ARMA

ARMA Art, I:

The ARMA has quite a gallery of Medieval and Renaissance art associated with questions of battle. Here is one:

The clear effect of even single-hand sword blows against steel helmets. In the center a sword splits the top of a helm from behind. On the right two swords hack into the sides of helmets while a spiked mace delivers a crushing blow. Notice also the portions of each sword (their center-of percussion) that does most of the striking is invariably the last third to second-half of blade. One rider in the center has an arrow in his cheek that appears to have hit behind his mail coif. On the lower right, a long axe cuts powerfully against a rider’s neck and back of the head, pulling him off his mount. On the ground one fallen fighter has deep shoulder and head wounds while another has a deep cut on the neck. Four different types of helmet are visible. All the shields appear to be medium sized flat heaters. From the gruesome Maciejowski Bible, c. 1250.

Father Sends

My Father Sends...

...a story about a cowboy.

A cowboy from Texas attends a social function where Barack Obama is trying to gather support for his Health Plan. Once he discovers the cowboy is from President Bush's home area, he starts to belittle him by talking in a southern drawl and single syllable words.

As he was doing that, he kept swatting at some flies that were buzzing around his head. The cowboy says, "Havin' some problem with them circle flies?"

Obama stopped talking and said, "Well, yes, if that's what they're called, but I've never heard of circle flies."

"Well, sir," the cowboy replies, "Circle flies hang around ranches. They're called circle flies because they're almost always found circling around the back end of a horse."

"Oh," Obama replies as he goes back to rambling.

But, a moment later he stops and bluntly asks, "Are you calling me a horse's ass?"

"No, sir," the cowboy replies, "I have too much respect for the citizens of this country to call their president a horse's ass."

"That's a good thing," Obama responds and begins rambling on once more.

After a long pause, the cowboy in his Texas drawl says, "Sure is hard to fool them flies, though."

Chivalry & Solidarity in Game Theory

"Chivalry & Solidarity in Ultimatum Games"

An interesting game theory experiment from 2001 appears to show that women find it very easy to come to agreements with other women; but men are far readier to accept offers from women than from other men. The two effects are noteworthy, though painting the woman/woman effect as "solidarity" seems a bit odd. It's more likely that they understand each other, and have similar desires to come to agreement; whereas men, who understand each other, want to compete.

By the same token, "chivalry" is the wrong term here; this tendency describes all men who participated. It would have been very great good luck to gather only chivalrous men into the study!

When a woman is his partner in the game, however, a man becomes much less competitive: he is ready to accede to her requests almost at the same rate that women agree to accept/agree with either men or mixed groups. Men facing other men, however, accept offers only if they are much more generous.

The graph on page 184 is the main thing, I think. It shows that actual results are fairer in men/men pairings; but agreement is far more common in female/female pairings. That may mean that women are more interested in agreement than fairness (or gain); but it also may mean that men are more willing to resist authority if they feel it is not treating them fairly. After all, the proposer is in the position of authority where the resource division is involved; all the respondent can do is accept or reject the proposal. Men would rather punish unfair actors than seek agreement, even if that means gaining nothing rather than gaining an unfairly small amount.

Unless, that is, they are receiving the proposal from a woman: then, they're much readier to be treated unfairly!

Another way of saying that, though, is that they are more willing to accept female authority -- fair or unfair -- than they are to accept unfair male authority. From another man, they will only accept fairness.

This only treats initial acceptance, of course. One might later resent being treated unfairly, even if this proves that -- in some cases -- one is readier to be treated unfairly. It's also interesting that both men and women are readier to be treated unfairly by women than by men.

The Cathedral of Dawn:

A find in archæology is startling because of its age, but not because of its purpose.

[U]nder our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization....

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey.

This we have heard before, and wisely.

Even in trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude
or irrational sources, they begin their proof with the first men
who were men. But their own proof only proves that the men
who were already men were already mystics. They used the rude
and irrational elements as only men and mystics can use them.
We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime
too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred
to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness;
and man became a living soul.

