I'm obsessed with hoaxes lately, and our ability to admit what we don't know. This is a wonderful art quiz. Can you tell the masterpiece from the hoax? I scored a 67%. This is a similar quiz. Again I scored a 67%.
Visual arts not your thing? Try this prose quiz, and distinguish snippets of Faulkner from a bad machine translation of German. I was more disappointed this time, because I scored only a 75% score, and I thought I could do better than that with an author I like very much.
iCure for cancer
The guy who writes "Rhymes with Cars and Girls" under the pen-name "The Crimson Reach" is a funny man. Today he wonders whassup with Apple these days:
And of course as everyone knows it’s been like a year and a half (AT LEAST) since Apple has released a revolutionary new product every single year. That’s a long time. Is Apple dead? The answer seems clear. This is cold hard objective number reasons going on. It’s not like there was just a Steve Jobs personality cult or something.His blog banner reads:
Dabbler who knows a little about a lot, and a lot about very little. All lies within The Crimson Reach.
This blog has been FULLY vetted AND fact-checked. (There were some issues.)
Natural law
From First Things, as I continue thinking about Grim's question about where Heidegger went wrong:
The truth is that we cannot talk intelligibly about natural law if we have not all first agreed upon what nature is and accepted in advance that there really is a necessary bond between what is and what should be. Nor can that bond be understood in naturalistic terms. Even if it were clearly demonstrable that for the majority of persons the happiest life is also the most wholesome, and that most of us find spiritual and corporeal contentment by observing a certain “natural” ethical mean—still, the daringly disenchanted moralist might ask: “What do we owe to nature?”
To his mind, after all, the good may not be contentment or even justice, but the extension of the pathos of the will, as Nietzsche would put it: the poetic labor of the will to power, the overcoming of the limits of the merely human, the justification of the purely fortuitous phenomenon of the world through its transformation into a supreme aesthetic event. What if he should choose to believe (and are not all values elective values for the secular moralist?) that the most exalted object of the will is the Übermensch, that natural prodigy or fortunate accident that now must become the end to which human culture consciously aspires?
Denounce him, if you wish, for the perversity of his convictions. Still, after all hypothetical imperatives have been adduced, and all appeals to the general good have been made, nothing would logically oblige him to alter his ideas. Only the total spiritual conversion of his vision of reality could truly change his thinking.
To put the matter very simply, belief in natural law is inseparable from the idea of nature as a realm shaped by final causes, oriented in their totality toward a single transcendent moral Good: one whose dictates cannot simply be deduced from our experience of the natural order, but must be received as an apocalyptic interruption of our ordinary explanations that nevertheless, miraculously, makes the natural order intelligible to us as a reality that opens up to what is more than natural.
There is no logically coherent way to translate that form of cosmic moral vision into the language of modern “practical reason” or of public policy debate in a secular society. Our concept of nature, in any age, is entirely dependent upon supernatural (or at least metaphysical) convictions. And, in an age that has been shaped by a mechanistic understanding of the physical world, a neo-Darwinian view of life, and a voluntarist understanding of the self, nature’s “laws” must appear to be anything but moral.
German philosophy
In "The Weimar Touch," A.J. Goldmann explores the German influence on American film culture when Jews and others fled Germany starting in 1933. Ed Driscoll goes further, and posits a broad intellectual American takeover by the Weimar Republic:
[T]o respond to the query by Thomas Friedman last year in the New York Times, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’
Well, 50 years ago, we did, didn’t we?He quotes Alan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind":
I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier. . . .
Feedback
One of the weakest points in the anthropogenic global warming argument is the heavy reliance on positive feedback assumptions. CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas, and can be projected to cause rapid, catastrophic warming only if we assume that it will increase water vapor, which is turn is a much stronger greenhouse gas. The problem is that there is little evidence that the positive feedback mechanism exists, and even some reason to suppose that the feedback may be negative. New evidence from NASA's water vapor project highlights the uncertainty:
Climate models predict upper atmosphere moistening which triples the greenhouse effect from man-made carbon dioxide emissions. The new satellite data from the NASA water vapor project shows declining upper atmosphere water vapor during the period 1988 to 2001. . . . The cooling effect of the water vapor changes on OLR [outgoing longwave radiation] is 16 times greater than the warming effect of CO2 during the 1990 to 2001 period. Radiosonde data shows that upper atmosphere water vapor declines with warming. . . . Both satellite data and radiosonde data confirm the absence of any tropical upper atmosphere temperature amplification, contrary to IPCC theory. Four independent data sets demonstrate that the IPCC theory is wrong. CO2 does not cause significant global warming.
Unclear on the concept
From the Washington Post, an explanation of the forecasting embarrassment that was Snowquester:
Still, I blame the storm more than I blame the computer models. The models are pretty good. It’s Nature that messed this up.H/t Watts Up with That, which adds the comment: "I hope he escapes from his alternate reality soon, people must be looking for him."
Swimming
Can you remember when you learned to swim? I was too young, but I'm sure I wasn't an infant. I've seen shows demonstrating that babies can learn. I've never known anyone, thank God, who lost a child to drowning. It was bad enough that a young school friend lost her dog that way during the family dinner, an experience that's always made me teach young dogs where the steps in the pool were, on those rare occasions when any of my dogs have encountered a pool.
More school bashing
Or is it more Big Apple bashing? Both, of course, but in another sense not really. Obviously, this CBS report that 80% of graduates from New York City high schools need remedial classes in the three Rs before they can start on credit courses in community college is an indictment of New York City public schools. But there are two nuggets embedded in the story that inspire a bit of hope. One is that the community college system hasn't caved in to what must be considerable pressure to dumb down the entry-level credit courses so that they include material that ought to have been taught in high school. The other is that the community colleges apparently have a system for quickly teaching the kids what they missed in high school, so we know it can be done. We just don't know why the high schools can't do it, at least for kids motivated enough to seek additional education after they've finished high school.
The One Horse Town of Nelson, Georgia
Well, not one horse exactly.
Sort of in between the two towns is Two Brothers Barbecue, which gives every sign of being more populous than either of these metropolises of an evening.
It's a lawless, lawless region.
The town has one police officer who is on patrol eight hours a day, leaving residents largely to fend for themselves the rest of the time.I know that area very well. The next "town" over is Ball Ground, which was very close to where I grew up. I guess Ball Ground has a police department too -- I know it does, because I've seen their car parked on the street. Their officers I haven't seen, not in all the years I've passed through there.
Sort of in between the two towns is Two Brothers Barbecue, which gives every sign of being more populous than either of these metropolises of an evening.
It's a lawless, lawless region.
The courage not to know
By "the courage not to know," I'm not referring to anything as obscure as Keats's "negative capability," just the willingness to admit that we have no basis for an opinion when we lack all information. Take the nice, caring people in this video, who are trying to reach a responsible position on issues of public policy:
H/t House of Eratosthenes. Or to take another example, Assistant Village Idiot posted a link to this description of Richard Feynman's experience on a California school board textbook committee. The other committee members took such careful notes of what he said about most of the many books they were to have reviewed that he gradually understood they hadn't actually read most of them. One set was supposed to contain three volumes, but he received only two. Committee members kept asking him what his opinion was of the third book, and he kept answering that he hadn't read it and therefore had no opinion. Many of the other members had rated it. Then a representative of the publisher joined the meeting and explained that they hadn't been able to make the publishing deadline for the third book, so they'd included a set of blank pages between the usual covers, meaning to include the real book later. The other reviewers were so determined to have an opinion that they came up with a rating on a book with blank pages.
Only one of the people interviewed in the video above was willing to come right out and say she had no idea what the absurd question meant.
H/t House of Eratosthenes. Or to take another example, Assistant Village Idiot posted a link to this description of Richard Feynman's experience on a California school board textbook committee. The other committee members took such careful notes of what he said about most of the many books they were to have reviewed that he gradually understood they hadn't actually read most of them. One set was supposed to contain three volumes, but he received only two. Committee members kept asking him what his opinion was of the third book, and he kept answering that he hadn't read it and therefore had no opinion. Many of the other members had rated it. Then a representative of the publisher joined the meeting and explained that they hadn't been able to make the publishing deadline for the third book, so they'd included a set of blank pages between the usual covers, meaning to include the real book later. The other reviewers were so determined to have an opinion that they came up with a rating on a book with blank pages.
Only one of the people interviewed in the video above was willing to come right out and say she had no idea what the absurd question meant.
Canterbury Tales
Victor Davis Hanson continues worrying about the future of California:
In medieval California, the elderly and retired sometimes head to the foothills, a poorer man’s coast, where there is less crime and less worry over what California has become. I never quite fathomed fully why a classical Greece of city-states on the plains became an Ottoman Greece of villages perched on mountain slopes. I knew, of course, in the abstract that Greeks fled Turks to escape the taxman, conversion to Islam, and the Janissaries, but I can now appreciate that maybe such a sense of impending dread is real in interior California, as valley towns become darker at night from lights that no longer work, and streets that are no longer safe and assumptions that are no longer familiar. Even the most liberal retired professor seems to head for the hills once his thirty years at CSU are up.
Wah
I find this kind of thing completely incomprehensible. The assumption seems to be that men can't be strong unless woman artificially make themselves weak. Where does this come from?
Sugar sugar
I thought this was a joke when I found it in my inbox, but apparently it's not. It's a whole website full of ultra-serious discussions about the fell hand of Big Candy, which wants to drive down sugar prices with cheap imports and deprive Americans of reasonably priced chocolate bars. (What will Rand Paul use to sustain himself during his next filibuster?)
As Europeans discovered how to grow and process this labor-intensive product in their hot-climate colonies, it spurred some of the earliest large-scale slave-labor economies. In 14th- and 15th-century Europe, crystallized sugar was priced similarly to nutmeg and cloves. By the 18th century, supplies increased and prices dropped enough to permit sugar consumption to soar. In the middle of that century, a German chemist discovered beet root as an alternative source, which grew in importance after Napoleon cut off sugar imports from England in 1813. Sugar production became increasingly mechanized and less dependent on large supplies of cheap labor.
Currently, the U.S. relies more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup for sweetening. Developed in 1957, HFCS began to swamp the market in the 1980s after import sugar tariffs, imposed in 1977, inspired food processors to seek a cheaper substitute. U.S. and Canadian sugar prices are at twice the global market level, while corn production is heavily subsidized.
Sidney Mintz wrote a book about the role of sugar in history that is said to rank with other recent epics about salt, potatoes, and corn. I haven't read Mintz's work, but the other three were great.
----- A Message from American Sugar Alliance ----- U.S. sugar policy ensures homegrown supplies, instead of depending on unreliable imports, as we did in 1942 when sugar was rationed. Support food security. Support sugar policy.We primates do like our sweets. Sugar cane may first have been cultivated in New Guinea. At some point, people figured out how to crystallize dry sugar out of the cane juice, which produced a concentrated and easily transportable commodity. Sugar spread west to Persia, then exploded into Europe with the advance of Islam, and later with the return of Crusaders, who brought the curious "sweet salt" home with them.
As Europeans discovered how to grow and process this labor-intensive product in their hot-climate colonies, it spurred some of the earliest large-scale slave-labor economies. In 14th- and 15th-century Europe, crystallized sugar was priced similarly to nutmeg and cloves. By the 18th century, supplies increased and prices dropped enough to permit sugar consumption to soar. In the middle of that century, a German chemist discovered beet root as an alternative source, which grew in importance after Napoleon cut off sugar imports from England in 1813. Sugar production became increasingly mechanized and less dependent on large supplies of cheap labor.
Currently, the U.S. relies more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup for sweetening. Developed in 1957, HFCS began to swamp the market in the 1980s after import sugar tariffs, imposed in 1977, inspired food processors to seek a cheaper substitute. U.S. and Canadian sugar prices are at twice the global market level, while corn production is heavily subsidized.
Sidney Mintz wrote a book about the role of sugar in history that is said to rank with other recent epics about salt, potatoes, and corn. I haven't read Mintz's work, but the other three were great.
History of the world
Reader James of "I Don't Know, But . . ." led me to Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine, in which the eponymous scholar publishes incisive summaries of history that are slightly less drunken and irresponsible than "1066 and All That." Dr. Boli is not a fan of Justinian. One installment details this fascinating and contradictory Byzantine ruler's reign in the 6th century A.D., while the next turns to the abrupt rise of Islam:
Another excellent post from Dr. Boli concerns unusual musical instruments.
Why did Islam spread so fast? Well, it is always very bad historical practice to assign a single cause to a complex historical event that must of necessity have had many causes. But, in a word, Justinian.In chapter 15, Charlemagne turns the lights back on. An eager public awaits the publication of chapter 16, "More Fun with Barbarians," addressing the Vikings, as prefigured by our own Lars Walker in a forward-thinking comment.
Another excellent post from Dr. Boli concerns unusual musical instruments.
Matthew 7:15-16
A question people continue to ask, decades after his death: how can we take Heidegger seriously as a philosopher, given his outright embrace of Nazism? The instinct to ask the question is the one Jesus referenced in the passage whose citation is the title of the post: When judging prophets, you will know the tree by its fruit.
So if that is right, and it seems right instinctively, poison fruit means a bad tree. But many medicines are poisons if taken in the wrong proportion.
I've been reading Heidegger recently, and some commentaries on him. He is said to be a genius, and if he impressed Hannah Arendt he must have been something like one. On the other hand, I get the strong impression that many of his commentators don't understand what he wanted to say -- not, I mean, that I understand things they have failed to understand, but that I get the sense they are flailing a bit. It is fairly clear that we are still not sure exactly what he meant to say, or why he wanted to say it.
That makes it hard to say just where he went wrong. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says it was in being too tied to the organic: favoring the family and therefore the blood, and therefore 'the race,' against the cosmopolitan. But it is possible to err in the other direction too. We often see that from liberal pundits who want to suggest that the US military ought never to be deployed except when it isn't in our interest (for humanitarian reasons, that is, but never because the US has something to gain). It may be that there is a poison here, but it may also be a medicine if you can get it in the right place, and in the right proportion.
Somehow he failed to do that.
So if that is right, and it seems right instinctively, poison fruit means a bad tree. But many medicines are poisons if taken in the wrong proportion.
I've been reading Heidegger recently, and some commentaries on him. He is said to be a genius, and if he impressed Hannah Arendt he must have been something like one. On the other hand, I get the strong impression that many of his commentators don't understand what he wanted to say -- not, I mean, that I understand things they have failed to understand, but that I get the sense they are flailing a bit. It is fairly clear that we are still not sure exactly what he meant to say, or why he wanted to say it.
That makes it hard to say just where he went wrong. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says it was in being too tied to the organic: favoring the family and therefore the blood, and therefore 'the race,' against the cosmopolitan. But it is possible to err in the other direction too. We often see that from liberal pundits who want to suggest that the US military ought never to be deployed except when it isn't in our interest (for humanitarian reasons, that is, but never because the US has something to gain). It may be that there is a poison here, but it may also be a medicine if you can get it in the right place, and in the right proportion.
Somehow he failed to do that.
When oil failed to peak
Stanley Kurtz has a three-part article in National Review Online about the movement to divest university funds of their fossil-fuel holdings. In part one, he introduces us to Bill McKibben, the anti-Keystone XL pipeline activist who advocates leaving 80% of known fossil-fuel reserves underground. "Since writing off 80 percent of reserves would wreck the oil industry’s profitability, McKibben maintains that only government compulsion can keep all that energy underground — through a steeply escalating carbon tax, for example." He also notes the discovery by McKibben's ally Naomi Klein "that the reparations movement had dropped its polarizing label and had seized instead upon 'climate debt' as a backdoor way of advancing global wealth redistribution."
Part two traces McKibben's advocacy of controlled economic decline.
Part two traces McKibben's advocacy of controlled economic decline.
McKibben is convinced that averting global warming requires a winding-down of modernity. . . . Th[e] [pre-modern] world of tight families and interdependent neighbors, says McKibben, was far more satisfying than our hyper-individualist, consumer-driven, tech-saturated present. He explains that his attraction to this pre-industrial social model long predated his encounter with the “greenhouse effect” in the Eighties. . . . Living in an increasingly isolating, secular, and materialist universe, McKibben’s young followers seem intent on turning climate apocalypticism into a substitute religion. That won’t fill the gap. You can run from the economy, but you can’t hide. And catastrophism alone will not a morality make.McKibben has pivoted adroitly to address changing beliefs about fuel reserves and climate, from global cooling to global warming, and from peak oil to the need to sequester 80% of supplies that suddenly are burgeoning to dangerous levels:
Just three years after McKibben consigned peak-oil denialism to the dustbin of history, peakism itself looks ready for the broom. Drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and other technologies for tapping so-called unconventional oil have ushered in a new era of fossil-fuel abundance. And it has all followed the classical economist’s playbook. As oil scarcity forced prices up, technical innovations once too costly to consider increased supply. Mistaken end-of-oil predictions have been issued since the dawn of the industrial age. All have been swept away by technological breakthroughs driven by the law of supply and demand.
While a few peak-oilers hold out, McKibben himself seems to have surrendered. Not scarcity but fossil-fuel abundance is our problem, he now says. His divestment campaign is essentially an attempt to induce peak oil artificially, via political pressure.Today's final installment examines the level of debate-squelching needed to make all this seem like good sense to the voters now emerging from fine campuses.
"Extraordinary"
What does 'extraordinary' mean?.
I would have thought an example such as the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War would have been more to the point. The question isn't whether there might possibly be circumstances in which a President can use military force on US citizens, but exactly what the defining terms are.
Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in "an extraordinary circumstance," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday.Well, nobody doubted that, if "extraordinary" means "a state of war or insurrection." The examples given in the letter are Pearl Harbor and 9/11, both odd examples since they don't involve US citizens as aggressors. If you'd shot down the planes on 9/11, for example, you'd have killed some US citizens... but it would have been accidental to your purpose. It would have been justifiable under the Just War Doctrine of Double Effect for that reason.
I would have thought an example such as the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War would have been more to the point. The question isn't whether there might possibly be circumstances in which a President can use military force on US citizens, but exactly what the defining terms are.
Trauma
The school where a budding juvenile delinquent chewed his poptart into the shape of a gun and was suspended is now offering counseling for anyone traumatized by the event. As Reason.com notes:
To be fair, the phrasing leaves open the possibility that the students would be "troubled" not by the imaginary gun but by the suspension, and by the ensuing realization that they're powerless pawns in a vast, incomprehensible game run by madmen.
Arms manufacturers voting with their feet
Sounds like some sensible states may get a chance to lure jobs away from gun-hating home states.
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