Mental purity

Glenn Reynolds has it exactly right.  The zero-tolerance approach even to tiny gun-like objects that no one could possibly mistake for a real gun has less to do with physical safety than with the extirpation of dangerous concepts from the minds of children.  Of course it doesn't matter whether the "gun" is an inch long or made of Poptart or formed with a thumb and fingers.  All that matters is the idea.  Soon the word itself will be taboo, if it isn't already.  They'd punish the thought itself if they could read minds.

Children will have to be taught that guns do exist, and are not inherently evil, but that the people who run their schools are incapable of remaining calm if the concept of a "gun" enters their heads, and therefore must be protected from the very thought.  (But cross-dressing and Che Guevara?  Totally OK.)  They can then draw their own conclusions about the value of the other ideas they are receiving from these people every school day.

The Bush Doctrine Pays Off

I have some good friends who are Turks, and they are quite invested in this uprising.  The hope is not necessarily to bring down the government, but to bring to justice some of the worst criminals -- including, of course, the highest officials such as the Prime Minister.

I'd like to ask you to pay attention to it, and if you know people who follow such things, get them interested in it too.  The whole area -- from Turkey to Syria to Egypt, from Syria to Iraq to Iran -- is a highly unstable powderkeg at this point.  In a way that's what we wanted, and indeed just what we expected, when we overthrew Saddam.  There are democratic revolutions in every country in the region.

Too bad we have no leadership with the vision to, well, lead.  We could really use it just now.

What turns out to be in the bill after you pass it

What Oklahoma discovered in the fine print of Obamacare, but is having to sue to enforce:

The ACA contains an assortment of carrots and sticks, the pertinent ones here being the subsidies available for the purchase of health insurance through state-created exchanges, and the penalties for individuals who do not buy insurance and employers who do not provide it.  The employer taxes are triggered when employees use the tax credit, and in some cases the individual taxes are triggered when the credit is available to them.  The tax credits apply only to those using exchanges created by the states.  The federal government can create its own exchanges within states; however, it has no authority under the law to use them to offer subsidies and inflict the accompanying taxes. 

But there was an unforeseen development:  Some 33 states have refused to create those exchanges, Oklahoma among them.  If a state’s residents are not eligible for exchange subsidies, then its employers are not subject to the associated punitive tax.  Contra the administration’s amen corner in the media, this was not a rookie drafting error in the legislation — it was an intentional feature of the bill.  The law is explicitly written to deny subsidies to states that refuse to create exchanges.  The president and congressional Democrats simply failed to anticipate that the majority of states would refuse to create exchanges.

Funnies

And two recent Jay Leno cracks:  "I know how President Obama can shut down Guantanamo Bay.  All he has to do is turn it into a government-sponsored solar power company."

-and-

"Fox News has changed its motto from 'Fair and Balanced' to 'See!  I told you so.'"

Among the Mountains of the Dragon

I return from the Slickrock Wilderness and the Tail of the Dragon, where I spent the last few days. Slickrock Wilderness is among my favorite places in the world, a place of rivers and moss-covered stones, arching trees lush and verdant, and sharp ridged-mountains.

This river is where I made my encampment.  I took the following video so that you could get a sense of what it is like to be there.  Imagine you have just left your camp, with the scent of pine smoke from the fire lingering, until you step down among these stones and the breath of the rushing river sweeps it away.

The Dragon itself is deadly, and provides the adventure to complete the perfection of the scene.  I was joined there by an old comrade from Iraq, whom I had last seen south of Baghdad at FOB Falcon, just before he got on a helicopter after fifteen months in Mahmudiyah and the Mada'in.  We saw that a rider went off the cliffs just ahead of us.  I helped several other bikers and a truck drag the Harley back up the cliff and onto the highway so that it could be evacuated.  What became of the rider, no one seemed to know.

Sunday's ride home was in a heavy downpour, but I hooked up with a motorcycle club headed toward Atlanta for the first way.  One of the members was a veteran and a friend of my friend, and only too glad to have me ride with them through the storm.  It was a great ride, in part because of the severity of the weather, which set the boldness of the company in its clearest relief.

To be numbered among such company and travel between beauty and danger:  it is among the things that are best in life.

