Poli Corr Mascot

Politically Correct Mascot:

Our friend Major Leggett has a suggestion for a new mascot for Ole Miss, which continues its ongoing efforts to cleanse itself of any sense of having anything to do with Southern history. They don't play the fight song anymore, but maybe they won't have to change the name of the team:

I am the former Admiral of the fleet of the Galactic Rebellion. I spend much of my time now looking into new ways to use my skills as a leader of Rebels. Currently my interests are in-line with those of the University of Mississippi, which, as fate would have it, is in search of a new leader for its Rebels.

Personally, I can think of a symbol that would be more apt even than that. We all know that the Democratic Party has been out front all along in pushing for political correctness, so nothing could be safer than to adopt their own symbol as an expression of your submission to these principles.

Nothing could be safer, that is, except if it also wears an Army safety belt!



Now, that's a safe mascot!

I want one

I Want One:

The Dictionary of Old English sounds like something I would love to be able to use.

Healey was quick to point out that the dictionary is consulted by scholars in a wide range of fields and disciplines: social historians who are studying words for rank and class, historians of economics who are examining records and terms of early taxes, and researchers of many stripes who are interested in working with the early form of a language in a linguistically pure environment as is presented by the corpus.

After listing all these reasonable arguments for why we need a dictionary of Old English she added, almost as an afterthought “Plus, it’s our language.”

It is our language indeed, and these four words from it that she uttered in an afterthoughtish way made me feel fiercely interested in seeing the rest of the words after the letter G defined. And this makes me think how odd it is that we are such ardent admirers of museums full of partially reconstructed bone fragments, taken from animals that are millions of years removed from us, and yet we find it so difficult to warm to Old English. While it is true that this is a dead language, it has died so recently (at least compared with the dinosaurs whose fossils are perennially alluring) that the corpse is still warm.

You can see the roots and traces of our language, evident even in the words that did not quite survive until the present day. Bealofus (liable to sin) did not last into our vocabulary, having been pushed out by the upstart and Latinate peccable (we apparently do not need more than a single word for this concept). But the bealoful of yesteryear became the baleful of today, and so even though bealofus lost the evolutionary battle it still tickles the familiar to see it there.

It's important to our concepts in other ways, too. Consider this piece on American Exceptionalism, a very current debate, which makes a reference to Benjamin Franklin's name.

The traditional Marxist claim about the U.S. was that it was governed by the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. This was not intended as a compliment, but it was largely true. Look at the archetypal American, Benjamin Franklin, whose name comes from the Middle English meaning freeman, someone who owns some property. Napoleon dismissed the British as “a nation of shopkeepers”; we are a nation of Franklins.

Actually, most of us don't hold land in the way a "Franklin" would have, i.e., in fee simple while owning no duties to anyone. The word shows the introduction of Norman concepts to England, as you can see by the way the etymology goes back to Middle English, but then veers off into Anglo-French and from there to Old French. The original members of the class had not been "franklins" in Old English, but thanes (as we are reminded by the character of Cedric the Saxon in Ivanhoe). The thanes had a connection of service, as knights did: the class was defined by their military service to the king. The Norman conquest stripped that from most of them, but left a class that had property and a certain strength, and so were left alone. Thus, they went from being 'retainers' to being 'freeholders' -- liberated, yet also lowered, since it was their service that entitled them to be considered members of the aristocracy. This, too, mirrors the knights -- they were a lower class than the nobility, but their status as being members of the overall aristocracy was in virtue of their service.

If we are 'a nation of Franklins,' then, we are a nation of free men -- but men who owe no service to the society or the government. That is at once a strength and a weakness.

God Gap

Foreign Policy Needs More God:

So says the Chicago Council on Foreign Policy, at the conclusion of a study.

American foreign policy is handicapped by a God gap, a narrow, ill-informed and "uncompromising Western secularism" that feeds religious extremism, threatens traditional cultures, and fails to engage and encourage religious groups that promote peace, human rights and the general welfare of their communities....

American foreign policy's God gap has been noted by others in recent years, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "Diplomats trained in my era were taught not to invite trouble. And no subjects seemed more inherently treacherous than religion," she said in 2006.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment's reluctance to engage religion continues today, the task force says. "The role of nationalism and decolonization was not widely understood in the U.S. until after the Vietnam War, despite considerable supporting evidence in the 1950s. Such is the case with religion today," says the task force's report, released at a conference at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.

