Memorial Day

Memorial Day:

This weekend we remember warriors fallen, and honor warriors living. RangerUp is doing so by donating a fifth of their profits for the weekend to Soldier's Angels, a group that needs no introductions here. I bought their memorial day shirt, which contains the famous St. Crispin's Day speech.



I'm not very good at these posts, but these are serious and solemn matters. We shall remember friends this weekend, and wish well to friends still in danger.

Hope

A Woman's Voice:

T99 had a post about women who sing; I suppose I might post up a particular favorite of mine. Her name is Hope: Hope Sandoval.



If you know her music, it is probably from this song, which was once famous.



As far as I know, though, she never did anything bad.





A particular favorite for long summer days:



Later she moved into more experimental music, but without losing the essential beauty.

Philosophy is All

The Roots:

Today's xkcd:

The alt text says: Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

I haven't tried that, but I suspect it's really true. Philosophy underlies all forms of human knowledge, as is demonstrated by the career of one philosopher I know. I think I recounted this once in the comments, but it deserves a post of its own.

He began as a student of chemistry, but in the first class he was told, "Really, chemistry is all about physics. So we'll start with physics... and not that boring old physics, but quantum physics."

Well, he thought, if chemistry is all physics, I should just be studying physics! So he changed majors, and went into physics.

First class in physics, he came into class and the professor said, "Really, physics is all math. So we'll start with math...." My friend walked out, and changed majors that very day to mathematics.

The math department didn't tell him that math was 'really' anything else, as mathematicians are pretty self-satisfied. So, for a long time he studied math.

After a while, though, he began to notice that some of the bedrock principles of math weren't accounted for by the math itself. He asked his advisor why we were assuming these bedrock principles.

"Well," his advisor said, "our bedrock principles really come from philosophy."

I know another philosopher who teaches 'philosophy of math.' I saw him once fending off a bunch of very angry young students. I asked him afterwards what that was about, and he said, "Oh, they were all from the math or artificial intelligence programs, and had just finished their first paper. They all gave the same answer to the problem I raised for them: their findings proved that there is a fundamental contradiction in one of the bedrock principles underlying mathematics, but there can't be a contradiction because this is a bedrock principle of mathematics."

Such is the life of a philosopher.

Chick Voices

Chick Voices

I'm overcome this morning by the need for some of my favorite women singing. First, Sandy Denny in Richard Thompson's re-working of the old tune "Willie O'Winsbury":

Which leads me to Maddy Pryor, a song from the Jacobite Rebellion:

And Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the third of the Four Last Songs:

States As Labs

States As Labs

This handy site lets you view the unemployment rates for one or more states over the last few years as a graph contrasting with the national rate.

My husband has been carrying on a debate all week with some online acquaintances, on the subject of the impact of oil prices on unemployment. Part of the discussion has been about differing states' attractiveness to business, with California (high unemployment) coming in last and Texas (low unemployment) coming in first. One of his interlocutors remarked: "The economy is too important to be left to businessmen." I just can't get over that.

Who Speaks to Us

Who Speaks to Us

I guess some graduating seniors get Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy, while others get comedians who feel compelled to make jokes about their pitiful undergraduate sex lives. This site links twelve commencement speeches between 1941 and the present. I couldn't bring myself to watch Will Ferrell, but I was pleasantly surprised by David Foster Wallace. Nevertheless, I'll take Churchill any time: Never give in, never, never, never, except to honor and good sense.

Hegel Goes West

Hegel Goes West:

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a story on the perils of bad philosophy:

In 1856, a Prussian immigrant named Henry Conrad Brokmeyer retreated deep into the Missouri woods with a gun, a dog and a copy of “Science of Logic,” a philosophical text by Georg Hegel. Alone with Hegel’s thoughts over the next two years, Brokmeyer became convinced that this abstruse work by a German 25 years dead could save the nation from the very divisions about to lead it into civil war. It didn’t, of course....

It's an interesting story, all the same, of how one bad reading of Hegel led to an attempt to paint St. Louis as the great culminating point of history.

Which reminds me of a Chesterton quote:

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing -- say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved.

Or St. Louis, I suppose.

Speaking of Chesterton and A&L Daily, they had a charming biography of his lately also.

Neighborhood Curators

Neighborhood Curators

I've been a suburban gal most of my life, with brief forays into other modes. When I went off to college, for instance, I couldn't wait to experience something a little more exciting and urban. For many years, my husband and I lived with a number of friends in a slightly commune-ish adjoining pair of decrepit mansions on the edge of a still-respectable neighborhood of large homes near Houston's Medical Center. We were quite a thorn in our neighbors' side, with our ratty landscaping and excessive front-yard parking and loud parties. The local neighborhood association's petty grievances against us gave me a decades-long aversion to officious meddlers determined to keep up the neighborhood tone. On the other hand, we knew that our landlord was only marking time and that our commune would give way eventually to redevelopment, to our neighbors' delight.

Lately I keep reading articles agonizing over the dilemmas posed by gentrification. Maggie's Farm posted a typical example this week. Young, affluent gentrifiers express a common fear that they will be perceived as intrusive or condescending, or that improvements to the neighborhood will so boost rents and property taxes that long-time residents of more moderate means will be forced out. The long-time residents themselves seem torn between nostalgia and relief. After years of crime and failing businesses, the streets are beginning to seem more safe and prosperous, but are they destined to take part in the improvement? The linked article mentions a concept I've seen expressed before as a "zoo" mentality, but calls it "curating a neighborhood," which I think is even more to the point. There always is a fantasy that the few distinctive, funky aspects of a decayed neighborhood can be preserved in amber even after the new money rolls in and renovates the homes and businesses -- if only we're culturally sensitive, and impose enough rent controls. I wonder, though, about residents who witnessed decades of decline without grasping their own agency in the process, and who now view the neighborhood's re-birth with a similar lack of personal participation.

Back when we were the local commune, a bunch of impoverished students and post-adolescents, we often resented our prosperous, image-obsessed neighbors. What did we care? We were renting, not investing, and we could split any time we liked. We paid negligible rent in exchange for the duty to do almost all our own maintenance, but we mostly lacked the resources or the motivation to keep the place up to middle-class standards. Eventually, when our landlord sold the houses to a developer who put up a boring row of townhouses, our remaining community was displaced. Should we have been kept in a zoo, a museum to commemorate our countercultural experiment? In the event, most of us just got married and moved out to the suburbs.

Now, of course, my husband and I have fled the suburbs again, this time opting for rural rather than urban delights. A lot of people move here to retire. The friction between the established residents and the restless newcomers has a familiar ring. It's not quite the same as the gentrification dispute, fortunately; there's very little racial or class animosity. Some of us newcomers serve as a source of constant hilarity, with our obsessive concern for the wildlife and other city-bred notions. (Half the neighborhood seems to have taken to keeping chickens, but the fresher we are from the city, the more we tend to see them as pets.) And the worm turns: I have to laugh at my discomfort every time I see a new lot cleared for development, as I cleared my own before building: if only no one else would build after we moved here! But I can't afford to buy the nearest few square miles just to ensure that all the nearby woods stay woods. So I expect in time to become a disgruntled long-established resident grumbling over the newcomers and their changes.

The End of the World

The End of the World

I don't know, maybe the world really did come to an end this weekend. The Texas legislature not only came to an agreement on a $165 billion two-year budget to address the state's $27 billion deficit, but it did so by raiding only 30% of its $10 billion rainy-day fund, and without raising taxes, while slashing the previous two-year budget by over 12%.

Still on the legislature's near-term agenda, especially in light of the cuts in education spending: a bill to address our crazy school-finance system. The Texas Constitution requires the legislature to fund a "free" and "efficient" public eduction system. (The legislature's only other constitutional mandate is to pass a budget.) A decade ago, a judge ruled that the traditional reliance on local ad valorem taxes did not pass constitutional muster, apparently because the word "efficient" turned out on close inspection to mean "uniform statewide, unrelated to the resources or desires of local populations." Because the Texas Constitution also prohibits a statewide ad valorem tax, and because there has never been any appetite here to fund schools via any other variety of statewide tax (we have no income tax here, for instance), the powers-that-be crafted a universally reviled mechanism known as the "Robin Hood" school finance system.

