The Bells Have Flown

The Bells Have Flown:

Here is a comparative reading on the hours in Gethsemane.

Belief and Skepticism

Belief and Skepticism

My contribution to Holy Week here at the Hall is a link to a couple of related posts at Brandywine Books, one from "Phil" and the other from Hall regular Lars Walker. Phil links to a Wall Street Journal article by a former atheist who found that his skepticism wouldn't hold up to a dispassionate review of the evidence for the Resurrection, prompted by his wife's sudden conversion and his own responding discomfort. Commenters were pretty unhappy about it.

Lars links to an article by Peter Wood in the Chronicles of Higher Education, pointing out how differently academia views suspension of disbelief in spiritual matters, depending on whether the spirituality in question is that scary, unfashionable Christianity stuff, or the virtuous belief in a "great prehistoric cult of the Goddess in Europe connected to matriarchal rule":

The possibility that a candidate for a position in biology, anthropology, or, say, English literature might secretly harbor the idea that God created the universe or that the Bible is true, is a danger not to be brooked. But apparently, the possibility that a candidate believes that human society was “matriarchal” until about 5,000 years ago is perfectly within the range of respectable opinion appropriate for campus life.

Finally, what Holy Week blogpost would be complete without a nod to the recent story of a 16-year-old who told her Seattle radio station that she was forbidden to bring easter eggs to school for her community service project unless she agreed to call them "spring spheres." This story may turn out to be as mythical as the Sphere Bunny; either that, or it's so embarrassing that a Seattle school board spokesperson claims the district's efforts to look into the incident have failed to turn up anyone willing to admit they said any such thing. That's actually encouraging, in a twisted way. But I have to admit that the 16-year-old's circumstantial and detailed account, as reported by the radio station, has more of the ring of truth to it than the school's bland denials.

You Can Never Leave

You Can Never Leave

You can always tell a socialist society by which direction they point the guns at the border.

The National Labor Relations Board has just asked an administrative judge to tell Boeing it must not begin production of new jets at its new facilities in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, because the relocation of this part of Boeing's business is an unlawful retaliation against its Seattle machinists union for past strikes.

The union has shut down Boeing’s commercial aircraft production line four times since 1989. Per the Wall Street Journal's take on this situation today, a 58-day strike in 2008 cost the company $1.8 billion. Talks with the union about leaving the work in Washington State bogged down over the union's demand for a seat on the board and a pledge that all future jets would be built in Puget Sound. Now Boeing has nearly completed construction of its $2 billion South Carolina plant; a thousand employees already have relocated there. Describing the motive for the relocation in an earlier interview with the Seattle Times, a Boeing executive said, “The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.” From this, the union concluded that “Boeing’s decision to build a 787 assembly line in South Carolina sent a message that Boeing workers would suffer financial harm for exercising their collective bargaining rights.” What's more, according to the complaint filed, the decision to move had the effect of “discouraging membership in a labor organization” and thus violates federal law.

It's obvious to me that Boeing workers will suffer financial harm and discouragement for exercising their collective bargaining rights in the way they have done historically. It's probably even fair to say that Boeing's proposed move to South Carolina will bring the nature of that financial harm into sharp focus for them, thus discouraging them further. I'd go so far as to guess that some of the squintier-eyed Boeing bigwigs are experiencing a certain amount of schadenfreude. So does it follow that Boeing's move is an unlawful retaliation for past strikes? Or is the union simply being mugged by the reality that an employer won't want to work in the union's state any more if the employer keeps losing money to work stoppages every few years? If union members are feeling discouraged about the benefits of union membership, why exactly is that? It's not as though Boeing were setting fire to the houses of the most troublesome unions reps. All Boeing is doing is removing its own hateful presence. Which is wrong. Come back here, dang it.

As the WSJ puts it: "Ultimately, the NLRB seems to be resting its complaint on the belief that Boeing spent nearly $2 billion out of spite, which sounds less like a matter of law than of campaign 2012 politics."