"Religion has been rapidly increasing as a factor in world affairs, for good and for ill, for the past two decades. Yet the U.S. government still tends to view it primarily through the lens of counterterrorism policy. The success of American diplomacy in the next decade will not simply be measured by government-to-government contacts, but also by its ability to connect with the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world whose identity is defined by religion."

This is indeed a critical weakness in U.S. policy, but not merely because of some sort of sentimental attachment to secularism. There are actually very solid reasons why American officials have more trouble talking in religious terms than, say, officials from the U.K. The British government, similar to ours in many respects, has an official church: the Church of England. The U.S. government has in the 1st Amendment a rejection of the 'establishment' of a national church.

As a result, any U.S. official making a religious statement can speak only in the most bland and unobjectionable terms; or he has to speak as a private citizen, making very clear that his personal sense and feelings have absolutely nothing to do with the policy of his government. That latter position strips any power out of what he might say; the former prevents any power from being present in the first place.

The official in the U.K. has 'top cover' in the sense that, because there is a doctrine that he can appeal to as the official faith of his country, he's got a lot more depth and range that he can invoke here.

So, what do we do about the 'God gap'? There's really not very much we can do. We can bring in more people with religious backgrounds to speak in addition to our diplomats and and other officers. We can go out of our way to show respect for religious practice.

The report had four specific recommendations, but point 4 is going to be problematic for the reason listed above. Essentially, they argue that we should stop talking about religious freedom, because that is seen as a kind of 'cultural imperalism' in places without religious freedom. Unfortunately, that's the one thing we can talk about; it's the one kind of 'official doctrine' to which our diplomats can appeal. "We believe in honoring your religion, along with all the others," sounds like weak tea, but apparently it's too strong.

There are not a lot of good answers here. This may be one area where our form of government has a structural weakness. The principle of religious freedom has also provided us with a great internal strength; and there are some people in the world outside our borders who likewise aspire to it (although always fewer than not, since 'religious freedom' is about the freedom of minorities, since the majority already has religious freedom by virtue of main force. Thus, religious freedom is most commonly about the freedom of others, others you probably believe to be necessarily different from yourself in a crucial way).

Hooah

Hooah.

This guy is my kind of guy. Mr. David Benke stopped a school shooter 'with the faith of his body,' as they used to say: wagering his life against a killer, and saving many others in the process. He also came away unhurt himself, whereas had everyone cowered he could well have been shot. This proves the truth of the proverb, 'He that will lose his life, that same shall save it.'

Also in good news today, car thieves meet Air Force security. These are things that make you feel good while you have your coffee.

Poison in the Well

Poison in the Well:

An interesting bit of history that I had never heard before.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Can you imagine the havoc that would be created if the government, today, were accused of poisoning crack cocaine or methamphetamine in an effort to scare off users?

Class War

"Class War"

That is the title of a Reason piece that portrays the public sector pension crisis as a case of public servants versus the rest of us.

Although Americans may have a vague sense that the nation has run up a great deal of debt, the public employee benefit problem is not well known. Yet the wave of benefit promises is poised to wash away state and local government budgets and large portions of the incomes of most Americans. Most of these benefits are vested, meaning that they have the standing of a legal contract. They cannot be reduced. And the government employees’ allies, such as California’s legislative Democrats, are cleverly blocking some of the more obvious exit strategies.

For instance, when the city of Vallejo went bankrupt after coughing up 75 percent of its budget to police and firefighters, the state Assembly introduced legislation that would allow cities to go bankrupt only if they get approval from a commission. Such a commission would of course be dominated by union-friendly members. The result: Cities would be stuck making good on contracts they cannot afford to fulfill....

That money will come from taxpayers. The average private-sector worker, who enjoys a lower salary and far lower retirement benefits than New York or California government workers, will have to work longer, retire later, and pay more so that his public-employee neighbors can enjoy the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.

He Was Right!

He Was Right!

Dad29 says: "He Said 'If You Elect Me the Seas Will Stop Rising,' and he was right"!

In the Instapundit sense, anyway.

Who built America?

Who Built America?

Thomas Freidman is talking about nation building in America again, which raises an interesting question. When we do 'nation building' in other countries, we're talking about using a relatively functional organization -- the US military, with State Department and other assistance -- to improve services in non-functional areas like parts of Afghanistan. America itself, though, is a 'functioning area' if anything is: problems with corruption and bad philosophy in our government aside, if America doesn't work than nothing can be said to be functional.