***

The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been
like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting
to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks.
But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great
cities long builded and lost for us in the original night;
colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even
the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees;
in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size
of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square
and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls
standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples;
standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world.
The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized.
Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old.

There are a few men who have seen so clearly as to be able to predict both the future and the past. Chesterton was one.

(H/t: Lars Walker.)

Kitten

"That Bull Wouldn't Hurt A Kitten."

It's part of the honor of those who work with large and powerful animals that there is a certain danger in the work. Frequently we play that down, amused at those less experienced with the creatures' strength and willfulness; but the danger never passes.

Ricky Weinhold, of Reinholds, was attacked Saturday by a 1-ton bull on a farm where he leased barn space in Wernersville, about 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Berks County Deputy Coroner Terri Straka said. The son of the farm's owner found his body Sunday in an outdoor pen.

The property owners had encouraged Weinhold to get rid of the bull, Straka said. She said the same animal believed responsible for the weekend attack rammed Weinhold last summer, breaking several of his ribs.

"He's been known to be temperamental," Straka said. "The property owners just didn't trust him. They told Ricky, 'This bull has got a bad disposition."'

Well, bulls are dangerous. Mr. Weinhold doubtless knew that, and gloried in what he did. Anyone might die in a conflict with a bull, and all must die sooner or later. At least here is a man who lived.

All of which reminds me of a story. It is meant with no disrespect, told in this context. As I said, it is the essentially dangerous nature of the bull that makes it honorable to deal with bulls; so this story is no insult, but a blessing.

A Federal officer stops at a ranch in Montana, and talks with an old rancher. He tells the rancher, 'I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs. The old rancher says, 'Okay, but do not go in that field over there.'

The officer verbally explodes saying, 'Mister, I have the authority of the Federal Government with me.' Reaching into his rear pants pocket, he removes his badge and proudly displays it to the farmer. 'See this badge? This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish...on any land. No questions asked or answers given. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand?'

The old rancher nods politely, apologizes, and goes about his chores. A short time later, the old rancher hears loud screams and sees the officer running for his life chased close behind by the rancher's prize bull. With every step the bull is gaining ground on the officer, and it seems likely that he'll get "horned" before he reaches safety.

The old rancher throws down his tools, runs to the fence and yells at the top of his lungs..... "Your badge! Show him your badge!"

Of course, in real life a Federal officer needs a warrant as well. Not, that is, that bulls are any more impressed with the one than with the other.

Zebras and Mules

Zebras and Mules:

How much can you know by deduction from facts you already know? A famous thought experiment ponders the question:

Suppose you are at a zoo in ordinary circumstances standing in front of a cage marked ‘zebra’; the animal in the cage is a zebra, and you believe zeb, the animal in the cage is a zebra, because you have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts. It occurs to you that zeb entails not-mule, it is not the case that the animal in the cage is a cleverly disguised mule rather than a zebra. You then believe not-mule by deducing it from zeb. What do you know? You know zeb, since, if zeb were false, you would not have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts; instead, you would have empty-cage percepts, or aardvark-in-a-cage percepts, or the like. Do you know not-mule? If not-mule were false, you would still have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts (and you would still believe zeb, and you would still believe not-mule by deducing it from zeb). So you do not know not-mule. But notice that we have:

(a) You know zeb

(b) You believe not-mule by recognizing that zeb entails not-mule

(c) You do not know not-mule.

Knowledge by deduction would normally permit you to reason to not-mule; this experiment suggests we may not be able to do that with confidence.

Of course, all this turns on the question of whether you could really cleverly disguise a mule to look like a zebra. Compare and contrast:






More contrasting than comparing, isn't there? From the shape of the ears to the general confirmation, there's no comparison. Of course, you can breed a donkey to a zebra, and then you get something that looks a lot like a cleverly disguised mule:



But it's neither a mule nor a zebra. It's a zonkey.