The most puzzling line in the NY Times report may be the statement of the NLRB's acting general counsel that "he was not seeking to close the South Carolina factory or prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there." So what is it he's after again, then? Maybe he'd like Boeing to go ahead and make money in South Carolina, then let the union in Puget Sound have a "taste" of the resulting profits?

I think Boeing has no choice but to file a counter-complaint alleging that the NLRB's action "discourages" state legislatures from passing right-to-work laws, and that therefore the administrative lawsuit must be enjoined on Constitutional grounds.

H/T Hot Air and The Daily Caller.

A better article

A Better Article on the Bible:

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a perspective on the beauty to be found in plurality.

In many ways, those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are no different from irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture.

Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what's at stake, namely the Bible's credibility as God's infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably.

But you can't fail at something you're not trying to do.

Anyone who has ever attended a Catholic mass has encountered the readings from Scripture; after the first two readings, in the masses I have attended, the reader underlines that the scripture is the word of God. I suspect this is the cause of much of the confusion.

If the reading were of one of the visions of God -- say, Ezekiel's -- this 'word of God' is really the word of the prophet: no one is really contesting the point (except the 'debunkers,' who may contest that there was a prophet at all). The same Church has endorsed St. Thomas Aquinas' view, however, that God is simple: He has no parts. Thus, the vision of the prophet speaks of the hand of God, but God has no hand: God has no parts.

The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know.”

4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! 5 This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath[a] enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’”

7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.

What does the Church mean, to endorse both claims? Something other than what many have taken them to mean, I suspect: but something very serious, all the same.

Holy Week

Holy Week:

We are now well into Holy Week, and I have failed to make any decent note of it here. As penance I shall try to read yet another rendition of the tired, empty gripes against religion published this week by the Washington Post.

OK, I've tried three times. Lunacy... reactionary... abortion is a natural right!... Leviticus... religion lies, lies, lies!

Great. Did you ever see the point of the thing, though? Did you ever understand what was at the root of the mystery that religion tries to approach? Failing that, there's no point talking about it with you. You're missing some essential human element; a rant like this should occasion the deepest pity for the author.

Fish

Fish and Potatoes:

A song in Norsk.



Vikings! Fish and potatoes are fine, but wasn't it more fun when you were plundering monasteries? Just let me add that public sector unions are the ones with all the golden idols, these days.

H/t: BSBfB.

We're From the Government, and We're Here to Save You Money

We're from the Government, and We're Here to Save You Money

The FDIC released a report today with the amazing claim that, if the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act had been in place in 2008, the FDIC could have prevented the multi-hundred-billion-dollar international Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and saved creditors billions of dollars without costing taxpayers a red cent.

The Lehman bankruptcy was an amazing lawyer-fest, with a whopping $1.2 billion in fees approved by the bankruptcy court to be paid out of the bankruptcy estate's assets. It ending up paying creditors only 21 cents on the dollar. The FDIC claims it could have paid creditors 97 cents on the dollar. One way it would have accomplished this public service is to avoid all the legal fees. That much I probably buy; many of the legal battles would not have been fought at all absent the special bankruptcy context.

The FDIC says it also would have helped things by making its own loan to Lehman for operating funds, thus eliminating Lehman's need to negotiate for debtor-in-possession financing in bankruptcy. I'm not entirely convinced by the FDIC's claim that Lehman would and could have repaid this loan without burdening taxpayers, but OK, maybe.

I'm less convinced about this:

Under Dodd-Frank, the FDIC can require that systemically important investment banks, insurance companies and other companies with large financial services components deemed vital to the global financial system have resolution plans.

Such a “living will” would have required Lehman Brothers to develop early on a plan to dump or restructure some of its toxic real estate and private equity investments before being placed under FDIC receivership. The FDIC and other regulators both inside and outside the U.S. would also have had the ability to study Lehman's living will and work to improve it.

