The Small Laws

The Small Laws:

The other day, I saw a strange post at Volokh, asking whether and why adult incest should be banned by law.

Now, it's a known fact that electing a Democratic president very often leads to challenges to the basic foundations of society. I'm not sure just why this is true; as a lifelong Democrat myself, until the formation of the Tea Party, I can't think of any good reason it should be true. There are plenty of Southern Baptists among the Democratic Party; there are plenty of Catholics; and their most devout voters, the black community, are stridently religious.

Nevertheless, elect a Democrat to the White House, and suddenly you're talking seriously about whether or not there is really a rational basis for banning incest.

Dad29 has the right answer about all this, which is of course to be found in a Chesterton quote.

When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

What you get, that is, is petty tyranny. A law that denies the will of the vast majority will need invasive powers if it is to enforce its authority. It will need to control you: if not your very thoughts, at least your expressions of those thoughts.

We gain a freedom to commit incest with our adult children: a freedom almost no one wanted, and which freedom almost everyone will resolve by hurling it away -- as one ought to do if one should discover something filthy in one's hand. That, though, brings us back around to Dr. Nussbaum's point, and our earlier discussion of it.

Oh, by the way, why is this incest thing suddenly something that people are willing to step up and defend? I can't help but notice that the guilty party is a noted Palin critic; and, I suppose, that suggests to a certain set that he must therefore be in the right. We need, then, to find out how we have gone wrong, in condemning behavior practiced by so obviously correct and wise a man.

I gently suggest: possibly not.

Matthew 5:9

Blessed are the Peacemakers:

I don't know how much peace was made by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who has died unexpectedly at the age of 69. The position is an honorable one, though, if undertaken properly with a serious heart. My condolences to his family.

UPDATE: I said above that I didn't know how much peace he had made, which was true in the literal sense: there's little enough in Afghanistan, and I wasn't familiar with his earlier career. This morning's biography in the Washington Post, though, makes it sound like he may have done quite a bit to forge peace, especially in the wars following Yugoslavia's collapse. It's worth reading.

The Piano Arrives!

The Piano Arrives!

I'm taking custody today of my good friend's dog, a dog I'm awfully fond of, for a month or so while she goes on her annual holiday walkabout. Since she lives several hours away, I normally would count on her to deliver him to me, or at least meet me halfway. Not today, though: the gorgeous 9-foot grand piano has arrived. I drove up to admire it and play for a while.

What a beautiful, beautiful instrument. This picture shows my friend, an accomplished flutist, playing a duet with her young son. Fifteen years ago when she turned up pregnant, she could hardly imagine becoming a mother, let alone that her son would become this fine musician. The last time he was at my house noodling around on my piano, I thought he was pretty good for such a young man, fourteen years old. That was nearly a year ago. In the intervening months he's progressed by leaps and bounds. He played some Rachmaninoff and Brahms and Mozart and Liszt, but as my heart belongs to Chopin, he indulged me with the lovely Nocturne in C sharp minor, which you can listen to here, played by another very young person:

We goofed around playing Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, with my friend playing the vocal parts on her flute, her son sight-reading the left hand of the piano accompaniment and me trying to sight-read the right hand. We made a mess of it, but I haven't had so much fun for ages. When I haven't been to her home for a while, I forget what a paradise of music and art it is. You can barely walk through any room without tripping over looms and spinning wheels. And although I didn't get to stay long, I now have my beloved Chuck, the chocolate lab, here for a month-long visit, making us a four-dog household. Who could ask for more?

Don't Forget the Shower

Don't Forget the Shower

The Geminid meteor shower is beginning already and will get better all night long. Right now they're coming about one every two or three minutes. Look east at Gemini, the two-star constellation a bit north of Orion and slightly lower in the sky. The meteors will appear to be radiating straight out of Gemini in all directions. Most of the ones we saw were a good hand's breath away from Gemini.

Mainstreaming the Constitution

Mainstreaming the Constitution:

Amazing!

A year ago, no one took seriously the idea that a federal health care mandate was unconstitutional.

No one?

A number of readers have taken issue with my saying that "no one" took this idea seriously. It would probably be better to say that very few experts on constitutional law thought there was much chance that the law could be successfully challenged on constitutional grounds. Some chance, but not much. And I think that is unquestionably true. The mainstreaming of this argument over the last 12 to 18 months is little short of remarkable.

This is one of those 'nobody I know voted for Nixon' things. By "no one" he means to say "no academic scholars of the law that I habitually read"; and by "mainstreaming" he means that "main stream" which is composed of constitutional scholars, Federal judges, and the like.

What he's missing is that, actually, everyone believed it was unconstitutional except for a few lawyers and leftists. The reason this argument could so quickly become "mainstream" in his technical sense is that it was already mainstream in the actual sense.

Ms. McArdle writes:

I've yet to see a major story showing how health care reform is working better than expected. So far, everything from the claims that Democrats would get a bounce in the polls after passage, to the promises that you could keep your insurance if you liked it, to the legal issues, turn out to have been overoptimistic at best.

