Institutions

An Institution:

This is a fascinating account of the development of Trinity College, where many of the most powerful women in America were educated.

Some of you may be put off by the fact that the article is clearly celebrating liberal women leaders, but don't be. This story is a very important one, as it highlights the way that crucial institutions are built. The builders in this case are spirited Catholic nuns.

If our civilization is to be saved, we also must build institutions. Recapturing and repairing broken ones may sometimes be possible, but very often it is easier -- and wiser -- to start anew.

In Catholicism, different religious orders describe themselves as each having a distinct “charism.” The term refers partly to the basic mission of an order, but also to a more intangible set of attitudes—a spiritual temperament that traces back to the group’s founding. The charism of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur involves running schools for women and girls. More than that, though, it entails a spirit of ambitious enterprise and fierce autonomy—a refusal to take no for an answer in the face of institutional authority.

We need some institutions each having a charism fitting our project. Yet I honestly would not know how to begin; I suppose you must begin with money.

Etiquette

Etiquette:

Normally, when one has a guest who violates some rule of manners, it is most praiseworthy to avoid drawing attention to it. When that person happens to wish to join your family -- so that they are petitioning not merely to be a guest, but a daughter -- there may be occasions when you have to express your dismay. After all, once married into your family, their bad manners will stand as a charge against you and your entire family!

Needless to say, this is precisely the opposite of the reaction of the journalist covering this story.

Southerners

"Southerners"

Dad29 had an interesting piece on a critic who worried -- in the 1930s -- that "Southern" ideas no longer received a fair hearing.

Can principles enunciated as Southern principles, of whatever cast, get a hearing?” he inquired in The Attack on Leviathan. “ . . . It seems to be a rule that the more special the program and the more remote it is from Southern principles, the greater the likelihood of its being discussed and promulgated. Southerners who wish to engage in public discussion in terms that do not happen to be of common report in the New York newspapers are likely to be met, at the levels where one would least expect it, with the tactics of distortion, abuse, polite tut-tutting, angry discrimination and so on down to the baser devices of journalistic lynching which compose the modern propagandist’s stock in trade. This is an easy and comparatively certain means of discrediting an opponent and of thus denying him a hearing.

As Dad29 points out, the "South" was only the leading edge here: the mechanism is currently being employed against rural Americans regardless of how northerly their point of origin. The relentless 'distortion, abuse, tut-tutting and discrimination' aimed at Sarah Palin during her run for the Vice Presidency is exactly of this type; and Alaska is pretty far north!

We're seeing the same thing aimed at Rep. Michelle Bachmann, and Christopher Hitchens -- whom I've often praised for his several good qualities -- gave the game away:

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it's good to be able to claim a small-town background? It was once said that rural America moved to the cities as fast as it could, and then from urban to suburban as fast as it could after that. Every census for decades has confirmed this trend. Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview. But still it goes on. Hence one's glee at the resulting helpings of custard.

While I share Hitchen's enthusiasm for the Libyan adventure -- if only it were properly pursued -- I find his disdain for the rural to be remarkably ill-informed. I have lived in small towns and big ones, urban America and rural America and densely-populated China; and of it all, rural America really does have a special set of virtues. I trust the gentleman from England doesn't realize it, perhaps having missed the opportunity -- or, perhaps, he simply lacks the right kind of eye.

Still, there is something to be said for the prejudice. Cities also produce a number of disagreeable qualities, and frankly I hate them. I hate them never more than when I'm forced to be inside one for any extended period. Yet it is good that there are cities, if only so that there are fewer people in the woods. The more people who share the prejudice, the more likely I am to be left in peace.

Wounds

Wounds and Manhood:

Dr. Kenneth Hodges wrote:

Wounds do not mark failures in the effort to be knightly. Although
each wound might be said to result from a failure to ward a blow properly,
the inevitability of this happening some times even to the best
knights means knights had to deal with the fact that they would be
hurt. Medieval sources testify to the thorough understanding that being
injured was an essential part of knighthood, even for the best knights.
Geoffroi de Charny, when he compares knighthood to religious orders,
emphasizes the injuries that knights regularly suffer. Likewise, Margery
Kempe uses knights as seeming commonplace images of bodily pain and
penance. Malory’s Gawain unwisely makes a similar argument in the
Grail quest: “I may do no penaunce, for we knyghtes adventures many
tymes suffir grete woo and payne.”