So, do we need "nation building"? Well, maybe, if you mean (as he seems to mean) infrastructure improvement projects. The Federal government certainly has a role in improving interstate commerce by building, say, roads across multiple states or bridges between two states.

How have we built the infrastructure we have? Let's look at a few examples.

The railroads: The Federal role here was limited to crafting a system that would encourage and reward private industry in building the rail system. They were paid bribes, essentially, in terms of the land that they were granted along the railway route, which they could sell or lease to raise funds. That paid for the construction of the railroad; after it was built, it operated on a for-profit basis.

The highways: The Interstate System was based on Dwight D. Eisenhower's support for a network of highways connecting the nation. He got the idea from the Lincoln Highway, the first intercontinental road, which was apparently built by a private group. Automobile manufacturers were important in funding the Lincoln Highway, and in lobbying for the Interstate System. The Federal role here was to help the states organize their efforts, and provide some funding.

The airport system: This, again, was a partnership between industry and (local) government. The cities of America have had a leading role here, with states supporting them. The Federal role has been smaller; but there has also been a large degree of input in terms of money and leadership from private industry.

The telephone network: This has been very largely a private investment, with the government serving a regulatory role either to avoid, or to manage, monopolies in certain areas. The same is true for cell phone networks.

The internet: The government played a major role in the formation of the internet, though private investment has expanded it in many ways. Government continues to sit in regulation on the basic structure of the thing, but new additions to the network are very often based on private companies, groups or individuals who have information they wish to add. Many of these provide their own infrastructure up to a point, and normally pay for access through their privately-owned Internet Service Provider.

We could go on and consider oil pipelines, deep-water ports, etc., but I think the point has been made.

The government has certainly had a role in the building of the infrastructure of America. Sometimes this has been a leadership role, and sometimes it has mostly been about arranging funding; and sometimes it hasn't led and it hasn't funded, but it's regulated the provision of privately-created services.

All of these models are before us if we talk about "nation building in America." I'd like to know two things about any such proposal:

1) What is this new system that needs to be built, which we don't already have in the sense that we "didn't have" a railroad or an Interstate System until it was built?

2) Which model of Federal leadership are you proposing? The one where they find ways to spur private investment (like the railroads)? The one where they take control of an existing private system (like the AT&T breakup)? Or the one like the Internet, where it really builds something new and then lets private groups add on?

Paranoia

Choices:

Three items today.

First:

Moving to her criticism of the president’s spending, Bachmann pointed to a chart of rising federal deficits.

“This is intending to fail,” she said.

“They have left us holding an invoice of $105 trillion in unfunded federal liabilities,” she went on, alluding to the federal government’s entitlement programs. “Sounds to me like someone is choosing decline.”

Second:

Two years after Buckley’s death, the John Birch Society is no longer banished; it is listed as one of about 100 co-sponsors of the 2010 CPAC.

Why is the Birch Society a co-sponsor?

“They’re a conservative organization,” said Lisa Depasquale, the CPAC Director for the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC. “ Beyond that I have no comment.”

On its website, the Birch Society describes it mission as to “to warn against and expose the forces that seek to abolish U.S. independence, build a world government, or otherwise undermine our personal liberties and national independence. The John Birch Society endorses the U.S. Constitution as the foundation of our national government, and works toward educating and activating Americans to abide by the original intent of the Founding Fathers. We seek to awaken a sleeping and apathetic people concerning the designs of those who are working to destroy our constitutional Republic.”

Third:

Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in.

Holder's admission comes in the form of an answer to a question posed last November by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Noting that one Obama appointee, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, formerly represented Osama bin Laden's driver, and another appointee, Jennifer Daskal, previously advocated for detainees at Human Rights Watch, Grassley asked Holder to give the Senate Judiciary Committee "the names of political appointees in your department who represent detainees or who work for organizations advocating on their behalf…the cases or projects that these appointees work with respect to detainee prior to joining the Justice Department…and the cases or projects relating to detainees that have worked on since joining the Justice Department."

In his response, Holder has given Grassley almost nothing.