I don't like contemplating the image of FDIC regulators "studying" Lehman's "living will" in order to "work and improve it" -- either quickly, cheaply, or effectively. I doubt they could have been made to understand Lehman's business at all. Then there's this:

One of the key benefits to FDIC resolution authority is the potential speed of the transaction. Title II of Dodd-Frank allows the FDIC to review a financial institution's books, identify a potential buyer and any troubled assets that need to be split off, and quietly conduct bidding prior to taking over as a receiver.

The FDIC does have a track record of pulling off these emergency prebankruptcy sales at great speed, but as you might expect, when the pressure's on, the government regulators get their shirts handed to them. Invariably they find out in a year or two that they cut a horrible deal and some evil capitalist made a lot more money than they intended to allow, and they complain about it loudly -- often suing to renegotiate the deal.

This one, for me, is the real howler:

One of the problems Lehman faced as it skidded into bankruptcy was that potential buyers, including Barclays and Bank of America Corp., identified between $50 billion and $70 billion in assets they did not want to touch. Lehman was in no position to bargain, so the buyers walked, necessitating the bankruptcy filing, according to the report. . . . FDIC receivership would have prevented that, the report said.

As far as I can tell, this just means that the FDIC would have strong-armed some favor-currying insured bank into accepting the toxic assets, which would have ended up some day as a drain on the FDIC insurance system.

WE'RE DELIGHTED BY THE UNEXPECTED

Or at least I am delighted by finding synchronicity where I least expected it:

“The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”

An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.

[snip]

In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

What the NYT article calls "those goose bump moments" - it describes the reaction I've always had to the Bard:

... how is poetic language different from normal language? Consider these examples, in which Shakespeare grammatically shifts the function of words:

An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)

A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)

A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)

As Davis's experiments have shown, instead of rejecting these "syntactic violations," the brain accepts them, and is excited by the "grammatical oddities" it is experiencing. While it has not been fully proven that we can localize which parts of the brain process nouns as opposed to verbs, Davis says his research suggests that "in the moment of hesitation" brought on by the stimulative effects of functional shift, the brain doesn't know "what part to assign the word to."

... we need creative language "to keep the brain alive." He points out that so much of our language today, written in bullet points or simple sentences, fall into predictability. "You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence" he says. "This represents a gradual deadening of the brain."

It even explains the magic of a baby's laughter.

Maybe it explains why I so often prefer the company of friends who have the grace to disagree with me. Who knows?

Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful.

My Brain Hurts

My Brain Hurts

You'll think me mad, but I've allowed myself once more to be drawn into an economic discussion with a "Modern Monetary Theory" enthusiast, because I was so startled to read that a solid bunch of progressives out there believe that the government deficit is not only a good but an essential thing for the welfare and happiness of Americans.

First of all, I've got to link to last year's Onion video on "The Money Hole" (h/t to today's Daily Caller for reposting it), which perfectly captures the lunacy of most political/economic discussions I've ever tried to listen to:

Now back to MMT: I take it the idea is that all private-sector financial transactions balance out to zero, which is Bad Thing, so the Government/Treasury/Central Bank injects new net financial transactions into the economy by spending more than the government taxes, which is a Good Thing. I asked why, in that case, the government shouldn't make the deficit even more fabulously beneficent by spending with greater abandon and collecting no taxes at all. The answer came back that that would cause inflation, a Bad Thing. What's more, without taxes, there would be no demand for the U.S. currency, because no one would believe it had value, just as my personal I.O.U. has no value if I have no visible means of future support. So why is a deficit a Good Thing, again?

And why is it not a Good Thing that all private-sector financial transactions net out to zero? Isn't that another way of saying that part of the private sector (say, older people who've amassed assets for retirement) is always lending to another part of the private sector (say, younger people who are starting businesses)? Why shouldn't it balance? And what, in the name of all that's comprehensible, would any of this have to do with the dream of full employment provided to us by a benevolent government?