...

Maurice Keen quotes several
men who justified tournaments precisely because they taught men how
to deal with pain. Roger of Hovedon said, “he is not fit for battle who
has never seen his own blood flow, who has not heard his teeth crunch
under the blow of an opponent,” and Henri de Laon agreed, writing,
“to be soaked [in] one’s own sweat and blood, that I call the true bath of
honour.”

This strikes me as relevant to contemporary social issues as well; but I won't draw the lines too finely.

Beer Goddess

Give Me That Old Time Religion:

It's good enough for me!

The Anchor Steam Brewery, in San Francisco, once cribbed ingredients from a 4,000-year-old hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian beer goddess.

We really need to regard the end of the "beer goddess" as a kind of giant backwards step in civilization.

Walzer Maimonides

Walzer on Maimonides, Charity, and Justice:

Michael Walzer, a leftist thinker who has written one of the most important modern works on Just War Theory, has a new piece on questions of charity and justice. He is interested in the Jewish model -- because it was stateless -- which strikes him as useful because, in the (hopefully continual) absence of a global state, he believes that all of us are stateless. This leads to some interesting lines.

With little or no coercive power, the Jewish communities in the Diaspora had to rely heavily on the charitable contributions of their members. The contributions were indeed necessary, for without them there would be no way, for example, to ransom Jewish captives (a major concern of the Diaspora communities throughout the Middle Ages), help the poor and the sick, provide for orphans, or fund synagogues and schools. And so the medieval philosopher Maimonides argued, following Talmudic precedents, that insofar as Jewish communities in the Diaspora had coercive power, they could legitimately force their members to give tzedakah.

...

Pledge cards were distributed, filled out at the table, and then put in an envelope and passed to the head of the table. There sat the owner of one of the biggest stores in town -- let's call him Sam Shapiro. Sam knew everybody else's business: who was doing well and who was not, who was paying college tuition for their children, who had a sick mother, who had recently made a loan to a bankrupt brother, who had money to spare. He opened each envelope, looked at the pledge, and if he thought that it was not enough, he tore the card in half and passed it back down the table... What moral or philosophical principle was Sam enforcing? He probably could not have answered that question, but the answer seems obvious: "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That line is from Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program. Sam was not a Marxist, not by a long shot, but he adjusted the demands he made on each of us to his knowledge of our ability to pay. And we all believed that the UJA would distribute the money to those most in need.

A strongly left-leaning thinker will find these principles easier to endorse than a right-leaning one; but Walzer is worth engaging even for those on the right. For example, he has this to say:

What does it mean to address the needs of the poor? This, too, is a question not only of charity but also of justice. Maimonides has a famous discussion of the eight levels of tzedakah, but only two need concern us here. The highest form of charitable giving, he wrote, is to set up a poor man in business or in work of some sort, to make him independent.

All of this talk of charity is directed toward a final assessment of humanitarian invasions. Walzer has an interesting history here, having strongly favored them before the Iraq war... and then, for reasons that strike me as being out of line with the principles he argued so well in Just and Unjust Wars, finding ways to oppose the invasion of Iraq. See what you think.

Piva

Piva:

Performed by Les haulz et les bas.

Elise

Elise:

I would just like to take a moment to point out that our friend Elise has been blogging again, including quite a bit of commentary on David Mamet's new book (which I haven't read, and am fairly certain not to read).

Her latest post is one that was written as a criticism of the Left, but that deserves a serious and thoughtful response from the Right -- and, indeed, from my part of the Right broadly considered.

A woman’s femaleness—and thus her sexual potential—is, in a patriarchy, always uppermost. A man can be a doctor, but a woman is a lady doctor. A man can be a lawyer, but a woman is a lady lawyer.

My sense is that it is true, even in the least patriarchal of societies, that sex has a fundamental place: in other words, that a man who is a lawyer is a man who is a lawyer even once we no longer deploy terms like lady lawyer.

