Continuing scandal dogs embattled Secret Service

This time they actually let someone get hurt. Investigations are underway to determine whether alcohol and underage hookers were involved. Speaking of which, I'm unable to give this image proper attribution because my husband got it off of some wargamers' site:

A Couple from Hoyt Axton

Not a well known name these days, but a man with a strong voice.





The Kingston Trio did some of his pieces.

For The Women Who Love Us:

Waylon Jennings has a famous song about a good-hearted woman, who loves a man who may not be good enough for her.  What isn't as well known is that he has another song on the subject, almost to the same tune but with a slower tempo:  and a more intimate.



All of us who have been long from home will understand:  and all of you, whose men have long been gone.

Setting the Bar:

It is very rare that a man should be at once under consideration for both the Medal of Honor, and sainthood.

There seems to be only one other example, which I owe to Deltabravo's posting in the comments of BLACKFIVE.  Even looking outside the United States, to degrees on par with the Medal of Honor, there are perishing few.  Joan of Arc, Alfred the Great -- him to only some Catholics -- perhaps Olaf or Edwin of Northumbria, perhaps St. George, and not many others.

It's a rare company.

On a Father's Love

We didn't say anything here about the infamous controversy of Ms. Samantha Brick, which probably most of you noticed a few weeks ago (I would guess since it pervaded even the parts of the internet that I normally visit). There wasn't much to say about it except that most of the negative reactions were unjustified, since no amount of inflated self-esteem could account for the regular buying of free drinks and other attentions that generally do accompany beautiful women. However she might have appeared to the multitude who wrote to insult her, to those men at those times she plainly was a joy, and her presence an honor to which they wanted to pay tribute.

She has written a followup piece, though, that probably deserves comment. It is about her father, and what his constant love did for her.

 This piece, far more than the other, is a thing worth conveying to all who might hear it.

A Moment of Unity:

I don't think we've mentioned Atrios here for most of the decade he's been blogging -- looks like once in 2003 and once in 2005 -- but he was significant to the left side of the blogosphere at the beginning.  He's celebrating his ten year anniversary this week and, a few minor disagreements on tone aside, it's hard to take issue with him on this point.  If there has been a less insightful and more overrated writer in the major media than Tom Friedman, I can't think who he would be.

Happy birthday, Duncan Black.

While we're celebrating this moment of comity, is there anything at all to object to in the following segment?  The Breitbart boys are trying to blow it up, but generally I think there's a lot of sound advice in it.  You can put that down to broken clocks and twice a day, or to whatever else you like, but all things considered there's a serious issue at work here.



I saw Richard Cohen say today, of Paul Ryan's budget, that it was:

...an Ayn Randish document whose great virtue is a terrible honesty. (We are indeed going broke.)

If you think through the consequences of that, Mr. Farrakhan's warning has a different sound.  If we have reached the days when the bipartisan blinders can't keep out that fact any longer -- that fact and all the consequences for our society that it portends -- he might not be too far wrong.

Modest WaPo Dislikes Spotlight, Wide Circulation

You know how it is. You just want to publish a newspaper to a few like-minded citizens, without all the fuss that comes from robust circulation numbers and other unwelcome attention. Then your news desk gets a story suggesting that the Affordable Care Act will increase the budget deficit by $340 billion (or even as much as $527 billion) instead of reducing it by $132 billion, as the President previously had claimed. Your editors get together and decide that it's sort of news, but it doesn't deserve to be highlighted; you put it below the fold on page A3. You make sure it is "prominent on the home page for only a short time."

But the unruly public refuses to go along with your expert judgment of the story's unimportance. Brash bloggers turn on the high beams. Before you know it, Drudge links to it under the headline "ObamaCare Explodes Deficit." (You hate it when they call it "ObamaCare." It's "derisive.") Next thing you know, conservative and liberal bloggers are abuzz with citations to your story and arguments about how the budget impact should be calculated.

The wise old heads at your publicity-shy news desk all recognize a familiar futile attempt by the unwashed masses to determine truth and falsehood. With their superior sophistication, the new desk professionals grasp that

The truth is that every complex law change, every annual federal budget, is a risk. They’re all based on assumptions and forecasts that may or may not come true. And when they don’t, Congress and the president have to adjust.