The real answer to the question, though, is not "Can I really know if I'm looking at a zonkey or a zebra?" Rather, the real question is, "Whose job is it to be able to know how to tell the difference?" The thought experiment errs by assuming that just because person X can't tell the difference, knowledge isn't possible. It is possible, though, for the zoologist; and he's probably the one who put the sign on the cage. So, can person X know that he's looking at a not-mule? Yes, if the zoologist can be trusted.

Bill Whittle wrote about that, once. That's why the climate-change apostasy is so disturbing: it's a direct assault on that web of trust upon which civilization is founded.

Tolkien Wasn't Jewish

Tolkien and Judaism:

Did you know that there was talk of a Nazi edition of The Hobbit?

When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”

The article goes on to wonder why there are no Jews in the top authors of fantasy literature. Tolkien's remark about giftedness is clearly on point: the author of this piece can unselfconsciously wonder about "an entire literary genre—perhaps the only such genre—in which Jewish practitioners are strikingly rare." Who besides the Jews could honestly claim that there was only one literary genre in which they were rare? Not many!

The investigation is an interesting one.

To answer the question of why Jews do not write fantasy, we should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.

It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience.

It goes deeper than this, though, if I may say so. Jewish thinkers have very often been suspicious not merely of feudal or medieval ethics, but of heroic ethics. I suspect the reason has to do not nearly so much with our history or literature, as with their own.

After the battle is won, the Israelites capture the five fleeing Ammonite kings. Joshua drags the monarchs before him and orders his generals to "put your feet on the neck of these kings." As they stand on the kings' throats, Joshua tells his commanders, "Do not be afraid or dismayed: Be strong and courageous; for thus the Lord will do to all the enemies against whom you fight." Then, Joshua himself executes the kings and hangs their bodies in the trees. This episode is so proudly barbaric that it's painful to read. It's clear that we readers are supposed to take the Israelites' side here—they're conquering the Promised Land, they're God's Chosen People, the Ammonites are vile statue-worshippers, etc.—but the unapologetic savagery is hard to bear. This probably reveals a profound weakness in me, but I imagined myself—in the way one always imagines oneself inside a book—not as one of my own ancestors, the victorious Israelite generals, but as a heathen king with a boot on my neck, moments from a brutal death.

Joshua and the Israelites have been doing nothing but killing in this book—killing by the thousands, killing women, killing children, killing animals—but it is the death of these five men, who aren't even innocents, that inspires the most revulsion. There's an obvious reason for this, one Stalin understood: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." All the other killings in Joshua are mass killings. This is the only time the book of Joshua gives us death in a tight close-up, and it's appalling.

The rest of the chapter is gruesome, but in the statistical way. Joshua sweeps from city to city across southern Canaan, sacking them one after another:

Joshua took Makkedah on that day, and struck it and its king with the edge of the sword; he utterly destroyed every person in it; he left no one remaining …
Then Joshua passed on … to Libnah … He struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it; he left no one remaining in it …
To Lacshish … He took it on the second day, and struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it …
Gezer … Joshua struck him and his people, leaving him no survivors …
To Eglon … [They] struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it he utterly destroyed that day … etc. etc.

The worst parts of Leviticus seem positively joyful compared with this smug roster of slaughter.

Read that in the echo of the Holocaust, and you can begin to understand why there is little interest in writing Jewish heroic fiction. The tradition they would naturally draw on leads directly to a soul-shaking conflict, for their own heroes treated the women and children of fallen nations in a way that has to be horrifyingly familiar.

Consider Simone Weil's War and the Iliad as a counterexample. Weil was Jewish by ancestry, though she became a Christian mystic after a religious experience at Assisi. Her work is characterized as "an inspired analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost." She actually calls it "the only true epic the Occident possesses," standing head and shoulders over all the other great poems and tales of the West because it treated the slain with the same sympathy as the slayers.

It may be the only poem that ever has, not merely in the West. Yet it is no accident that Tolkien's Catholicism could stand as a root for a recovery of the heroic tradition, even in the wake of World War II. It was the Catholic tradition that gave rise to the concept that the hero defends the innocent as well as fighting his enemies; and that their women and children are not legitimate targets.

The Peace and Truce of God was a medieval European movement of the Catholic Church that applied spiritual sanctions in order to limit the violence of private war in feudal society.