Making America Work

Making It Work:

The Economist has a strong piece on the subject of success in American politics. Why, they begin, are things looking so hard for Washington, D.C.? Blame Obama:

Although a Democratic president is in the White House and Democrats control both House and Senate, Mr Obama has been unable to enact health-care reform, a Democratic goal for many decades. His cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions has passed the House but languishes in the Senate. Now a bill to boost job-creation is stuck there as well. Nor is it just a question of a governing party failing to get its way. Washington seems incapable of fixing America’s deeper problems. Democrats and Republicans may disagree about climate change and health, but nobody thinks that America can ignore the federal deficit, already 10% of GDP and with a generation of baby-boomers just about to retire. Yet an attempt to set up a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission has recently collapsed—again....

America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.

So, it turns out that obeying the 10th Amendment's restriction on Federal powers is not just the right thing to do for constitutional reasons. It is also the more effective way to enact the policy you prefer. If you're willing to set your goal as "Changing the way we do things in California," or "Making Massachusetts better," you can accomplish a lot -- and with low constitutional hurdles to clear.

If what you want to do is "Change America," that's going to be harder. It's supposed to be hard. America has always been big -- even the 13 original states, in an era before railroads and other motorized travel covered a substantial area. It has always been diverse, with agricultural areas and urban ones; with different religious groups and interests, and immigrants from everywhere.

The model is designed to let different parts of this big, diverse nation do different things. You're supposed to be able to live the way you want in Tennessee, if you can't in Boston. That's the idea.

If it's hard to wrench the ship of state to a new course on a whim, it's supposed to be. The Federal government has wide powers to alter those few things that are really supposed to be its job. The Bush administration, which wanted little authority over the day to day lives of Americans, wielded tremendous and decisive authority in international affairs: and of course they could do so, because that was a legitimate area for the Federal government to exercise wide authority. Therefore, the Founders designed the system to support that kind of action.

If it's hard to force legislation on the country at the Federal level, good. Maybe you should stop and do something else instead. The only new Federal laws we really need are laws to repeal some of the existing over-regulation of our daily lives; and to reduce the percentage of our paycheck-to-paycheck wealth that the Federal government intends to suck up and spend.

Aside from that, we've got all the Federal laws we need.

Against Mothers in Combat

Against Mothers in Combat:

Hoover considers the question. Can we make this distinction? I'm putting the question particularly to my female readers, who are a stalwart lot on the matter of women having the right to compete on equal terms. So? Does motherhood make the difference Hoover thinks it does, or not? If so, why? If not, why not?

He's had all he can stand.

A pilot furious with the Internal Revenue Service crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, that houses federal tax employees, setting off a raging fire.

I wonder how much more of this we'll see.

The Roots of Morality

The Roots of Morality:

Many modern philosophers are under the impression that humanity sort-of invents morality. This is not Protagoras' "Man is the Measure of All Things" concept, although like most of the problematic moral issues of the modern era there are ancient echoes of bad ideas long abandoned. Rather, this is rooted in the writings of Immanuel Kant on moral philosophy, although those who followed him have run with it well past his own writings (which presuppose the existence of God, though Kant doesn't believe we can have reason to believe in God; and state that the 'moral legislation' we are doing can only produce laws that are in accord with the moral laws that would be acceptable to a 'holy will').

The normal condition has been to assume that any 'moral law' is rooted in nature, whether because God put it there or because it arises from evolutionary success. Dogs and other canids have a clear moral structure, as do other advanced animals.

We talk about the dogs and horses a lot, because they mirror our own ethics in useful ways (though the animals are quite distinct biologically, unlike the primates who may be more similar to us). Since this is the year of the Tiger, though, it might be worth looking at how a Tiger would 'legislate' morality.

If Kant were right, a tiger who evolved into a rational being would abandon eating other rational beings -- he would be able to understand Kant's 'categorical imperative,' and would reason that it was wrong to use other rational beings as means to his ends.

Is that plausible? Would a rational tiger reason any such thing? Or would he use his reason to decide that nature had made him an efficient predator, and that it was his duty to keep others strong by removing the weak and stupid from the gene pool?

If that's right, the concept that humanity is in charge of morality is an illusion; our reason doesn't create morality, but is merely used to ratify what we already believe by nature. Where we disagree -- some people are quite willing to prey on others -- we resolve the issue not by reason, but by force (which appears to me to be another law of nature).

It's only a thought experiment, since there isn't any rational tiger. Still, what do you think?

Socialist Books

Books Are Good:

Some books are better than others, but what really matters is what you do with the books you read. If these books are to help you understand a problem in American society, and route around it, that's one thing; if they're inspiration and a roadmap for you, that's something else.

Good catch.