Yes, that's true. So is this, from Professor Richard Epstein:

The key successful move for Virginia was that it found a way to sidestep the well known 1942 decision of the Supreme Court in Wickard v. Filburn, which held in effect that the power to regulate commerce among the several states extended to decisions of farmers to feed their own grain to their own cows. Wickard does not pass the laugh test if the issue is whether it bears any fidelity to the original constitutional design. It was put into place for the rather ignoble purpose of making sure that the federally sponsored cartel arrangements for agriculture could be properly administered.

At this point, no District Court judge dare turn his back on the ignoble and unprincipled decision in Wickard. But Virginia did not ask for radical therapy. It rather insisted that “all” Wickard stands for is the proposition that if a farmer decides to grow wheat, he cannot feed it to his own cows if a law of Congress says otherwise. It does not say that the farmer must grow wheat in order that the federal government will have something to regulate.....

Virginia has drawn a clear line that accounts for all the existing cases, so that no precedent has to be overruled to strike down this legislation. On the other hand, to uphold it invites the government to force me to buy everything from exercise machines to bicycles, because there is always some good that the coercive use of state authority can advance.

Dr. Epstein really gets to the core of the problem with the law, and the reason it is so blatantly unconstitutional. It is unconstitutional not for some technical reason attuned to some careful reading of precedent, but because it effectively eliminates all restraints on government power. Establishing a form of government that was restrained to only essential powers was the reason for writing a Constitution in the first place. If the Founders had wanted a state with unlimited power to do "good," they could have named an Imperator, and set standards for choosing one who was more-or-less reliably good.

Instead, they created a government of and for the people, most of whom won't be all that good. Such a government needs to be carefully limited. That's what the Constitution exists to do. A law that slaps aside those limits is unconstitutional at its very heart: it is poisonous to the character of the American project.

Every Tongue

"...And Every Tongue Shall Confess..."

Aye, and every block of wood.



And why not every block of wood, if it comes to that?

Face-blind

Face-Blind:

What if you couldn't recognize faces?

It's an amazing faculty, actually: try this optical illusion, and you'll see that you can easily recognize the faces even at extremely low resolution.

A great deal of the human mind is biologically ordered to focus on this, which means that we are normally very good at it. It is normal for animals to be good at particularly important adaptive traits, and incapable of others that would seem to be as easy. "It is fairly easy to teach a dog to walk on its hind legs, but virtually impossible to teach it to yawn for a food reward. Cats can be taught to escape from boxes by pushing a sequence of buttons and pulling strings, but cannot learn to escape by scratching themselvs."*

That latter claim is kind of surprising, since you'd think you could use the ordinary kind of operant conditioning to train the cat. Apparently not!

Neither can you learn to recognize faces, apparently: you either can or cannot. You can train to recognize different kinds of faces: when I first started dealing with horses, I couldn't tell any two brownish horses apart; eventually, I could not only recognize but read the face of a horse, determining its sex and so on from the facial structure. You can do that with higher animals generally. In doing so, though, you're not generating a new mental faculty: you're only training one you have by nature.

* Stephen Budiansky, The Nature of Horses (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 158.

. . . and Action

and . . . Action

The completed Christmas tree, two full weeks before the day. And all the ornaments boxes stashed back away, whew. Now we're off to a neighbor's house to pick sour oranges, to be made into vinegar, candied peels, marmalade, and anything else we can think of, then a historic homes tour, or at least what pass for historic homes in such a young area.

And tonight, caroling! Speaking of which: "Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow . . . ." Not here, of course, but it looks like much of the rest of the country is getting snowed in this week.

Filibuster

If You Must Filibuster...

...do it the old fashioned way.

Sanders began his speech on Friday at 10:24 a.m. and wrapped up just before 7 p.m. He has threatened to filibuster the Obama-GOP deal when it is brought to the Senate floor next week.

That reminds me of a joke.

A Texan walks in to an Irish bar in Boston. He walks up to the bar, takes a big wad of cash out of his coat pocket, and slams it down. "I've always heard that you Irish are big drinkers," he said. "I've got five hundred dollars here that says that not one of you can drink ten pints of Guinness back to back, without stopping. Who's the man who'll prove me wrong?"

The bar gets real quiet, and people look a little uncomfortable. Finally, one guy gets up and slips out the door.

The Texan smiles and puts his money away, and orders a bourbon. A little while later, though, the guy who had slipped out comes back. He walks up to the Texan, and says, "Is the bet still on?"

"You bet!" the Texan says. The bartender pulls the ten pints, and the little fellow starts to drink them.

He gets one down easy, and two, and three, and four... but he starts to slow down around five, and six... he's looking pretty unsteady by seven and eight... and he's barely holding together at nine. Still, with a great effort and some deep breaths in between, he manages to drink down the last, tenth pint.

"Amazing!" the Texan says, handing him the money. "I didn't think anyone could do it. But let me ask you this -- I saw you step out when I first got here. Where did you go?"

"Oh, well," the Irishman said. "I wasn't sure I could drink that much beer at once, so I went to the other pub down the street to try it out!"

Senator Sanders was trying it out today. I think he can do it.

Q of Day

Now That's Something You Don't See Every Day:

It's kind of amazing to watch this clip, and see (a) the current President of the United States cut completely out of the frame; and (b) the former President of the United States tell him to "please go," and then (c) carry on a press conference that was far more insightful and in depth than any we've seen from the sitting President.

Yet here we are.



The worst thing about this clip is the feeling that -- policy differences aside -- nearly all of us would be happier of the illusion of Bill Clinton taking over again were a reality.

Ode to the Gun

Ode to the Gun

A friend sent me a collection of gun sayings, some I hadn't heard before:

"Those who hammer their guns into lows, will plow for those who do not." -- Thomas Jefferson

"I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." -- George Mason

Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and independence . . . from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurrences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable . . . the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference -- they deserve a place of honor with all that's good." -- George Washington.

The email also included this summary of post-gun-control extermination of citizens. The timing of numbers of exterminations sound right to me, though I can't vouch for the timing claimed for the various gun-control measures:

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1938, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1935, China established gun control. From 1948 to 1952, 2o million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1964, Guatemala established gun control. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1956, Cambodia established gun control. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control: 56 million.

H/t to Fascist Soup for the Safe Family Gun Guide.

Druid Fix Update -- Lights

Druid Fix Update -- Lights

Before I'd used up all the lights in the box, the NPH diffidently suggested there might be enough already. Bah, I said, you're a bomb-throwing anarchist. Everyone knows the rule at this time of year: if enough is enough, too much is just right. It's no time to be throwing tradition out the window.

Tomorrow I can start on the ornaments.

A Poem from China

A Poem from 中国:

The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke. Except when it's not.

I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
aflood with joy

Faraway place
I’ve exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ’s birth
I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers

Deep in the night, empty road
I’m biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I’m handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere

A blink, a trembling instant passes
to a flash of awareness: I’m still alive
On Central Television News
my name’s changed to “arrested black hand”
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting
I lift up high up the self-invented lie
tell everyone how I’ve experienced death
so that “black hand” becomes a hero’s medal of honor

Even if I know
death’s a mysterious unknown
being alive, there’s no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I’m still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares

Besides a lie
I own nothing

Liu Xiaobo, a poet and literary critic, is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. China has forbidden him to travel to the award ceremony, which will be held on Friday in Oslo. This poem was translated by Jeffrey Yang from the Chinese.

That's the kind of thing that the prize was supposed to be about. The thing has power, if it is used wisely.

December Night Sky

December Night Sky

I've just found a fine site for guiding our night sky observations. I just enjoyed watching all three short videos about what we see with amateur equipment (naked eye or ordinary binoculars) in December. Not only will we have a full lunar eclipse on the night of the Solstice, but there is a good meteor shower on December 13 and 14. The shower starts in Gemini, which is in the eastern sky to the left of Orion. Many of the meteors will seem to fly right at Orion. The site also recommends to our attention this pretty double cluster just to the right of Cassiopeia, in the Milky Way in the northern sky.

Druid Fix

Druid Fix

I have to admit that last year I was -- just very slightly -- disappointed in my Christmas tree. The selection at the local tree-mart was poor, the tallest trees were not quite as tall as advertised, and my tree was a trifle skinny. Not being totally enthralled by my Christmas tree, an unusual experience, threw me off to a surprising degree. I felt disloyal and ungrateful.

Not this year! I chose a tree without unwrapping it, trusting in its generous height and thickness, and it has not disappointed me now that we've lugged it painfully upstairs and set its limbs loose. Oh, it was a heavy one! We almost had to call for help. Here it is, awaiting decoration, a full nine feet tall and more than five feet across at the base. Wait till you see it all done!

UPDATE: Don't let another minute go by before you check out Lars's link to some amazing nativity sets here. And I agree with Lars, the dog nativity is awesome.

Hope

Reasons for Hope:

Well. Isn't this interesting.

So, other than this having something to do with the situation in Korea, why would you do that in December?

hat tip: Fark

RIP Elizabeth Edwards

Rest in Peace:

My condolences to the friends and family of Elizabeth Edwards.

No Longer Shocked

No Longer Shocked:

What happens when the art world can no longer shock us?

[O]nce you've seen Duchamp's "Fountain" and gotten the joke, is there anything worth revisiting in it? Whatever frisson it might once have delivered was used up in its first display. Once the shock is gone, all that's left is a urinal.

The heirs of Duchamp can't even count on the benefit of an initial shock. Pity the poor artist who would try to get a rise out of an audience these days....

On the contrary, this is a great time to be an artist -- if you're willing to do the work involved in mastering the skills of an artist. Once shock can no longer create a cheap and easy effect, what remains is skill and beauty. The artist coming up today, who is willing to put the work in to truly learn how to paint or sculpt, will find that the art world is finally ready to receive the things of value.

DADT

DADT:

Cassandra asked for a link to the post I wrote last weekend at BLACKFIVE, Against DADT Repeal. The interesting thing about that post, I thought, was the quality of the comments: we had some excellent and insightful arguments made on both sides of the question, with relatively little of the bad manners that can often characterize this particular debate.