This is because sex is part of one's first nature, as Aristotle puts it: the part of ourselves that we obtain from nature. 'Being a lawyer' is part of our second nature, which refines and (hopefully) improves upon our first nature; but it cannot supplant it. We should not expect it to do so, either for ourselves or for others.

Nor, indeed, should we wish to be able to blind ourselves to these basic differences. Over the last eight months, I've been reading a great deal of Hannah Arendt's work; and while I think I am ready to identify and explain just what it is about her approach that bothers me, I have also found in it a great deal to admire. She has a particularly convincing and persuasive argument that plurality should be recognized as the basic condition of the universe.

The fact that even our solitary consciousness divides itself when we are alone and in thought -- so that we can have a conversation with ourselves, and run the risk of falling into disharmony with ourselves -- is evidence that consciousness cannot operate properly without a plurality. There is a fundamental benefit, in other words, to having another consciousness with whom to compare notes; so fundamental that we are forced to replicate the experience even when we are alone.

Indeed, I think the argument is stronger than she makes it out to be, as she is trying to dissolve metaphysics and yet seems to have demonstrated a genuine metaphysical principle. This is an argument that approaches the mystery of creation; it explains why a unity (such as God is supposed to be by Augustine, Avicenna, and many others) would produce a plurality. The neoplatonic model usually asserts (as did Augustine) that it is simply 'abundant goodness' -- that the essential nature of the One is existence (which Augustine, Avicenna and Aquinas identify with the good), and that it 'has so much' existence that existence simply spills over.

God creates, that is, because He cannot do otherwise; it is His nature. Here is another way of approaching the point: a conscious mind, perhaps even a divine one, will instantly create a plurality when it is alone. Creation follows naturally from consciousness, not merely existence or goodness.

In any case, these are very high metaphysical arguments for taking differences seriously, and seriously valuing them. This is true even for our enemies, whom we are rightly told we should love. How fine it is to have a worthy enemy, who will push you to strive for your own best! How fine it is to have a wicked enemy, who gives as a free gift the opportunity to strike a blow for what is right and just! Life offers nothing finer. We rightly love the ones who give us that adventure.

We who are men should likewise love women, precisely because they are different from ourselves. The opportunity to learn from women is a great gift to men, precisely because it offers another and different view on the world (or, if you wish to continue framing this in the rather stronger and more useful theological terms, this divinely-blessed creation). They can see in places where we are blind; and vice versa.

This does not escape the perils of having a first nature that can be improved but not discarded. Rather, it accepts those first natures as part of the order of the world: and it accepts them in large part because it begins to see the benefit that goes with the hazard.

When Elise's favorite Lefist blogger writes, "As a feminist, I want women to be able to walk through the world as something more than just....", I understand and wish to accord with her. She should certainly have the right to be 'more than just...' her first nature, and should have the liberty to develop her second nature to its highest degree. I am glad to defend her rights in this regard.

I am furthermore glad to defend a space for those who share her first nature to walk through the world without being preyed upon by those who haven't properly tamed their own first natures. Valuable those these things are, they nevertheless are meant to be refined and trained by reason and discipline; though, those who will not are still valuable as enemies of the wicked type. Compartmentalizing sexuality isn't the same as denying first nature; it's an exercise of the virtue of moderation, which is surely the hardest and most excellent of the virtues.

This places me, I think, in the position of asserting that women have something uniquely valuable to offer humanity as women -- and that as a sort of metaphysical consolation prize for being unable to satisfy the desire for an escape from what her first author calls a 'ghetto.' Women can and should be free to walk the world 'not just' as women, but nevertheless as women. It is your charge and your honor to do it well or badly. I cannot and do not wish to offer men any greater freedom, for whatever that is worth.

The Deficit Crisis

The Deficit Crisis

Not just the budget deficit, but that other one: the attention deficit.

Now's when I'm really missing Fred Thompson as a candidate:

[T]his is . . . about more than winning the elections next year. We must win the argument upon which the necessity for spending reductions is based. . . . Economic numbers fluctuate. The principles on which our economic salvation rests do not.

Suppose Republicans win next year because we are “not the other guys.” Then what? Winning is necessary but not sufficient to save our country from fiscal disaster. Two years later the Democrats will still be offering free stuff and the postponement of pain. We can’t win the several subsequent elections that will be necessary to put us on the right path unless we win the war of ideas and develop the ability to explain why restraint and reform are necessary and that fostering a nation of free people, free markets, and the rule of law is not only morally just and right but is the only way to sustainable growth and prosperity.

It's the same problem I posed in the context of wars that require a purpose of more than two years' duration. The people have to have the purpose. We can't count on shifting elected leaders to embody it by themselves.

Afghanistan:

I am not currently free to discuss this subject, but I would like to hear what the lot of you think about it. Here are some others' thoughts.

STRATFOR:

...as the process of pulling back accelerates and particularly as allied forces increasingly hunker down on larger and more secure outposts, their already limited situational awareness will decline even further, which opens up its own vulnerabilities.

One of these will be the impact on not just situational awareness on the ground but intelligence collection and particularly exploitable relationships with local political factions. As the withdrawal becomes more and more undeniable and ISAF pulls back from key areas, the human relationships that underlie intelligence sharing will be affected and reduced. This is particularly the case in places where the Taliban are strongest, as villagers there return to a strategy of hedging their bets out of necessity and focus on the more enduring power structure, which in many areas will clearly be the Taliban.

(Obama's Afghanistan Plan and the Realities of Withdrawal is republished with permission of STRATFOR.)

The Washington Post:

PRESIDENT OBAMA failed to offer a convincing military or strategic rationale for the troop withdrawals from Afghanistan that he announced Wednesday night. In several ways, they are at odds with the strategy adopted by NATO, which aims to turn over the war to the Afghan army by the end of 2014. For that plan to succeed, military commanders believe that U.S. and allied forces must hold the areas in southern Afghanistan that have been cleared of the Taliban through this summer’s fighting season as well as that of 2012. They also must sweep eastern provinces that have not yet been reached by the counterinsurgency campaign.

By withdrawing 5,000 U.S. troops this summer and another 5,000 by the end of the year, Mr. Obama will make those tasks harder. By setting September 2012 as a deadline for withdrawing all of the 33,000 reinforcements he ordered in late 2009, the president risks undermining not only the war on the ground but also the effort to draw elements of the Taliban into a political settlement; the militants may prefer to wait out a retreating enemy. It also may be harder to gain cooperation from Pakistan, whose willingness to break with the Taliban is linked to its perception of U.S. determination to remain engaged in the region.

Richard Cohen, at least, is very happy:

The American Century just ended. This was the phrase coined by Henry Luce, which so aptly described America as the modern-day colossus, more powerful than any nation had ever been. Wednesday night, President Obama said that power had reached its limit. He was bringing 10,000 troops home from Afghanistan. The war was not finished, but we are.

“America, it is time to focus on nation building at home,” the president said.

There it was, the theme of the speech. We had done what we could in Afghanistan, and there was, of course, more to do. But the purse was empty and the nation was tired -- this is me, not Obama, talking, but he said much the same thing. “We must be as pragmatic as we are passionate; as strategic as we are resolute,” Obama said. In other words, we are going to pick our fights more carefully, and when we do, we can use the new weaponry of drones and the units of SEALs and such. No need for massive armies anymore. From the president’s mouth to God’s ear, I would add.

A Historic Moment:

A Turkish admiral sails into Abu Dhabi "for the first time in centuries," says the news; and longer still since one was welcomed!

Just how long? I'm not sure: This might be a starting point for figuring that out.

Singing in the Rain

Singing in the Rain:

A local theater was showing it tonight; I didn't get by, but I regret that I couldn't make the time. It was a favorite of my mother in law's, and a classic of American culture.



The idea of watching it in a historic theater, today, reminds me of a scene in The Professional, in which Leon goes to a similar theater alone. An immigrant alone in New York without good English, he has no human connections; and the scene shows him sitting in the theater by himself, face alight with joy, looking cautiously at the few others in the theater in the hope of seeing that joy reflected. The look is cautious, from that old human fear of intrusion into the business of others: the fear of rejection and exclusion.

The one scene and the other play off each other well. I am sorry that I can't find the right clip online so that I could show them both to you: a scene of transcendent joy, and a scene of very ordinary isolation and fear even in the presence of that joy.

The Spider & the Diving Bell

The Spider & the Diving Bell

This Discover Magazine site's column called "Not Exactly Rocket Science" is one of the best finds I've made in a long time. Check out this piece on a spider that blows an underwater bubble and uses it as a kind of detachable gill organ.

Every week the author lists a couple of dozen links to a variety of articles by others as well, like this link to an amputee who tattooed his remaining shoulder to look like a dolphin, or this one about levees and the illusion of flood control. It's easy to get lost here.

Birds Do It, Bats Do it

Birds Do It, Bats Do It

Do our bodies contain an ancestral but atrophied gift for "seeing" magnetic fields? Birds navigate with the aid of a protein in their retinas called cryptochrome, which is sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field and therefore serves as a built-in compass. And it's not just birds that can do this trick but bats, turtles, ants, mole rats, sharks, rays, and flies. What's more, the molecule that confers the sensitivity is "an ancient protein with versions in all branches of life," including humans. Drosophila flies can be trained by artificial magnetic fields to search for food in a particular direction. Remove the gene responsible for their cryptochrome and they lose the ability -- but it can be restored by giving them human cryptochrome.

Even if human bodies contain a retinal molecule that is sensitive to the angle of the magnetic field, that doesn't mean that humans have (or still have) a sensory and neural apparatus that permits them to translate the molecule's sensitivity into a useful perception. There has been limited, and disputed, research into whether some people have a robust sense of direction that can't be explained by visual cues. The investigation is complicated by the possibility that any magnetic/directional sense we do have is tied to the retina and therefore hard to untangle from ordinary visual clues. Still, the possibility of these mysterious ninja talents always enchants me.

Related: From a link at the same site, an article about echolocation and the "the brain’s extraordinary flexibility and power to squeeze perception out of a range of information streams, some of which are normally non-conscious to us." Some great video there:

Discretion

Discretion

The Supreme Court has just ruled that 1.5 million women cannot proceed in the form of a class-action lawsuit against WalMart for employment discrimination. The ruling did not address the merits of whether Wal-Mart has discriminated against women, only whether the proposed class met the standards for certification, which require (among other things) that there be questions of law or fact common to the class, i.e., "commonality." (The justices ruled unanimously on a subsidiary question of class certification, but split 5-4 on the threshold issue of commonality.) The Supreme Court found that the Wal-Mart plaintiffs had failed to identify an alleged practice of discrimination that applied broadly to the entire class of all women hired since 1998.

The alleged harm in this case does not arise from an identifable company-wide policy. It arises from a delegation of subjective salary and promotion decisions to each local manager. The plaintiffs's expert sociologist argued that, notwithstanding the employer's formal corporate-headquarters policy against gender discrimination, Wal-Mart's "corporate culture" made it somehow "vulnerable" to gender bias. From this, the plaintiffs concluded that Wal-Mart had a duty to take effective action to ensure that women did not suffer statistically in terms of access to higher pay and promotions. The sociologist, however, could not go much further than to point to a vulnerability to bias; in particular, he was unwilling to hazard a guess whether there was a 0.5% or a 95% chance of "stereotypical thinking" producing an incorrect result in any particular decision about a raise or promotion. The Court stated:

[Plaintiffs] wish to sue for millions of employment decisions at once. Without some glue holding together the alleged reasons for those decisions, it will be impossible to say that examination of all the class members' claims will produce a common answer to the crucial discrimination question.

Accordingly, although the plaintiffs may proceed with their individual discrimination actions, they will not be permitted to proceed on behalf of all women employed at Wal-Mart -- a setback that will markedly reduce their settlement leverage.

This is a "disparate impact" case. The plaintiffs don't propose to prove that each of millions of employment decisions was activated by gender bias, but only that the percentage of women in Wal-Mart's workforce decreases as you proceed up the ladder of pay and responsibility. Women account for 70% of the hourly jobs in the stores, for instance, but only 33% of management employees. The theory is that local managers improperly exercise their discretion over pay and promotions so as to favor men. The illegal "disparate treatment" of women, therefore, takes the form of Wal-Mart’s refusal to limit its managers’ local authority in order to bring it more into line with the gender-neutral aspirations emanating from headquarters, despite headquarters' obvious awareness of the disparate impact.

The basic theory of their case is that a strong and uniform “corporate culture” permits bias against women to infect, perhaps subconsciously, the discretionary decisionmaking of each one of Wal-Mart’s thousands of managers—thereby making every woman at the company the victim of one common discriminatory practice.

Rejecting this argument, the Court held:

"[W]hether 0.5 percent or 95 percent of the employment decisions at Wal-Mart might be determined by stereotyped thinking” is the essential question on which respondents’ theory of commonality depends. If [the expert] admittedly has no answer to that question, we can safely disregard what he has to say. It is worlds away from “significant proof” that Wal-Mart “operated under a general policy of discrimination.”

Because I'm naturally sympathetic with women, but just as strongly skeptical of "disparate impact" cases where the actual mechanism of discrimination is hazy, I like to do a thought experiment with this kind of dispute. I've often puzzled, for instance, over the scarcity of conservatives in academia and journalism. Should conservatives be able to bring a class-action lawsuit against the New York Times or Harvard University for disparate impact? (I realize political orientation is not a legally protected class, but just go with me here.) It would be childs' play to establish that many hiring decisions in academia and the press involve subjective discretion, and that the institutions' leaders are vulnerable to stereotypical thinking about the relative merits of the analytical powers of conservatives and liberals. They may not even be fully aware of their own vulnerability. As the dissent noted in today's decision:

The practice of delegating to supervisors large discretion to make personnel decisions, uncontrolled by formal standards, has long been known to have the potential to produce disparate effects. Managers, like all humankind, may be prey to biases of which they are unaware. . . . The very nature of discretion is that people will exercise it in various ways. A system of delegated discretion, [according to Supreme Court precedent], is a practice actionable under Title VII when it produces discriminatory outcomes.

The dissent's position may be more in line with Supreme Court precedent on these technical class-action standards; I honestly don't know. I do know that this kind of fuzzy thinking about discrimination is dangerous, particularly when it seeks a remedy for unconscious bias. If the Wal-Mart plaintiffs had prevailed, what could the remedy be, other than a removal of discretion from local managers in favor of some kind of blind quota system designed to ensure that equal numbers of women appeared at each rank of corporation position and salary? How else can you extirpate unconsciously bad behavior? When has that kind of rigid affirmative action improved an institution's performance or avoided backlash against the unfairly favored group?

I'd prefer to see employment discrimination cases limited to cases where the bugaboo is something more specific than "discretion." If the presence of discretion in business decisions is really the worst a plaintiff can complain of, then I have no problem with limiting the case to that particular plaintiff, rather than expanding the lawsuit to cover millions of employees working for hundreds or thousands of different bosses, male and female, in numerous different stores, on the theory that some vague over-arching institutional "vulnerability to error" was operating on them all in the same way.

Who's Integrating?

Who's Integrating?

A remarkable comment from the UK:

Muslims are integrating into British society better than many Christians, according to the head of the Government's equality watchdog.

Trevor Phillips warned that "an old time religion incompatible with modern society" is driving the revival in the Anglican and Catholic Churches and clashing with mainstream views, especially on homosexuality.

Normally the idea with integration is that newcomers integrate into the existing society. This is a queer reversal of the meaning of the word -- the kind of meaning-shift that is the hallmark of a kind of political murder. What is at stake is British society's ability to regulate itself according to its ancient rights and customs.

That's the kind of thing that has provoked regular wars in British history, and rightly so. The ancient customs and rights were won on the field of battle, and must be defended there; for if they are lost, there is only slavery before the state.

Father's Day

Father's Day:

Today is Father's Day. I want to tell you about a man I know, a friend of mine who is a very good father. He is also a Commander in the US Navy Reserves, an officer and a gentleman.

He and his wife have two children who are both special-needs. The bills associated with them, even with the kind of insurance and help that you get as a member of the military, have run to over a million dollars. Though an officer in the US Navy is reasonably well-paid, he is not nearly so well-paid as to have a million dollars in savings. So he signed whatever he had to sign to take care of his kids, and took the debt -- as well as the responsibility for their future care -- onto his shoulders.

He already knows how he will be spending the rest of his life: working hard to try to earn enough to pay off what he owes, so that when he dies the banks can seize and sell off the rest. No matter how hard he works, he will likely never accumulate enough to pay off the debt for his children.

We talk about people walking away from their mortgages -- or their families, or their kids -- in pursuit of personal pleasure or advantage. It's worth remembering just what the cost is for the man who does it right. It is a life of hard work, responsibility, and self-sacrifice, in return for nothing except the smiles of your children and the sense of having done what was right.

I am proud to call this man my friend, but there is a reason we don't see more of him. Our world, with its abundant pleasures, has accepted pleasure as the rule: the unlimited sexualization of our public space has driven all objections to its continual march aside; marriage is to be valued chiefly as a contract between two parties seeking pleasure from it, to be dissolved as soon as it is no longer pleasurable; children are to be welcomed only when they are wanted and without special needs, otherwise tidily aborted. All of this makes it possible to live a very easy life, filled with pleasures, each responsibility shrugged off as soon as it becomes noisome.

The good father does otherwise. His life is harder and filled with far less of this pleasure that rules other lives. What he gets in return is hard to say; but it is clearly true that rational man, economic man, would not make the choice. It is honor -- for honor is sacrifice -- that commands it.

Thus we owe good fathers a very great deal of honor. I doubt most of them get it. A nation that has forgotten how to pay every other kind of debt is likely to forget this one too. Nevertheless, gentlemen, I salute you.

Gun & Garden

Gun & Garden:

Via The Sage of Knoxville, a 14-round pump-action bullpup shotgun for home defense.



OK, as far as it goes. It doesn't go far enough, however...



Now you're talking.

Siege fo Beauvais

The Siege and Women of Beauvais:

In this week in 1472, Charles of Burgundy was advancing upon the town of Beauvais in France. She was a proud Medieval city, and even at this late date -- technically just after the Hundred Years War -- her garrison was feudal rather than composed of professional mercenary companies. These are her arms:

The few knights raised by the feudal system were extraordinary strategists, but too small in number to defend the walls against what was then a modern army -- one that boasted not only mercenaries in ranks, but a professional artillery unit that kept up a day and night barrage on the gates of the town. The walls indeed were breached, but in the words of historian Geoffrey Hindley (Medieval Sieges & Siegecraft, Skyhorse Publishing 2009, pp. 125-6):

[Although one gate] was badly holed by artillery fire, his men were fought back by citizens supported by women and even children, bringing up arrows and crossbow bolts and flaming torches to hurl in the faces of the attackers. Many women in fact plunged into the bloody hand-to-hand mêlée, hurling torches on their own account and helping ensure that the enemy could not force entry through what had now become an inferno.

The New York Times piece we read earlier this week mentioned "in 1433, officials in Florence charged with regulating women’s dress and behavior[.]" Regulations were meant not only to deal with possible sexual immorality (as the quote suggested), but also to enforce social class structure on an urban middle class that was increasingly competing with the old nobility in wealth and status.

It is therefore worth noting that the King -- who issued a charter for a municipal corporation for the city following the heroic defense -- also took the step of erasing the sumptuary laws for the city's women. "At a time when sumptuary legislation regulated dress according to social rank," the historian notes, "any citizeness of Beauvais might wear what she pleased; and the annual procession inaugurated to commemorate the victory was to be led by the women."

One of these women was Jeanne Laisné, who was better known afterwards as "Jeanne Hachette" -- roughly, "Joan the Hatchet." This is a fair nickname for anyone to bear, provided it was earned honestly; as good as Judas Maccabeaus, i.e., "Judas the Hammer."

Viking Music

Viking Music from Oslo: