
I'm inclined to think that this field is much like physics: there's a broad consensus that we're close to understanding what's going on, but a small minority of stubborn scientists who persistently poke holes in the proposed consensual theory that are hard to close again. I think that means that, most likely and in both cases, the overarching theory is analogous to Newtonian physics, and Aristotelian physics before that: it's going to give way fundamentally at a point we haven't quite identified yet.
That's still no reason to avoid being concerned about many conservationist issues, such as the excess of plastic wastes in the oceans. Those are clear and persuasive problems that we ought to try to fix.
Scholarly Economics
You might be asking yourself, 'How about a Grim post fully in favor of capitalism for a change?' I can do that.
Academic conferences run on a similarly exploitative model. Those same grad students producing free work for the journals will show up early to perform free labor for the conference. Usually these conferences cost money to attend, which leads to the strange spectacle of unpaid graduate students taking money to pass on to the conference itself. They money passes through their hands and by their labor, but none of it accrues to them. They may shuttle people back and forth from airports to hotels to conference centers. They may fetch donuts and coffee for conference attendees. A capitalist model would have this being done by taxi drivers and caterers and temps from the employment service: jobs without a great deal of prestige, but whose members are at least paid for their time.
The tenured scholars exploiting the grad students and adjuncts are at least engaged in the business of education -- they are, at least, actively involved in the pursuit and distribution of knowledge. The school administrations have absorbed the lion's share of the recent increases in tuition, while leading the charge to reduce tenured faculty as teachers in favor of badly-paid adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants. This serves no one's interests except the administrators'. Students are injured by having teachers who are not as experienced or distinguished. Faculty are injured by being trapped in adjunct positions for most or all of their careers. Grad students gain valuable experience as teachers, but graduate into a career path in which their options are far less attractive than even a few years ago, and in which ever more "free work" is expected of them if they are to be considered for one of the increasingly-few tenure track positions.
This is a model built on a love of learning rather than a love of money, which seems wise and proper. It is insulated from much of the disciplines imposed by capitalism, which are alleged to lead to inequalities and unfairness. Yet it appears to be one of the most unfair and exploitative systems out there: one that provides wealth and prestige to the people at the top, on the backs of a great deal of "free" labor being provided by those struggling honorably below. It does not appear that capitalism can be blamed for these outcomes: at least under a capitalist system, the weakest members of the system would still be paid something.
The first scholarly journals appeared in 1665, and since then, they have not paid authors, peer reviewers, or editors. “All the key players have been giving away their work for 350 years,” says Suber. “Scholars write journal articles for impact, not for money. They are freed to do this because they have salaries from their institutions.” Yet the physical aspects of print technology, still cutting-edge in the seventeenth century, today limit scholars’ ability to circulate their ideas and findings. Now, Suber says, “the Internet allows them to give it away to the whole world.”...There is, actually, no guarantee that salaries from institutions exist to provide for those giving away their work. The people who need to give away work the most are graduate students and adjuncts hoping to receive, someday, one of the increasingly-few tenure track jobs. Grad students are actually paying for the privilege of access to the libraries and research facilities that would allow them to give away work for free. Adjuncts are being paid, but usually at poverty-line levels for schedules that make additional research work a massive burden. Those who run the journals enjoy tremendous prestige, which they bestow where they will in return for free labor to produce free research which -- if it is successful -- increases the prestige of the journal as well as the author. That increased prestige for the journal produces subscriptions, and therefore revenue: but there are no royalties to the author.
CONSIDER for a moment the business model of traditional subscription journals. Scholars contribute their articles to the journals for free; they receive no royalties or other revenue. Scholars also act as peer reviewers and provide other editorial services to the journals on a pro bono basis.
Academic conferences run on a similarly exploitative model. Those same grad students producing free work for the journals will show up early to perform free labor for the conference. Usually these conferences cost money to attend, which leads to the strange spectacle of unpaid graduate students taking money to pass on to the conference itself. They money passes through their hands and by their labor, but none of it accrues to them. They may shuttle people back and forth from airports to hotels to conference centers. They may fetch donuts and coffee for conference attendees. A capitalist model would have this being done by taxi drivers and caterers and temps from the employment service: jobs without a great deal of prestige, but whose members are at least paid for their time.
The tenured scholars exploiting the grad students and adjuncts are at least engaged in the business of education -- they are, at least, actively involved in the pursuit and distribution of knowledge. The school administrations have absorbed the lion's share of the recent increases in tuition, while leading the charge to reduce tenured faculty as teachers in favor of badly-paid adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants. This serves no one's interests except the administrators'. Students are injured by having teachers who are not as experienced or distinguished. Faculty are injured by being trapped in adjunct positions for most or all of their careers. Grad students gain valuable experience as teachers, but graduate into a career path in which their options are far less attractive than even a few years ago, and in which ever more "free work" is expected of them if they are to be considered for one of the increasingly-few tenure track positions.
This is a model built on a love of learning rather than a love of money, which seems wise and proper. It is insulated from much of the disciplines imposed by capitalism, which are alleged to lead to inequalities and unfairness. Yet it appears to be one of the most unfair and exploitative systems out there: one that provides wealth and prestige to the people at the top, on the backs of a great deal of "free" labor being provided by those struggling honorably below. It does not appear that capitalism can be blamed for these outcomes: at least under a capitalist system, the weakest members of the system would still be paid something.
Religious Freedom
As frequently annoys several of you, I think that economics should always and in every respect be subordinate to moral philosophy. I think that permits a great deal of freedom to pursue one's economic interests, whatever they may be. Still, when they come into conflict, I expect you to do what you think is right, not what you think is likely to make you more money. Those two things may line up, of course. When they don't, duty and virtue have priority.
I am thus inclined to view threats of economic boycotts if we do not surrender religious liberty principles as strong evidence in favor of the validity of the proposed laws. Similar evidence lies in the court rulings that bankrupt families which have tried to assert, however politely, their refusal to surrender their moral objections in favor of physical wealth.
It's not a question of agreeing with their interpretation of their faith. Some of you may; I know at least several of you do not. That is fine. We have room for disagreement.
What is important is the correctness of their priorities. When someone tries to use economics to force you to abandon morality, you are correct to stand on morals and refuse to consider economics until your moral concerns are satisfied.
The moral concerns themselves may be right or wrong. Under the First Amendment, that's not a public concern. Moral concerns arising from religious interpretations are for the religious individual to decide. Even if you think they are wrong to believe as they do, what they are certainly right about is standing up for what they believe is right instead of for what they believe will make them wealthy.
Those who would use wealth to subvert faith are not virtuous. Those who would use wealth as a lever to try to force others to abandon their faith and their morals ought not to win the day. Laws that strive to protect people from their machinations are wise laws.
If you really need a cake you will find that there are many more bakeries in America. If the wedding gift you really wanted was to force the religious to kneel before your moral opinions, that is a right you do not and ought not have.
I am thus inclined to view threats of economic boycotts if we do not surrender religious liberty principles as strong evidence in favor of the validity of the proposed laws. Similar evidence lies in the court rulings that bankrupt families which have tried to assert, however politely, their refusal to surrender their moral objections in favor of physical wealth.
It's not a question of agreeing with their interpretation of their faith. Some of you may; I know at least several of you do not. That is fine. We have room for disagreement.
What is important is the correctness of their priorities. When someone tries to use economics to force you to abandon morality, you are correct to stand on morals and refuse to consider economics until your moral concerns are satisfied.
The moral concerns themselves may be right or wrong. Under the First Amendment, that's not a public concern. Moral concerns arising from religious interpretations are for the religious individual to decide. Even if you think they are wrong to believe as they do, what they are certainly right about is standing up for what they believe is right instead of for what they believe will make them wealthy.
Those who would use wealth to subvert faith are not virtuous. Those who would use wealth as a lever to try to force others to abandon their faith and their morals ought not to win the day. Laws that strive to protect people from their machinations are wise laws.
If you really need a cake you will find that there are many more bakeries in America. If the wedding gift you really wanted was to force the religious to kneel before your moral opinions, that is a right you do not and ought not have.
Not This Time
Some folks wrote to ask about this.
Private intelligence is often a business expense, not a profit-making venture. Sometimes it's a necessary condition for protecting other business interests, especially in places like Libya. Passing on what you were collecting anyway may not require any payoff.
Sometimes, the whole thing is a purely patriotic volunteer effort from concerned citizens who just want to help hold the world together. The people I've known from the Clandestine service have been extremely patriotic, which is no surprise since they are selected in part for that kind of deep personal commitment to the good of the nation. They already have networks from their days on the job. Sometimes they pass it on, even after they retire. Maybe that's the case here and maybe not. The Clinton machine has a well-deserved bad reputation. That doesn't mean they don't know people who are better people than they are.
All of that is to say: you can try to follow the money, but there may not be any money to follow. There may be favors instead of hard currency. There may be nothing to follow at all. It might even, conceivably, have been done for all the right reasons.
Hillary's spymaster was a former director of the Clandestine Service for the CIA in Europe. He now owns his own private intelligence firms. These are not the sorts of services purchased by poor men. These are the sorts of services purchased by very, very rich men, and big well-capitalized corporations, and even governments.That's not true, actually. They're often provided for free. If you're providing free intelligence to the Clinton machine, it's with the expectation of a quid pro quo somewhere along the way. But if you're providing it to the Secretary of State, it might be for patriotic reasons entirely separate from remuneration. Say you happened to be in position to know something important, which could really help the US government get something right. And you happened to have the right personal connections -- not directly, but you knew someone who knew how to get it in Madame Secretary's daily reading list. You might very well pass it on.