Just because someone points out that a vast budget impact, which was widely reported and heavily relied on in the process of getting the law passed, was transparently based on double-counting (the Medicare "doc fix"), and is off by the better part of a trillion dollars, doesn't mean it's news. It's just all part of the inevitable world of forecasts and assumptions that may not come true. Happens all the time. Nothing to see here. Move along.

But it's too late. The Washington Post's ombudsman sadly acknowledges that the paper gets a "frisson of pleasure" from the attention that a hot story attracts -- but they're above all that. They're more interested, apparently, in pushing their favorite agenda. So they really wish people would let them give unfavorable stories a quick, decent burial below the fold on page A3 after running for an eye-blink.

Something's really got to be done about making the new media shut up.

H/t Instapundit.

Colombian Coup

Not that kind, the PR variety.

The Unity of Consciousness, Part I

Joseph W. asked for a separate and new thread to discuss this subject, which arose in our discussion of problems of creation.

Even a summary of this problem -- indeed, even a book-length summary -- would necessarily compress a massive amount of careful argument.  What I am hoping to provide here is more like a sketch of a summary of the problem; to tackle the problem with the seriousness it deserves is the work of years, not a few hours.  The basic problem is twofold:  how can I have knowledge about the world, and how can I communicate regarding knowledge of the world with other minds in a useful way?

Note that this is different from the question of "how/why did communication between intelligent beings arise?"  One can accept an evolutionary response to that kind of question:  it arose because, when 'tried' by animals who happened into it, it proved valuable.  This is a different question, which is about how (and indeed whether) it is possible for such a thing to be at all.  If evolutionary utility were the only criterion, why do animals not teleport themselves or engage in other sorts of fantastic behavior?  They do not because they cannot.  They do this because they can:  but why can they?  It's a very difficult problem.

Let's start with Kant's idea of transcendental unity of apperception.  He was responding to some difficulties raised by Hume -- Hume is still today a powerful source for difficulties -- about how the mind can work.  Kant argues that when we take our sense perceptions -- sight, hearing, touch, and so forth -- we must mentally mold our various senses into a single object that can serve as an object of thought.  This is called representation (that is, we are re-presenting the sense data as an object of thought rather than as data per se).  It's not just the object that has to be represented as a whole, though:  we must also represent all of our disparate experiences as a kind of unity, the unity we take to be ourselves (for what are we if not the sum total of our experiences?).

One consequence of this approach is that we end up being unable to have any knowledge at all about anything in the world.  Those things are not what our minds represent to us:  the unity imposed upon them is artificial, for one thing.  Thus, what we have "knowledge" about is only our representations, not the things themselves.  Kant calls these things "noumina" and our representations "phenomena," and argues that noumenon are completely unknowable by human beings.

That's going to be a problem for communication about the world -- for science, say.  We think that we are engaged in learning about the world through the scientific method, which involves experiements, measurements, and then communication of our results to see if others can reproduce them.  If Kant is right, no part of that approach works the way we think it does.  Our experiments are not of the world, but of mental phenomena that are different from the world in ways we not only cannot know but cannot conceive.  Our measurements are likewise.  Our theories about the meaning of these results are thus doubly disconnected from reality, because they are theories about theories about what things are really like.  That's problematic enough, but now I need to convey them to you for you to try to reproduce.

You've got your own set of representations.  Since neither you nor I have access to the things in the world, but only our individually constructed representations, we have absolutely no way of knowing if we are talking about the same objects.  When I communicate my ideas to you, what I think I'm saying to you is being filtered as sound impulses and then re-presented by your mind to you according to your own unity of apperception:  thus, I have no idea what you're hearing when I tell you something.

We might be satisfied to say, "Well, my own unity will represent all input in a coherent way, so while I don't really know if you're agreeing with me or not, it will appear to me that we agree on the basic facts."  That would make sense, but it doesn't explain why science appears to give us increasing new capacities to do physical things:  we can work together to produce rockets that fly to the moon, for example.  That's a capacity that suggests that we really are cooperating:  there's nothing in our pre-existing unity that should suggest it.  It is a capacity that arises from this cooperation, which suggests that the cooperation is real.