Castaway

I think I've mentioned before how unhinged I get when confronted with a homeless animal: the orphan's panic, which also manifests itself as a lifelong preoccupation with tales about the sudden collapse of human civilization.  Yesterday I received a double-whammy, when a young man and his little dog took refuge at our church from a sudden rainstorm.  How happy we were to get some rare rain, and how ironic that it should be falling on a fellow trying to make a safe home for his pup while living out of a knapsack!  We made him come inside, while he tried to insist he was OK under a large tree.  Then the storm knocked out our power, so we finished the service by candlelight, blessedly free for once from the electric organ I've never cared for.

It developed that our young refugee had somehow become separated all at once from his wife, his job, and his home in San Antonio, some 200 miles away.  Normally, I confess, I am not tremendously moved by the prospect of a life so disastrously disordered; I do what I can without a lot of upset, and then typically disengage.  One of my most frequent prayers, not uttered without trepidation, is that my heart of stone should be melted.   It was answered at least in part this week, but even though I knew how much it would hurt, I didn't really know, if you understand me.  Even at the distance of more than thirty years, I retain the most excruciating memories of being at loose ends between jobs, between apartments, profoundly alienated, and casting about with some desperation for a family or society to be plugged into.  It's not so hard to replace any one of those things at a time, but finding yourself cut loose from all of them at once is a disorienting horror: a shock to the core.  And yet, knowing and remembering all that, it still took the presence of the dog to cut through my defenses.

Our church got the fellow set up for the next week in a modest motel with some cash and some food.   He's already made the rounds on foot to look into the simplest sort of job nearby.  Why am I so gripped by his crisis?  I suppose he's pushing two of my buttons very hard:   it didn't occur to him to abandon the dog and leave town, with the excuse that his life had fallen apart, and it didn't occur to him to find a way to live on public assistance.  Instead, he has humbled his pride and asked for help from individuals in his path.  To my way of thinking, therefore, it lies with me now to figure out a way to help him rebuild a shattered life.  He wants so badly to solve the most basic problem of finding a useful function that will earn him the money for food and shelter.  A home, a job, and his dog for family.  These are the things that make it possible to carry on when everything else is stripped away.

Horseshoes, hand grenades, and pregnancy

More from Rocket Science (it's a good week).  Suppose you've put a lot of time and effort into a research project, and you've chosen for your own reasons to use the arbitrary but time-honored and respectable standard of statistical significance (i.e., p = 0.05, but your results stubbornly refuse to make the grade.  You could instead quote the effect size with a confidence interval, but for whatever reason you refuse to do that.  All that time and effort, with nothing to publish, seems unfair.

Not to worry.  New, substance-free circumlocutions have sprung up to describe how tantalizingly close your work has come to rendering meaningful results.  Psychologically Flawed has published a convenient list in alphabetical order, including such evasive or emotionally charged winners as:

"flirting with conventional levels of significance (p=0.1)"

"inconclusively significant (p=0.070)" 

"narrowly missing conventional significance (p=0.054)" 

"nearly borderline significance (p=0.052)" 

"not absolutely significant but very probably so (p=0.05)" 

"only slightly missed the conventional threshold of significance (p=0.062)" 

"teetering on the brink of significance (p=0.06)" 

"trend bordering on statistical significance (p=0.066)" 

"very closely brushed the limit of statistical significance (p=0.051)"

They coulda been a contenda!  My favorite: "not significantly significant but . . . clinically meaningful (p=0.072)."  I look forward to papers describing results as "longing for significance but thwarted by hidebound, linear, and cruelly normative conventional standards."

Why rape is not like property theft

More from Rocket Science:

When you carefully tuck your high-value portable property under the passenger seat (just kidding, smash-and-grabbers! That's definitely not where my iPad is!), it's because you don't want potential thieves to know it's there.  But draping your vagina in a floor-length modesty frock is unlikely to persuade anyone that don't have one, and therefore might not be worth violating.

Other dissimilarities at the link.

The art of visual communication

What happens when novices, trainees, and experts are asked to draw the same thing?  The novices mimic textbook illustrations, the trainees reproduce images from personal observation, and the experts generate schematics that eliminate detail they no longer consider essential.

H/t Rocket Science.

Are warmenistas really CFC deniers?

Bookworm Room has up an interesting post about global warming, CO₂, and CFCs.   Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry at the University of Waterloo, contends that temperature trends don't track CO₂ levels at all well when solar input is eliminated, but they do track CFC levels wonderfully.  Bookworm's readers engage in a spirited discussion of whether CFC emissions used to be a manmade problem that has now largely been solved, since CFCs were largely replaced by new refrigerants by 1989 treaty), or whether human contributions never were that large in comparison with natural sources to begin with.

Shifts & expedients

The pages I'm formatting at Project Gutenberg this morning come from a particularly delightful and useful book called "Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel, and Exploration," published in 1871.  The authors seem to have seen military service in the Crimea and South Africa, in addition to exploring in Asia and Australia.  They put together detailed notes, copiously illustrated, on the proper provisioning of expeditions, including how to build any number of things on the road, from tents to boots to wheeled carts to rafts to sledges.  A couple of pages for examples:

It will be a little while before the book is finished and posted to the free Project Gutenberg site, but you can see what a wealth of material there is over there.

Price fixing: the endless policy

Argentina is discovering what every other country that's tried to fix prices has already discovered:  whoever's in charge eventually realizes that he can't make it stick unless he dispenses with all those tiresome restrictions on political power and becomes a dictator for life.  It's not Kirchner's fault, though, right?  She had the best of intentions.  She just needs everyone to go along for their own good, and they're not cooperating.  How long  before she figures out she's got to stop her subjects from leaving the country?

Fifty Rules for Dads of Daughters

This is one of those lists that gets passed around because it is heartwarming and because it is supposed to be fairly good advice. It's a surprisingly young man who has written it, if I'm reading his biography correctly!

All of you will have guessed that I'm interested in the list in part as a way of exploring the differences between sons and daughters. How many of these rules would be different if written for sons? Are there other rules you'd advise for sons but not daughters, or especially for sons, that are not on this list?

One that strikes me as an obvious choice is number 7, "She will fight with her mother. Choose sides wisely." This is not a problem with a son: you are always on his mother's side, even on those occasions when you take her aside later and persuade her to change her mind.

Lysenkoism

Peter Ferrara has an article in Forbes drawing climate-science lessons from the disgraceful career of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.  Not caring that much for the tone of the article, and especially of the comments, I'm not going to quote from it.  Instead I'll summarize Lysenkoism as I understand it.  I find it interesting that the public discourse on the "science" of climate change is now so debased that Lysenkoism is being trumpeted as a cautionary tale both by warmists and by skeptics.

Lysenko was a Ukrainian agronomist who discovered as a young man in 1927 that he could improve the sprouting qualities of winter wheat by exposing them to unusual cold and moisture.  He then concluded, on the basis of no apparent (or perhaps falsified) evidence, that the improved qualities of the wheat seed would breed true, such that future generations of seeds would sprout more successfully even without the cold/wet treatment.  This attempt to overturn the principles of modern genetics in favor of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (a throwback to Lamarck) went on to enjoy an enthusiastic, confused, and scandalous vogue in the Soviet Union for several decades.   In 1938 Lysenko was named president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, from which position he wielded enormous power in Soviet science.  The Soviet Union showered him with accolades, including seven Orders of Lenin and the title of "Hero of Socialist labor.”

Despite his deep confusion about the underlying mechanisms of genetics, Lysenko continued to implement genuinely helpful agricultural innovations that mitigated, to some degree, the disastrous famines caused by communist policy.  Lysenko's alignment with his leadership's political goals then bled over in the illogical but common human way to his evidence-free assertions about genetics.  So important were his anti-famine successes, combined with his politically correct background as a member of the peasant class untainted by bourgeois education, and his ability to motivate peasants to return to farming in the wake of collectivist confiscation of their farmlands, that Lysenkoism became official Soviet policy under Stalin.  Lacking actual evidence for his eccentric theories, and facing new pressure when his later theories did not pan out (such as the requirement to till the fields to a depth of five feet), Lysenko succumbed to the temptation to use political power to silence his enemies.  Andrei Sakharov charged him with having the arrest and death of "many genuine scientists" on his hands.  Under his influence, for instance, the founder of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences was sent to his death in the gulag.

About a decade after the conclusion of Stalin's reign of terror in 1953, there was a movement toward the restoration of the scientific method in the Soviet Union and a purging of pseudo-science inspired by political fashion.

Truth over theory: it will always lead to better science and generally to better public policy.  My own view, in addition, is that it makes for better people and happier relations among them.  When I see beliefs that can't be maintained in the population except through lies, self-delusion, and force, I see beliefs that belong on the ash-heap of history.  As C.S. Lewis describes the techniques employed by unscrupulous tempters: "You see the little rift?  'Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.'"

The Brilliant & Colorful Ages

Memorial Day

My brothers at BLACKFIVE have many excellent posts to commemorate the holiday. Keep scrolling.

To many of you as to me, it is an important day. All the best to you.

Take this, in memory of one of the ones honored today: the poet Joyce Kilmer, killed in the first World War while he was acting as a scout for the American Expeditionary Force. It is about one of those whom he thought worthy of defense.

As Winds That Blow Against A Star

(For Aline)

Now by what whim of wanton chance
Do radiant eyes know sombre days?
And feet that shod in light should dance
Walk weary and laborious ways?

But rays from Heaven, white and whole,
May penetrate the gloom of earth;
And tears but nourish, in your soul,
The glory of celestial mirth.

The darts of toil and sorrow, sent
Against your peaceful beauty, are
As foolish and as impotent
As winds that blow against a star.

Steyn on the Mundane

Having killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: It took 20 minutes for the somnolent British constabulary to show up. And so television viewers were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of south London, chatting calmly with his “fellow Britons” about his geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.

If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence....”

Being jumped by barbarians with machetes is certainly “mundane” in Somalia and Sudan, but it’s the sort of thing that would once have been considered somewhat unusual on a sunny afternoon in south London — at least as unusual as, say, blowing up eight-year-old boys at the Boston Marathon.

The world is changing that way.

A Policeman's Lot Is Such A Happy One

In a story titled "Parking Tickets Issued on Wrecks While Stockholm Burns," the Swedish press looks on in wonder at what their nation has become.

[W]hile the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.

”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”

But...

Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced despite the increasingly chaotic situation. Early Wednesday, while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford.

When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival. The fact that the vehicle had been effectively destroyed – its windshield smashed and the interior heavily damaged by fire – was irrelevant according to the meter maid, who asked Fria Tider’s photographer to destroy the photos he had taken.

It's as if the whole country of Sweden has become a university.

H/t: Dad29.

UPDATE: The police are finally roused to action!

Faced by another night of terror at the hands of predominantly immigrant rioters, Swedes grown tired of the police’s inability to put an end to the unrest took to the streets Friday night to defend their neighborhoods.... In the Stockholm suburb of Tumba the police decided to abandon their earlier non-intervention policy as a large group of police officers rounded up and dispersed a group of vigilantes trying to fend off rioters.

The decision to round up vigilantes while, according to Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving, ”doing as little as possible” to stop rioters, met with a wave of protests in various social media and on the Internet.

Who's stopping you?

I'd reveal the source of this (probably unoriginal) joke if I didn't think it would interfere with its enjoyment:

Recently, while I was working in the flower beds in the front yard, my neighbors stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog. 

During our friendly conversation, I asked their 12 year old daughter what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President someday. 

Both of her parents -- liberal Democrats -- were standing there, so I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?" 

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people." 

Her parents beamed with pride! 

"Wow . . . what a worthy goal!" I said. "But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that!" I told her. 

"What do you mean?" she replied. 

So I told her, "You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and trim my hedge, and I'll pay you $50.  Then you can go over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house." 

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?" 

I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party." 

Her parents aren't speaking to me.

Guess that ethnicity

"Ah, 'youth,'" as Mark Steyn would say.  RT News reports on the fifth straight night of rioting in Stockholm.  I got to paragraph 21 before the article identified the "youths" or "youth gangs" or "rampaging teenagers" as "Young Muslims."  But at that point, at least, the article got down to basics:

“The problem is not from the Swedish government or from the Swedish people,” the editor in chief of Dispatch International said.  “The last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden that really don’t like Sweden.  They do not want to integrate, they do not want to live in [Swedish] society:  Working, paying taxes and so on."

*     *     *  

“The people come here now because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing.  They don’t have to work, they don’t have to pay taxes – they can just stay here and get a lot of money.  That is really a problem,” added [Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist].

*     *     *   

"It’s always the same problem. There is a massive refusal by Muslim youngsters of the basics of Western society... and they take any excuse whatsoever to show that with violence – that is where the problem is,” [said Gerolf Annemans, the parliamentary leader of a Belgian far-right nationalist political party].

In related news, opinion-makers struggle to identify the mysterious motivation of youths who beheaded a British soldier this week while screaming Islamofascist slogans.  We're going to put the same team on it that's spent the last few months or years struggling to decipher the impenetrable motives of the Fort Hood shooter and those guys who got so upset by a video in Benghazi.