I've never been schooled properly in economics. It was one of those things I never even considered studying in college. Now I'm completely at sea, trying to read up on this stuff. Can someone tell me whether MMT is complete lunacy, or is it worth trying to read more about it until I can make sense of some of the concepts? Because reading some of the links I've been sent to really makes me feel like I'm trying to understand the works of Joseph Smith, but without bringing sufficient faith to the task.

My husband recommended Thomas Sowell's excellent text, Basic Economics, to make up for my inadequate formal education, and I'm enjoying it thoroughly, because it's written in something I recognize as English. In the meantime, I see S&P has "revised its outlook" on the U.S. sovereign credit rating, perhaps preparatory to downgrading its AAA status:

Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable.

We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policymakers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.

Preferences in Culture

Preferences in Culture

I have no idea how to explain the seeming decline in culture that Grim has posted about, except for my persistent suspicion that it has more to do than I would like with my tastes having been cemented in early adulthood. I become more of a curmudgeon with every passing decade. I do think it's interesting to look at differences in opinion between lay readers and "expert" readers in compiling a "100 Best Novels" list, in this case one compiled by the Modern Library.

The expert list places a higher value on craft and the sophistication of ideas, while the popular list rewards sheer entertainment value. It pains me to admit that I am familiar with many titles on the expert list only because I've seen movie versions (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Wings of a Dove, The Golden Bowl, Deliverance, The Maltese Falcon, A High Wind in Jamaica, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Brideshead Revisited, Sophie's Choice, The Sheltering Sky, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ragtime). Others I've read only because they were assigned to me, but found that they'll never be for me: any James Joyce, for instance, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But there's a solid core of titles I agree with: Lolita, the Forster works, the Faulkner works.

The readers'-choice list is heavy on Ayn Rand and other speculative or ideological works such as science fiction. It includes some of my pulp favorites: books I actually like well enough to re-read, even if I would never try to defend my choice on purely literary grounds to a discriminating reader. Yes, I confess, I enjoyed both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" and I've at least read all of the several additional Rand entries. No, I won't try to defend the awful writing; I don't care. L. Ron Hubbard (three entries! Yikes!) and Frank Herbert and Lovecraft, not to mention Cormac McCarthy, will never be my cup of tea, but this list contains no fewer than six of my favorite Heinlein yarns, each of which I've re-read till the covers came apart. I was also happy to see some of my favorite Faulkner works on both this and the expert list. But who is this Charles de Lint guy, with eight winners? He's not even remotely familiar to me.

Reading lists like this always tempt me to go over to Amazon and order a bunch of stuff. Since I just did that last week with a pile of books about economics and social science that are still lying around in an accusing pile, I guess I'll have to defer my gratification. But I will put in a plug here for a recent fiction purchase, an early Patrick O'Brian coming-of-age romp called "The Road to Samarcand," the adventures of an orphaned young man traveling on the Silk Road in the 1930s with his adventurous, worldly-wise uncle and a scholarly dingbat of a cousin. (Hey, where's O'Brian on the popular list?)

In the meantime, I want to hear from all of you about all the books on these lists that I haven't read but should.

Chivalry & the French Revolution

Chivalry & the French Revolution:

One of the periodic articles about the alleged death of chivalry has garnered a strange reply from Stacy McCain. The reply is more interesting than the original post, which is well-traveled ground for us.

What Burke denounced as a “barbarous philosophy” was the spirit of modern radicalism — Liberté, égalité, fraternité — that rejects all tradition and custom as oppressive superstition. The mob that invaded Versailles in October 1789, insulting the Queen whose honor Burke thought should be avenged by “ten thousand swords,” was acting in accordance with this radical “scheme of things,” wherein “a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman [and] a woman is but an animal.”

If you want to know how to restore chivalry, you must forget the idea that chivalry is about manners. It is about sacrifice. The problem with this analysis is that it neglects the degree to which Marie Antoinette was always treated like an animal: a sacrificial animal. Let me quote here from Robert Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch, page 70-2.

Marie Antoinette... entered Strasbourg as a fourteen-year-old fiancee in a crystal coach.... On an island in the middle of the Rhine, the masters of ceremony had chosen the place where the archduchess was to be handed over, naked, to her husband's envoys. A special pavilion, in rooms decorated with tributes to the future queen, had been built to receive her.