We might say, "Well, let's stick with the evolutionary explanation.  Our brain structures are similar enough that we can 'understand' each other to a certain degree because similar structures produce similar representations."  Even if this were fully adequate, which it isn't, it doesn't make sense of the problem of why we can understand things that aren't like us.  I usually use horses as a model for examining the question of a unitary order of reason across species (an idea also rooted in Kant, via Sebastian Rödl's explorations); but we have a similar capacity with animals of any kind.  We seem to be able to distinguish between animals that are reacting to a pre-programmed instinct versus those which seem to have a capacity to reason and learn, for example, even if we don't share much evolutionary history with them.

The explanation is also inadequate because it simply doesn't answer the depth of the problem.  Kant's argument gives us a world in which we can have no knowledge whatsoever of the reality around us, including the minds of others.  To argue that our brain structures are 'mostly similar' is thus to argue facts not in evidence.  We can't know any facts about the structures of our brains, only about the phenomena of the structures of our brains -- and these are likely being represented according to a pre-existing internal order that makes them accord to some degree with what we expect from them.

It also just doesn't make sense to leap from "it is impossible to have any knowledge whatsoever about the things themselves" to "nevertheless, we seem to do a pretty good job."  You can't jump from "impossible" to "a pretty good capacity" in the same way that you can't build a line out of points.  The points have no extension, so no number of them added together will give you an extended line.  Likewise, no amount of phenomena can be combined into a noumenon:  no phenomenon contains any nouminal content.

This has led people to question, well, everything:  it has led otherwise serious people to wander around speculating about Zombies (which set of arguments, by the way Joe, is very similar to the ones you cited to me re: whether AIs would have real consciousness); or mad scientists keeping our brains in a vat.

Or it has led people -- particularly practical-minded people -- simply to ignore the problem and pretend it doesn't exist.  This science stuff seems to work; why worry too much about why it works?

I suppose I will stop here, and call this "part one," because there remains a great deal to be said about what I think the right way to resolve the problem happens to be.  For now, though, maybe we should stop and take a moment to appreciate the problem.

Economics & Medieval Norwegian Coins

Studies of medieval coins in Norway suggest a more complex economy than is commonly pictured:

The trick is in the coins’ metallic body – a mix of copper and silver that makes them much less sturdy than coins from present times. Medieval coins were easily frayed by everyday use, and by studying the degree of this wear and tear, Gullbekk was able to come up with rough estimates of how many hands the coins have seen in their lifetime. 

Gullbekk explains that if one knows the time period certain coins were used, one can make a well-informed guess of the coin’s circulation velocity in the years it was used as currency.

I bet this trick would work for the period of Anglo-Saxon coins in England, as the government was apparently successful in forcing everyone to turn in their coins to be melted-down and re-struck periodically.  Thus, when we do find coins from a particular period, it's in hoards whose age can be estimated fairly precisely.  You could take those coins and have a very reasonable estimate of their life in circulation.  (The only problem is the relative rarity of such coins, since -- as mentioned -- the government was fairly successful at collecting up old coins and melting them down.)

H/t:  Medieval News.

A Wise Notion

The Guardian describes Dr. Terry Eagleton's new position on literary theory.  His old position was to declare that there was no quality or set of qualities that could define "literature."

Eagleton has not reneged on scepticism: he is just sceptical about it.

That strikes me as very wise.  There is nothing that should more stimulate us to be skeptical than skepticism.

Dangerous choices

Here's something I like to see: states trying something new with the public schools on a large enough scale that we might be able to draw some conclusions. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal handily won a second term with a campaign that leaned heavily on education issues. He put together impressive bipartisan support for an education reform bill that will put a lot more choice in parents' hands, using vouchers, additional charter schools, and tenure reform. These reforms expand on a tiny trend begun as a crisis response in the wake of Katrina:

Only in New Orleans, where devastation from levee breaches during Hurricane Katrina led to an extreme makeover of schools, have results been dramatic. Although there were bright spots, city schools as a whole were among the worst-performing in the state before the disaster.

Since the state took over most schools post-Katrina, that is changing. Recovery School District students, including charter and traditional campuses, posted their fourth consecutive year of improvement last year. The proportion of students scoring at grade level or above grew to 48 percent in 2011 ­-- more than double the percentage in 2007.

