House opinionating

Sippican goes off on stupid house trends.  He wouldn't approve of some things about our house, but I'm right there with him on other trends:

1.  Snout Houses.  As he says, don't nail your house to the ass-end of your garage.  It's an egregious failure of American design that we can't figure out what to do with the cars.  Here, we put the house on stilts with a wraparound porch on the second level and the garage underneath.  We never put the cars in the garage, though.  They just get parked wherever.

2.   Flat-Screen TVs over Mantels.  Guilty.  Works for us.

3.  Microwaves over Stoves.  I prefer not to put any electronics (other than the vent hood) over the hot stove, but our microwave is built into the upper cabinet, which he disapproves of.  He thinks a microwave belongs in the island, but ours is an island-free galley kitchen, not an 800-square-foot extravaganza.

4.  Cook-Tops on Islands.  See above.  We did put in a nice, powerful hood that's properly vented to the outside.  My mother-in-law's vent hood doesn't vent anywhere.  I fail to see the point.

5.  Open Plan in a Big House.  For the airport-lobby look.  I'll go him one better:  our not-very-big house has the quaint kind of kitchen that's not integrated with the living room.  My husband feels more strongly about this one than I do.  I enjoy houses with the integrated kitchens that seem almost obligatory now, but he's the cook and he doesn't feel like being on stage (or subjected to conversations) when he's getting dinner masterpieces ready to bring out.  The idea usually is to avoid making the kitchen drudge feel isolated, but that's not an issue with him, to put it mildly.  (See "Introverts," below.)  But I chuckle now when I see plans in fancy housing magazines that include an "away room," which used to be what we called any ordinary room with an old-fashioned door.

6.  Very High Ceilings in a Family Room.  Guilty again, and loving it.  We suffered for too many years in a suburban house with 8-foot ceilings.  The common room here goes right up to the peak of the roof and suits us just fine in addition to accommodating my Christmas tree.  All other ceilings are 9 feet or higher.  I'd have been happy with 11 feet everywhere, but it does complicate construction.

7.  Plastic Everything.  Unlike Sippican, we live in a hurricane-threatened swamp and therefore made some concessions to humidity, including vinyl-clad window exteriors and lots of Hardie-plank and a PVC-related extruded material that I can't tell from wood trim once it's painted.  It's dimensionally stable and fire resistant.  I agree with him about anything that's supposed to mimic stained wood, though, including plastic decking material and vinyl fences or rails.  That technology is still in the double-knit polyester design stage.

8.  Ceiling Fans Everywhere.  Guilty again.  This is just more Yankee talk, frankly.  I feel less strongly about it, but my husband wants a breeze from above in every room, all the time, especially when he's trying to sleep.  The ceilings are high enough to accommodate the fans.

9.  Enormous Jacuzzi Tubs.  No, but we have two claw-foot tubs and no showers.  Sippican claims no one will bathe in front of a window, but it sure doesn't bother us -- though of course we're isolated behind trees and up on stilts.  If we can't manage to die here, I'm sure the lack of showers will give us fits in a resale.  For that matter, buyers probably will wonder why we didn't hide the toilet in a little closet (not me; too claustrophobic) and why we're perfectly able to share a single sink in the master bath.  Neither of us places time-consuming or complicated demands on a sink.

10.  Powder Blue and Cocoa Brown Color Scheme.  Not our thing.  I've seen worse color schemes, though.

Sippican doesn't mention my number-one objection in modern housing trends:  flat, "picture frame" exterior window trim, like the one pictured on the right.  I want a proper window sill on the bottom, with a nice shadow line.  Our framers were deeply confused by this request.

More Tea?

Guess it's a good night for the TEA Party, who staked a lot on beating the Senate's longest-serving Republican... and beat him.  There was a lot of talk about how the Presidential primary showed that the TEA Party movement was short-lived, but the TEA Party is only two years old.  You can't stage a winning Presidential campaign in two years; you have to start almost as soon as the previous one is over, as then-Senator Obama did rather than fulfilling the office to which he had so recently been elected.