...

On an island washed by the currents of the Rhine, a wooden pavilion had been erected: "the house of the consignment." There, Maria Antonietta, as she had been called in childhood, became forever Marie Antoinette. The consignment took place on an international border, which ran down the middle of the pavilion and through the great table in the center of the main hall. Marie Antoinette entered the pavilion from the Austrian side. In the last room before the border she was slowly undressed before the escort that had accompanied her from Vienna. Not even a ribbon or a hairpin was to remain in contact with her body. She was thus offered, naked, to fabrics woven in the new French land -- to the silk shift, the stockings from Lyon, the little slippers fashioned by the Court's shoemaker....

[T]he passage through ritual death was noted by the many eyes that were observing her and that would continue to observe her until her biological death. This act of sacrificial stripping effected her complete transfer to the land that was clothing her with destiny. Protocol is the last power for protecting abandoned symbols. It ensures that symbols, even when they are not perceived as such, can continue to act[.]

The French Revolution meant to tear down old symbols, but -- this seems to be Calasso's key thesis -- all it achieved by abandoning the rituals was to restore the blood to what long ago had become symbolic sacrifices. The ancient order raises its head once the rituals that placated it have been abandoned.

The archaeologist P.V. Glob believed that these were "offerings to the gods of fertility and good fortune"...

Many bog bodies show signs of being stabbed, bludgeoned, hanged or strangled, or a combination of these methods. In some cases the individual had been beheaded, and in the case of the Osterby Head found at Kohlmoor, near to Osterby, Germany in 1948, the head had been deposited in the bog without its body.

Usually the corpses were naked, sometimes with some items of clothing with them, particularly headgear. In a number of cases, twigs, sticks or stones were placed on top of the body, sometimes in a cross formation, and at other times forked sticks had been driven into the peat to hold the corpse down. According to the archaeologist P.V. Glob, "this probably indicates the wish to pin the dead man firmly into the bog." Some bodies show signs of torture, such as Old Croghan Man, who had deep cuts beneath his nipples.

Some bog bodies, such as Tollund Man from Denmark, have been found with the rope used to strangle them still around their necks. Some, such as the Yde Girl in the Netherlands and bog bodies in Ireland, had the hair on one side of their heads closely cropped, although this could be due to one side of their head being exposed to oxygen for a longer period of time than the other. The bog bodies seem consistently to have been members of the upper class: their fingernails are manicured, and tests on hair protein routinely record good nutrition.

The Catholic churches burned in the French Revolution had been the halls of sacrifice, where now only one victim was sacrificed: and when they drank his blood and ate his flesh, he was satisfied. Yet in the ancient order, the old order and the new one, there was always sacrifice.

All honor comes from sacrifice. Honor is sacrifice: and therefore the greatest honor is for the one who stands up and offers to be the sacrifice. This is why we honor those who put on the uniform of our military, which is nothing less than an offer to go forward into the ritual of sacrifice so that the rest of us do not have to do so. In this they are doing just as Jesus is said to have done for all mankind; as Beowulf did for Hrothgar.

It is important to realize exactly why the queen was not just a woman, and not just an animal. It is important to realize why the queen, above all, deserved ten thousand swords. She was the sacrifice. She was the royal child sacrificed by Austria to France after the Seven Years War, given over in ritual death so that other children would not have to be given over to war.

It is not for no reason that the words "sacrifice" and "sacred" are so closely linked. This was the order that the Revolution broke, and the reason the streets of Paris ran red with blood.

Infants Behind the Wheel

Infants Behind the Wheel

H/t Zero Hedge

An angry rant about taxes. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

via Instapundit

How to Meet Nice Guys

How to Meet Nice Guys

It's an old problem: where to go, what to do, to meet nice fellows you might want to date and even, some day, marry. For gently raised young women of prior centuries, the task might have been entirely handled by her family. Modern young women demanded the right to do their own screening and picking. Sometimes that meant choosing from among lifelong acquaintances from the neighborhood. Sometimes it meant meeting young men at church, or school, or (eventually) at work. These days, who has time? Who goes to church? Who stays in touch with the old neighborhood, or listens to what one's family thinks about a prospective date?