Comments "Upgrade"

Comments "Upgrade"

The threatened promised upgrade to the Echo comments system has arrived. I realize that some of you didn't like it very much, but I didn't find anything else that would be any better; and any other change would have resulted in the loss of the 20,000+ existing comments, which would annoy me (though I archived them as xml files, we would have no practical access to them).

Good luck with the new system. I hate change as much as the rest of you, I assure you. :)

Palin on Tea Parties

Mrs. Palin on Tea Parties:

So, we just finished saying that one of the most important contributions Mrs. Palin might have to the Tea Party movement was in helping it learn what it needs to do to compete for power. It happens that she spoke to that issue tonight.



You can skip the first bit, where O'Reilly is talking to himself. He wants to say that the Tea Party movement needs to do a William Buckley and cast the extremists from its ranks; but that's not the real question. The real question has to do with how the bulk of the movement can pursue an agenda without a central authority. He's missing the point; she seems to be onto it.

Daring Young Men

Daring Young Men:

What do you know about the Berlin Airlift?

[An important work of history-since-1945 devoted] less than a page to the airlift. That caused Reeves to wonder whether the 277,500 high-risk, expensive flights through Soviet airspace to supply food and fuel to the West Berliners had disappeared in the mists of history.

Students questioned by Reeves said they had never heard of the airlift. Reeves' contemporaries generally guessed the effort had occurred during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, not the presidency of Harry S. Truman 13 years earlier.

Unable to restrain his enthusiasm, Reeves told audiences about Truman's heroic decision to supply Berlin by air, in the face of objections from his cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it would be impossible to feed a city of more than two million by using cargo planes.

"Then I would babble on about the daring young men (and some women) from the States and Great Britain being pulled away from their new lives, their wives, their schools, their work for the second time in five or six years," Reeves writes. "This time they were supposed to feed the people they had been trying to kill, and who had been trying to kill them, only three years earlier."

Much of the mission in Iraq has been of the same nature. America may not be the only power in history that so readily forgives former enemies, and bends itself wholly to their good when they are ready to be friends instead; but it must be in rare company.

The Pirate Queen

The Pirate Queen:

So, via Dr. Althouse, some fellow has gone to a lot of trouble to photoshop Mrs. Palin to remove everything he calls 'glamorous' about her.

Result? It demonstrates that her loveliness, which is genuine, is not a result of the make-up or hairstyle. If anything, several of the retouches make her beauty clearer by removing distractions. (I always took the beehive hairdo as a way of playing down her beauty, since it's not normally associated with beauty. And since when is taking off the glassess supposed to be the way that you make a woman less glamorous? That runs counter to every movie Hollywood ever made. She really has these people spinning.)

My suspicion, however, is that you could photoshop her with a pirate hat, a scar across her face, and an eyepatch without changing anyone's mind.

Dr. Althouse says, "This is an effort at defeminizing Sarah — like drawing a mustache on her." Given her sense of humor, I won't be surprised if she turns up soon on a FOX broadcast wearing a fake moustache. If she did, it would only increase my sense of admiration.

What do people like about her? It's as if no one has understood. It's not just that she went to small, state schools; it's not just that she did local news and beauty pagents before she became a small-town mayor. It's very much that she does things like write notes on her hand because she still gets nervous in interviews and forgets even the most basic things she wanted to say. Yes, she does; and everyone who has ever had to speak in front of a group can relate to the pressure, while imagining how much worse it must be for someone the media longs to destroy and humiliate. What is amazing is that she doesn't let it stop her: she writes a note on her hand, and goes right ahead.

She's ordinary, yet has managed -- through discipline, through these little tricks, and through the strength of the family she and her husband have built -- to succeed at what she has set out to do. When she hits a wall, she finds a way to climb it.

Of course people admire her. She happens also to be lovely. Good that she is; why shouldn't she be?

Cossacks

Cossacks:

For Doc Russia.



A good piece! Here's another:

Year of the Tiger

Year of the Tiger!

We were in China for the Lunar New Year in 2001, and let me tell you, it is a thing to see. This year is the Year of the Tiger, which is the sign that stood over the year in which I was born.

Tigers are said to be most compatible with horses and dogs. Chinese tradition holds also that tigers love to resist authority, are unable to resist a challenge when honor is involved, and provide excellent protection against the danger of burglary.

What was your year of birth, in the Chinese system? They poured thousands of their finest minds into developing it, over hundreds of years: did it work? How much does the system match what you find to be true of yourself?