Science Fiction Metaphors

Lars Walker links to a piece on Inca society, which mysteriously managed to create a vast empire without inventing a few things we take to be pretty important: money and markets. They did have corporations, sort of:

The secret of the Inca's great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life.

Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society. In another quirk of the Incan economy, nobles who died could still own property and their families or estate managers could continue to amass wealth for the dead nobles. Indeed, the temple at Pachacamac was basically a well-managed estate that "belonged" to a dead Incan noble. It's as if the Inca managed to invent the idea of corporations-as-people despite having almost no market economy whatsoever.

Mr. Walker points out that the fascination shown by the authors is a mark of fairly remarkable ignorance. The nature of the society is not hard to understand at all, as it turns out. He links to James Lileks, who draws the same conclusion.

What I find amusing is the contrast in the comments threads at the original piece versus the comments at Lileks' place. They both devolve into science fiction metaphors based on the assumption of the readership about what they're seeing.

From the original:

Dunny0 03 Jan 2012 3:39 PM
So, they were the Federation then.
Gotcha.

allium @Dunny0
Coronado was misinformed - the Seven Cities of Gold-Pressed Latinum were to the south, not the north.

a cat named scruffy - former dj @Dunny0
The Federation with human sacrifice of children.
I suspect Picard would disapprove.

So it's sort of like Star Trek, then. A kind of ideal society, to which we might aspire! Minus the human sacrifice, of course.

Lileks' readers seem to grasp the situation better:

Lewis_Wetzel
I saw the Inca story as well. Money is a means of exchange and store of value. IT"S PEOPLE! YOU"VE GOT TO TELL THEM! INCA MONEY IS PEOPLE!

The Birth and Death of a Rail Town

Since the Thunder Road piece was such a hit, how about one linking a gorgeous Western with a real-life story about ghost towns on the rail lines? (H/t: Fark.)



If you haven't seen this movie, you ought to. You're going to want to see it more than once, so set aside some time.

Why, Yes, I Did Get A Check

Taranto is on to the shell game:

The federal government has been making such too-good-to-be-true offers for decades--the "Social Security" game dates all the way back to 1935--but such scams seem to be multiplying of late. An example appears on the White House website under the heading "Did You Get a Check?"

"Because of the new health care law," the site explains, "insurance providers are now required to devote at least 80 percent of the premiums you pay to your health care--not to advertising, or administrative costs, or salaries for their CEOs. . . . Companies that aren't meeting the standard are actually providing rebates to their customers."

As a matter of fact, I did get a check from my insurance company thanks to the new health care law.

I burned it.

I didn't ask anyone to step in between me and the company I'd made an agreement with in good faith. They kept their part of the bargain, and I'm not about to fail to keep mine.

However, the next letter I got from my insurance company sadly explains that my premiums are about to go way up. I wonder what could possibly have raised the cost of insuring us so much? Perhaps all those new services they're required to offer me for free? Whatever it was, the check I got -- had I cashed it -- would not have begun to cover the difference in price.

The insurer invited me to continue to enjoy my current benefits for quite a bit more, or to move to one of their other plans if I prefer. They said they could afford to offer me a plan at a similar rate to the old plan if we raise the annual deductible by a thousand dollars.

I imagine that, should I accept this invitation, in a couple of years that option will be gone as well. Such high-deductible plans won't meet the required standards, and I'd be fined if I accepted the offer.

Thanks for the check, though.

Teachers unite

. . . but not to teach, unfortunately.  Louisiana recently passed a bill to expand school vouchers for kids in failing schools.  The teachers unions are not big fans of the initiative.  The opening legal salvo of one of the state's largest teachers union (together with 47 local affiliates) is a lawsuit seeking an injunction on state constitutional grounds.  The lawsuit flopped at the initial stage but will go up on appeal.

As a backup strategy, the union has sent threatening letters to the private schools that expect to receive voucher funds, asking them to return a letter acknowledging that there are serious constitutional problems with receiving the money, and promising to refuse to accept it for the time being.  Otherwise, of course, the union threatens them with a lawsuit as well.

Competition is uncomfortable.

Another Perspective on Gridlock

Lately we've been discussing at VC the question of 'Gridlock good, compromise bad,' or 'Compromise good, gridlock bad?' The Hill proposes that both gridlock and compromise are good in their proper hour: what is bad is irresponsibility.

Many observers and participants — including the entire GOP and Democratic leadership — are quick to cry gridlock and to blame inaction on some new awful hyper-partisan or ideological era.