But anonymous hookups are so dispiriting, not to mention how many of them peter out after a one-night stand, or become outright dangerous. Along came Match.com, where you could be introduced to a guy who had filled out a form, and you could trust him enough to be alone with him after only a few hours, without knowing anything about his family, his history, or his character! Except, of course, that Match.com is a lot better at fostering introductions than about vetting your prospective paramour. The company has now been sued by a woman who is shocked to discover that a stranger is still a stranger. A guy she met through Match.com followed her home after the second date and assaulted her. Now she wants a judge to shut the company down until it institutes an effective mechanism for screening out sexual predators.

Maybe Match.com will have to start attending church with its male members and getting to know their families and friends. And it can have a special division that roughs the guy up if he doesn't live up to his reputation as a gentleman.

The Joys of Urbanism

The Joys of Urbanism

Here's how big a city containing the entire world population of 6.9 billion would have to be if it were the same density as some of the world's cities:

Paris:

New York:

Singapore:

San Francisco:

London:

Houston:

Most of you are idiots

Most of You are Idiots with Nothing to Say:

Present company excepted, of course. However, that is the conclusion of two separate articles treating the bounty of literature being published today.

Why read?

If we take the argument a step further, we face the possibility that the humanities are actually countereconomic; the notion of alterity and sympathy, taken seriously, would undo the profit motive and put a fair amount of grit into the workings of economic activity. It would undermine the individualism upon which exchange, in its current forms, is based.

Why write?

A loud, swarming noise of hundreds of thousands of books published each year, one almost indistinguishable from the next. Here are three new biographies of Coco Chanel, published almost simultaneously. A giant stack of memoirs about being sexually abused as a child. A dozen or so fantasy trilogies that begin with a poor girl who, upon the death of her mother, discovers she’s actually heir to the throne and must fight off usurpers.

Surely, though, the best ideas float to the top?

Does one dare to raise one’s voice above the commotion, try to draw some attention away from those taking up the spotlight? Who gets in that rarefied space is still determined by the writer’s gender, connections, beauty, nepotism, youth, or “platform.” Not even the most idealistic among the cultural critics bother to argue that the system is merit-based.

That's from a female author, by the way.

We've occasionally discussed the problem -- usually in the context of music -- of "Where are our Wagners?" Eric reminds us that we are in a time of extraordinary richness of sharing: we can hear forms of music that most of the greats never heard while they were composing; and those great composers; and many other forms as well.

This should be producing some magnificent synthesis, Beethoven with punk rock: but what we're getting instead is... well, it's garbage. Literature and academic thought is likewise drowning in sewage.

What is to be done about this? Also, what does it mean that more variety -- even more access to the greatest that history has ever produced -- does not reliably produce greats, but seems instead to drown them? I have heard that happiness is often imperiled by having too many choices; this seems like another problem of that type.

It is a problem not often considered in philosophy, which often follows Aristotle's formula that 'the good' is what things desire, and they desire those things because they lack them in some sense. Here is a case where we lack nothing -- not the best. Yet, lacking nothing, we are unable to make good things ourselves. It is as if the magic has broken, and the spell receded: all that is left are the old things, the works we cannot make alone.

A Solution to Global Warming

A Solution to Global Warming

According to the San Francisco Business Times, marijuana grown indoors is responsible for 1% of U.S. electrical production and contributes 17 million metric tons of carbon per year, not counting exhalations.

A couple of years ago, I spent a little over a year representing the bankrupt owners of a large redwood timber company in Humboldt County, California. The few local towns are tiny. They used to depend almost entirely on the timber industry, before it was ripped to shreds. More recently, the local economy has given the superficial impression of depending on tourism (it's an extremely beautiful, remote area), but it's widely believed that the actual source of income buoying the place up is grow-houses. Locals believe that most of the rental house stock is in use as indoor pot farms. A very small town supports two fully-stocked hydroponics-supply stores.

