Old Husbands' Tales

Not really.  I was just having a little gender-bending fun.  The site is really called "Life's Little Mysteries," and it contains an entertaining variety of explanations.  For instance, it's possible that Gollum really would have submerged upon falling into Mount Doom, though you might have thought he would float, lava being denser than a living body.  Perhaps more to the point for those of us more likely to visit the coast than an active volcano as the summer vacation season opens, you shouldn't pee on a jellyfish sting, but pouring vinegar on it may help.

For alternative views, this scientist asserts that all home remedies commonly believed to assuage the pain of either bee or wasp stings are rubbish.  This one cites a lot of contradictory evidence regarding the treatment of fire ant stings with everything from acids to alkalines to meat tenderizers.  He adds the helpful advice that you should try either ammonia or bleach, but never mix them together, as they will release deadly chlorine gas.  Not that this should matter much outdoors, but people have been known to hurt themselves badly in enclosed bathrooms, especially poking their faces down too close to toilet boils that have been cleaned with, say, Ajax and ammonia.  This more medically oriented site says just remove the stinger, if any, wash with soap and water, and try ice, antihistamines, pain relievers, and maybe think about when you last had a tetanus booster.  I don't know if any of this works; I barely react to bees, wasps, or fire ants in any case.  I also found out this week that I'm nearly immune to a scorpion sting.  That same day, however, I found out that a bite from my own danged cat will send me to the urgent-care clinic for antibiotics to treat a thumb that's still swollen and painful now two days later (but on the mend).  Well, at least my tetanus booster was up to date.

H/t Maggie's Farm

Independence Day

Pause and reflect.

When in the course of human events  it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation...

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures....

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures....

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation...

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: 

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:...

You can make a lot of distinctions here, if you care to do so.  But there's a lot to compare, however carefully you wish to contrast.

Happy Independence Day.  Maybe it's time for a little rebellion.

UPDATE:  Dr. Mead has composed a modernized version of the Declaration.

George Washington was just as good as Bill Clinton:

Another poll to help us achieve despair.  Best Presidents Ever:

5. (tie) George Washington, +15 points (16 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
5. (tie) Bill Clinton, +15 points (28 percent place in top-2, 13 percent place in bottom-2)

Man, that's depressing.

The Palio

Machu Picchu

Speaking of crazy Russians, here is one who has assembled a remarkable virtual tour of Machu Picchu out of high-definition photographs.  If you haven't got the time or the money for a trip to Peru, at least you can virtually take the hike and look around!

Theme Songs

The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys settles on this for their internet theme song.  There's a significant amount of bad language, but the singer is Russian, so probably it's not even obscene by relevant community standards.  In any case, 2:37-2:50 is brilliant.

I never thought of having a theme song.  Nevertheless, I guess our theme song would have to be this.



Well, OK, it has the disadvantage of being an hour and nine minutes long.  But it's worth it, and isn't that the point?

Tact

A friend sent me this link, designed to make us miss the Great Communicator.

The verdict on the court

My husband and I have been going back and forth over whether Justice Roberts's decision can be defended.  I was inclined to stick up for him at first, but I'm coming around to the opinion that he fell into the trap of issuing an opinion tainted by politics.  That they weren't the politics his enemies predicted he would fall prey to doesn't change this conclusion.  The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal did the best job I've seen so far explaining where he went wrong:

America has its origins in a rebellion against arbitrary and pernicious taxation and the Framers wanted to make it extremely difficult to impose or raise direct taxes.  These can easily morph into plenary police powers, the regulation of private behavior and conduct that the Constitution vests in the states.  For this reason, while the taxing power in addition to raising revenue can achieve regulatory results, those regulatory results must be constitutional themselves. 

*** 

That boundary held for 225 years until Thursday's ruling, as the Court had repeatedly struck down Congress's efforts to arrogate to itself police powers under either the Commerce Clause or the taxing power.  The Chief Justice ruled instead that the mandate was an unconstitutional exercise of federal police powers under the Commerce Clause, only to transform the taxing power into a license for the federal government to impose taxes whose defining feature is commanding people as members of society. His discovery erases the limiting principle—apportionment—that constrains the taxing power for everything besides income and excises. . . . [T]he punishments in the [current] tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows.  Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.  Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty. 

*** 

His ruling, with its multiple contradictions and inconsistencies, reads if it were written by someone affronted by the government's core constitutional claims but who wanted to uphold the law anyway to avoid political blowback and thus found a pretext for doing so in the taxing power.  If this understanding is correct, then Chief Justice Roberts behaved like a politician, which is more corrosive to the rule of law and the Court's legitimacy than any abuse it would have taken from a ruling that President Obama disliked.  The irony is that the Chief Justice's cheering section is praising his political skills, not his reasoning. Judges are not supposed to invent political compromises.

Cardboard tomatoes -- a mistake?

Or did they do it to us on purpose?  I always figured that tastelessness in modern tomatoes was an unintended consequence of the desire to make them firmer and easier to transport.  It's true that the worthless flavor and texture of just about all supermarket tomatoes is an unintended consequence, but not of the desire to make them as tough as tennis balls.  It was a side-effect of something far more useless:  a gene that makes the tomatoes turn uniformly red when ripe, instead of leaving unsightly patches of green.  So now they're purty, but not worth the trouble of chewing.  The linked article claims that researchers think they figured out to turn the flavor gene back on, but regulations forbade them actually to taste a research product, so they're not sure, and anyway they'd be crazy to try to market an evil GM tomato, right?

Heirloom tomatoes have escaped this fate, so it's still possible to grow a decent tomato at home.  At least, I assume it's possible for some of you.  We have terrible luck with tomatoes here, perhaps because we don't use pesticides, but perhaps even more because our climate tends to go from "too cold to bloom" to "too hot to set fruit" in the space of about a week every spring.  It makes me want to build an air-conditioned greenhouse, because a good tomato is the crown of creation.

Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld

Jimbo at BLACKFIVE posted a link to this gentleman's obituary, and he's right:  it's a remarkable one, well worth reading.  His was a life well led!

Google fu

Every Sunday, the "Rocket Science" blog I enjoy so much posts a lot of links to a variety of science articles.  For the last couple of weeks it's been boring, but today is a bonanza.  One of my favorites is a short article stuffed with tips for Google searches.

If you've ever worked as a lawyer or paralegal, you probably know a lot of tricks for searches in sites like Lexis or Westlaw that permit you to search for X but not Y, or X within 15 words of Y, or exactly the phrase "X Y Z," or only documents that have all three of X, Y, and Z.  It seems you can do the same things with Google code, as spelled out in this article.  I already knew that typing "Pendergast L. Snooks" will weed out the pages that mention that far less interesting fellow, Pendergast W. Snooks.  But "Pendergast L. Snooks" -sheep will enable you to focus on Mr. Snooks's  invaluable contributions to heirloom tomato production without bogging you down in a lot of articles about the unfortunate farm scandal.

You may also have known that, once you're on a page, you can use "Ctrl-F" to search for a word within it.  I use that one all the time.  I've noticed, though, that search engines will send me to sites that don't contain all words I was looking for, which is annoying.  Typing "Pendergast L. Snooks" intext:tomato will zero in on his important horticultural work while filtering out the many web pages distracted by his earlier careers in basketball, espionage, and Hollywood.

You can upload an image to Google and ask it to show you "more like this."

It's just the handiest article I've found in ages.

Fun

I've been enjoying these quizzes, recommended by Bookworm.  She warned me I'd waste a bunch of time on them.

You Heard It Here First:

Nature magazine discovers the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

You got to read about it here almost a month ago.  I think that may be the first 'scoop' I can remember us having here -- one from the year 774, at that.

Owning choices

Cassandra links to a Bookworm piece lampooning the incoherent conspiracy mutterings about Chief Justice Roberts, whose Machiavellian prowess enabled him to pull off a plot so intricate, so varied, so internally contradictory that it simultaneously outraged everyone from one end of the political spectrum to the other.  And the piece is very funny.  To tell the truth, though, I enjoyed another of Bookworm's Obamatax pieces even better.  She follows Charles Krauthammer in stressing Roberts's insistence on leaving a political mess in the hands of the voters who must remedy it:

The American voters, by putting Democrats into Congress and the White House, broke the American system.  They now own that broken system and it’s up to them to fix it.  In this case, if the voters are smart enough, they’ll elect Republicans by a large majority.  If they’re not smart enough, we’re in for a lot more breakage. 

Viewed this way, Roberts did the right thing.  He protected the Supreme Court’s integrity and he made the American people responsible for their own stupidity.

Even so, like me, Bookworm worries about the principle that, even if Congress must not regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause, it can still tax inactivity to its heart's content.  I would prefer to see taxes returned to their revenue-raising function.  We should stop using them as a coercive tool to implement one utopian scheme after another, generally involving a redistribution of wealth from "them" to "us."

Nevertheless, the honest truth is that my strongest objection to Obamatax is not a Constitutional one.  If I believed that single-payer healthcare made sense, in the same way that I believe a unified and coherent national defense makes sense, I'd have no problem financing the system with a tax that fell most heavily on free-riders who weren't already bearing their share of the tab.  How is that much different from making people pay for a police and fire department?  The problem is that I think a single-payer health system is a good way to destroy what's left of the rational part of our healthcare system.  Competition and other private-sector tools are the only way to fix the mess we've already gotten ourselves into by flirting with top-down solutions.  So naturally I don't want to fund the healthcare system with a tax, or to see Congress take any other action that tends to get the government even more deeply involved by any means it can dream up, Constitutional or otherwise.

But that is a political choice reflecting values and opinions about what works.  So get to the polls this November.  There are lots of issues we can't and shouldn't expect the Supreme Court to resolve for us -- either because that's not its proper role or, if you don't believe that, then because it's too likely to disappoint us.

And in the meantime, if you are inspired to attend some spirited town hall meetings, go for it.

Holder held in contempt

Well, we knew that already.  But now he's been held in criminal contempt by a formal vote of the House of Representatives, on a 255-67 vote.

You can tell all those lies again...

...about them things you did  and the medals you got for them  and not get hauled into court anymore.

But, you'll still be a liar. I think I tend to agree with the decision, because the public shaming when it all comes out, (as it invariably does) is probably punishment enough.

And, if you defrauded people with those lies of yours, you can always get hauled into court for that.


As the saying goes: "I like free speech, because then I know who the idiots are".

Breaking news on Fast & Furious

BREAKING: Eric Holder releases new statement: Fast and Furious was a tax.

H/t Ace.

Nur über meine Leiche

Angela Merkel warned earlier this week that Germany will bail out the rest of the EU over her dead body.  A Citadel CEO and University of Chicago economist argue today in the N.Y. Times that the solution to the Eurozone problem is not for Greece to abandon the Euro, but for Germany to do so.

I've often confessed here that monetary theory confuses me.  People act as though currency were a magic wand.  I see it as a kind of promise, and therefore something that's incompatible, long-term, with lying.  The proposal for Germany to re-introduce the Deutschmark at least has the advantage of uniting words and reality in the combination we often describe as "honesty."

Obamacare lives

Roberts is no judicial activist, I'll give him that.

What a disappointing week.  Well, I suppose the lesson is the usual one:  some of the these problems have to be solved with the ballot box, not with the courts.

Update:  It's a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice Roberts joining Justices Ginsberg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor in construing the individual mandate as a tax rather than a penalty for Constitutional purposes.  (It's still treated as a "penalty" for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act; if it had been a tax for that purpose, the Court could not have heard the case.)  The Court rejected the attempt to justify the mandate as an exercise of either the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause, stating that the Commerce Clause cannot regulate passive non-behavior.  Instead, it's simply a tax imposed on people who decline to buy insurance.  The penalty is not so harsh as to constitute an absolute prohibition of the decision to go bare.

The Court struck down the portion of Obamacare that funds an expansion of Medicaid, but threatens states with the loss of all of their traditional Medicaid funding if they opt out of the expansion.  As it stands, therefore, states will have a free choice whether to participate in the expanded Medicaid system.

A Dissent from Hume

As part of a discussion on another subject in the company of a bunch of Villains (that post and its extensive discussion are well worth reading in their own right), Grim pointed out a David Hume claim known today as Hume's Guillotine, or the is-ought problem.  The link, provided by Grim, presents a good summary of the question; it's also laid out, of course, in Part III, Section 1, "Moral Distinctions Not Derived from Reason," of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature.  Grim asked what I thought of the matter.

The short answer is that Hume was wrong.

This post attempts to show how.

The salient parts of Hume's argument, as concerns this post, are these:

He states his problem:

Now as perceptions resolve themselves into two kinds, viz. impressions and ideas, this distinction gives rise to a question, with which we shall open up our present enquiry concerning morals. WHETHER IT IS BY MEANS OF OUR IDEAS OR IMPRESSIONS WE DISTINGUISH BETWIXT VICE AND VIRTUE, AND PRONOUNCE AN ACTION BLAMEABLE OR PRAISEWORTHY? … In order, therefore, to judge of these systems, we need only consider, whether it be possible, from reason alone, to distinguish betwixt moral good and evil, or whether there must concur some other principles to enable us to make that distinction.

Hume then makes this claim:

Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections [through opinions of injustice or through a sense of obligation], it follows, that they cannot be derived from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence.  Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions.  Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular.  The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

Hume notes, of Reason:

Reason is the discovery of truth or falsehood.  Truth or falsehood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact.  Whatever, therefore, is not susceptible of this agreement or disagreement, is incapable of being true or false, and can never be an object of our reason.

with this about morals:

Now it is evident our passions, volitions, and actions, are not susceptible of any such agreement or disagreement; being original facts and realities, compleat in themselves, and implying no reference to other passions, volitions, and actions.  It is impossible, therefore, they can be pronounced true or false, and be either contrary or conformable to reason.

An administrivium: Hume makes a distinction between Reason and moral, identifying the moral as a passion.  For this post, I'll write about rational reason(ing) for Reason and moral reason(ing) for the moral.

Hume's proposition, itself, flows from a false dichotomy.  Our reasoning and moral capacities are gifts from God—indeed, they are the same gift.  The split between them is a wholly human-originated partition, which we generate strictly for the purpose of better understanding the gift.  Thus, rational and moral reasoning begin (its) existence in us, not just inextricably intertwined, but as one and the same.  We can move between them as easily as we can move from our front yard to our back. 

With regard to a part of the second above, concerning the claimed inability for rational reasoning to motivate behavior, this also is wrong.  Consider a game of poker (which, when I was actively playing it had no relation with gambling whatsoever).  A coldly objective—rationally reasoned—assessment of my hand, of the hands of my fellow players, of their betting histories, and so on, takes me to executing a behavior: fold, call, or bet, with a subset under betting of adjusting the size of these bets.  Each of these behaviors is originally motivated by a reasoned assessment the data at hand; moral reasoning has not entered into it at all.  A couple more examples: a man has a pistol and confronts a home invader who holds a weapon to the man's wife, threatening to her unless the man complies with a demand.  This is a highly emotionally charged situation, yet the man can—and a trained man does—observe the factors, sees the wife does not cover very much of the home invader, the range is short, the invader's weapon is not an immediately lethal one (a knife, perhaps, or the finger is not on the trigger), assesses his own marksmanship, and makes a decision to take his shot—or not.  Rational reasoning has determined the shot; rational reasoning has motivated the action of shooting or holding fire.  So it is in another wholly unemotional—dispassionate—activity, like driving: an action of taking this route, or that one, based on the purpose of the trip and the relative efficiencies of the two routes.  Rational reasoning determines the action of the choosing of the route and spurs the driver to act on the choice.

In the fourth above, concerning morals, his claim is internally contradictory.  If we can say that a passion,  a moral, is originally true, originally a fact, then we have...in fact…identified it so.  While we have not identified a falsifiable alternative, we have identified a truth, a fact.  This, comports with rational reasoning: a truth has been discovered.  In this case of origin, that a falsehood is not present to be discovered in no way invalidates the rationally reasoned discovery of the original truth.  A agreement or disagreement (the third above) is simply the agreement/disagreement that this discovery is an original fact.  Of course, a first principle—an original fact—cannot be proved from within its own logical system, but if Hume is correct, rational reasoning is separate from moral reasoning, and it is this separate logical system that has discovered the original fact—from without that other system.

Moreover, if the moral is always, of origin, true—a true fact, as it were—and rational reasoning can distinguish between the true and the false, then it is eminently possible for rational reasoning to recognize the moral, when it recognizes a particular truth.  Nor does rational reasoning need to be a (the) source of good or evil, as Hume decries it for not being: it need only be able to recognize the two and distinguish between them—as it does with any truth or falsehood.

Hume also proceeds from a minor false dichotomy: that it is "possible, from reason alone..." or "…whether there must concur some other principles…."  Yet this is not an either/or proposition; both can be in play.  Moral vice and virtue—morality—can be discerned through rational reasoning, but doing so does not preclude the same distinction by moral reasoning: that is, a virtuous end can be developed by rational reason, and that same virtuous end can be developed by moral reason.  In short, we can, from rational reason alone, distinguish betwixt moral good and evil, and we can make the same distinction from moral reasoning, also.  And, just to dot the i and cross the t, rational reasoning remains fully capable of discerning non-moral truths and falsehoods, as well.  A couple of examples from our Founding will illustrate.

A rational reasoning argument for an economic exchange between free men that improves both men's well-being might go something like this.  Each man has something of value that the other wants.  The two freely and of their own volition agree on a medium of exchange and a value of the objects desired, and they execute the exchange.  As a result of that exchange, both men are better off: both have gained something of value that they did not have before, and neither has not given up anything of greater value in order to realize the gain.  But this is a free market. 

A moral reasoning argument for an economic exchange between free men (keeping in mind the free will He has imbued in us), equal in the eyes of God, might go something like this.  Each man has something of value that the other wants.  The two freely agree on a medium of exchange and a value of the objects desired, and they execute the exchange.  Neither man has gained dominion over the other as a result of the exchange, and neither man has used dominion to force the other into an exchange to which he would not otherwise have agreed.  As a result of that exchange, both men are better off: both have gained something of value that they did not have before, and neither has not given up anything of greater value in order to realize the gain.  But this is a free market.  And in both free markets, the increased well-being of the two men has facilitated their ability to satisfy other moral obligations: they have, for instance, more wherewithal with which to help those less fortunate than they. 

The other example concerns a type of government.  A rational reasoning argument for a government suited to preserving the freedom of men, vis., the freedom of exchange economy described above might go something like this.  What sort of government will best preserve that sort of free market economy?  One such is a government that leaves the people sovereign over that government, easily able to draw the government back when it becomes too overreaching.  This would include, especially for large populations, an electively-oriented representative sort of government at a local level, and groupings of these local governments into a larger, still electively-oriented, representative government at a national level, where the power of the sovereign people is preserved, and so is the power of their more-or-less local governing jurisdictions.  With another little fillip: divide the government into equal, competing sections so as to make it yet harder for that national government to accrete power to itself.  But this is, roughly, a republican government.

A moral reasoning argument for a government suited to preventing some men from gaining dominion over the rest—and so of preserving the morally-derived free economy described above—might go something like this.  What sort of government preserves the essential equality of men before God?  One sort is a government that leaves the people sovereign over that government, and so directly responsible for their own behavior, rather than surrendering that obligation to another—rather than ceding dominion to the men populating that government.  This would include, especially for large populations, an electively-oriented representative sort of government at a local level, and groupings of these local governments into a larger, still electively-oriented, representative government at a national level, where the power of the sovereign people is preserved, and so is the power of their more-or-less local governing jurisdictions.  With another little fillip: divide the government into equal, competing sections so as to make it yet harder for that national government to gain dominion.  The men of the governments at any level are thus prevented from gaining dominion over those whom they purport to represent.  But this is, roughly, a republican government.

With these two examples, we see that rational reasoning and moral reasoning arrive at the same Reason and moral truths.  Having achieved the crossover between Reason and moral at both endpoints, it's easy to see that the crossover can occur at any other place in the chain, as well.

Eric Hines