Robin Hood doesn't simply require rich school districts to donate all tax revenues over some average per-student level to poorer districts. Instead, it is a confusing wealth-based system in which "excessive tax wealth" is defined by taxable property within each district divided by the number of students attending public school there. If a district has lots of commercial property, or expensive vacation or retirement residential property, it can reach Robin Hood status despite having a higher-than-average proportion of low-income students, and in fact without any regard to its actual level of tax revenues. The Houston and Dallas districts, for instance, have both long since crossed the Robin Hood line even though more than 3/4 of their student bodies are considered economically disadvantaged. Districts in this unenviable position find themselves sending anywhere from a few percent to over half of their school tax revenues to the state for redistribution among "poorer" districts. (The formula is so confusing that, although I've been trying to read up on it for the last week, I am completely at a loss.) Nor can a Robin Hood district escape its status by lowering its taxes; only a devaluation of its total taxable property could achieve that aim. A tax cut would reduce the amount of tax income subject to redistribution, but not the percentage confiscated by the state.

One possibly unintended result: when real estate buyers no longer see a strong link between location and a secure source of funding for excellent local schools, property values drop:

[T]he Robin Hood system is anything but financially efficient. Robin Hood does not just move money from rich school districts to poor school districts. It does so in a way that destroys far more wealth than it transfers, and that erodes the tax base on which school funding depends. . . . ''Our estimates suggest that Robin Hood caused Texas to lose a net of $27,000 per pupil in property wealth,'' . . .

My little county (the smallest in Texas) is a Robin Hood district on the strength of its vacation and retirement housing stock. Our voters have just approved a $26 million bond to fund repairs to crumbling school buildings; in the last six years, we've lost $36 million in local ad valorem tax revenues to the Robin Hood system. A quirk of the system is that taxes earmarked to repay construction bonds are immune to confiscation. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of a decrease in our local ordinary ad valorem school taxes to defray the tax hike we'll need to repay the bond.

Changes in the law in 2006 ameliorated the Robin Hood problems to some degree and transferred a portion of the funding burden to statewide business taxes. Will the newly slimmed-down Texas budget hurt education here? I'm not convinced of the link between spending and good results in this field. In fact, I'm not completely sure there isn't an inverse relationship. Texas ranks 46th in spending among the states, but 4th- and 8th-grade math and reading proficiency levels are all above average. Where Texas does lag, apparently, is in SAT and ACT scores, a result that may say more about the ethnic composition of its students than anything else. The Texas Education Agency figures for 2008-09 show that Hispanic students (including many recent immigrants) account for 48% of public school enrollment and 65% of kindergarten enrollment. Texas still fares better than the national average in each ethnic group. Not bad for a porous-border state.

Apocalypse yet?

Harold Camping:



That undead preacher from Poltergeist:



Coincidence?

I think not.

Kemosabe

Who's this 'We,' Kemosabe?

National Geographic says:

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

"We"?

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place." They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean.

Knowledge & Belief

Knowledge & Belief:

Here is an interesting article from the frontier between science and philosophy. A scientist from CERN is talking about knowledge versus belief.

The European: What is the difference between justified opinion and belief?
Heuer: Justified opinion or knowledge is something that you can at least partially prove. Belief or philosophical thought cannot be examined through experiments.

The European: For Aristotle, physics was the primary science that could tell us almost anything about the cosmos. But he also thought that all things had an innate capacity – the telos – to develop to their full potential.

And so it fell to philosophy to investigate the nature of things.
Heuer: At the edge of physics, it becomes linked to philosophy. But in the case of particle physics, it is really not a question of “believing” but of deducing something from a larger theoretical framework or from experimental data. Once you can prove something, it is no longer a question of philosophy.

That's not right, actually; philosophy deals as much as it can in things that can be proven. There are far fewer of those things than is commonly believed, but we'll leave that for the moment.

There are two questions here, and the scientist misses the import of the second one entirely. What he wants to say is that nothing has a telos; this is to say that there is no reason why things are what they are. To say that there is no telos behind the physics is to say that there is no metaphysics, which is what scientists usually say. What they fail to realize is that "there is no metaphysics" is itself a metaphysical claim: there is no standard by which to judge it other than metaphysics. (By that standard, I would argue, it doesn't fare well; but we'll leave that as well.)

The other problem is that he divides knowledge from belief, but the normal formula for knowledge includes belief. (An aside: can you have an opinion you don't believe?) Knowledge until Gettier raised his flag was supposed to be "justified true belief," that is, rather stronger than 'justified opinion.' Justified opinion can't be knowledge if it is not true, after all: otherwise you are saying that you could know something that is false. You could certainly believe something that was false; but if that is "knowledge," then there's no reason to distinguish between justified opinions that are true and those that are false. The only question to ask is: how good is your justification?

Some who work in epistemology (that is, the study of just what constitutes knowledge) want to include only things that are not just true, but safely true. If you made a lucky guess that the roulette wheel would turn up black this round, that shouldn't count as having known that the wheel would come up black -- no matter how strong your opinion, or whatever your justification.

Quantum physics is an area in which we end up admitting that we don't know very much; it's largely a set of gambles, where the science lies in establishing the range of possibilities as exactly as possible. It's not clear to me how you can know much of anything here. You can have an opinion; and you can have a justification. Whatever that is, it isn't knowledge.

Lenin 1917

Manifest Destiny:

Lenin in 1917... 'You know what probably won't happen soon? A Communist revolution.'

Prediction is hard work, even for those with Historic Destiny on their side!

Free Market

Your Free Market at Work:

Headline: "Is college too pricey to pay off? 57% say yes."

Percentage of Americans with a college degree: 38.74%.

The Control of Nature

The Control of Nature

If you've never read John McPhee's fine piece on the Atchafalaya River Basin's ambition to capture the Mississippi River, or even if it's just been a while, now is a good time to take advantage of The New Yorker's decision to move it out from behind the paywall:

Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. . . . By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles—well under half the length of the route of the master stream.

For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya’s conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans.

. . .

[Just north of Baton Rouge, on the west bank of the Mississippi, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] dug into a piece of dry ground and built what appeared for a time to be an incongruous, waterless bridge. Five hundred and sixty-six feet long, [the Morganza Spillway] stood parallel to the Mississippi and about a thousand yards back from the water. Between its abutments were ten piers, framing eleven gates that could be lifted or dropped, opened or shut, like windows. To this structure, and through it, there soon came a new Old River—an excavated channel leading in from the Mississippi and out seven miles to the Red-Atchafalaya. The Corps was not intending to accommodate nature. Its engineers were intending to control it in space and arrest it in time. In 1950, shortly before the project began, the Atchafalaya was taking thirty per cent of the water that came down from the north to Old River. This water was known as the latitude flow, and it consisted of a little in the Red, a lot in the Mississippi. The United States Congress, in its deliberations, decided that “the distribution of flow and sediment in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers is now in desirable proportions and should be so maintained.” The Corps was thereby ordered to preserve 1950. In perpetuity, at Old River, thirty per cent of the latitude flow was to pass to the Atchafalaya.

Until it doesn't. During the 1973 flood, the Morganza spillway floodgates had to open wide, sending a good part of the Mississippi floodwaters through the Old River channel across to the Atchafalaya to the west:

In mid-March,Raphael G. Kazmann, author of a book called “Modern Hydrology” and professor of civil engineering at Louisiana State University . . . got into his car, crossed the Mississippi on the high bridge at Baton Rouge, and made his way north to Old River. He parked, got out, and began to walk the [Morganza Spillway] structure. An extremely low percentage of its five hundred and sixty-six feet eradicated his curiosity. “That whole miserable structure was vibrating,” he recalled in 1986, adding that he had felt as if he were standing on a platform at a small rural train station when “a fully loaded freight goes through.” Kazmann opted not to wait for the caboose. “I thought, This thing weighs two hundred thousand tons. When two hundred thousand tons vibrates like this, this is no place for R. G. Kazmann."

It makes you wonder whether the Atchafalaya will win this time. The whole McPhee article, including an account of the levee system beginning in the early 18th century, is worth reading.

Son!

Son!

H/t: Our brothers at the BSBFBs.

No right to resist

No Right to Resist:

McQ is rather outraged over this, and with some reason.

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.

The author of the story reporting this is right – somehow the ISC managed, in one fell swoop, to overturn almost 900 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta.

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry.

One might almost say: OK, as long as there's a mandatory death penalty on any policeman who attempts to enter my home without legal cause. We can sort that out in court, rather than on the occasion; but if it is proven that he forced entry to my house under arms without legal cause, thus putting my family in jeopardy of their lives for no reason, he must die. As long as we make the stakes that high, the principle could be preserved.

Almost, I say, because those rights we have from the days of the Manga Carta are rights won on the field of arms. They are the core of our rights. We may not surrender them for any cause, nor license such surrender by any procedure. It does not matter what the court says; the court is as wrong as was King John. We have the same duty that our ancestors did, if the courts do not recognize their error.

Avoiding a mugging

Avoiding a Mugging:

A philosophy major, who has also had the honor of being a victim of mugging multiple times, chimes in.

So . . . I was walking back from the home of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman and instead of doing the normal thing and taking Q Street west to 5th and then walking south, I wanted to take a shortcut by walking south on North Capitol to then cut southwest on New York. But then lo and behold right by Catania Bakery a couple of dudes ran up from behind, punched me in the head, then kicked me a couple of times before running off. Once, years ago, in Amsterdam a guy threatened me with a knife and took my money. These guys took nothing, and just inflicted a bit of pain. All things considered the threaten/rob model of crime seems a lot more beneficial to both parties than the punch-and-run model. But I guess it takes all kinds.

To offer a policy observation, higher density helps reduce street crime in an urban environment in two ways. One is that in a higher density city, any given street is less likely to be empty of passersby at any given time. The other is that if a given patch of land has more citizens, that means it can also support a larger base of police officers. And for policing efficacy both the ratio of cops to citzens and of cops to land matters. Therefore, all else being equal a denser city will be a better policed city.

Speaking as a fellow student of philosophy, allow me to suggest that police are probably not the answer. Even in the best-policed city, police will not be on every corner at every moment. I've traveled in Manila, Zamboanga, Shanghai, D.C., Iraq and Kuwait, and no one ever thought to try to mug me. I would suggest that the best defense is a clear and unmistakable potential for a good offense. There are several ways of providing yourself with that, if nature has not done so; but one way or the other, it's what you really want.

Now, as a philosophical argument -- an empirical one -- that ends up harmonizing unpleasantly with the argument that rape victims might have protected themselves by dressing more conservatively. It is worth noticing where these arguments align and where they diverge. It is true, for example, both that women should be able to dress as they like without being raped; and also that a defenseless man ought to be able to walk where he likes without being mugged.

Mr. Yglesias' argument is explicitly about countermeasures, though, not the rights of victims. However it should be, in fact rape and assault are dangers; and given the dangers (indeed, given both dangers), it is best to be able to defend yourself than to rely upon others. The best defense is personal, and clearly stated to observers: that gives you both the capacity to defend yourself, and a reduced probability of having to do so.

Ignore heathen

Ignore that Heathen, Chums. Onward to Adventure!

It's amazing how reasonable this course of action can seem, when presented in the form of a silent movie.

Cowboying Kerry

Le 'Cow-boy,' c'est moi.

Good to see everyone's favorite unilateralist buckaroo out there defending American interests.

The United States will consider all its options, including a raid inside Pakistan, if it knows the whereabouts of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, US Senator John Kerry said on Saturday.

The internal polling on the Bin Laden thing must be looking really good.