The S.F. Business Times asserts that, after medical marijuana was legalized in 1996, residential electricity use in Humboldt County jumped 50% in comparison with other parts of California. One of the issues complicating my bankruptcy case was the presence of squatters in the redwood forests, who grew pot in the clearings and had a distressing tendency to start small brush wars in response to intruders. Paradise, man! Global warming probably will make the pot crop even more vigorous.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON MARGINAL TAX RATES



Discuss amongst your ownselves.

While I mostly agree that raising taxes on the rich isn't the answer to erasing the federal deficit, I can't help observing that there's precious little evidential support for the view that allowing marginal tax rates for the highest income bracket to climb to 40% is either unprecedented or gol-durned unAmerican.

The fact is that for the past century, the top marginal tax rate was nearly ALWAYS been higher than 35%. Not that "it's always/usually been that way" is a particularly solid normative argument for taxing the living daylights out of the Chinese toy-loving minions of the richest one percent.

On the otter heiny, "it's always/usually been that way" makes a pretty good argument against the notion that Armaggedon will result if we raise taxes on Teh Evil Rich (among whom the blog princess is mildly disturbed to find herself) :p

UPDATE: the argument conservatives *should* be making:

I find this simply fascinating.

In a blog post that I thought was about Congress, a self described progressive suddenly takes a hard left turn into fatty-hate:

We are a nation of sacred cows. I'm talking about two aspects of America. One is our personal tonnage and the other is our indignation when anyone looks askance at someone who is obese. If feeling disgust and annoyance around people who are seriously obese is unfair, well, count me as one of the unfair. One reason has to do with feeling uncomfortable and frustrated in the company of people who are both self-destructive and heedless. The other has to do with those whose addictions add to everyone's difficulties. They cost us all a lot. The losses are measurable exactly as war's costs are measurable -- in young lives and a nation's treasure.

I wonder if this is going to be the new meme, now that hating on Republicans seems to be becoming passe', especially since the supposedly progressive President is starting to sound like one. And since obesity knows no color line, there are all sorts of entertaining implications to this line of thinking.

I suspect that this particular blogger is a retired baby-boomer, since he (the voice sounds like a he to me) has the time to post dozens of posts a day. I notice this blog showing up on memorandum much too often for a blog that appears to have no readers. Or at least no one who comments.

That gives me a thought.

Ymar, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to show this person error of their ways in your winning style. See how long it takes for him to start deleting your comments. (Anyone else who wishes to, can join in as well.) There is certainly enough to comment on over there.

Budget Spectacles

Eat the Rich

Obviously last week's budget drama -- the impending doom of a shut-down of non-essential federal government activity -- was just a warm-up for the festivities surrounding the impending doom of a failure to raise the debt ceiling. (I'll add here my apologies to households expecting a military paycheck, as I would have considered freezing those funds a cause for a general public uprising, almost alone among the proposed effects of a shut-down. Cutting off paychecks to Congress would have been more my speed.)

Most of the excitement is generated by two sides shouting "Spend less!" and "Tax more!" at each other. So now might be a good time to consider Iowahawk's no-nonsense approach to finding the additional tax money to fund the nation's $10 billion-a-day spending habit:

12:01 AM, January 1

Let's start the year out right by going after some evil corporations and their obscene profits. And who is more evil than those twin spawns of Lucifer himself, Exxon Mobil and Walmart? Together these two largest American industrial behemoths raked in, between them, $34 billion in 2010 global profits. Let's teach 'em both a lesson and confiscate it for the public good. This will get us through...

9:52 AM January 4 . . .

Iowahawk manages to make it through the end of 2011 with a series of confiscations, then finds himself at the beginning of 2012 needing to do it again. Anyone know, he wonders, where we can get more plutocrats?