Meanwhile North Carolina joins the rest of the South in constitutionally banning gay marriage.  I had to look this up -- Georgia passed its amendment in 2004, before the issue commanded my attention in any serious way.  A quick review of what I wrote here in 2003/4 was that, while the issue didn't really interest me, it was properly decided at the state level by constitutional amendments being a clear example of a power reserved to the states or to the people by the 10th Amendment.  Thus, amendments like tonight's in North Carolina seem like a reasonable way for the people to clarify just how much power they are prepared for the state to wield:  the power to regulate an existing institution, or the power to redefine it?

I have no idea how I voted on the 2004 amendment in Georgia; I don't remember it at all.  It was only later that, studying Aquinas, I came to understand just what was wrong with the structure of matrimony as it exists in America today.  My position against "gay marriage" is a consequence of that more basic argument of the nature of marriage, which we talked about at length here.

In any event, what I find surprising about the NC vote is the lopsided nature of the victory, and the huge turnout.  The foes of the amendment appear to have outspent the supporters two-to-one; the supporters carried the day anyway, 61-39 percent at current count.  That's a big victory for an amendment running into a two-to-one spending headwind.

So:  a big TEA Party victory, and a strong social conservative turnout in the face of a spending spree.  Those are good omens as we look to November.

I don't think crudité sales are going to finance that band trip

Massachusetts performs a valuable service as a laboratory for nutso social experiments, right up there with California.  Its newest contribution is a movement to phase out school bake sales, those nefarious attempts to corrupt our children's innate preference for watercress over cookies.

I don't know if we're losing the battle on obesity, but the fatheads definitely are taking over.

Prison Songs

This first one is by Richard the Lionheart, composed during his imprisonment while Duke Leopold of Austria was seeking ransom for him.  Leopold was excommunicated for imprisoning a crusader, but the ransom was heavy all the same.



I don't think they ever did get old Railroad Bill, though the Alabama boys sure did try.



Johnny Cash did a lot of prison songs.  This one is from San Quentin.



But the king of prison songs in recent years is David Allan Coe.  He went to jail at nine years old, and spent most of his time for the next twenty years inside.  He had an interesting career after that, living for some years in a hearse he insisted on parking right outside the Grand Old Opry, and later in a cave in Tennessee.  I wouldn't watch this one if you are of a sensitive nature, but if you do watch it, give some credit to the prison officials who let him do this bit for a crowd inside.

Well, at least they've got their priorities straight

The defendants in the KSM mass-murder terrorist trial are worried, according to their lawyer, that they will be unable to focus on the defense of their lives if female attorneys for the prosecution keep exposing their knees.  Also, the defendants want to be protected from committing a sin if they can't keep their eyes away.

Hey, at least the chicks at the prosecutor's table aren't giving them the Sharon Stone treatment.  We do observe civilized limits.

One of the defendants had to be carried into the courtroom in a "restraint chair," which puts me in mind of the Elmore Leonard line about federal marshals who assisted a defendant in regaining his composure.  Maybe blinkers would assist the composure of the others. But there probably are going to be lots of things about a capital murder trial that will be unavoidably painful.

SAWB

Once upon a time Atlanta's mayor, Andrew Young, explained why the Mondale presidential campaign was not going very well.  It was because, he said, it was run by a bunch of "smart-ass white boys."  The Late, Great Lewis Grizzard of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution adopted the phrase to introduce himself to audiences.  "Finally, I know what I am!" he said, in that early day for affirmative action.  "I'm a smart-ass white boy!"

Naturally, I thought of that this weekend.



The thing is, Tucker Carlson is wrong.  So is she, though, and just where she apparently doesn't see it.

The United Nations this weekend was talking about how the USA needs to give some land back to the Native Americans.  It's easy to mock the UN here, but let's look at the substance of the complaint.

Close to a million people live on the US's 310 Native American reservations. Some tribes have done well from a boom in casinos on reservations but most have not. 

Anaya visited an Oglala Sioux reservation where the per capita income is around $7,000 a year, less than one-sixth of the national average, and life expectancy is about 50 years. 

The two Sioux reservations in South Dakota – Rosebud and Pine Ridge – have some of the country's poorest living conditions, including mass unemployment and the highest suicide rate in the western hemisphere with an epidemic of teenagers killing themselves.

This is the reason why Native Americans are granted affirmative action benefits.  If someone fights out of Pine Ridge and makes it to college, they've already overcome a massive burden.  The whole point of the practice is to correctly judge just how much harder it was for them to get there than it was for those who had an easier road.  We ought to want this.  That's where Tucker is wrong:  the system isn't unjust by nature.  For them, we ought to want it.

"I should in that case hold you," replied the yeoman, "a friend to the weaker party."

 "Such is the duty of a true knight at least," replied the Black Champion; "and I would not willingly that there were reason to think otherwise of me."

The problem with what Warren did was that she made a mockery out of the system.  This is where Greene was wrong.  The question isn't whether she was qualified -- even well-qualified professors, when they are looking for a job at Harvard, are looking for any advantage that may come to hand.  That she is already a strong candidate is just the point.  This is not a system for the strong to use to tilt things even further in their favor.  It is a system that is meant to uphold the weak against the strong.

I'm just as Cherokee as Elizabeth Warren -- to judge by "blood quanta," which is apparently the standard that we're now supposed to apply.  Apparently the currently serving Cherokee Nation Chief is no more than that.  In my case it comes even further back in the family history, when this was frontier country and white women were very rare (a constant in the story of the American frontier is that women move to the frontier, wherever it is in any generation, rather more slowly).  A couple of my frontiersman ancestors took Cherokee brides.  It works out to the same percentage.  It also means my family is American since the mid-1700s, which counts for... exactly nothing, in determining who is a "real American," according to what I'm given to understand is the acceptable standard.

Never once in my life did I think of marking myself as "Native American" for some advantage.  It would be a positive insult to those people on Pine Ridge if I did.  I've suffered nothing for it; everyone whose family has been in the South for two generations, black or white or otherwise, has that much Native American "blood quanta" if they care to track it down.  For the people of Pine Ridge, it's everything; for us, it's a very minor part of the story of what it means to be American.

Most of us would be called "white boys" by our FOX News commentator; and why not?  I have no reason to buck the term if Lewis Grizzard wouldn't.  Nevertheless I'll bet if you looked, he was at least 1/32nd Native American.  All of us are, and that means nothing at all.  It's wrong to help yourself by taking from the weak and the poor.  If law or custom make it easy to do so, we are wrong if we take advantage -- and if the law backs us in our wrongness, then the law is just as wrong as we are.  Everyone knows that.

Grim, last winter.

Innies and outies

I enjoyed this short article about tips for managing an introverted nature, especially the spirited discussion in the comments section from introverts insisting "I just want to be me."  Like many of them, I'm a bit baffled by why our extroverted brethren enjoy the gatherings of strangers that constitute their mysterious social life.  If I'm going to hang out with people (especially people I don't know well), I want to have an agenda:  to play music together, to paint the house, or at least to cook or share a meal.  Failing that, we'd better have extremely strong ties and shared interests in order to prevent the conversation from flagging.

But as I'm a bit cold-natured and socially clueless, in recent years I've made an effort to mingle.  I always hang out in the parish hall after Sunday services, for instance, and since that's not a social convention that does anything for me naturally, I concentrate on practicing listening skills.  (Left to my own instincts, I'd babble nervously and become a bore.)  After a few years of this, I can't say it's grown on me much.  Every so often it leads to a new friendship -- that spark you both feel when you realize you'd rather talk to each other than mingle -- and it always leads to a greater awareness of the situation and needs of those around me, which is good regardless of whether it's fun.  Nevertheless, it retains an ersatz quality that reminds me I'm in alien territory.

I'll always prefer a few intense relationships to a large number of friendly ones, and focused conversations to casual interaction, not to mention (usually) solitude to groups.  It will always be easier to get me to come to a party if its purpose is to pick up trash and then enjoy a picnic than if the agenda is to stand around with mixed drinks.  As you can imagine, I was just about the world's worst networker as a law partner, a real stinker in that department.  I was a lot more useful as the person you could tell to stay up three nights in a row in order to produce an outstanding chapter 11 plan on brutally short notice that would stand up on appeal.  That kind of thing is hard work, but it doesn't hold a candle to the drain I experienced from having to attend cocktail parties.  Oh, how glad I am to leave behind any professional obligation to attend cocktail parties.  In a sane world I'd have found a way to get double my usual hourly rate for that chore, instead of having to pretend it was so much fun that I'd happily give up my nights and weekends to endure it.

The fact remains that we all have to mingle from time to time, and it's nice for us introverts to have a few tricks to make it less excruciating for ourselves and those around us.  It's not like the extroverts have any plans to return the favor by learning how to structure social activities to our satisfaction, but that's OK.  The extroverts will be happier with each other's company, anyway.  They would hate our idea of parties and probably can't think of a good reason to learn otherwise.

Cheaper medicine

I've never yet failed to enjoy a TED lecture.  I have to ration myself, because my satellite internet connection won't permit me to stream video for very many minutes in any one day.  This lecture is about using off-the-shelf video game units to build for about $100 the kind of eyeball-controlled electronic devices that, up to now, paralyzed patients have had to pay $50,000 or even $200,000 for.

Patients with severe skeletal-muscular problems such as spinal injury or neurological disease tend to preserve their ability to control their eyes.  Not only the optical nerve, but also the other eye-related nerves, are more like an extension of the brain itself, in contrast with your other bodily movements, which are mediated through the spine.  When you add this ability to cunning little devices that track and respond to eye movements, it means that profoundly disabled people not only can web-surf but also can communicate and even drive mechanisms like wheelchairs.  The lecturer in this video has figured out ways to make these devices so cheap that they're reasonably available to just about anyone.

The price of cure

A history of surgery in the New England Journal of Medicine paints a vivid picture of why healthcare is such a large part of the modern budget, while at the same time being such a new part that its cost continues to outrage our feelings and expectations.  Only a little over a century and a half ago, surgery was confined almost exclusively to the kind of interventions that could be completed so superficially and rapidly that they were somewhat likely to do more good than harm.  Live-saving amputations were the earliest examples.  Lacking anesthesia, surgeons put all their emphasis on brute speed.  With the discovery of ether, they slowly realized they could afford to take their time and refine their techniques.  With the further discovery of hand-washing and sterilization of equipment, surgeons found themselves able and justified in expanding their repertoires to more challenging areas, such as the torso, and to less emergent medical conditions.  Today, medical science acknowledges more than 2,500 standard surgical procedures, often performed with minimal invasiveness, and with a success rate undreamed of in the mid-19th century.

We no longer expect to die of such common troubles as appendicitis.  We don't yet, however, quite expect to pay for their cure.  Unlike food, shelter, and clothing, the provision of which has been an expected economic burden on individuals and families since the dawn of history, medicine still somehow strikes us as a miracle cure that some kindly wizard should bring to the door in a diamond phial.

I'll have another

Always fun to see a horse come from behind, especially when the jockey is a long-shot youngster.  For most of this clip, I'll Have Another is way back in the middle.  It's only in the last 300 yards or so that he explodes.  The announcers said as a yearling colt he could have been had for $11,000.

Super duper

The full moon will be will be about 221,802 miles from Earth tonight, which is about 15,300 miles (roughly 7%) closer than average, and therefore is making its way into the popular consciousness as a "supermoon."  Wikipedia sniffs that it's really called a perigee-syzygy, and that indeed all full moons are really just plain old syzygys.  ("Syzygies," which probably is more correct, lacks orthographical style and balance.)  I don't think the snooty name is going to catch on; it's hard to rhyme and it doesn't scan worth a hoot. Although "perigee" and "syzygy" aren't bad dactylic oblique rhymes for each other, they wouldn't make a satisfying limerick.

There's been some crazy talk lately about how much stronger the tidal forces will be, or how big and bright the moon is going to look, or even what social paroxysms may be observed.  Newspapers tend to say it will be "14% bigger and brighter," whatever that means.  A disk area of 14% greater size, I suppose?  That sounds bigger than it looks to the naked eye.  Here's what a 12% increase looks like, from 2011's perigee-syzygy-superdupermegamoon:

As for tides, the effect hasn't been that great in the past.  Supermoons happen pretty often, about once a year.  The variation results from our satellite's elliptical orbit.  Although the moon's orbit has a period (obviously) of one month, the "bump" of the ellipse is out of synch with the full-new-moon-phase cycle by a couple of days, so it takes a little over a year to repeat a line-up of the full moon with the short end of the ellipse.  Solar eclipses (not to be confused with ellipses) also are affected by how close the moon is to the Earth, as well as how close the Earth is to the sun; that can make the difference between a really dark eclipse and one with a bright ring of sun peeking out all around the dark moon.  Eclipses, however, exhibit much longer cycles than supermoons, because eclipses also are affected by the fact that the moon's orbit around the earth is about 5 degrees off of the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun, a retrogressing wobble that makes the plane of the moon's orbit cross the plane of the Earth's orbit in a direct line between Earth and sun only every 18 years or so.

It's been so cloudy here that I'm not sure we're going to see the supermoon at all, but we'll make sure the guns are loaded anyway, in case of a zombie apocalypse.

Sears, Roebuck, and the Blues...

The claim here is that the Sears Catalog was midwife to the blues.

You know what?  Tell me what you think of the argument.  Let's take it from the top.

Rethinking the Crusades

Jonah Goldberg's new book is not of any more interest to me than was his last book, but I saw via Instapundit that he had posted an excerpt on the Crusades.  That is a subject that interests me, so I read through what he had to say.

His general point is that the Crusades should be thought of as a kind of defensive war, rather than a kind of proto-imperialism.  Further, he adds, rather than an affront to Islam they represent one of Islam's minor victories.

Let me offer you a different way of thinking about the Crusades.

Most of what you'll see written on the subject in popular sources will focus on either the First Crusade (characterized by its mystical vision of St. George, and apparently miraculous success in recapturing Jerusalem), or the Third Crusade (with the irresistible characters of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin).  What we call "the First Crusade," though, wasn't really the first one at all.

If by "Crusade" we mean a war undertaken by Western fighting men who fought to capture land from Muslims in return for a spiritual promise from the Church that their sins would be expiated by the violence, we should look to 1063.  The Pope at that time was Alexander II, who sent a bull to clerics in France to encourage French knights to join in fighting against the Muslims in what is now Spain.  This is thirty years before the "First Crusade," but it was followed by several more.

The Papacy held that the Iberian peninsula was the actual property of St. Peter, and therefore belonged to the Church:  a series of Popes from Alexander to the famous Urban encouraged one crusade after another to recapture the land and restore it to the dominion of the Pope.  The kings of the Spanish kingdoms began to enjoy significant success, but of course they didn't wish to accept the domination of the Pope once they had captured the land.  The Church eventually settled its claims in return for properties, chiefly granted to the new Crusader orders -- the Templars and the Hospitallers, that is.  Less well known, though, were a whole series of Crusader knightly orders that were particular to the Spanish crusades, set up by the kings along the same lines as the more famous orders to fight in Spain.

The popes even went so far as to issue an order forbidding Spanish knights from going to the Crusades in the east, because they were needed to fight at home.

Now, if you factor in the Spanish crusade with the Eastern ones, the question of whether 'the Crusades' represent an Islamic victory looks a bit different.  The Muslims eventually recaptured Jerusalem, and indeed Constantinople; however, they lost Spain entirely.  Furthermore, the structures set up to conquer in Spain were largely transferable to the New World in 1492 -- that is, the year when the last Islamic lands fell in Spain, while Columbus opened the way west.  The effect of the Spanish crusades was thus the conquest and conversion of the entire population of South and Central America; it would have been the conversion of the whole of the Americas if not for the religious wars that split the Christian faith.

In addition, to get a full appreciation of the Crusades you have to look at the ones internal to Europe, where they were about enforcing discipline and putting down dangerous heresies.  The success of these was mixed -- indeed, the religious wars just mentioned could be seen as the final failure -- but they are also an important part of the picture.

Seen as a whole, the Crusades become a different picture.  They were far more than an attempt to recapture lands from Islam, and far more successful than at first may appear.  They didn't win everywhere, or for all time, but the strength and size of Christianity even today is directly related to their prosecution.

By the way, if you want to read a book on the Spanish Crusades, an excellent one is Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain by Joseph F. O'Callaghan.  His writing on medieval military organization and financing is somewhat general, but he puts together the history of events very well.

Croatia

Now here's a video that's probably worth your time.  It's an adaptation of the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th to a tourism video for Croatia.  The result is, for the most part, remarkable.

Of course, the architecture and a few cultural icons aside, what really carries it is Beethoven.  And that reminds me, again, of a problem we have often considered.  The beauty of the music that came out of Europe from the 1700s to the late 1800s was unrivaled in human history; Croatia has a claim to it because Croatia is European, and indeed a central part of the same romantic movement in Europe that inspired Beethoven.

If the music of that era is unequaled, though, it is we ourselves who fail to equal it.  The lady who performs here is a fine cellist; she replicates her part well.  Who writes for her now, as once he did?

Practicing chaos

H/t Ace.  Naturally I can't find confirmation of any of these quotations, but I did find another unprovable one:  Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop is said to have tried to get a rise out of Winston Churchill before WWII by predicting that, if it came to war, the Italians would side with Germany.  Churchill replied, "It seems only fair.  We had them last time."

Cradle To Grave

Wow.

Give the man credit:  he's standing up for cradle-to-grave government support, at least for women.  The focus on how women benefit from cradle-to-grave government wardship is an interesting one.

To some degree this is a practical fact of the kind of welfare state we've put together.  We tend to make transfer payments to the poor and the old.  Women make up the bulk of the one category because they tend to be the child-rearing parent in divorced families.  They make up the bulk of the other category because they live substantially longer.

Thus the split is an organic one, sort of:  it grows naturally out of supporting the poor and the old through government transfer payments.  The Obama administration is just doubling down on it, and trying to think of many ways to craft additional woman-specific payments and benefits.

Still, time was that accusing someone of being in favor of "cradle-to-grave" government involvement in our lives was a pretty serious charge.  Apparently the Obama administration thinks that, at least for women, the time has come to embrace it.

"Composite" Girlfriends & Literary Allusions

There seems to be a lot of talk today about the President's admission that the girlfriend in one of his autobiographies is a "composite."  That's an interesting thing to have done.

On the one hand, I can appreciate how it would be a decent act to keep the real girlfriends of one's past out of the glare of the public eye.  If you were writing an autobiography for the purpose of presenting yourself as a public figure, with the intent of trying to push yourself off in politics, it might be kind to leave real names out -- especially when you were talking about sensitive matters of the heart.

On the other hand, a "composite"?  Could you make a composite of two or three people you cared about deeply?  Wouldn't it rather be the case that you can't help but see such people as the individuals that they are?

Consider the letter making the rounds today:

“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — [T.S.] Eliot is of this type,” Obama wrote in one letter to McNear. “Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter — life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”

This indicates that the speaker thinks of himself as outside "the western tradition," which ought to be problematic enough for the President's defenders.  What strikes me, though, is the way that the literary figures are completely interwoven with the thoughts.  This is common among people who have spent their lives immersed in literature.

I cannot recall ever hearing the President speak this way, though.  He's given a lot of speeches, but literary references are rare within them, and essentially absent from his off-the-cuff remarks.

Now it could be that the private, girlfriend-seeking Barack Obama is just a very different man from the public speaker; apparently Nixon was that way (as Cassandra recently pointed out).  Still, Nixon was also a lot less public as a public figure:  the times allowed a President to be different in private than in public in a way that they don't seem to do now.

So it strikes me as odd.  Either the literature is deeply embedded in the thought process, or it is not.  I've seen no evidence of it outside the book.  What to make of that?

What Do You Mean By "Compassion"?

So, there's this study that says that atheists are more motivated by compassion than believers.  Now, if you are like me, you read this and you think, "Wow -- that's surprising.  So, if you're a random guy who needs help, you're better off looking for help with atheists than with nuns?  That's not what I'd have expected."

It's also not what the study proves, as it turns out.

"Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not," study co-author and University of California, Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer said in a statement. "The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns."

So, in other words, religion performs the expected function after all:  it drives people to help out that random guy.  Without it, you're likely to help if and only if you have an existing emotional connection with the individual who wants help.

That's not shocking at all.  It's just what you'd expect.

Outlaws!

I have to say I find this really, really funny.

Some black bloc man bigger than me with bandana tried to take my camera from me violently fuck that! Smash the state not my camera
Stephanie Keith (@Steffikeith) May 1, 2012
Source: @Steffikeith

It's one thing to be an outlaw if you're prepared to live outside the law.  But if you smash the state, dear lady, who's going to protect your camera?  Twitter?

Eastward, ho

The problem with federalism is that sometimes the states run experiments whose results are hard to discount.  This week has seen a flood of California-is-boned articles, summed up for us in a handy way here, but this short set of statistics stood out for me:

From the mid-1980s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

California also ranked in the top five or ten in a number of troubling contests, from most-taxed to most-regulated. It typically shares honors with New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia.