Rules To Waste The Land:

Three little rules today -- two of them from Health and Human Services, a foreshadowing of the increased importance it will take on in every little aspect of your life from now on.

#1:  The first rule has to do with ensuring that abortions are paid for by, well, you.

The Department of Health and Human Services this month issued a final rule regarding the exchanges required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The rule provides for taxpayer funding of insurance coverage that includes elective abortion through a direct abortion subsidy.   

To comply with the accounting requirement, plans will collect a separate $1 abortion surcharge from each premium payer. As described in the rule, the surcharge can only be disclosed to the enrollee at the time of enrollment, and insurance plans may only advertise the total cost of the premiums without disclosing the abortion surcharge.

H/t D29, who also links the actual rule.  My favorite part of it is the part where HHS asked for public comments:

A large number of commenters offered feedback on proposed §156.280... We considered the comments received on this section, and are finalizing the provisions of proposed §156.280 without modification....

Well, naturally.

#2:  'You know what would be really neat?  It'd be neat if we could take your Federal tax dollars, and use them to lobby state and local governments to raise your taxes.  It's like a feedback loop!

'Too bad it appears to be illegal... but that's a temporary problem we will ignore for now.  Perhaps we'll ask some future, compliant Congress to fix the law later... but we may not bother, since we are the ones who decide when to enforce the laws.'

#3:  Remember how, when you were a kid, you used to love to go swimming at the public pool on hot summer days?

On Jan. 31 of this year, DOJ granted the industry's call for a clarification: But it was not the answer they wanted. All 300,000 public pools in the United States must install a permanent fixed lift. The deadline for compliance is tomorrow, March 15....

There is no way all 300,000 pools can install permanent lifts by Thursday. There simply are not enough lifts in existence or enough people who know how to install them, according to industry spokesmen. Plus, each lift costs between $3,000 and $10,000 and installation can add $5,000 to $10,000 to the total. 

So what happens tomorrow when a disabled individual checks into a Holiday Inn and finds no lift at the pool? The Obama DOJ has said it will not be enforcing the new guidelines right away. That means no fines from the government, for now. 

But the ADA also empowered citizens to sue businesses that are not in compliance with DOJ guidelines. The result will be a huge payday for enterprising trial lawyers everywhere.

Officially, the Constitution empowers Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal.  Maybe we're now issuing them to trial lawyers, for use against American citizens.

Home Work

If you'd like to see how my friend's home-schooled young son is coming along on that great big piano I posted about a while back, here he is playing Chopin's Prelude No. 17 in A-flat major and looking very grown-up in his grandfather's tie. If he can't pick up girls with this kind of performance, he's not half trying.

Fiber-minded women gathered at my friend's house today from all over Texas. The house and various outbuildings are fairly stuffed from one end to the other with spinning wheels and looms, at least ten of each. It's like something out of Hansel and Gretel: everywhere you look there are skeins of homespun hand-dyed yarn, home-woven rugs, drawings, paintings, and carvings. Outside there are cisterns, barns, chickens, bathtubs full of Louisiana irises and lily pads, handmade concrete paving stones set with old pieces of china or license plates, fruit trees, vegetable patches, roses, wildflowers, and a lot of cats and dogs.

We dyed some cotton, wool, and silk fibers and fabrics with indigo. One of our company tried to figure out how to make an old fiber-carding machine work that someone had found. The newbies among us practiced spinning; I discovered the problem I was having on my own wheel (aside from the difficulty in keeping the newest dog from eating it) is that the treadle doesn't function smoothly. Having used my friend's better wheel, I'm inspired to fiddle with mine and improve it. I'm not quite ready to bring a loom into my home, though, a fact that should comfort my husband.

Revolution and Generation

A rather dire warning from a woman who was once an Iranian judge... until the revolution of 1979, after which she found herself promoted to "secretary."

There's no doubt that the Arab Spring movements have much to concern us.  There's also no doubt that, when the existing social contract expires, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," as Mao Zedong rather rightly noted.

What that means is that we have to sort out who is going to have the guns and convince them that female political power is in their interests.  How to do that?  If it cannot be done, then there will be no rights for women in these societies for a long time to come -- until the new "social treaty" stabilizes, enough for a gentler kind of evolution of thought to take place.  That is the kind of thing that takes generations, not revolutions:  think how many generations were needed here.

Tone Deaf

Let's say that you're outraged by the position of Jesuit universities such as Georgetown with regard to access to birth control.  You'd like to convey the severity of your feelings on the subject to Catholic no-goodsters.

Could you come up with a worse way to try to be impressive than by announcing "a week-long exercise in self-denial"... in the middle of the Lent?

The Offense of Dante

Having seen the destruction of one Medieval masterpiece this week, a self-described "human rights" organization is advocating that we should go for two.  The NGO, Gherush92, explained that Dante's Divine Comedy is -- well, the scope of their complaint embraces every modern heresy.  It's everything that good-hearted people should hate.

Via Media comments that they have a few more suggestions for books that should not be presented to school-age children:

The Bible. This deeply problematic tome has incited full-fledged religious wars and been used to justify slavery, anti-semitism, homophobia and countless other injustices. It should be banned posthaste, along with any works which make reference to its contents, such as Paradise Lost, Dr. Faustus and the collected writings of Martin Luther King Jr.

Pride and Prejudice. Far from being a harmless romantic tale, Jane Austen’s novel is an offensively heteronormative work that implicitly privileges the so-called traditional family and marriage over alternative social arrangements. (We recommend substituting the morally superior Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on your syllabi.)

To Kill A Mockingbird. Promotes cruelty to animals.

The Qur’an. Rejects other religions as inferior. Frequently misread by a small but rambunctious minority of readers as a call to wage holy war on modernity and various national landmarks. Has something against pork, threatening livelihoods of many innocent farmers.

No Country for Old Men. Ageism.

Sherlock Holmes. While ostensibly centering around the exploits of the sleuth of Baker Street, this sinister series in fact promulgates anti-Mormon and anti-Jewish bigotry along the way. Case closed. Permanently.

The map of the cosmology, which can be enlarged, was drawn in the 19th century by an Italian scholar and man of letters named Michelangelo Caetani di Sermoneta.  It shows one of the ways in which the Comedy is helpful to students:  it graphically illustrates the Western worldview's dual debt to ancient Greece and the religious tradition.  Plato takes the (apparently eternal) circular movement of the heavens to be evidence of a semi-divine attempt to replicate the unchanging perfection of the Forms.  The "sphere of fixed stars" and the other celestial spheres were a feature of Greek astronomy that was important especially to Aristotle's physics and metaphysics; its central place in Dante's view of reality was shared not only by Christian thinkers like Aquinas, but by Jewish ones like Maimonides and Gersonides, and Islamic thinkers -- especially Avicenna, who made those spheres the mechanism of God's creation and providence.

Every one of these thinkers is subject to the same complaint as Dante:  each of them is entirely certain of the truth of their faith, and the inferiority of others.  Maimonides' writings, when they touch on race as such, are at least as racist as anything Dante imagined; Avicenna's writings on women will be shockingly offensive to everyone outside of the Islamic world today.

Nevertheless, the student will learn more from any one of these thinkers than from the whole corpus produced by "human rights organizations" working today.  Take what you want from them, and leave what you don't; but if you were to make a list of the thousand greatest minds in history, few of these names would be absent from it.  A guide who provides as useful an introduction to this rich landscape as Dante is invaluable.

The student, in any case, must be trained early to be courageous in the encounter with new ideas, and capable of sorting the good from the bad.  That particular talent, I believe, is called "discrimination."

The Burning of Krásna Hôrka:

Krásna Hôrka, a thirteenth century castle in Slovakia, burned this week due to children playing with matches inside of it.  It is a great tragedy, and a rare opportunity to see the danger that fire posed to medieval fortifications.

The towering flames had now surmounted every obstruction, and rose to the evening skies one huge and burning beacon, seen far and wide through the adjacent country. Tower after tower crashed down, with blazing roof and rafter; and the combatants were driven from the court-yard. The vanquished, of whom very few remained, scattered and escaped into the neighbouring wood. The victors, assembling in large bands, gazed with wonder, not unmixed with fear, upon the flames, in which their own ranks and arms glanced dusky red. 

-Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

Yet fire was not only a siege weapon but a daily tool in such castles:  the main form of heat, and the only form of light beyond the sky.

(Via Medievalists.net, which has far more video from the story.)

"Errant"

High, the painful mountains,

Covered with thorny blue pine.

Mists rise from falls like fountains;

Under trees, with outstretched spine,

The sharp spires of fallen cones

Lie atop grey and aged stones.

In the smoke there shapes a girl

Or else in dreams I have with me;

In the darkening I watch her curl,

The helmet propping up my knee.

Too dark to read, with whitened blade,

I carve a staff in living glade.

Come morning I shall go, and ride

The wildr'ness ridge for distant miles;

Below, the wood is green and wide,

Above, geese sway in arching files;

I ride till trees prick sun with lance:

There in smoke my dream will dance.

Sometimes I dream she calls to me,

And reaches out to stroke my face

In that hot white city beside the sea;

But morning wakes upon the waste.

I rise up from my bed of stone,

Take up my boots, and ride alone.

Grasping the Nettle

I thought I'd touched nettles before, but this is a new one on me. Twenty-four hours later, I still felt as though I had electrodes hooked up to my fingers.

Wikipedia tells me that the stem of the Urtica dioica bears short and long hairs. The long hairs are little needles that inject acetylcholine, histamine, 5-HT (serotonin), moroidin, leukotrienes, and possibly formic acid. (My nettle sting did feel a bit like an ant-bite at first.)

"Urtication" is the process of flogging with nettles. It's not done only to torment; it is considered a folk remedy for rheumatism. Similarly, a beekeeper of my acquaintance reports that it is common knowledge among his colleagues that beekeepers have no autoimmune diseases, a fact they attribute to being routinely stung in the course of their duties. I have heard reports of people cured of crippling arthritis after a dangerous bout with multiple bee stings. So maybe I should be out there grasping nettles, or annoying bees, but I think I'll pass.

Nettles lose their sting upon being cooked, and are said to taste like spinach. Late in their season, however, they produce a gritty molecule that can irritate the urinary tract, so harvest them young. They are used to flavor some cheeses, such as Yarg and Gouda. Their stems produce a fiber somewhat like linen, but coarser. Their roots produce a useful yellow dye. Their presence indicates highly fertile soil, and they are excellent sources of nitrogen for compost. They are one of the few plants that can tolerate and even flourish in soils rich in poultry droppings. We certainly have those. Major chicken-poop operation going on here, though I must say that the nettles were growing quite a distance from the chicken coops.

It's been about 27 hours, and now the effect is finally wearing off.

Just Live It Right the First Time

H/t Maggie's Farm, part of a quotation from the 17th-18th-century Shawnee leader Tecumseh as rendered in the recent movie, "Act of Valor":

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.

The Girl, Getting Bigger:

You all remember my little girl Avalon, right?  She'll be two this spring.

The Emotional Oracle

More links from Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Your brain knows more than you think. Your gut won't give you a good answer about a complex situation you're completely ignorant of, but it may give you an excellent result if you've been exposed to a lot of facts that you haven't yet had a chance to sort through rationally and systematically. Experimenters found that subjects could make very good seat-of-the-pants guesses about complex systems like the stock market, sports tournaments, and weather, after they'd had a mass of uncoordinated data shoved at them on each subject. This result is consistent with something I was reading recently about successful techniques for "cramming" for quiz shows, and with my own experience in picking crossword solutions out of what sometimes seems like thin air. I suppose it's also related to what allows great athletes to do the impossible, or even what makes typing or playing the piano possible without tripping over one's own feet like the proverbial self-conscious centipede.

I wonder if people would do better or worse at this trick after the electro-treatment I mentioned in my last post?

All Quiet in the Head

A nagging millstone, or the "still, small voice"? A mild electro-therapy to the brain is said to quiet the internal cacophony and permit its subjects to learn new tasks with greater ease. It sounds like a way to get catapulted right into The Zone. The author reports that the effect lasted for about three days, and that she missed it like crazy when it wore off. If the device were commercially available, she'd "wear one at all times and have two in my backpack ready in case something happened to the first one." But she wonders whether we would be better or worse people without the nagging doubts that we so often hear in our minds.

Art Against War

The New Criterion has an article called "The New Old Lie," which treats the current demand that war always be treated as essentially meaningless.

The latter view, Schwarz has written, “that combat, even combat that defeats Nazi Germany, is without uplift, without virtue, and without purpose” is “unusually clear-eyed” about “real war.” This belief has been overlooked by a population that wants to be coddled and so refuses to recognize that true artistry goes hand in hand with, as Schwarz would have it, the accurate, nihilistic view of war. 

This conceit has long been de rigueur among professional critics of high culture. In his introduction to Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson equated human war to the aggression of gangs of baboons and sea slugs: “at bottom the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.”... 

Over the past half century, scarcely an American student has studied Great War poetry without finding out that Wilfred Owen produced the greatest poem of the war. With its horrifying depictions of the suffering and death of fighting in the trenches, his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” proved “the old lie”—that it is sweet and fitting to die for your country. Tellingly, we would be hard-pressed to find a student these days who has read “Dulce et Decorum Est” in its original form by Horace. After all, the Roman poet could not possibly have produced art if it contained such sentimental pap.

We've spoken of that poem before. "The divide in our nation is between those who feel that the words are "the Old Lie," and those who engrave them in stone."

Why PUA Techniques Don't Work:

xkcd has it nailed.

You can't beat this without hitting bottom.  And once you've hit bottom, you're not looking down on other people:  you're looking up.



I think of the scene from "Fight Club" where Tyler Durden forces the Asian guy, at gunpoint, to return to his studies.  It's at that moment, facing death as a failure, that you realize that anything would be better than this.



And so, you're looking up.  As long as they're fighting, they're fighting for something better.  God save them, and us.

Happy Lent.  Mine has been a failure so far:  and that means it has been a success.  Lent, taken seriously, is also about hitting bottom.  It lets you know that you ought to love the man who is your enemy, because a man like you deserves an enemy.  The man you ought to hate is the man who will accommodate you as you are.

A Song for Spring

The spring is upon us.  And so, a song:



It has a name that honors the generation before the one currently fecund; but without them, how would we have the new?

UPDATE:  As to which, our brothers at BSBFB say...

[W]hat's the difference between bagpipes and an onion? No one cries when you chop up a bagpipe. What's the difference between a bagpipe and a trampoline? You take your shoes off to jump up and down on a trampoline...

Thanks, guys.  We almost appreciate it.

A Surplus in Five Years

The senators most aligned with the TEA Party have produced legislation designed not merely to balance the budget, but to create a surplus within five years.  Such a plan might begin to address the severe budgetary issues threatening the nation:  the unfunded promises in Federal pensions, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that will consume the budget.  We must do this sooner and faster, rather than later and more slowly.

The Hill describes the plan -- eventually, after seven paragraphs of explaining that it is a "wish list" that can "never pass" and providing talking points about it.  Here are the details.

The lawmakers said they would turn Medicare into a premium support plan that would give seniors the same healthcare plan as members of Congress. They say this would save an estimated $1 trillion over 10 years....  

The trio would curb Social Security spending by increasing the retirement age over time and indexing benefits to individual incomes. High-income earners would see slower growth in their benefits while low-income workers would see increased benefits.   

The proposal would fund Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps and child nutrition programs through block grants.  It would cut most discretionary spending to fiscal year 2008 levels but spare national defense spending from the deep cuts mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act.  It would freeze foreign aid spending at $5 billion a year and eliminate the departments of Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development and Energy and privatize the Transportation Security Administration.   

The plan would repeal the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

All of that sounds like a good start.  It's a nice touch that they don't "eliminate" foreign aid, as it is one of our cheaper but more effective foreign policy tools.  It's an easy cut that demagogues often suggest to Americans, but we get a lot of mileage out of USAID in places like the southern Philippines.

Pagans MC and the 2nd Amendment

Volokh comments on an interesting case that shows something of the limits of our legal approach to the world.  American laws are based on a model drawn up by businessmen and lawyers, who have a certain way of approaching the world in which business-style arrangements are assumed to be good models for thinking about other social arrangements.  Thus, we have John Locke's concept of a "social contract," which substitutes a business model for the actual facts about how political bonds are formed and maintained; and we have the modern concept of marriage as a sort-of contract rather than a kinship bond, the limits of which we've discussed at length here.

Another limitation is demonstrated by the current case.  The President of a chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle Club (PMC) is a convicted felon who is, therefore, denied exercise of second amendment rights.  Now, he lives in a violent world in which he might come into conflict with the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC), which has been trying to push the PMC out of some of its traditional territory, and so he feels (with some justice!) that he needs protection.

Many men in a situation where the law was putting their lives at risk -- and not merely outlaw bikers! -- would simply have thumbed their noses at the law and done what they felt they had to do.  Our chapter President, however, actually obeyed the law in spite of his felonious past:  he just asked that members of his club who were able to obtain lawful concealed weapons permits do so, and then carry firearms when with him on club business in order to protect him.

The court has held that those club members who did this -- who, remember, were able to pass the criminal background checks required for them to obtain legitimate concealed weapon permits -- broke Federal law.  The reason the court believes this is true is that it accepts the government's argument that the club members were "employed" by the chapter President.  The club members appealed the conviction on the grounds that, actually, they weren't employed by the President at all:  he didn't pay them, for one thing; there was no contract; there were no benefits; and they certainly didn't conceive of it as an employer-employee relationship.  This is because it wasn't an employer-employee relationship!  They weren't his employees, but members of a club.

I frankly think that PMC is in the right here, and the government in the wrong.  The government wants to act on the presumption that PMC is an organized criminal group, but it hasn't proven that.  The government's argument is that 'employed' is a word with several senses, and one of those senses is 'used for a purpose'; but, while that is in some sense true, it's nonsense as an argument in this case.  It's clear that isn't what the statute controls.  It controls employment relationships.

The reason this law doesn't prevent what the government would like to prevent here is that the law was written by people who brought these contract-type assumptions to the problem.  PMC and HAMC and the others are not like corporations (even if, as sometimes happens, they incorporate in order to register trademarks and such).  Their fundamental ethic is not capitalist.  They don't live in the same world as the lawyers and businessmen who wrote the law.  A law built around contracts, employers and employees, and so forth, is naturally irrelevant to what these motorcycle clubs are doing.

What you are dealing with in PMC is the Jomsvikings.  They are a warrior brotherhood bound by a code that separates them from the rest of American society, and which is enforced outside the law by systems of honor backed by violence and threats of violence.

The existence of such an order within American society may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how it is used and for what purpose.  My reading on these kinds of clubs is that they are usually a mixture of good and bad.  The old war-band ethic has a lot to recommend it, and some men may find it to be the order that lets them structure a life worth living.

You can see a lot of the mixture of good and bad in this old documentary.  (There are nine parts; watch for Jerry Garcia playing a HAMC wedding, which is conducted on terms that are surely unenforcable in any court -- a fact that might give the lie to the idea that marriage is a contract, since if it were, you could enter into a contract on such terms.)  However you shake out on the idea of good and bad, though, what should be clear to everyone is this:  what they are doing has nothing to do with laws based on contracts and employment.  They're doing something very different from any of that.

The Afghan Ulema Council Ruling on Women

Ms. Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan Member of Parliament who survived a Taliban attempt on her life, worries that a recent ruling by the Afghan Ulema Council represents an outreach by Karzai to the Taliban.

"They have started taking some of those basic rights," she said, "like working together, living together, going out like a free human being. I am worried for my daughters and for all the girls and women of Afghanistan."

It's certainly right to be worried.  A rush transcript of the ruling can be read here; it dwells chiefly on the rights of women in Islam until section "F," when we hear about the other side of the coin.

F.   Women cannot be inherited. Similarly, there are many other rights, granted to a woman under the religion of Islam, which are observed. But, where a Muslim woman has many rights, [she also] has duties and obligations, such as:

* Adherence, in faith and action, to the orders and prohibitions of Islam’s sacred Shariah
* Complete adherence and observance of the hijab [according to the Shariah], which protects the dignity and personality of the woman
* Avoiding mingling with stranger men in various social situations, such as education, shopping, the office and other affairs of life
* In consideration of the clarity of verses 1 and 34 of Surah an-Nisa’ [of the Qur’an], men are fundamental and women are secondary; also, lineage is derived from the man. Therefore, the use of words and expressions that contradict the sacred verses must be strictly avoided.
* Respecting [the orders] about the multiplicity of wives (polygamy), which are in accordance with clear orders of the Qur’an
* Avoiding travel without a [Shariah-sanctioned] mahram (male companion)
* Adherence to the clear orders of Muhammad’s Shariah in case of divorce

The authors helpfully cite the source of their claim that women are secondary:  verses 1 and 34 of the Surah an-Nisa' (i.e., "The Women").  As we all know by now, the Koran is supposed to be the actual word of God, filtered only by Muhammad and the angel, allegedly Gabriel, who revealed it to him.

1. O mankind! Be dutiful to your Lord, Who created you from a single person (Adam), and from him (Adam) He created his wife [Hawwa (Eve)], and from them both He created many men and women and fear Allah through Whom you demand your mutual (rights), and (do not cut the relations of) the wombs (kinship) . Surely, Allah is Ever an All-Watcher over you.... 

34. Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has made one of them to excel the other, and because they spend (to support them) from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient (to Allah and to their husbands), and guard in the husband's absence what Allah orders them to guard (e.g. their chastity, their husband's property, etc.). As to those women on whose part you see ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful), but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance). Surely, Allah is Ever Most High, Most Great.

You may also find verse 11 to be telling, since it deals with inheritance rights between sons and daughters; though, remember that the English tradition was primogeniture; this system, though unequal, does provide a better inheritance (and therefore, property) system for the daughters than that.

The BBC notes that this ruling has the potential to reverse the legal freedoms instituted for women in Afghanistan a decade ago, following the American invasion.

I gather that the American people will not endure a presence in Afghanistan of the length that we devoted to, say, Japan or South Korea.  That being so, it will fall on women like Fawzia Koofi to prove these freedoms are rights.  Perhaps there are ways we can be of some service, even once we can no longer hold back the tide.

Americans had better steel themselves to swallow this, though, if we do choose to walk away.  You're going to have a chance to reconsider just what is meant by the word "rights."  Those things, taken for granted, are like wine:  they are a gift from God, in the sense that the possibility of wine -- like the possibility of freedom -- is inherent in the structure of the world.  Yet if the good is to be had it must be made by human hands, and made new every year.  If we do not do the work, there will be no wine.

But wine, I have heard, is also banned by the Koran.

Sic Transit Lex

By now you will have heard that one of the most famous, and most justly famous, of the milbloggers died when his fighter crashed yesterday.  The man we called Neptunus Lex was a good companion (especially, one might be inclined to say under happier circumstances, for a fighter pilot).  He was also a good writer:  his thoughts were clear and his expression courtly.

You can leave condolences at his place.  I am going to follow the example at BLACKFIVE and close the comments here, because it's best that they be made where his family can see them.

He had a mechanical problem with his plane just a few days ago.  You may remember reading about it.

It’s funny how quickly you can go from “comfort zone” to “wrestling snakes” in this business. 

But even snake wrestling beats life in the cube, for me at least. In measured doses.

Spoken like a man.  He certainly was one.

Some Go Back

My father was a long-time Captain of the local Volunteer Fire Department.  Thus I know, and have had it impressed upon me since I was quite young, that no one should ever go back into a burning building.  The people who go back in to rescue others, having made it out themselves, almost never survive.

For some things, though, I'd go back too.

Firefighters recovered the body of Chief Warrant Officer Edward Cantrell on the second floor of his North Carolina home, not far from the remains of 6-year-old Isabella and 4-year-old Natalia.

I'm sorry, Chief.  You did all you could.  Angels can do no more.