But there isn’t gridlock, which usually results from Democrats and Republicans sharing power and clashing over alternative positions. Gridlock slows things down — almost always a good thing — but it doesn’t stop serious legislation from happening. Welfare reform, balanced budgets, defense cuts and capital-gains tax rate cuts in the 1990s were all the product of gridlock that slowly gave way to consensus.
And today’s Congress is more than happy to pass legislation when it suits members’ interests. In just the past few months, for instance, the ostensibly gridlocked Congress reauthorized the Export-Import Bank program that gives money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods; extended sharply reduced rates for government-subsidized student loans; re-upped the Essential Air Service program that subsidizes airline service to rural communities; and voted against ending the 1705 loan-guarantee program that gave rise to green-tech boondoggles such as Solyndra and Abound. None of these were party-line votes — all enjoyed hearty support from both Democrats and Republicans.

Another instance of budding bipartisanship is the pork-laden farm bill that extends sugar subsidies, maintains crop subsidies and creates a “shallow-loss program” that effectively guarantees incomes for farmers at a time when that sector is doing historically well. The bill passed the Senate with 16 GOP votes. Though the House version of the bill is still being worked out, no one doubts it will not only pass, but largely resemble the Senate version.

What we’re actually witnessing — and have been for years now — is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility by Congress and the president for performing the most basic responsibilities of government.

Discuss.

Moonshiners of Dawson County

Once a year in the cool fall weather, Dawsonville, Georgia, hosts the Mountain Moonshine Festival.  Since moonshine is illegal, however, the main feature is a car show -- especially restored old classic moonshiner rods that they used to use to run the shine down into Atlanta, and elsewhere.

However!  Lo and behold, somebody actually got a permit out of the state of Georgia to make moonshine for lawful sale.  The old times are here again, except for the illegal hotrodding.

Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery joins Milledgeville –based Georgia Distilling Co. as two of only a handful of “legal” moonshine producers in the country.

“We are testing equipment now that we have the green light from the state,” Dawsonville Moonshine owner Cheryl Wood told The Gainesville Times. “We will be in production in August.”

The distillery will rely on a 250-gallon copper still, two 415-gallon stainless steel mash tanks, a 1,050-gallon stainless steel mash tank and an ample supply of grains and sugar. It will sell its bottled corn liquor to a wholesaler, which will then supply it to a distributor, who will sell the product to retailers.

The company wants the liquor ready for the 45th annual Mountain Moonshine Festival on Oct. 26-28, according to the Times.

Sounds like a good time. In spite of the 90-proof high test, it'll be a family-friendly event. The high school marching band will come play, and there will be a lot of old cars and folks who are really proud of all the work they've put into making them shiny again.

You may remember this old movie, starring Robert Mitchum. See 11:11 and following.

Grim Cooking: Frijoles Charros

You may remember my preference for outdoor cooking in the summertime, to keep the heat out of the house.  This is never wiser than when cooking with dried beans, which need hours of soaking and then hours of heat to maximize their softeness.

Frijoles Charros is such a recipe.  There are a number of variations on it, but it follows the old frontier model of dried beans and salt pork as its base.  You saw plenty of versions of this north of the border as well.  "Pork and beans" is an easy staple, and the base ingredients don't require refrigeration.

Here's a fancy version of the recipe, involving chorizo sausage. The version you see being cooked here omits the sausage and bacon in favor of more sugar-cured salt pork, because that's just what I happen to have on hand today.  We're using home grown peppers and tomatoes.  The oregano came from our herb garden.

The key to cooking beans over the fire is to revisit it regularly to stir the pot and add fresh, cold water.  When the beans are tender, it should be ready to go.

Originalism and the IRS

Apparently the IRS doesn't think any more of altering the law by executive fiat than the Labor Department. It creates an interesting question.

A July 18 report by the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon has revealed a critical flaw in the Obamacare law that could ultimately prove to be its undoing. Namely, if states refuse to set up an insurance exchange under the law, the federal government lacks authorization to dispense some $800 billion in subsidies through a federally operated exchange.

This is important because, coupled with states’ option to implement the Medicaid expansion or not, it appears the key player in defunding Obamacare going forward will be the states. The Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare found that the law’s mandatory Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional, effectively giving states an opt-out provision that many now plan to take.

In short, if states refuse to expand Medicaid, and there is no funding for the insurance exchanges, Obamacare will effectively be defunded.

To deal with this flaw, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on May 24 simply issued a regulation effectively rewriting the law that would allow the federal government to fund the exchanges.

On the one hand, clearly the Democrats who passed the ACA never even thought of the possibility that the States would simply refuse to play along. Congressional intent -- at least Democratic Congressional intent, since no Republicans voted for the ACA -- was that these exchanges should exist, and be government-funded. It's easy to imagine that, if they had realized the States might not play along, the Democratic Congress who passed the ACA would have included authority for the Federal government to do it instead.

The problem is, the law doesn't say that the Federal government can do it. There's no authority in the statute, and the Congress that approved the ACA doesn't exist any more. It was explicitly rejected by the People in 2010's landslide elections. The current Congress wouldn't approve this change to the law.

So... is the IRS doing the right thing, following the original Congress' apparent intent by revising the law on the fly in a way that older Congress would have approved? Or is it violating the separation of powers by not deferring the legislative question to the current Congress, or to the next one?

Runoffs & A Landslide

Looks like the Mighty 9th is going to a runoff. It's a shame we can't send them both to Congress, really. Dan Collins is endorsed by Zell Miller, and an old mountain friend of the family with a good legislative history. Martha(!) is a conservative firebrand. It almost doesn't matter which one wins: Collins has more actual experience on the job, but Martha(!) is a committed TEA Party activist.

Meanwhile, back in my old ancestral home of Forsyth County, the sheriff looks like he'll have to fight his re-election in a runoff too. You want to know how hard it is to boot out an incumbent sheriff in the Great State of Georgia? This hard:

In that heated race, Paxton seeks to overcome a January incident in which deputies and firefighters found the married sheriff unconscious in the doorway of the home of a female friend who told authorities the sheriff had been drinking. The sheriff denied being drunk.

Used to be even the District Attorneys in Georgia referred to the sheriffs as "the Dixie Mafia." It's a surprisingly powerful office. Our incumbent looks to have been re-elected too, without a runoff, though in a closely-fought election. That's to the good, from my perspective. He's a former Marine, keeps his word, and also he keeps his resources concentrated in the urban parts of the county. We don't see them out here, and that suits me fine.

No runoff for T-SPLOST. The tax increase died in a bloodbath.

Cynic, Justified:

The meat-axe budgetary process called "sequestration" will disproportionately target Defense spending, mandating the loss of untold thousands of jobs starting in January of next year. Many of these will be jobs in private industry that support the Department of Defense, but many more will be actual government jobs.

So I wasn't surprised to see the headline, as Drudge put it, "White House scrambles to prevent defense cut pinkslips before election." I assumed that this meant the White House was trying to pressure key Democratic leadership to do something about the sequestration issue before the upcoming deadline, which is the end of this fiscal year.

I have to admit to having been shocked by their actual tactic.

Obama's Labor Department on Monday issued "guidance" to the states, telling them that a federal law requiring advance notice of mass layoffs does not apply to the layoffs that may occur in January as a result of automatic budget cuts known as "sequestration."

I had thought I was getting dangerously cynical, but in all honesty I would never have guessed they'd stoop to this. It's not that we're going to scramble to save your job; we're just going to scramble to make sure you don't find out you'll be fired until after the election. And we're not going to scramble to change the law that requires the notification, which we don't have the votes to do; we'll just issue "guidance" that the law contains an unstated exception.

What happens if a corporation or a contractor decides to issue notifications anyway, in compliance with the actual law? After this, I'd have to guess that they will be punished in some way. Perhaps they'll find it hard to get future contracts; perhaps instructions will go out that they be first on the chopping block.

I had hoped to discover that I was being too pessimistic about the health of our institutions. Clearly the opposite was true. We'll have to adjust elevation and windage, I guess: down and left.

Freedom, guns, and butter

Steyn is irresistible this week:

Americans, so zealous in defense of their liberties when it comes to guns, are cheese-surrendering eating-monkeys when it comes to dairy products.  On the roads, on the cheese board, in health care, in banking privacy, and in a zillion other areas of life, many Europeans now have more freedom than Americans. 

For the record, I'm consistent in these matters — I want it all:  assault weapons and unpasteurized Camembert, guns and butter.  Certainly, cheese makes a poor attitudinal rallying cry:  "I'm proud to be a Frenchman, where at least I know my Brie!"

Election Day

The biggest issue on the ballot today is the T-SPLOST, which remains a very tight contest down to the wire.

If you like me live in the 9th Congressional District, though, you're electing a Congressman today. There's no way that district is going to vote for the winner of the Democratic primary, so the winner of today's Republican contest will be the victor in November as well.

This is one of the hot TEA Party races this year, too. The favorite of the Republican establishment is facing an insurgent campaign from one Martha Zoller, who apparently is a "radio talk show host, conservative swashbuckler, and Tea Party favorite."

I was initially suspicious of Ms. Zoller based on her advertising campaign, which made billboards that read just "Martha!" That kind of thing smacks of the cult of personality, although Hillary(!) did it too, and nobody ever mistook her for a charismatic. I voted for her in the Democratic Primary in 2008, and I'm only sorry she didn't win it.

It's an interesting race for another reason, which is that the counties voting today aren't necessarily the counties that the new Representative will represent. By the same token, many of the voters in today's 9th will actually be represented by the winner of the 10th district contest, in which they have no say today.

That's a strange way to do business.

As green as you can afford to be

Walter Russell Mead on environmentalism as a luxury good:

An age of energy shortages and high prices translates into an age of radical food and economic insecurity for billions of people.  Those billions of hungry, frightened, angry people won’t fold their hands and meditate on the ineffable wonders of Gaia and her mystic web of life as they pass peacefully away.  Nor will they vote George Monbiot and Bill McKibben into power.  They will butcher every panda in the zoo before they see their children starve, they will torch every forest on earth before they freeze to death, and the cheaper and the meaner their lives are, the less energy or thought they will spare to the perishing world around them. 

But, thanks to shale and other unconventional energy sources, that isn’t where we are headed.  We are heading into a world in which energy is abundant and horizons are open even as humanity’s grasp of science and technology grows more secure.  A world where more and more basic human needs are met is a world that has time to think about other goals and the money to spend on them.

And, as he points out, greens should be glad Gaia in her ineffable wisdom put the oil share here instead of in, say, Nigeria or North Korea.

H/t Ace.

Born to hunt

Despite my professional sympathy, this is a chilling insight into the uncompromising fierceness of the scariest fish:

Sand tiger foetuses ‘eat each other in utero, acting out the harshest form of sibling rivalry imaginable’.  Only two babies emerge, one from each of the mother shark’s uteruses:  the survivors have eaten everything else.  ‘A female sand tiger gives birth to a baby that’s already a metre long and an experienced killer,’ . . . .

A new book, Demon Fish, receives an approving review from Theo Tait in the London Review of Books.  Tait muses over our disproportionate reaction to the shark danger:

Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to be hospitalised by a Christmas tree ornament than by a shark.  Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year.  Many shark populations have declined by 70 per cent or more in the last thirty years.

Sure, tell that to my amygdala.  As the reviewer concedes, they're down there below the surface, and they eat us alive.  My amygdala doesn't find Christmas ornaments daunting in the least.  No one's going to make a fortune directing a blockbuster movie about people that stab themselves with glass icicles, or whatever it is they do to put themselves into hospitals at Yuletide (sounds like there's an untold story there).

The Reading Summer Dance

From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, year 871:

A.D. 871. This year came the army to Reading in Wessex; and in
the course of three nights after rode two earls up, who were met
by Alderman Ethelwulf at Englefield; where he fought with them,
and obtained the victory. There one of them was slain, whose
name was Sidrac. About four nights after this, King Ethered and
Alfred his brother led their main army to Reading, where they
fought with the enemy; and there was much slaughter on either
hand, Alderman Ethelwulf being among the skain; but the Danes
kept possession of the field. And about four nights after this,
King Ethered and Alfred his brother fought with all the army on
Ashdown, and the Danes were overcome. They had two heathen
kings, Bagsac and Healfden, and many earls; and they were in two
divisions; in one of which were Bagsac and Healfden, the heathen
kings, and in the other were the earls. King Ethered therefore
fought with the troops of the kings, and there was King Bagsac
slain; and Alfred his brother fought with the troops of the
earls, and there were slain Earl Sidrac the elder, Earl Sidrac
the younger, Earl Osbern, Earl Frene, and Earl Harold. 

They put both the troops to flight; there were many thousands of the
slain, and they continued fighting till night. Within a
fortnight of this, King Ethered and Alfred his brother fought
with the army at Basing; and there the Danes had the victory.
About two months after this, King Ethered and Alfred his brother
fought with the army at Marden. They were in two divisions; and
they put them both to flight, enjoying the victory for some time
during the day; and there was much slaughter on either hand; but
the Danes became masters of the field; and there was slain Bishop
Heahmund, with many other good men. After this fight came a vast
army in the summer to Reading. And after the Easter of this year
died King Ethered. He reigned five years, and his body lies at
Winburn-minster. Then Alfred, his brother, the son of Ethelwulf,
took to the kingdom of Wessex. And within a month of this, King
Alfred fought against all the Army with a small force at Wilton,
and long pursued them during the day; but the Danes got
possession of the field. This year were nine general battles
fought with the army in the kingdom south of the Thames; besides
those skirmishes, in which Alfred the king's brother, and every
single alderman, and the thanes of the king, oft rode against
them; which were accounted nothing. This year also were slain
nine earls, and one king; and the same year the West-Saxons made
peace with the army.

Since Tex Wants to Talk Fashion...

...how would you like to learn about bras from the 1400s? Believe it or not, this represents a serious revision of our understanding of historic costume.

In an interview with Associated Press, Beatrix Nutz, the lead archaeologist for the find, said, “We didn’t believe it ourselves,” she said in a telephone call from the Tyrolean city of Innsbruck. “From what we knew, there was no such thing as bra-like garments in the 15th century.”

Up to now there was nothing to indicate the existence of bras with clearly visible cups before the 19th century. Medieval written sources are rather vague on the topic of female breast support....

Doubtless they were discreet. Even in my lifetime, we used to refer to these things as "unmentionables."

Mustard Seeds

Some years ago, the king of Thailand ordered that his subjects make lots of origami doves. These doves, symbols of peace, were to be airdropped into the southern portion of Thailand, a place called Pattani after an older, Islamic kingdom.

Fifty Thai aircraft distributed one hundred and twenty million paper doves, in an attempt to demonstrate good will to the people of that restive province.

Did it work? Of course it did not. The local insurgents passed a rumor that the doves were coated with contact poison, and that it was all a plot to kill off the Muslim population. Whether or not the local peasantry believed the rumors, peace still has not come to Southern Thailand.

Yet we can admire the spirit of the thing, even if in practical fact it did not work. It was a nice try, a fine and a romantic deed. Perhaps a few of those doves fell on a heart ready to receive the message; perhaps someday we may yet see a wild crop grow out of that good soil.

I feel much the same way about the Swedes who recently piloted a single small plane into the forbidden airspace of Belarus, and air-dropped teddy bears on parachutes with messages of freedom. (Thanks to Tom for passing this one along).

The stiff hand of tyranny is not so easily moved, but it was a bold and romantic gesture. Perhaps a few of the messages will resonate. Perhaps we may yet see a crop grow out of the rare seed that fell on good ground.

Distribution

Not quite in time for its 100th anniversary, the Panama Canal is undergoing a widening project that may generate a cascade of changes for American ports and distribution systems.  Higher fuels costs are pushing shippers to use larger, slower vessels.  Access to the canal would make the trip to East Coast or Gulf Coast ports only about two weeks slower than delivery to the West Coast, and slightly cheaper; what's more, it avoids the increasing problems of congestion in West Coast ports.  Norfolk, Virginia, already can accommodate 50-foot drafts.  Charleston and Savannah have plans in place for deeper-water ports.  All these southeastern ports have some cost advantages over New York, whose sky-high real estate costs require costly drayage to send goods to Pennsylvania or New Jersey for storage before ultimate transport.  The Gulf Coast, I'm afraid, is bringing up the rear, but there are possibilities here as well.

When I was a kid in school, they were always trying to teach us about distribution systems, but I never could understand how anyone could be interested.  I suppose I thought everything magically appeared where people needed to use it.  Now the process fascinates me:  all that intricate balancing of supply and demand, speed and cost, so vulnerable to disruption and so ready to repair itself if allowed.  I'd love a chance to pick the brain of the supply analyst who's quoted at length in the linked article; he seems to have a birds-eye view.

H/t Photon Courier.

The great escape

C.S. Lewis on how unnatural it is to be a gentle hero:

The knight is . . . not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. . . . 

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another.  It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson.  It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. . . . 

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections -- those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be "meek in hall", and those who are "meek in hall" but useless in battle -- for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed.  When this disassociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair.  The ancient history of the Near East is like that.  Hardy barbarians swarm down from their highlands and obliterate a civilization.  Then they become civilized themselves and go soft.  Then a new wave of barbarians comes down and obliterates them. . . . 

The ideal embodied in Launcelot is "escapism" in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.

~ Present Concerns, "The Necessity of Chivalry" (1st published in Time and Tide, Aug. 1940).

Fly Abatement

This is a fantastic idea. There are always flies around a horse farm, and fly abatement is one of the things we spend a fair amount of time (and some money) dealing with. It's necessary, but never fun... until now.