That progress has come as most city schools became public charter schools, a concept that the governor's legislation would expand statewide.

Some opponents of the reform legislation have tried to make charter schools seem like a questionable experiment and point to the failure of some schools. But there are highly successful, stable charter schools in New Orleans. And the fact that some unsuccessful schools have been closed down is a sign that the system is working.

Grim and I sometimes argue about the value of the free market. He is skeptical of its tendency to monetize values that should be beyond monetization. I in turn am drawn to its way of putting choices in the hands of the recipients of goods and services. The advantage of competition is not that someone wins and someone loses. The advantage is that customers can gravitate to what succeeds and abandon what does not. The "losers" in this contest aren't doomed to bleak lives in hovels after their customers withdraw their resources and support. They can always adopt the winning strategies if they like, and quit losing. What they can't do is force their customers to keep coming back to hear a new set of excuses for failure. Parents don't have to agree or disagree with any of the excuses. They can simply go to another school, which is getting better results with a different approach.

Does this approach protect us against parents who make poor choices? Of course not. Making up for bad parents is beyond the capacity of a public school system, as failing schools are always telling us.

Scale

Don't miss this XKCD graphic about ocean depths.

Engagement

From a not particularly snide N.Y. Times story about the famously combative Andrew Breitbart, an anecdote from his wife at his funeral: “I came home one day to our first apartment to find a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she wrote, “trying to wrap up the conversation and get out.”

Stuffed with Stuff

Bookworm is talking this week about being oppressed with stuff. I have a few hoarding genes, nothing too extreme. Not like my poor aunt, who barely can stand to let me throw away a tissue when I visit the tiny, crowded hospital room where she still languishes, now quite close to the end, and who still obsesses over the possessions she had to leave behind when she moved into an assisted-living facility ten years ago. Certainly nothing like the sad souls who immure themselves into houses jammed to the ceiling in every room. I'm more a case of too much laziness to sort through and dispose of what I don't need or use. I do notice, though, that fatal internal message that says, "Don't throw this out, even though you haven't used it in five years. Someday you may want it," which is the siren song of the hoarder.

When I was young and unencumbered by possessions, I used to love it when relatives decided to shed their excess stuff. I had nothing but cheap, utilitarian, boring new stuff and coveted their funky old objects. When I could afford it, I would shop at antique stores for the same kind of thing. Every middle-aged or old person with too much stuff should have a niece like me, to accept and cherish their wonderful old things. My bedridden aunt doesn't so much miss possessing her old things as worry about them, as if they were puppies that need to be adopted into a loving and appreciative home. The problem is, these concerns extend not only to nice old furniture but to boxes of empty jelly jars. I can't even clear out her greeting cards unless I agree to take them to some church group that plans to cut them up and use them in crafts. Part of this is Depression-era thrift, of course, but the rest is just anxiety and alienation. She's about to cast off a lot more than her stuff. She's going through a door she can approach only empty-handed.

My taller half is considerably more orderly than I, and gradually has converted me to an appreciation of unclutter. Not that I achieve much unclutter, but now I do at least aspire to it and occasionally take lurching, partial steps in that direction. We managed to scrape off quite a few barnacles when we moved here six years ago. It's time for another wave. Anything that's still useful needs to go to the local thrift store, and the rest to a landfill.

Maybe I'll find my missing dulcimer.

When Galaxies Go Bad

Trying to find something amusing on TV while I crochet away the afternoon, I stumbled on a real gem of a "science" show on what we like to call the "Not If But When" channel. It wrapped up with some of the silliest anthropomorphizing I'd heard in a long time. The parts in quotations were spoken by people purporting to be real-live astronomers:

Galaxies are home to stars, solar systems, stars, planets, and moons. Everything that's important happens in galaxies. Galaxies are the lifeblood of the universe. "We arose because we live in a galaxy. Everything we can see and everything that matters to us happens within galaxies."

But the truth is, galaxies are delicate structures, held together by dark matter [previously identified as the stuff that must be there because it accounts for the tendency of galaxies to stay together when otherwise we'd expect them to fling apart]. Now, scientists have found another force at work in the universe. It's called "dark energy." Dark energy has the opposite effect of dark matter. Instead of binding galaxies together, it pushes them apart. "The dark energy, which we've only discovered in the last decade, which is the dominant stuff in the universe, is far more mysterious. We don't have the slightest idea why it's there." "What it's made from, we don't really know. We know it's there, but we don't really know what it is or what it's doing." "Dark energy is really weird. It's as if space has little springs in it, which are causing things to repel each other, and push them apart."

Far in the future, scientists think that dark energy will win the cosmic battle with dark matter, and that victory will start to drive galaxies apart. "Dark energy's going to kill galaxies off; it's going to do that by causing all the galaxies to recede further and further away from us until they're invisible, until they're moving away from us faster than the speed of light, so the rest of the universe will literally disappear before our very eyes. Not today, not tomorrow, but in perhaps a trillion years, the rest of the universe will have disappeared." Galaxies will become lonely outposts.

But that's not going to happen for a very long time. For now, the universe is thriving, and galaxies are creating the right conditions for life to exist. "Without galaxies, I wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be here, perhaps life itself wouldn't be here." "We're lucky. Life has only evolved on Earth because our tiny solar system was born in the right part of the galaxy. If we were any closer to the center, well, we wouldn't be here." "At the center of the galaxy, life can be extremely violent, and in fact, if our solar system were closer to the center of our galaxy, it would be so radioactive that we couldn't exist at all."

Too far away from the center would be just as bad. Out there, there aren't as many stars. We might not exist at all. "So in some sense, we are in the 'Goldilocks' zone of the galaxy: not too close, not too far, just right." . . .

More and more scientific research is focusing on galaxies. They hold the key to how the universe works. "We should be amazed to live at this time: here, in a random universe, on a random planet, on the outskirts of a random galaxy, where we can ask questions and understand things from the beginning of the universe to the end. We should celebrate our brief moment in the sun."

Galaxies are born. They evolve, they collide, and they die. Galaxies are the superstars of the scientific world, and even the scientists who study them have their favorites . . . . "My favorite galaxy is the Milky Way galaxy. It's my true home."

We're lucky that the Milky Way provides the right conditions for us to live. Our destiny is linked to our galaxy, and to all galaxies. They made us, they shape us, and our future is in their hands.

We were discussing recently the appropriate use of poetry in science writing. We also have been discussing the abiding human need to construct fables of meaning, but I prefer my fables more coherent than this. The producers of the show (and most of the "scientists" they were interviewing) needed to put down that doobie. If we had been somewhere else, we wouldn't be here. But as it is, no matter where we go, there we are. And I can feel my skeleton.

Full Metal Jousting

Thought you all might find it interesting to know that the History Channel has a show about modernized jousting. I watched an episode last night and was impressed by the seriousness and skill demonstrated. The men were cute too.

Anytime something of the past can be preserved like this, it's a good thing.

Haidt's Surveys

Dr. Jonathan Haidt has a new book out, which Cassandra has recommended to me highly -- I have not had time as yet! -- and which is beginning to make ripples in the community.  You may have seen the Hot Air piece on how conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives; or the New York magazine piece with the amusing illustrations that was featured on the always-interesting Arts & Letters Daily.

Dr. Haidt has updated his online quizzes, which you may enjoy taking for fun or edification; or just to help see the point he's trying to make.  I was pleased to score perfectly on the scientific knowledge quiz, for example; it's not hard, and I expect all of you will do likewise.  Both liberals and conservatives average over six out of seven total points.

The point he is making that gets the most attention comes from his "Sacredness Survey," where he's pushing the argument that conservatives and liberals share three value systems (fairness, avoidance of harm, and purity), but that conservatives have two more (authority and in-group loyalty).

I learn from this survey that Haidt's model ranks me as considering all but one of these values considerably more sacred than is normal for either liberals or conservatives; the exception is authority, for which I apparently have almost no respect whatsoever.

That helps me to understand Dr. Haidt's point, but it shows me that he doesn't quite understand my way of thinking about things.  I have a great deal of respect for legitimate authority; but I run it in with in-group loyalty. That is to say, my view of legitimate authority is that it arises from a mutual and reciprocal bond of loyalty.  Lacking such a bond, there is no legitimate authority.  This is because authority must be earned and deserved.

You'll find the surveys interesting, and perhaps illuminating.  I also have it on good authority that Cassandra will be writing about this book soon, so you'll get a head start on your homework!

Speaking of cognitive dissonance

My sister, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, had a coffee cup made for her husband, bearing a slogan she admires: "Never talk to your government without a lawyer." Her husband is a lawyer, as of course am I. She had just finished mentioning to me that I'd have a chance to meet a friend of hers at my niece's upcoming wedding, and that I would like her: she's a lawyer, but the "good kind." (No trace of irony or self-awareness.) She also seems blissfully unaware of the irony of her mug, given her otherwise unbounded enthusiasm for looking to government for solutions to everything. I might have observed that I wasn't looking forward to having to bring my lawyer to my medical appointments in decades to come.

But I don't see any reason to turn every single conversation with my sister into a pitched political battle, so I contented myself with repeating to her one of my favorite old jokes:

I come from a mixed household: my mother was Catholic, my father Jewish. So I went to confession, but I brought a lawyer. "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
-- I believe you know Mr. Cohen."

Housemoms: the new "bling"

"Luxury" is a word that contains a slew of moral assumptions. The usual definition involves something that goes beyond necessity and pertains to sumptuous living. It shouldn't surprise us that people living in different circumstances would vary sharply in their estimates of what was necessary and what was luxurious: to a man with a bus pass, a Honda Civic seems almost as luxurious as a Rolls Royce.

A definition of luxury becomes even more fraught with unconscious moral assumptions when the term is applied to activities that at one time were considered duties. You hear people talk, for instance, as though the prohibition against theft were a luxury that only the rich can afford, because they are not truly hungry. A more thoughtful way to apprpoach that issue would be to say that a rich man's honesty has not been tested by hunger, with a cautionary note that a rich man should be slow to assume that he would do a better job than his neighbor of avoiding theft if he ever were equally hungry. By defining a virtue as a luxury, however, someone who wants to remove the stigma from violation of a duty can score an indirect moral point in his own favor, or at least disarm his critics in advance -- as if everyone in less desperate straits than oneself were at least unpleasantly complacent, if not outright greedy.

I am referring, obviously, to the President's recent statement that he and his wife did not have the "luxury" of letting her stay home with the kids. This statement is remarkably full of loaded assumptions. To begin with, it's hard not to laugh at the idea that a family with hundreds of thousands of dollars of income "can't afford" to forgo a second paycheck. But even if you buy that notion, calling a stay-at-home mom a "luxury" is essentially to make a judgment that the big house and the cable TV are basic necessities, while personally raising their children constitutes the frill.

The President presumably considers himself something of a feminist, without ever thinking about it very hard. Being a man of his culture, however, he naturally assumes that the man works and then, if there's still not enough money, the woman works too, which just shows you that he's not nutty enough to expect even a very liberal electorate to swallow too many transformative social experiments all at once. But a real feminist wouldn't justify her decision to earn a living by saying her husband couldn't afford to support her. She might suggest that, if it were clear that at least one parent ought to stay home with young children, then some careful thought should be given to which parent it should be. She might also take the position that it's no one's business but hers and her husband's how they arrange to share the adult duties in their household.

In the meantime, luxury strikes me as a word connoting envy. Ann Romney, understandably, is the target of a lot of envy, who is being asked to justify her good fortune and is being rather casually reviled for it.

Update: Over at her place, Cassandra has summed up nicely part of what I was trying to say. Ann Romney takes heat for staying at home. Sarah Palin takes heat for failing to do so.

The one constant in all of this agonizing over a woman's proper role has been that if the woman happens to be a liberal, there is no wrong answer. But if she's conservative, there is no right answer. . . . [S]ome folks on the right are just as deeply confusicated about all this pesky talk of women having dangerous choices as their progressive brethren in Christ.

There's always someone out there ready to explain to us females how our choices aren't quite up to snuff, on one side of the political aisle or the other, and how we need to let someone else circumscribe them for us, lest we stray into danger or make unfair inroads into someone else's turf. As far as I'm concerned, if adults can establish households in which the bills get paid one way or another without reliance on violence, fraud, or handouts, and any kids under their roof are free from abusive neglect, everyone else can butt out.