Private intelligence is often a business expense, not a profit-making venture. Sometimes it's a necessary condition for protecting other business interests, especially in places like Libya. Passing on what you were collecting anyway may not require any payoff.
Sometimes, the whole thing is a purely patriotic volunteer effort from concerned citizens who just want to help hold the world together. The people I've known from the Clandestine service have been extremely patriotic, which is no surprise since they are selected in part for that kind of deep personal commitment to the good of the nation. They already have networks from their days on the job. Sometimes they pass it on, even after they retire. Maybe that's the case here and maybe not. The Clinton machine has a well-deserved bad reputation. That doesn't mean they don't know people who are better people than they are.
All of that is to say: you can try to follow the money, but there may not be any money to follow. There may be favors instead of hard currency. There may be nothing to follow at all. It might even, conceivably, have been done for all the right reasons.
A Horror Story
Imagine an eleven-year-old girl, home alone by night. A vehicle pulls into the driveway outside, and a man gets out. He comes to the door, and knocks loudly. She doesn't answer, so he goes around to each door in turn knocking on it, seeking entry. When no one comes to any door, he forces his way into the house with a prybar.
She hides in her closet, locked in a bedroom, and hears him prowling through the house. He forces his way into the room. She hears him coming her way. He opens the closet door.
He sees her.
Then, he runs away.
She hides in her closet, locked in a bedroom, and hears him prowling through the house. He forces his way into the room. She hears him coming her way. He opens the closet door.
He sees her.
Then, he runs away.
Another Lesson in Spirituality
I think this one is very helpful even for those of us who aren't planning to date, but merely have to talk to these people once in a while.
Hampsterdance
Once upon a time...
So that reminds me of this tremendously unfair and inappropriate video.
With apologies to DL Sly at least, as I don't doubt that woman can drive anything with wheels.
So that reminds me of this tremendously unfair and inappropriate video.
With apologies to DL Sly at least, as I don't doubt that woman can drive anything with wheels.
Inconceivable!
In other words, the swing votes here, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, may have voted for a liberal social policy because of a conservative method of statutory interpretation. Yes, the end result is to expand the social safety net for women. But the reason that result was reached was because of a close, conservative reading of the statute in question.
Just the Facts, Ma'am
We recently had an invigorating discussion about facts, so I thought I'd actually look the word up. I know, linguists tell us that dictionaries don't define words, they document usage. I'll make no appeals to authority here! Nonetheless, it's an interesting selection from the OED. Who knew that facts can be acts, disputed, and guilt? Or that Sgt. Friday never said,"Just the facts, Ma'am"?
Interesting that the word also carries the meaning of actions, deeds, events. Real things, indeed.
Firmly believed?
9 is interesting because it goes against what I think a fact is. I'll leave all the example sentences.
Source: "fact, n., int., and adv.". OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67478?result=1&rskey=b6Jdx4& (accessed March 24, 2015).
fact, n., int., and adv.
Etymology: < classical Latin factum deed, action, event, occurrence, achievement, misdeed, real happening, result of doing, something done, in post-classical Latin also thing that has really occurred or is actually the case, thing known to be true (11th cent.; from 13th cent. in British sources), case, legal dispute (from 13th cent. in British sources), use as noun of neuter past participle of facere to make, do < an extended form of the Indo-European base of do v.
I. Senses relating primarily to action.
1. An action, a deed, a course of conduct; (formerly also occas.) †an effect, a result. Also as a mass noun: action, deeds, as opposed to words. Now somewhat rare.
Interesting that the word also carries the meaning of actions, deeds, events. Real things, indeed.
II. Senses relating primarily to truth.
6. Law
a. The sum of circumstances and incidents of a case, looked at apart from their legal bearing.
b. In pl. with the same sense. Also: items of information used or usable as evidence.
7. That which is known (or firmly believed) to be real or true; what has actually happened or is the case; truth attested by direct observation or authentic testimony; reality.
Firmly believed?
8a. A thing that has really occurred or is actually the case; a thing certainly known to be a real occurrence or to represent the truth. Hence: a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to an inference, a conjecture, or a fiction; a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based on it.
b. With the and following clause or preposition.
(a) The actual occurrence of an event; the real existence of a situation or state of affairs.
E.g.: 1986 Amer. Scholar 65 572/1 The fact of their nationality colors the way men and women think, particularly about politics and society.
(b) The circumstance that something is the case.
c. Uses emphasizing the truth of an assertion, esp. in fixed phrases.
(a) The (honest) truth. Freq. in the fact is with that-clause, esp. asserting something surprising, unwelcome, or controversial, or making an admission; also colloq. (orig. U.S.) without the.
(b) A true statement. Freq. in (and) that's a fact.
d. A person, an institution, etc., undoubtedly in existence; a person or thing experienced or seen.
9 is interesting because it goes against what I think a fact is. I'll leave all the example sentences.
9. A piece of information allegedly or conceivably true; something presented as a fact (in sense A. 8a) but which is disputed or unproven; (more strongly) an unproved assertion, an allegation.
1566 W. Painter Palace of Pleasure I. lii. f. 304, I humblie beseche you to tell me the truth of this facte.1632 J. Hayward tr. G. F. Biondi Eromena 21 They resolved that the Admirall should goe disguised..to assure himselfe of the fact [It. fatto].1699 tr. C. de Saint-Evremond Arguments M. Herard 113 The Fact is false, there has been no dissipation of the Cardinal's Goods by Monsieur Mazarin.a1729 S. Clarke Serm. (1730) V. i. 8 It would have been absurd to allege, in preaching to Unbelievers, a Fact which itself presupposed the Truth of Christ's Mission.1797 Morning Chron. 27 Aug. 2/4 If another soldier should call you a jail-bird, and the truth of the fact be notorious.1824 Westm. Rev. 2 209 This is..a false fact, supported by a supposed motive.1872 W. H. Lamon Life Abraham Lincoln xi. 236 Douglas denied the fact; and Lincoln attempted to prove his statement by reading a certain passage from Holland's ‘Life of Van Buren’.1941 A. M. Lindbergh Diary 13 Oct. in War within & Without (1980) 233 It bases its accusations on false statements and inaccurate facts.1968 Hartford (Connecticut) Courant 29 Aug. 16/4 One cannot help but question the credibility of the writer's facts.2002 Vanity Fair June 160/3 Waksal hotly disputed some of the facts in that story.
10. Guilt, especially actual guilt as opposed to suspicion. Obs.
Phrases
P9. orig. U.S. "just the facts ma'am" and variants: used with reference to the eliciting or presentation of an unembellished or straightforward account of factual information. Also attrib.: strictly factual; unembellished, dry.With allusion to the investigative technique of police detective Sergeant Joe Friday in the U.S. radio and television series Dragnet (first broadcast in 1949), although the exact phrase ‘Just the facts ma'am’ did not occur in either the television or radio series.
Compounds
C1 a. fact-fetishism n.
1957 D. MacDonald Triumph of Fact iii, in Anchor Rev. No. 2. 122 Fact-fetishism is to some extent a class phenomenon.
1964 K. Winetrout in I. L. Horowitz New Sociol. 149 We wind up with fact-fetishism, with a ‘social science of the narrow focus, the trivial detail, the abstracted almighty unimportant fact’.
2010 P. Garrett Victorian Empiricism 201 An all too familiar definition of empiricism as fact-fetishism.
C2. fact-proof adj. impervious to facts, willing to disregard facts.
1828 Foreign Q. Rev. Feb. 28 Nothing softer than the Reviewer's fact-proof cranium could resist it.
1909 G. B. Shaw John Bull's Other Island p. ix, He is never quite the hysterical, nonsense-crammed, fact-proof, truth-terrified, unballasted sport of all the bogy panics..that now calls itself ‘God's Englishman’.
2010 Sydney Morning Herald (Nexis) 2 Nov. 11 So anger is a standard tool, used by both sides of politics. Is there anything new about it? One striking feature of rage 2010 seems to be that it is increasingly fact-proof.
Source: "fact, n., int., and adv.". OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67478?result=1&rskey=b6Jdx4& (accessed March 24, 2015).
A Plea For Reform
...to any Constitutional attorney: I can’t pay you (see above), but I have a tax return that will make your eyes bleed. Get me in front of a jury or, better yet, the Supreme Court, and let us ask 12 or nine reasonable people if the burden of completing this particular tax return – a requirement I must meet to retain my liberty and my property – is reasonable or not. And if just one of the jury or bench believes that a reasonably educated person could accurately complete my tax return in a reasonable period, I’ll be happily defeated – as long as he shows me how.
Otherwise, use me as a legal guinea pig to pull down this entire rotten structure that turns good people into unwilling law breakers or liars of both... Our tax code is so complex that people our government deems too poor to buy their own health insurance must fork over nearly a tenth of their income just to comply with it.
History and narrative
David Foster has up an interesting post about fiction and non-fiction.
In recent years I've been reading more history than was my early habit, when I tended more to fiction. I find that I have a hard time remembering the history and keeping it straight unless I can tie it into fictional worlds. Modern fiction set in historical periods can be a problem, since most authors jam everything so full of anachronisms, but this problem can be ameliorated slightly by reading fiction written during the time in question. The trick is not to take the fiction as an accurate statement of history, but as a suggestion of what facts an author of that period took for granted, and what things hadn't even occurred to him yet.
Malaria and flowers
How malaria makes its hosts more inviting to mosquitoes when it's time to jump ship:
Plasmodium's ancestors lost the ability to photosynthesize a long time ago. But they still hold onto some of the ancestral enzymes from the bacteria that their forebears swallowed 1.3 billion years ago. As a result, Plasmodium is weirdly similar to flowers and trees. Some scientists have even taken advantage of this evolutionary kinship by looking at weed-killers as potential drugs for malaria.
This ancient heritage also explains why Plasmodium can smell like lemons. Odom and her colleagues found that the parasite make pinene and limonene using enzymes that are related to the ones that plants use to make these chemicals.
There are reasons to think that the parasite are using these chemicals to lure mosquitoes. While we're painfully aware of the appetite mosquitoes have for blood, the fact is that mosquitoes also feed on flower nectar. They depend on the nectar for sugar they need to fuel their flights. Many insects are keenly sensitive to certain colors and odors that flowers produce, which guide them reliably to their next meal of nectar. Odom and her colleagues found that the antenna of malaria-carrying species of mosquitoes are exquisitely sensitive to pinene and limonene. If you want to attract mosquitoes, it makes sense to make those chemicals.
Yes, Let's Do That
"Let's hop into a time machine and go back to the England of yore!"
A small selection of readings in the original accent from a few important periods of English literary history. Well, and actually a bit earlier: all the way to Arthurian Britain, as well as we can guess at it.
But take heart: if you couldn't ask for the beer in Old Brythonic, ask for it in something like Latin. Pretty much any Romance language you know will have preserved a word for beer that Arthur's kindred would have learned to understand.
A small selection of readings in the original accent from a few important periods of English literary history. Well, and actually a bit earlier: all the way to Arthurian Britain, as well as we can guess at it.
But take heart: if you couldn't ask for the beer in Old Brythonic, ask for it in something like Latin. Pretty much any Romance language you know will have preserved a word for beer that Arthur's kindred would have learned to understand.
Surprise!
Obamacare is proving to be a drag on small business growth. Close to two thirds predict compliance costs of the ACA will "increase costs a lot" this year.
That's Some Tight Security
From American Public Broadcasting:
Nearly nine years after Brett first saw combat here, this Detroit native returned to Iraq to defend the Christian faith he holds so dear.... Brett asked us to not to us his last name for security reasons. In 2006 he served in the U.S. army’s 14th mountain division for 15 months in Iraq. Brett was wounded by a roadside bomb and is a veteran on disability.Good luck looking up his service records from the 14th Mountain Division, ISIS.
V S Naipaul on Daesh
Naipaul once wrote a book called A Turn in the South, which treated the racial problems of thirty years ago with a compassionate eye for all sides. His outright condemnation of the so-called Islamic State is the more powerful given his demonstrated ability to imagine different perspectives sympathetically. Sometimes, it's just because you can accurately imagine someone's inner life that you find them disgusting.
Update on Women in the Combat Arms
As the military drives on with President Obama's orders to integrate women into every military job, the Washington Times reports that evidence suggesting this may be unwise is being suppressed.
In particular they mention a British study that just came out late last year, which you can read here. In terms of combat effectivness -- which one would think ought to be the only consideration -- the British identified 21 factors they thought could plausibly be said to contribute to combat effectiveness. Women studied had negative results in 11 of these 21 areas.
"In three of the 11 negative factors, mitigation would be a significant challenge," the report says. "These are survivability, morbidity and deployability, much of which are predicated by physiology."
Those are some pretty important areas. Will they survive in combat? Will they suffer injuries that will hamper their teams? Can they be deployed at all?
The problems turn out to be related. Women suffer combat stress injuries much quicker than men, which reduces their ability to maneuver -- and also makes them less dangerous to their enemies, not just less likely to survive.
1. We're doing all these assessments on what amount to closed courses. The whole reason to establish a closed course is to limit the risks: you can drive at speeds that would be ridiculously unsafe in traffic, or practice combat-driving maneuvers in a relatively safe environment before you have to go out and do them for real. The problem is that the armed forces will have to go out and do this for real at some point. If we discover in a three-month survey on a closed course that we're encountering morbidity and survivability problems that also impact the ability to effectively kill the enemy, we need to understand that the effect of this on a unit deployed at war for a year or more is going to be magnified substantially. For want of a nail, the shoe... the horse... the troop... the regiment... the battle.. the war.
2. That Congress and the military are glad-handing their way through this suggests that we're not listening to negative findings if they conflict with the great goal of 'gender equality.' Will negative findings from the battlefield be enough to correct us here? Or will we refuse to see it even then? 'Their command should have trained them harder'; 'their leadership didn't provide adequate support'; 'the environment is toxic for women'; 'who dares question that she got pregnant at deployment time?'
The danger is accepting a permanently higher number of American dead and injured to further our chase for this will-o'-wisp.
In particular they mention a British study that just came out late last year, which you can read here. In terms of combat effectivness -- which one would think ought to be the only consideration -- the British identified 21 factors they thought could plausibly be said to contribute to combat effectiveness. Women studied had negative results in 11 of these 21 areas.
"In three of the 11 negative factors, mitigation would be a significant challenge," the report says. "These are survivability, morbidity and deployability, much of which are predicated by physiology."
Those are some pretty important areas. Will they survive in combat? Will they suffer injuries that will hamper their teams? Can they be deployed at all?
The problems turn out to be related. Women suffer combat stress injuries much quicker than men, which reduces their ability to maneuver -- and also makes them less dangerous to their enemies, not just less likely to survive.
These studies suggest that the relative strength of women, compared to men, when carrying the combat load are likely to result in the early onset of fatigue. This is likely to result in a distinct cohort with lower survivability in combat. Similar research points to a reduced lethality rate; in that combat marksmanship degrades as a result of fatigue when the combat load increases in proportion to body weight and strength. The risks regarding survivability are therefore relative; these are about biology rather than character.UPDATE: I think this concerns me for two basic reasons.
1. We're doing all these assessments on what amount to closed courses. The whole reason to establish a closed course is to limit the risks: you can drive at speeds that would be ridiculously unsafe in traffic, or practice combat-driving maneuvers in a relatively safe environment before you have to go out and do them for real. The problem is that the armed forces will have to go out and do this for real at some point. If we discover in a three-month survey on a closed course that we're encountering morbidity and survivability problems that also impact the ability to effectively kill the enemy, we need to understand that the effect of this on a unit deployed at war for a year or more is going to be magnified substantially. For want of a nail, the shoe... the horse... the troop... the regiment... the battle.. the war.
2. That Congress and the military are glad-handing their way through this suggests that we're not listening to negative findings if they conflict with the great goal of 'gender equality.' Will negative findings from the battlefield be enough to correct us here? Or will we refuse to see it even then? 'Their command should have trained them harder'; 'their leadership didn't provide adequate support'; 'the environment is toxic for women'; 'who dares question that she got pregnant at deployment time?'
The danger is accepting a permanently higher number of American dead and injured to further our chase for this will-o'-wisp.
Practicing without a license
I'm in favor of it, obviously. The Washington Post reports in alarm over the high cost of legal services, even approving in its own backhanded way of high hourly rates charged by lawyers in light of the poor things' unfair student debt (that being, obviously, the only excuse for a market rate in a just society). Here and there, however, people are trying out the legal equivalent of a nurse practitioner.
For years I ran my firm's pro bono legal clinic for homeless kids, 99% of whom had the same recurring problems, typically involving outstanding warrants for unpaid tickets. My neighbors come to me with the middle-class equivalent, which is wills and divorces, with the occasional business contract. Only in the case of the business contracts am I likely to add much value to what is available online to anybody with a modicum of instruction and experience. Cheap over-the-counter legal assistance for routine problems would cut way down on the cost of a lot of ordinary problems. If at the same time it makes some dull and lazy lawyers feel the cold breath of competition on their necks, well, maybe they'll get better at returning their phone calls timely.
Do I worry that people will get into trouble when a cut-rate semi-professional doesn't diagnose the zebra conditions? Not very much. The realistic alternative for most people is no legal advice at all. There are many, many controversies that can't be solved by a lawyer for less than the amount in dispute. Like a nurse practitioner, a legal practitioner who finds himself in over his head can refer people to an expert for anything really hairy. That's what I do when people approach me for consumer jobs outside my expertise: I try to do the bone-headed part up front--all the time-consuming process of extracting the facts and documents from the client, and roughing out an approach--then refer them to an expert with a situation that should now be cheaper to handle. Long experience tells me that the expensive part of a lot of legal work stems from using the lawyer as a secretary. Nearly all the cost of administering an estate, for instance, is monkey work consisting of endless repetitive letters to holders of various sorts of accounts and titles, finding out what documents they need filled out and sent in before they'll transfer title to heirs. Anyone with a bit of training can do that for himself and save a ton of money. Cassandra, with her paralegal experience and natural advantages, could do all of it standing on her head.
We sometimes couch licensing restrictions as a public protection, but there's usually a big old hunk of anti-competitive merchant protectionism built right in there.
For years I ran my firm's pro bono legal clinic for homeless kids, 99% of whom had the same recurring problems, typically involving outstanding warrants for unpaid tickets. My neighbors come to me with the middle-class equivalent, which is wills and divorces, with the occasional business contract. Only in the case of the business contracts am I likely to add much value to what is available online to anybody with a modicum of instruction and experience. Cheap over-the-counter legal assistance for routine problems would cut way down on the cost of a lot of ordinary problems. If at the same time it makes some dull and lazy lawyers feel the cold breath of competition on their necks, well, maybe they'll get better at returning their phone calls timely.
Do I worry that people will get into trouble when a cut-rate semi-professional doesn't diagnose the zebra conditions? Not very much. The realistic alternative for most people is no legal advice at all. There are many, many controversies that can't be solved by a lawyer for less than the amount in dispute. Like a nurse practitioner, a legal practitioner who finds himself in over his head can refer people to an expert for anything really hairy. That's what I do when people approach me for consumer jobs outside my expertise: I try to do the bone-headed part up front--all the time-consuming process of extracting the facts and documents from the client, and roughing out an approach--then refer them to an expert with a situation that should now be cheaper to handle. Long experience tells me that the expensive part of a lot of legal work stems from using the lawyer as a secretary. Nearly all the cost of administering an estate, for instance, is monkey work consisting of endless repetitive letters to holders of various sorts of accounts and titles, finding out what documents they need filled out and sent in before they'll transfer title to heirs. Anyone with a bit of training can do that for himself and save a ton of money. Cassandra, with her paralegal experience and natural advantages, could do all of it standing on her head.
We sometimes couch licensing restrictions as a public protection, but there's usually a big old hunk of anti-competitive merchant protectionism built right in there.
Melville on battle
From Sheridan at Cedar Creek, by Herman Melville:
Shoe the steed with silver
That bore him to the fray,
When he heard the guns at dawning
Miles away;
When he heard them calling, calling--
Mount! nor stay.
Maybe Because She's Done So Much To Earn It?
Poll: Democrats think the media is harder on Clinton than other politicians.
Never Take A "Data-Driven" Road Trip
My late father-in-law was an aerospace engineer, and his adult children still gripe about the trauma of family road trips he planned. We must hit the next sight-to-be-seen! No time for dinner! No, we can't just stop here and enjoy ourselves!
NPR found someone even less likely to plan a good time.
NPR found someone even less likely to plan a good time.
Randy Olson, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University and a self-proclaimed "data tinkerer," believes he's devised a route that could allow a family to hit a landmark in each of the Lower 48 states, from Grand Canyon in Arizona to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the Statue of Liberty in New York, in just nine days of driving.Allow me to suggest: no.
"About 9.33 days, if you drove non-stop," Olson clarifies.
That means no time sleeping or using the restroom — and no bad traffic.
Sexual Identity
A brave soldier comes out.
(It's a parody of the genre, so expect the usual language.)
UPDATE: RangerUP finds a date for our soldier.
(It's a parody of the genre, so expect the usual language.)
UPDATE: RangerUP finds a date for our soldier.
Barriers to entry
Adam Smith warned us that merchants are forever looking for ways to protect themselves from competition. Thirty-five states have a "certificate of need" process that drives up medical costs.
The Bible and science
From "The Lost World of Adam and Eve":
Isn't the claim that readers cannot properly understand Genesis without knowing Hebrew and the ancient Near Eastern culture just a form of scholarly elitism?
It’s no more scholarly elitism than recognizing someone has to translate the Bible into English. Bringing the ancient text to us is not just a matter of word rendering; it’s a matter of understanding the culture in which it was written. We have to translate not only language but also culture. We all are dependent on the expertise of others. I’m never inclined to think that the exercise of one’s spiritual gifts or talents is elitism. I’m a hand, not an eye. And someone else is an eye and not a hand. That’s how the body of Christ works.
British tribes
I'd love to see the same analysis done in the U.S., to see whether it would corroborate the findings in David Fischer's excellent book, "Albion's Seed." With so much frontier to settle, the U.S. findings presumably would be more smeared out towards the west.
Le Sacre du Printemps
Springtime.
We got through with half a rank of wood left, which can form the first part of next winter's firewood.
We got through with half a rank of wood left, which can form the first part of next winter's firewood.
St. Chesterton
Apparently there's a movement. If it's proper, though, there will be miracles. Although possibly he is a case like Aquinas: the writings are the miracles.
What's It Like To Live Like A Viking?
Ingrid Galadriel Aune Nilsen, Master of Arts, explains how becoming a full-time Viking re-enactor has changed her views on modern society. Her English is labored, so you'll have to be patient. It's still interesting what she thinks.
The ideal of a 'functioning democracy' in the Viking Age isn't so far fetched. The Icelandic sagas suggest that it worked more often than not.
The ideal of a 'functioning democracy' in the Viking Age isn't so far fetched. The Icelandic sagas suggest that it worked more often than not.
"A Fantastic Opportunity For You To Assert Your Dominance On Everyone Around You..."
"...which improves your life."
Content warning for those of you who don't share Tex's sense of humor.
Content warning for those of you who don't share Tex's sense of humor.
"Kant is a Moron"
That's the headline of all the articles about this act of graffiti.
Thus, the proper translation is more like "Kant is a sucker," which is much more defensible than him being a moron -- or even "Kant is a square," which is actually true. Kant is the squarest of squares.
The Russian word used is a relatively mild term of abuse for a slow-witted or foolish person, and could also be translated as "loser," "dumb-ass," or "chump". The vandals did not, however, leave any accompanying critique of Kant's thinking to justify the smear on his intellectual powers.I asked a Russian-speaking comrade about this, and he tells me that the actual word needs context. It's apparently a term that is of particular origin in the criminal community in Russia, which thinks of itself as pursuing a life worthy of a man because it isn't subordinate or groveling. This term refers to someone who deserves to be robbed, because they are the kind of person who slaves away to pay taxes and be lived-off by others.
Thus, the proper translation is more like "Kant is a sucker," which is much more defensible than him being a moron -- or even "Kant is a square," which is actually true. Kant is the squarest of squares.
Welcome to the Happiest Place on Earth!
I think we discussed the NY Post article debunking claims that Scandinavian countries are happiest. Gallup has come up with a new way of asking the question.
The Simpsons were right again.
By this standard, if you are interested, the Scandinavian countries have precisely the same level of happiness as the United States (except for Denmark, which scores a point lower).
Gallup tallied the “yes” responses to five questions from roughly 1,000 people in each country surveyed. The questions included:So where is the happiest place on earth? Latin America!
Did you feel well-rested yesterday?
Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?
Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?
Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?
Did you experience a lot of the following feelings during the day yesterday? How about enjoyment?
The Simpsons were right again.
By this standard, if you are interested, the Scandinavian countries have precisely the same level of happiness as the United States (except for Denmark, which scores a point lower).
Class Leadership
So I saw this story about a student banned from class for challenging the commonplace '1 in 5' sexual assault statistic. This is hardly a rogue position, as challenges have appeared in very mainstream publications such as the Washington Post and TIME.
Nevertheless, I assume the teacher was responding less to the challenge and more to the mode of challenge. That's a matter of taste, to some degree: academia is supposed to be able to sustain robust but civil disagreements, but what constitutes the boundaries of "civil" are very much under contest. The excerpts from the professor's letter suggest that other students were highly uncomfortable, and that he had issued multiple warnings before the ban. Online student-reported feedback suggests that he's a good professor: he rates near the top in all categories except "easiness," where he rates at the bottom. This is exactly as it should be. I'm inclined to trust his sense of his environment.
Besides, it sounds as if the professor's claim that there were sexual assault survivors in the classroom is extremely plausible:
Nevertheless, I assume the teacher was responding less to the challenge and more to the mode of challenge. That's a matter of taste, to some degree: academia is supposed to be able to sustain robust but civil disagreements, but what constitutes the boundaries of "civil" are very much under contest. The excerpts from the professor's letter suggest that other students were highly uncomfortable, and that he had issued multiple warnings before the ban. Online student-reported feedback suggests that he's a good professor: he rates near the top in all categories except "easiness," where he rates at the bottom. This is exactly as it should be. I'm inclined to trust his sense of his environment.
Besides, it sounds as if the professor's claim that there were sexual assault survivors in the classroom is extremely plausible:
Despite its small size, Reed’s students reported the most sex crimes of all colleges and universities in the state of Oregon during 2010–2012 and ranked third in the number of reported assaults per 1,000 students in the country in 2012.Sounds like part of the reason the student's mouth was such an issue is a complete failure of the college to uphold other standards. That's neither the student's nor the professor's fault, but it can't help but be a factor here. Reed as an institution bears the real shame in this story.
No Wonder It's Hard to Develop Virtuous Citizens
Related to Grim's recent post that discussed developing virtues in our citizenry, I recently ran across an article in the New York Times by philosophy professor Justin P. McBrayer that considers one reason why it's difficult to do today. The article is a quick read, so I'll let you take in the rest there, but the problem begins with this:
I agree with McBrayer that a lot of young people today end up with a serious case of doublethink. On the one hand, they insist that things like sexual morals are merely personal opinions. On the other, they are great devotees of social justice, which is nothing but a system of morality. It's very strange. His partial explanation for why that is sounds true to me.
When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.
Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.”
I agree with McBrayer that a lot of young people today end up with a serious case of doublethink. On the one hand, they insist that things like sexual morals are merely personal opinions. On the other, they are great devotees of social justice, which is nothing but a system of morality. It's very strange. His partial explanation for why that is sounds true to me.
Ah, youth
From James Taranto:
The headline in London’s Guardian the other day was certainly eye-catching: “Privatising BBC3 Would Be as Pernicious as Isis Destroying Iraq’s Historic Sites.” It seems like an overstatement but turns out not to be much of a statement at all. Here’s the first paragraph of the commentary, by Stewart Lee:
When so-called Islamic State destroyed historic sites in Iraq, I was wary of making judgments of other cultures, and gave these exuberant young men the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps shattering the statues was mere high spirits, like when Greeks trample wedding crockery? Or perhaps it was the fault of MI5?We strongly disagree with Lee on ISIS, but it does sound as though he’s right that privatizing BBC3 wouldn’t be the least bit pernicious.
Douthat on Marriage
A helpful inquiry.
Currently the politics are such that there's no possibility of controlling immigration or reducing globalization. Those who control the political class in our country are completely in favor of both of those things, as they benefit financially from them. The one thing we can really do to help the poor and working classes, then, is to encourage public morality.
That society should find ways to support the development of virtues in its citizens has been a commonplace idea since Plato. That it remains a perennial issue doesn't imply, I think, that there's no solution to it: it implies that something about human nature always requires a focus on developing virtue and avoiding vice.
How to do that, though? The working class is unlikely to take lessons from the government, because it is manifestly obvious that the government isn't concerned about their good: the policies of both political parties are dead-set on opposing the good of the working class in immigration and globalization, and dead-set on pursuing the good of their donor class instead. The Republican politician's game of pretending to oppose amnesty only makes them less credible with everyone. Similarly, the implementation of Obamacare has been a disaster for the workers of America, as we've often discussed: the only jobs available in much of the country are 24-hour-a-week part-time gigs, or temporary/seasonal labor, that avoid the law's mandates. The government has presented this as "help" for the worker, but it's clearly the opposite in effect.
You can make the argument in the hope of persuading people, but the working class is less likely to read political blogs (or the New York Times, for that matter). Churches are a good option in some places, less in others. In any case, they need more than persuasion: virtue development is hard. In many cases a young, poorer, married couple lacks models for success -- their parents may well have been divorced -- and therefore doesn't know what skills they need or how to develop them. We don't teach them in schools, instead handing them condoms and telling them to be 'safe' while working it out for themselves.
The first counterargument is about men: It concedes that there is a modest upward post-’60s trend in household income, rather than a steep decline, but it argues that focusing on the general trend ignores a collapse in earnings for low-skilled men.... As I said in the column, a modest version of this argument makes sense to me. Less-educated men haven’t seen the same gains as their female peers in recent decades, male-dominated sectors of the economy have declined relative to the female-friendly sectors, and so some lower-income men clearly do look relatively less appealing as partners, less “marriagable” in strictly economic terms than they would have in 1960.I think that's right. Marriage is still very beneficial for those who can keep its disciplines. The working class is being damaged by both a collapse in public morality, and also by an immigration-heavy policy that makes American workers compete with immigrants who are willing to accept much less (as well as by globalization, which allows companies to hire non-American workers in the cheapest parts of the world).
At the same time, though, even in a world where women are earning more on their own, the strictly-economic advantages of the two-parent family and the potential costs of single parenthood are still very significant, and they get more significant, not less, as you go down the ladder of income and education.
...the issue is this: The men dragging down the overall low-skilled wage average since the ’60s are primarily recent immigrants, whose numbers have dramatically increased relative to mid-century, and whose wages are low by American standards but obviously much higher than the wages earned by their fathers and grandparents in their countries of origin.
Currently the politics are such that there's no possibility of controlling immigration or reducing globalization. Those who control the political class in our country are completely in favor of both of those things, as they benefit financially from them. The one thing we can really do to help the poor and working classes, then, is to encourage public morality.
That society should find ways to support the development of virtues in its citizens has been a commonplace idea since Plato. That it remains a perennial issue doesn't imply, I think, that there's no solution to it: it implies that something about human nature always requires a focus on developing virtue and avoiding vice.
How to do that, though? The working class is unlikely to take lessons from the government, because it is manifestly obvious that the government isn't concerned about their good: the policies of both political parties are dead-set on opposing the good of the working class in immigration and globalization, and dead-set on pursuing the good of their donor class instead. The Republican politician's game of pretending to oppose amnesty only makes them less credible with everyone. Similarly, the implementation of Obamacare has been a disaster for the workers of America, as we've often discussed: the only jobs available in much of the country are 24-hour-a-week part-time gigs, or temporary/seasonal labor, that avoid the law's mandates. The government has presented this as "help" for the worker, but it's clearly the opposite in effect.
You can make the argument in the hope of persuading people, but the working class is less likely to read political blogs (or the New York Times, for that matter). Churches are a good option in some places, less in others. In any case, they need more than persuasion: virtue development is hard. In many cases a young, poorer, married couple lacks models for success -- their parents may well have been divorced -- and therefore doesn't know what skills they need or how to develop them. We don't teach them in schools, instead handing them condoms and telling them to be 'safe' while working it out for themselves.
Where's An Actuary?
It occurs to me that this offer is one that it would be enlightening to test with data. Leaving the politics to the side entirely, is it a good deal?
So, if I were an actuary writing you an insurance policy, would I charge you more or less than $50 a month to cover you for the additional risks?
Obviously that leaves out questions about how dangerous your neighborhood is, etc. It's also not about the politics: if you're a law-abiding American citizen, I fully support your right to keep and bear arms as you please. I'm just interested in how the money works out. Is $50 a good deal? Should a rational economic actor who is not otherwise inclined to carry, and who lives in a safe neighborhood where the firearm is unlikely to otherwise be useful to them, take such a deal if offered?
A local attorney said he is giving his employees a $50 bonus each month if they choose to conceal carry.Now carrying a pistol exposes you to a certain amount of risk. Even with near-perfect use, the danger that you will accidentally shoot yourself or someone else is higher if you handle a firearm every day than if you don't ever handle one. (So much higher that, even in Iraq, the Army made everyone inside the wire except guards on duty carry in condition green -- magazine not loaded, chamber empty, rifle on safe). Assuming you are properly trained and that you obey correct safety rules, however, the risk is not great. On the other hand, the consequences are potentially substantial: major medical bills or wrongful death lawsuits are quite expensive.
“I was like so you’re going to give me $50 to carry a pistol? And he was like, yup that’s what we’ll do. Well sign me up,” said paralegal for Puryear Law P.C. Elizabeth Payne.
Carrying her gun at work gets her $50 extra each month from her boss.
So, if I were an actuary writing you an insurance policy, would I charge you more or less than $50 a month to cover you for the additional risks?
Obviously that leaves out questions about how dangerous your neighborhood is, etc. It's also not about the politics: if you're a law-abiding American citizen, I fully support your right to keep and bear arms as you please. I'm just interested in how the money works out. Is $50 a good deal? Should a rational economic actor who is not otherwise inclined to carry, and who lives in a safe neighborhood where the firearm is unlikely to otherwise be useful to them, take such a deal if offered?
Israel and Iran
We have come to an odd passage with yesterday's election. United States policy is now formally opposed to the elected government of Israel, which has (with a few exceptions) been an American ally of long standing. Some state that the world is no longer bound to defend Israel. I wonder what precisely that is intended to mean, since the "world" of international diplomacy has typically been strongly critical of Israel at the UN and elsewhere. Nevertheless, commentary expects Israeli isolation to deepen. Perhaps the pressure is intended to grant the President some cover to fail to veto a Security Council resolution that would lead to Israel being declared a rogue state, or a criminal regime, or placed under punishing sanctions. That would represent a shock to the seven in ten Americans who view Israel favorably, a figure which suggests that the administration is acting against the will of a clear majority of Americans.
In Iran, on the other hand, we have a longstanding enemy that continues to pursue nuclear weapons while also backing terrorist groups across the region. Yet our policy seems strangely aligned with them. We are both working to assist Iraq's government against Daesh. Yet the Maliki government is heavily Iranian influenced, so much so that its army is now fighting alongside Iranian-trained Shi'ite militia. Furthermore, Maliki has broken the accords with Sunni Iraqis that we helped to negotiate and often pledged to ensure. It was at one time US policy to ensure that those agreements were fairly kept, which might have prevented the breakout success of Daesh in Western Iraq in the first place. Meanwhile, Iran seems happy with our proposals on its nuclear policy, proposals made in spite of the clearest possible signal from the US Senate that it will not ratify that deal and might even overturn it with veto-proof majorities. Here, too, the administration is out of order with the democratic will of the American people in a serious way.
The unifying factor here is an apparent preference to hurt our friends and help our enemies, in defiance not only of the well established character of these relationships but the sense of the majority of the American people and their representatives.
In Iran, on the other hand, we have a longstanding enemy that continues to pursue nuclear weapons while also backing terrorist groups across the region. Yet our policy seems strangely aligned with them. We are both working to assist Iraq's government against Daesh. Yet the Maliki government is heavily Iranian influenced, so much so that its army is now fighting alongside Iranian-trained Shi'ite militia. Furthermore, Maliki has broken the accords with Sunni Iraqis that we helped to negotiate and often pledged to ensure. It was at one time US policy to ensure that those agreements were fairly kept, which might have prevented the breakout success of Daesh in Western Iraq in the first place. Meanwhile, Iran seems happy with our proposals on its nuclear policy, proposals made in spite of the clearest possible signal from the US Senate that it will not ratify that deal and might even overturn it with veto-proof majorities. Here, too, the administration is out of order with the democratic will of the American people in a serious way.
The unifying factor here is an apparent preference to hurt our friends and help our enemies, in defiance not only of the well established character of these relationships but the sense of the majority of the American people and their representatives.
Not a suicide pact yet
And never again, I hope:
Netanyahu [told] the country that left-wing groups funded by foreign money were busing Arab voters to the polls in order to elect a left-wing government led by his Zionist Union rival Isaac Herzog. Netanyahu’s opponents interpreted this as an appeal to racism. . . . But a critical mass of voters viewed the prospect with alarm not because they’re racists but because a government that relied on the votes of anti-Zionists that favor Israel’s dissolution was something they considered a danger to the future of their country…. They may not like Netanyahu but today’s results demonstrates that there is little support for a government that would make the sort of concessions to the Palestinians that President Obama would like. They rightly believe that even if Israel did make more concessions it would only lead to more violence, not peace.
A Documentary for St. Patrick's Day
If you have an hour or so this evening, you might enjoy it.
We will do what we always do on St. Patrick's Day here at the Hall, and have a showing of The Quiet Man a bit later.
We will do what we always do on St. Patrick's Day here at the Hall, and have a showing of The Quiet Man a bit later.
Separations
A liberal writer ponders why other liberals are welcoming an increasing role for religion in public life.
The preference for waging war against conservative ideas in the courts is based on the hope that the battlefield itself is biased against conservatives. This follows from three ideas: 1) The judiciary must, in order to do their jobs, be highly educated. 2) The academy has largely been captured by liberals, which means educated people will have been taught to think by liberals most of the time. 3) As a consequence that re-enforces the bias, peer pressure among the highly educated is to conform to left-leaning ideas. Thus, the courts are much better ground for locating the real power of government than the legislature in which the general population gets most of the vote in selecting representatives. If the courts will just go along with stripping legislatures of the power to create laws that transgress against the principles of the left, it doesn't matter very much if you win or lose elections. When you win, you can pass new laws in line with your principles. When you lose, you can relax because the courts will throw out new laws that you'd oppose.
Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages to this approach. One of them is this one: when the court goes against you, it generally goes all the way. The other one is that politicizing the courts damages the legitimacy of two whole branches of government. The author really wants the courts to come up with political compromises here, in order to rewrite the laws in a way that would satisfy everyone. That's a legislative function. Should the courts take over the legislative function while also embracing the power to set aside legislatively-enacted laws that violate principles held by the educated elite who make up the judiciary, the court has effectively gelded the legislature. The legislature will not be respected as a co-equal branch of government if its power is completely co-opted by the courts.
By the same token, since Federal judges are not elected (and in this court serve lifetime terms) their decisions have no democratic legitimacy. When the legislature rewrites the law, it does so with the direct involvement of the people's representatives. Those representatives, should they defy the people's will, can be replaced at the next election. Unelected judges who cannot be replaced ought not to perform the legislative function in a republic that claims to draw its legitimacy from the will of the people.
So, grammercy for coming up with a viable compromise. I think people might go along with it. Take it to the legislatures, and at the state and local level as well. Make the argument. Point out that Jefferson and Madison are on your side. You might convince some people. Stop trying to get the courts to alter the playing field such that laws you don't like are forbidden to legislatures. Instead, play fairly and talk with the people with which you disagree instead of suing them.
Crazy idea, I know. But I'm pretty sure it's how the system was supposed to work.
Going back to Jefferson and Madison, the idea behind separating church and state has been to prevent the state from forcing taxpayers to pay for other people’s religious practices. Fair enough. But in order to get religious conservatives to go along with that principle, secular liberal thinkers felt they had to give them something in return. And what do religious conservatives want? They want to be able to express their deepest religious convictions in the public sphere. They want to pray at town meetings, to place religious symbols in government buildings and on public lands, and, more generally, they want the state to acknowledge the importance—and perhaps also the truth—of their religious heritage.See, the legislature is where you go to make compromises with the other side. When you try to fight your battles in the courts, you're going to get decisions on one side or the other. That's the nature of the beast.
So here we have the makings of a compromise: Liberals would get a ban on state funding of religion, and conservatives would get state-sponsored religious recognition...
Except that the Roberts court, like the Rehnquist court before it, isn’t interested in taking this deal. In exchange for greater acceptance of religious practice and symbols in the public square, they have given up, well, nothing. In a series of 5–4 decisions, conservative majorities have rejected the ability of taxpayers to challenge state funding of religion...
If giving up your side in exchange for nothing looks like a shoddy compromise for liberals, what else might explain acceptance of Justice Kennedy’s new coercion principle[?]
The preference for waging war against conservative ideas in the courts is based on the hope that the battlefield itself is biased against conservatives. This follows from three ideas: 1) The judiciary must, in order to do their jobs, be highly educated. 2) The academy has largely been captured by liberals, which means educated people will have been taught to think by liberals most of the time. 3) As a consequence that re-enforces the bias, peer pressure among the highly educated is to conform to left-leaning ideas. Thus, the courts are much better ground for locating the real power of government than the legislature in which the general population gets most of the vote in selecting representatives. If the courts will just go along with stripping legislatures of the power to create laws that transgress against the principles of the left, it doesn't matter very much if you win or lose elections. When you win, you can pass new laws in line with your principles. When you lose, you can relax because the courts will throw out new laws that you'd oppose.
Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages to this approach. One of them is this one: when the court goes against you, it generally goes all the way. The other one is that politicizing the courts damages the legitimacy of two whole branches of government. The author really wants the courts to come up with political compromises here, in order to rewrite the laws in a way that would satisfy everyone. That's a legislative function. Should the courts take over the legislative function while also embracing the power to set aside legislatively-enacted laws that violate principles held by the educated elite who make up the judiciary, the court has effectively gelded the legislature. The legislature will not be respected as a co-equal branch of government if its power is completely co-opted by the courts.
By the same token, since Federal judges are not elected (and in this court serve lifetime terms) their decisions have no democratic legitimacy. When the legislature rewrites the law, it does so with the direct involvement of the people's representatives. Those representatives, should they defy the people's will, can be replaced at the next election. Unelected judges who cannot be replaced ought not to perform the legislative function in a republic that claims to draw its legitimacy from the will of the people.
So, grammercy for coming up with a viable compromise. I think people might go along with it. Take it to the legislatures, and at the state and local level as well. Make the argument. Point out that Jefferson and Madison are on your side. You might convince some people. Stop trying to get the courts to alter the playing field such that laws you don't like are forbidden to legislatures. Instead, play fairly and talk with the people with which you disagree instead of suing them.
Crazy idea, I know. But I'm pretty sure it's how the system was supposed to work.
Well, Obviously
When large groups of female students on a campus claim they feel unsafe if they cannot utilize their constitutional rights to carry a firearm, does it cause a massive uproar and immediate shift in policy? When pro-Palestinian students rally, chanting phrases that make Jewish students feel unsafe, does the student body call an emergency meeting with the plan of silencing the pro-Palestinian students?Islam isn't a... oh, why bother.
Of course not.
But, when a single Muslim student calls a movie like ‘American Sniper’ racist...
The Rifle Team at Harvard
Increasingly I find myself reading news stories and thinking, "We talked that all through ten years ago." The important lesson may be that blogging is a waste of time.
Today the story that is wasting my time and energy is this story about Ivy League schools taking up rifle teams. Yes, fully ten years ago we had that all out here at the Hall.
Today the story that is wasting my time and energy is this story about Ivy League schools taking up rifle teams. Yes, fully ten years ago we had that all out here at the Hall.
[I]f any pale student glued to his desk here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruit is that pallid and emasculate scholarship, of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.Francis Parkman wrote that. If you don't know who he was, you should look him up. If you're a Harvard man and you don't know, your school has failed you: as it has if it produced you without teaching you to shoot a rifle or use an oar.
In Celebration of Blogger's About-Face
...some sexually explicit content.
Seriously. Don't watch that at work. :)
Seriously. Don't watch that at work. :)
Good News For The Clinton Administration
The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law. The office handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails....No more of that!
Unlike other offices within the White House, which were always exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, the Office of Administration responded to FOIA requests for 30 years. Until the Obama administration, watchdog groups on the left and the right used records from the office to shed light on how the White House works.
Premise Good, Conclusion Bad
Crooked Timber draws our attention to a new British law called "Prevent" that seems to impose serious restrictions on the kinds of political ideas you can advance in certain public spaces. There's some sort of exemption for institutions of higher education, since professionals might need to study dangerous ideas. However, they are still meant not merely to monitor but to "engage and consult students on compliance with their Prevent duty."
So, Grim Can Start Posting All That Sexually Explicit Content Again
An update on the Blogger porn content policy
This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy stating that blogs that distributed sexually explicit images or graphic nudity would be made private.
We’ve received lots of feedback about making a policy change that impacts longstanding blogs, and about the negative impact this could have on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities.
We appreciate the feedback. Instead of making this change, we will be maintaining our existing policies.
Sustainability
It's not always clear what we mean by it:
That fossil fuels are finite is a red herring. The Atlantic Ocean is finite, but that does not mean that you risk bumping into France if you row out of a harbor in Maine. The buffalo of the American West were infinite, in the sense that they could breed, yet they came close to extinction. It is an ironic truth that no nonrenewable resource has ever run dry, while renewable resources—whales, cod, forests, passenger pigeons—have frequently done so.
Collective guilt for thee, not for me?
There was a piece to a National Review article that I saw on Ace's page that touched on the idea that the protesters and inciters in Ferguson have some level of culpability in the shooting of the two officers outside of police headquarters there. And it's an article worthy of reading. But I think both Ace and the author (Andrew McCarthy) missed a salient point. While the usual suspects in Ferguson are complaining about being tarred with the brush of the shooter (just as they did with regards to the ambush assassination in New York City), they have no problem tarring all officers in those police departments with collective guilt. We hear about "command climate" and "institutional racism" and all manner of reasons why the entire structure is corrupt. And yet when someone from within their ranks (quite literally) shoots a cop, suddenly it's "bad actors" and "we had nothing to do with it".
So which is it? Is everyone on both sides culpable for the actions of "bad actors" from within their ranks, or are we to judge individuals on their own merits and faults? Because I have no stomach for the hypocrisy of either side claiming that they should be held to different standards. Last time I checked, we have a system where everyone is equal before the law.
So which is it? Is everyone on both sides culpable for the actions of "bad actors" from within their ranks, or are we to judge individuals on their own merits and faults? Because I have no stomach for the hypocrisy of either side claiming that they should be held to different standards. Last time I checked, we have a system where everyone is equal before the law.
That "Unprecedented" Letter from the Republican Senators to Iran
Over the weekend, I had a liberal acquaintance link the following image on her Facebook:
And while I normally have a great deal of tolerance to publicly post ideas I disagree with, this one bothered me, specifically because I happen to know a bit of history about this very question.
You see, during the Carter Administration, the President (through his State Department) negotiated a treaty with the Soviets. The name of this treaty was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II Treaty of 1979 (more commonly known by the acronym SALT II). And, generally speaking, the treaty was pretty bad for the US. It committed us to limitations in the very systems most feared by the Soviets, and in return they "promised" to limit the same classes of weapons (which they lacked the technology to duplicate on the scale we had). Before ratification before the Senate occurred, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. So the Senate balked. And in 1986, they flat out repudiated the treaty, and it was dead.
So, what would happen if 47 Senators told the "Russians" that they "shouldn't trust us" because we "wouldn't keep our end of the deal?" Well, I don't know about the exact number of Senators that killed SALT II (but I do know that it was Democrats who held the majority in the Senate in 1986, so that should tell you how bad the deal was), so it may not have been 47. And they didn't tell the "Russians" since it was actually the Soviet Union back then. And as for "they shouldn't trust us" I think the author is saying that "we won't ratify this piece of dreck" is saying "not to trust us" because we "wouldn't keep our end of the deal", but if that's how the Iranian theocratic dictators want to take it, I don't really care.
So I basically summarized all this, linked to the details of the treaty and called it a day. Strangely, no debate followed. I guess pithy quips via image macro are only so clever when there's no competing history to refute them.
And while I normally have a great deal of tolerance to publicly post ideas I disagree with, this one bothered me, specifically because I happen to know a bit of history about this very question.
You see, during the Carter Administration, the President (through his State Department) negotiated a treaty with the Soviets. The name of this treaty was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II Treaty of 1979 (more commonly known by the acronym SALT II). And, generally speaking, the treaty was pretty bad for the US. It committed us to limitations in the very systems most feared by the Soviets, and in return they "promised" to limit the same classes of weapons (which they lacked the technology to duplicate on the scale we had). Before ratification before the Senate occurred, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. So the Senate balked. And in 1986, they flat out repudiated the treaty, and it was dead.
So, what would happen if 47 Senators told the "Russians" that they "shouldn't trust us" because we "wouldn't keep our end of the deal?" Well, I don't know about the exact number of Senators that killed SALT II (but I do know that it was Democrats who held the majority in the Senate in 1986, so that should tell you how bad the deal was), so it may not have been 47. And they didn't tell the "Russians" since it was actually the Soviet Union back then. And as for "they shouldn't trust us" I think the author is saying that "we won't ratify this piece of dreck" is saying "not to trust us" because we "wouldn't keep our end of the deal", but if that's how the Iranian theocratic dictators want to take it, I don't really care.
So I basically summarized all this, linked to the details of the treaty and called it a day. Strangely, no debate followed. I guess pithy quips via image macro are only so clever when there's no competing history to refute them.
Yeoman Farmers
It used to be when a Kennedy would marry, we'd get a whole set of stories about how they were "American royalty," and this wedding was therefore somewhat like the marriage of prince so-and-so to some duchess or other.
Nobody anywhere thinks that about Dakota Meyer marrying Bristol Palin. Dakota Meyer has a better claim to the virtue of courage, at least, than any prince I can think of who has lived since the Hundred Years War; Palin is certainly from a family of high political connections among a certain political party. Yet I think it's fair to say that no one would mistake them for royalty.
Even better, no one would mistake them for people with aspirations toward being royalty. That's the real difference.
That no one would make the comparison might be a way in which some people look down on them as not being fit for membership in the aristocracy. That they would be horrified by the comparison says something about their own character. The something said is deeply American.
Good luck to a young couple. Marriage is hard, but it can be wonderful.
Nobody anywhere thinks that about Dakota Meyer marrying Bristol Palin. Dakota Meyer has a better claim to the virtue of courage, at least, than any prince I can think of who has lived since the Hundred Years War; Palin is certainly from a family of high political connections among a certain political party. Yet I think it's fair to say that no one would mistake them for royalty.
Even better, no one would mistake them for people with aspirations toward being royalty. That's the real difference.
That no one would make the comparison might be a way in which some people look down on them as not being fit for membership in the aristocracy. That they would be horrified by the comparison says something about their own character. The something said is deeply American.
Good luck to a young couple. Marriage is hard, but it can be wonderful.
Why Our Enemies Are Doing Well
The answer is straightforward:Certainly it's the weak and the poor who have the most interest in overturning any given system. But Peters, though not wrong, has only half the answer. The problem isn't just that the elite is both insular and so detached from the real world as to be largely immune to the pain their bad decisions cause. That's true, but it's not the whole truth.
* Social insularity: Our leaders know fellow insiders around the world; our enemies know everyone else.
* The mandarin’s distaste for physicality: We are led through blood-smeared times by those who’ve never suffered a bloody nose.
* And last but not least, bad educations in our very best schools: Our leadership has been educated in chaste political theory, while our enemies know, firsthand, the stuff of life.
...
[W]hen new blood does enter — through those same “elite” institutions — it’s channeled into the same old calcium-clogged arteries. And we get generals with Ivy League Ph.D.s writing military doctrine that adheres cringingly to politically correct truisms and leaves out the very factors, such as the power of religion or ethnic hatred, that prove decisive. Or a usually astute commentator on Eastern European affairs who dismisses Vladimir Putin as a mere chinovnik, a petty bureaucrat, since Putin was only a lieutenant colonel in the KGB when the Soviet Union collapsed and didn’t go to a Swiss prep school like John Kerry.
That analyst overlooked the fact that Hitler had been a mere lance corporal. Stalin was a failed seminarian. Lenin was a destitute syphilitic. Ho Chi Minh washed dishes in the basement of a Paris Hotel. And when the French Revolution erupted, Napoleon was a junior artillery officer.
The other half of the problem is the old problem of scale. We talk about this here often under the heading of Schumpeter's economic principle; it's more familiar to military science as the OODA loop. Our institutions are so large and so intricate in their approval chains that there's a huge advantage in terms of how fast a decision can be made and acted upon for streamlined organizations. Putin just issues orders, after all. ISIS isn't very big. USEUCOM or USCENTCOM has to socialize a plan among all their staff sections, who reach down to subordinate commands for input and then hash out a plan among themselves before they present it to their general. Most likely, he will need to push that plan up to the Pentagon if it represents a radical change to existing strategy. They have their own process before an answer comes back down, and the easiest answer is to push the suspense for the decision to the right while we ask a few more people. If the change requires a change from an interagency partner, their bureaucracies have to get involved too.
Even if the President were replaced with someone with new-blood ideas and the will to enact them, the bureaucracy would still have to go through at least a basic staffing process to ensure that it carried out the decisions in an orderly fashion. Because the bureaucrats are part of the existing order, there will be many who drag their feet or otherwise resist firm leadership (remember the CIA's campaign of leaks to the press about Bush's programs?).
In the absence of firm leadership from a President with such ideas, the system is almost too ossified to move at all. This is a real issue even for those leaders who are correctly motivated and trying to do the right thing.
What has to be done to address these challenges is to create a new way of responding to them -- one that isn't part of the bureaucracy, and that doesn't answer to it. A lot of the success of the special operations community comes from the fact that it operates on a much shorter chain. Were Congress to issue a letter of marque to a private organization tasked with fighting ISIS, that organization could act with Congressional authorization without any need to be directed by the State Department or the other executive bureaucracies at all.
It's absolutely true that we need new blood from outside of this elite, people who are more familiar with and in more direct contact with real life. We also need for them to be able to move fast and hard. They need to be able to make a call and make it happen with the same speed that our enemies can leverage. Otherwise, even our great strength and wealth will but little avail us.
A higher authority
The White House is taking that letter more seriously than I expected:
Sure, it’s tasteless for the American president to go over the heads of the American legislative body and appeal to an unelected council of international diplomats in order to outmaneuver his domestic opposition. This kind of behavior is also precisely what the American people have come to expect from Barack Obama.
Scots Magic
A joke I heard today:
An Englishman and a Scotsman go to a pastry shop.
The Englishman whisks three cookies into his pocket with lightning speed.
The baker doesn't notice.
The Englishman says to the Scotsman:
"You see how clever we are? You'll never beat that!"
The Scotsman says to the Englishman:
"Watch this, a Scotsman is always cleverer than an Englishman."
He says to the baker,
"Give me a cookie, I can show you a magic trick!"
The baker gives him the cookie which the Scotsman promptly eats.
Then he says to the baker:
"Give me another cookie for my magic trick."
The baker is getting suspicious but he gives it to him. He eats this one too.
Then he says again:
"Give me one more cookie... "
The baker is getting angry now but gives him one anyway. The Scotsman eats this one too.
Now the baker is really mad, and he yells:
"And where is your famous magic trick?"
The Scotsman says:
"Look in the Englishman's pocket!"
Honor and Food
As I assume is well known to readers here, in the United States Marine Corps it is a standard that leaders do not eat until their men are fed. This is a point of honor, because honor is sacrifice of your interests for the good of others in your community. The leader occupies a position of honor, which means that when there is a sacrifice to be made, it properly belongs to him to be the one who makes it. The leader sees that those under his command are fed first, and only then takes time -- if there is time -- to eat himself.
So I read with interest this article about an attempt to re-invigorate traditional Japanese foodways, in which the person in the position of honor also has a duty related to the order of the eating of food. It's just that it's the opposite order:
So I read with interest this article about an attempt to re-invigorate traditional Japanese foodways, in which the person in the position of honor also has a duty related to the order of the eating of food. It's just that it's the opposite order:
“The principal is the first person to eat lunch,” says Masahiro Oji, director of the Ministry of Education’s School Health Education Division. “If he gets sick none of the rest of the food gets served."Different practical concerns prompt a different order, but the deeper issue is the same.
That Glow
Way back in 2004, Newsweek writer Evan Thomas admitted that "the media ... wants Kerry to win. They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic .... There’s going to be this glow about them ... that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points."
Apparently their relationship to Hillary Clinton is slightly different.
Apparently their relationship to Hillary Clinton is slightly different.
No Progress
Grim's Hall, 2008:
So, OK. Let's ask the same questions. What is the female version of what is on display in men seeing women as valuable, listening to their advice as a civilizing influence (an impulse rather unfairly degraded by being phrased as "putting on a pedestal"), and trying to do right by them and show them that they are safe and welcome in public places?
And why should we receive men who do it as bad? There are some senses of the word "strong" in which women are stronger than men. There are others, including the most fundamental sense, in which this is not the case. That fact is a fact simply: can't we be honest about it? Can't we show each other honor while recognizing each other's imperfections? If we can't acknowledge the truth about each other's imperfections without failing some assumed duty of respect, talk about putting on a pedestal!
I looked up the definition for "sexism" today, and I find that it is defined as "the sense that one sex is inferior to, or more valuable than, the other." We have a number of ways of expressing the same concept: "male chauvanism" or "female chauvanism," "misogyny," and so forth.The Daily Mail, today:
What we don't appear to have is a way of expressing a concept that recognizes the real differences between the sexes in a way that honors them. As far as I know, there is no word in the language for a "a sense that though the sexes are genuinely different, both are necessary and valuable." That is to say, we have a lot of ways of describing a problem, but we have no way of talking about the solution.
I've tried to use the term "chivalry" in this context -- that men should regard women, though different, as wonderful and valuable, and should take care to listen to their concerns and help make a world in which they feel welcome.
Two things happened when I did that, which point up the severity of the problem. The first is that it was pointed out to me, by a well-meaning and kind-hearted woman, that I was offering good advice to men, but nothing for women. If "chivalry" is right for men, what is the female version of recognizing the differences between themselves and men, honoring men, and trying to make a world in which we also feel welcome and valued? I have no answer to that question: there is no word I know of that applies.
The other thing that happened was that certain feminists received my use of "chivalry" as a sort of code-word for male chauvanism.
They found men whose answers led to them being classed as benevolently sexist smiled more while playing the quiz game and chatting. They were more patient while waiting for their female partners to answer the trivia questions and warmer, friendlier and chattier than those who were hostile sexists... Study co-author Jin Goh said: 'Benevolent sexist men hold women in high regard and are willing to sacrifice themselves to save and protect women.
So, OK. Let's ask the same questions. What is the female version of what is on display in men seeing women as valuable, listening to their advice as a civilizing influence (an impulse rather unfairly degraded by being phrased as "putting on a pedestal"), and trying to do right by them and show them that they are safe and welcome in public places?
And why should we receive men who do it as bad? There are some senses of the word "strong" in which women are stronger than men. There are others, including the most fundamental sense, in which this is not the case. That fact is a fact simply: can't we be honest about it? Can't we show each other honor while recognizing each other's imperfections? If we can't acknowledge the truth about each other's imperfections without failing some assumed duty of respect, talk about putting on a pedestal!
Can't Wait For The Hillary Presidency
The main piece of news to emerge from the session was her confusingly worded disclosure that she has already deleted the emails that she believes are no one’s business but her own.
Go to hell is not typically a sentiment expressed by politicians on the brink of a presidential campaign. But in Hillary Clinton’s case, it reflects a sincerely held belief[.]
OK, So We Can't Make "Treason" Stick...
...how about the Logan Act?
...critically, the citizen must act “without authority of the United States.” Although most assume that means without authority of the Executive Branch, the Logan Act itself does not specify what this term means, and the State Department told Congress in 1975 that “Nothing in section 953 . . . would appear to restrict members of the Congress from engaging in discussions with foreign officials in pursuance of their legislative duties under the Constitution.” That doesn’t mean Members would have immunity under the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause; it just means the statute would arguably not apply in the first place. Combined with the rule of lenity and the constitutional concerns identified below, it seems likely that contemporary and/or future courts would interpret this provision to not apply to such official communications from Congress....There's a long history here.
Finally, as Peter noted yesterday, the Logan Act has never been successfully used (indeed, the last indictment under the Act was in–not a typo–1803). Although most assume this is just a practical obstacle to a contemporary prosecution, it’s worth reminding folks about “desuetude”–the legal doctrine pursuant to which statutes (especially criminal ones) may lapse if they are never enforced[.]
In 1970, as an inactive Naval Reserve Officer, Kerry traveled to Paris and talked with North Vietnamese government officials. He even stated later to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “I realize that even my visits in Paris,” Kerry testified, “are on the borderline of private individuals negotiating.” He got it wrong there too. Again the Logan Act does not differentiate between public or private individual. It's pretty clear on the "any" part.That one really was treason in the aid-and-comfort sense, coming from a military officer at a time when we were deployed at war against the very people with whom he was publicly negotiating, but the man went on to a long career in the Senate and now holds the position of Secretary of State.
Small is Beautiful
The polling did not just show the lack of faith in national institutions and leadership; it also shows that people increasingly feel that the best solutions for the country's problems will come from local communities, state governments, and institutions. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said that state and local institutions—from governments to businesses to community groups and volunteers—offer the best new ideas because they were closer to the problems, more adaptable, and had a greater stake in finding solutions. Just 22 percent of respondents thought the federal government and big business were better equipped to solve the country's challenges.The Federal government can still do some useful things. It just shouldn't try to do so many things that are better left to smaller governments. State and local governments can often represent a community with a sort of consensus about what should be done, or about what's important or best in life.
To varying degrees, that attitude remained constant across gender lines, age, race, and party affiliation—reflecting respondents' strong preference for state and local institutions and solutions.... It shows the extent to which people across demographic groups are turning away from the federal government[.]
The Federal government has to represent a vast number of communities, and Americans simply no longer share a set of common values across the population. As the diversity of the American community grows, the government will either have to become less powerful or less legitimate. Put another way, the Federal government can either let powers pass to smaller communities that can honestly represent the will of the people, or it will have to use increasing amounts of force and compulsion to impose a view without broad support.
I still think the 10th Amendment more or less gets this right: outside of specifically delegated powers, the Federal government should draw back and leave things to the states. We should reconsider the amendments after the original Bill of Rights insofar as they expand Federal power beyond that original allocation, or serve to limit the power of the states vis-Ã -vis the Federal government. We should encourage a rollback of Federal laws accordingly.
Win Small, Lose Big
A Small Victory:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) said it will not seek to issue a final framework for the rule “at this time” after receiving more than 80,000 comments on the proposal, the “vast majority” of which were negative.A Huge Loss:
Regulators won a big victory at the Supreme Court on Monday as the justices endorsed expansive powers for changing the interpretation of federal rules. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that federal agencies do not have to follow procedures for notifying the public and collecting comment when changing the interpretations of rules, effectively removing steps from the process that can take months and sometimes years to complete.So the next time there won't be 80,000 negative comments on a proposed rule change. There will just be a rule change. If you're lucky, you'll find out after the fact. If not, you'll find yourself in violation of a law that "changed." Like magic.
Definition of a problem
As permaculturist Joel Salatin likes to say, sometimes a problem is just a system that worked well but was split into two systems that created seemingly intractable problems. His example is barren fields and toxic feedlots, as opposed to fields well composted with animal manure. The "bike desk" is an invention meant to take two problems and combine them into a solution: people spend too much time inert in front of desks, and it takes a lot of energy to power their desktop toys.
Traitors!
The NY Daily News goes all-out.
Do these people think Americans owe a personal duty of loyalty to the President? That Congress is not a co-equal branch of government structurally designed to counterbalance the Executive, but rather a subordinate branch of government?
No wonder Congress so rarely tells the truth. First honest thing they've said in months, and look how people react.
Do these people think Americans owe a personal duty of loyalty to the President? That Congress is not a co-equal branch of government structurally designed to counterbalance the Executive, but rather a subordinate branch of government?
No wonder Congress so rarely tells the truth. First honest thing they've said in months, and look how people react.
Right to Work
"Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests." - United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23.4.
Scott Walker signs the Right To Work law in Wisconsin.
Nobody's saying you can't form a trade union. They're just saying you can't force people to join it. If you can deliver on your promises to improve pay and working conditions in a serious way, you can probably get people to sign on. Unions did this for years. Yes, it's harder to do it this way than with a rule that requires workers to join your union; yes, it's harder to do it this way than with rules forbidding the company from hiring scabs. But you can still do it, if you devote yourself to providing returns for the workers who pay dues. You can still make your case to the people, too, who may refuse to cross a picket line if they agree you are being shabbily treated.
It was too easy for a long time. Many unions did badly by their members, and devoted themselves to power and corruption instead of helping their own loyally as the first priority. If you want to survive, you'll have to get back to what made unions strong in the first place.
Wikipedia says that "scabs" in this context dates to the Elizabethan era, by the way. I had no idea.
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