This was the tradition that invented the idea of loving enemies even as you fought them. It was this tradition that first introduced the idea a warrior could swear himself to the service of a lady, rather than regarding her as a mere prize or slave. (Contrast part 1 of Mr. Plotz's essay on the Book of Joshua, wherein women are normally prostitutes!)

It is not, then, simply that the Jews of the Middle Ages suffered from the swords of knights -- though they certainly did, at times. It is that modern heroic literature is rooted in a concept of what it means to be a hero that is originally Catholic; it is not rooted in Jewish epics, in the ancient Greek epics, any more than it is rooted in Chinese or "Aryan" epics. If Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were the first to pull it forward, it is because they were closest to the garden in which it grew.

Let that not be the last word! The modern world needs heroes, and it needs heroes from precisely this tradition. If Jewish writers want to tackle heroic writing, this is the road to take: one that views their enemies as potential friends, and their enemies' innocents as sacred. Anyone who can write in that tradition will be improving our world: we need far more of that vision than we've had.

Unfortunately, the essay ends pointed in another direction. The final example, of what the author hopes is an emerging tradition of Jewish heroic fiction, is merely self-obsessed.

[T]heir deepest struggles are expressed in the language of contemporary self-actualization. “Before I can return with you to any human realm and be who you expect me to be,” Yonatan tells the empress with whom he has fallen in love, “I have to deal with who I am.” The empress meanwhile learns that, to fulfill her own magical quest, she must discover that “the abyss is within you … you must jump into the depths within yourself.” Yanai’s former involvement in Israel’s New Age culture—she wrote for a prominent New Age magazine, spent time in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, and edited a volume of literary erotica by women before turning to fantasy—makes itself felt here.

The author says that he would hesistate to give the book to a teenager, because it contains nothing they don't already know. Self-esteem is not the reward the hero seeks. Honor is sacrifice. It is repaid not with self-love but with the love of those you have served.

For Tolkien's tradition, it was both God and one's beloved that one served, in the hope of love. As Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willhelm said to his knights, "There are two rewards that await us: heaven, and the recognition of noble women." For those who wish to write in another tradition, you can speak of service to the ethic of heroism instead of service to God; you can speak of service to any beloved person or community. Yet it is service that defines.

The Declaration of Arbroath

The Declaration of Arbroath:

In an interview with a Tea Party founding member, there is this quote on what to do with certain celebrity figures trying to associate themselves:

She, like many Tea Party members, resists the idea of a Tea Party leader — “there are a thousand leaders,” she says.

Glenn Beck? “He can be a Tea Partier, but it’s not like the movement bends to him.”

Sarah Palin? She will have to campaign on Tea Party ideas if she wants Tea Party support, Ms. Carender said, adding, “And if she were elected, she’d have to govern on those principles or be fired.”

That's the spirit! Robert the Bruce would have understood, since his supporters had the same opinion:

Him, too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King. To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

It must not be enough that a person says the right things; we need them to do the right things. These things will be hard, but it is time to start taking apart the anti-constitutional parts of the Federal government, and restoring the Constitutional order. The Federal government certainly has a role, but it is a role limited by enumerated powers, balanced and checked.

What? Actually Vote?

What? Actually Vote?

Senator Bunning apparently stood up for making his colleagues do their job. Alone of all the Senators, he objected to a 'unanimous consent' call for an extension of expiring stimulus spending.

“It is simply unfair for one senator to attempt to hold the Senate hostage on this issue,” Durbin said. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) told POLITICO that it’s “just awful,” and that Bunning’s objection could turn off televisions for millions of households with satellite dishes, since the package has provisions dealing with that issue.“You’ve got to be pretty mad about something to stop that,” Rockefeller said of Bunning.

It's "unfair" to allow one Senator to prevent a "unanimous" vote?

As for turning off people's TVs, so they'll have to pay attention to the hole we are digging for ourselves: Good!

Addiction

So, What Do We Mean By "Addiction"?

The case for treating sex as an addiction:

In the last week of treatment, he and his doctors mapped out what his life would look like back home after recovery. He sees a counselor and goes to a 12-step recovery program. "In my first 365 days after treatment, I went to 523 meetings," he says.

Early on in his recovery he did sometimes look at Internet pornography, but a software program he installed on his computer alerted his wife and sponsor in his support group, and he stopped looking at porn.

Gradually, Rogers says, he learned how to have a healthy sex life with his wife.

"That's what we aim for," Parker says. "We're not trying to turn someone into a monk. He needs to learn how to have sex like a gentleman."

The case against:

As Tiger Woods undergoes treatment, T. Byram Karasu—the University Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein College—says medicalizing normal human behavior doesn’t help anyone....

The treatment for sexual addiction is a form of pseudo-redemptive window dressing in which no one, especially the addict himself, really believes.

Sexual addiction is not like other addictions. Unlike addictions to alcohol, cocaine, and cigarettes, in which the craving is induced by external elements, sexual craving, by its nature, is an innate and natural phenomenon. And sex addiction is a specific situation—the frequency of erection and the intensity of orgasm—dependent on the person’s blood-level of testosterone.

It's interesting that the "for" case posits a treatment different from the similar 12-step treatment for alcoholism, which I have always heard requires you to stop drinking entirely. Medical doctors being so very interested in our animality, the assumption is that one cannot abandon sex entirely and be 'healthy,' since sexuality is normal and natural, and therefore ought to be present in reasonable amounts.

Eating and drinking are also normal and natural behaviors, and one can certainly point to gluttony as a problem not only for the glutton but those around him or her; but one really can't stop eating, whereas one actually can stop having sex. Indeed, the practice of celibacy has enjoyed a high reputation through most of human history: it is supposed to have numerous benefits, so I have heard. Fasting, the closest analog, can only ever be a temporary condition.

Would we say that the same mechanism is at work in gluttony and unchaste behavior? Sometimes there is at least the additional aspect of deception; gluttony is usually practiced openly, whereas one can openly sleep with lots of other people if and only if one is unmarried. Leaving deception aside, though, it does seem to be an unnatural focus of pleasure in only one otherwise natural process.

Here, too, we return to alcohol addiction: the enjoyment of a glass of wine or a fine ale has such a long history -- at least since the dawn of civilization, and quite possibly explaining the dawn of civilization -- that it would be a little strange to view it as non-natural behavior at this point. It would be nice if we could develop a 'therapy' that allowed a man to 'drink like a gentleman,' instead of abandoning the normal as well as the unnatural pleasure. Why can't we do that? Or can we?

There’s one element of the Sinclair Method that may surprise some people. The patient must continue drinking alcohol for the treatment to be successful. The drug naltrexone must be taken in conjunction with alcohol in order to be effective. While the drug may reduce the desire for alcohol so much that a patient eventually ends up giving up alcohol completely, abstaining from alcohol on a permanent basis is not a requirement of this treatment. One of the main goals is to get destructive, problem drinking under control so that a person can live a normal life.

It may be that there is a common root, then: the reward systems of the brain getting out of whack, and needing to be reset. Abstinence may be one way of doing that, and simply blocking the chemical rewards may be another. That would tend to explain why we can have apparently addictive behaviors in natural, innate things like sexuality or eating of food; but does it also explain unnatural behaviors like methamphetamine abuse?

Saving Money

How to Save Money, Federal Government Edition:

Dennis the Peasant has a wider complaint with this, but I'd like to focus on just one aspect of it.

By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said.

In other words, 'We're going to look for ways to disqualify low bidders in order to pay more for products and services than we do currently.'

This appears to me to be a method to raise, across the board, the cost of everything the government buys. Thus, the government will become more expensive even if it were simply to maintain current levels of services; but we'd also like (says the administration) to add a bunch of new services related to health care, environmental regulations, etc.

They really do not understand that there will soon be no more money. No one in the White House has even begun to think about it, to grapple with it, or to consider how we might address the problem.

Interesting

Interesting:

The VA is going to take another look at Gulf War Syndrome.

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?