R.I.P.

My uncle Charles died this week at the age of 91, having just celebrated his 69th wedding anniversary. He was an exceedingly kind and peaceable man, a newspaper publisher and editor by profession.   Though I knew he had served in the Pacific during World War II, I never heard him say a word about it.  I see now from his obituary (and some followup Google hits) that he went overseas with the 3rd Battalion, 15th Marines, 6th Marine Division.   He served at Guadalcanal, Guam, and Okinawa, and was cited by the Marine Corps commandant for action in the battle for Sugarloaf Hill on Okinawa.   He also sustained injuries in an attack on Naha Airfield, after the recovery from which he served in occupation forces in North China.

My cousin once confirmed that her father almost never spoke about his service, but some years ago he agreed to be interviewed by one of his grandchildren for a school project.  The family listened in amazement as he recounted for the first time the mass suicides in Okinawa by civilians who'd been taught that American soldiers would torture them if they were captured.   I assumed that his long silence on that subject meant he had left the Marine Corps behind as a permanently closed chapter of his life when the war was over.  Again, his obituary disabuses me:  he served as commander of the Marine Reserves’ 14th Reconnaissance Battalion in San Antonio after he moved to that city in 1950.  A Google link to a 1960 letter to the editor of a local newspaper shows him signing as "Inspector-Instructor," and a "Lt. Col." in the Reserves.  I don't know what, if anything, that says about his rank during the war, which doesn't appear in his obituary.

I can't find online my uncle's interview about Okinawa, but here is a perfectly fascinating transcript of a 1994 interview he gave about his role in the sweeping changes in San Antonio after 1950.  He was a passionately populist man with a lot of business sense.

He was last of my father's siblings.

Libertarian Anarchists

Now here's an interesting proposition from National Review author Kevin Williamson.

It's hard for most people, Americans, to imagine a country without government and/or politics. That isn't what you're advocating, is it?

Is it really so unthinkable? Politics killed 160 million people in the wars and genocides of the 20th century alone — improving on that record does not seem to me like an impossibly lofty goal. There is a negative aspect to what I’m advocating and a positive aspect. The negative aspect will be to some extent familiar to many people: radically limiting the government’s monopoly powers, reducing the number of opportunities it has to interfere with our lives, etc. But I think the more interesting aspect is the positive one: We can do a much, much better job taking care of the poor, the sick and the aged using the social and economic tools we already have at our disposal. Looking after the vulnerable is, in theory, the moral reason for having a coercive welfare state, but in fact politics does very little for them.

Tex said she was reading this book. How do you find it, Tex? That's the kind of proposition I like to hear, although I have some concerns about it. If the model for 'what right looks like' is the iPhone, I wonder if this dissolution of the state won't just leave us with corporate masters instead. There's nothing wrong with corporations per se, but they aren't organized around the principles of human liberty. What would a declaration of independence for a post-state world look like? If you lay down citizenship to become a consumer, isn't there a severe cost -- the kind of cost that we see when the interests of rich and powerful organizations are brought to bear against an individual or a poor community?

Does he have an answer for that problem?

"Is it safe?"

If a nagging worry about his ethics as a dentist didn't keep you from entrusting your teeth to this guy, his response to a Yelp! review might.  Yikes.

Don't be this guy

My husband is fond of this site, Bring the Heat, Bring the Stupid, but today is the first time I've checked it out.  Even though you're pretty sure nothing terrible is going to happen to the guy, it's hard to watch.  You want to shout, "No, you idiot!  Don't do it!"

Lois Lerner had the right to remain silent . . .

. . . but not the ability, as Ron White would say.  So did Lerner waive her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, or is Issa just being a big old Republican meanie?  I took some heat on this subject at Rhymes with Cars and Girls, where they think that a self-respecting libertarian shouldn't be so cavalier about the bill of rights.  I don't call it cavalier.  There's solid precedent that prevents a potential target of criminal prosecution from telling his side of the story under oath and then clamming up when it's time for his testimony to be challenged on cross-examination.  Lerner should be intimately familiar with these rules:  she has a law degree and in fact started her career as a staff attorney in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice.  I find it ironic that a taxpayer cannot invoke his right against self-incrimination as a basis for refusing to file a federal tax return (United States v. Sullivan, 274 U.S. 259 (1927)).   There's no need to weep for Lerner, who in all unlikelihood has held more than one potential defendant to tough standards in the area of self-incrimination.

Even Alan Dershowitz, the archetypal defense lawyer and lifelong liberal Democrat, thinks the case for Lerner's having waived her Fifth Amendment rights is "open and shut," and that if she was advised that she could get away with prefacing her invocation with a exculpatory statement, then her advisors committed legal malpractice.  It's possible, of course, that she didn't get any advice, but relied on what she took to be her own expertise.  It's also possible that she got "legal" advice from someone inside her own political bubble, in which case she should have known better.

To be fair, there is wiggle room here.  One good question is whether Lerner's self-serving opening statement constituted "facts," or only a vaguer "opinion."  Did she merely declare her own innocence, or did she go farther and attempt to testify about specific facts?

I have not done anything wrong.  I have not broken any laws, I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.

Granted, you could say it's somewhere in the gray area between fact and opinion.  Fifth Amendment waiver is "not to be inferred lightly."  Still, at the very least, she was skating out there on the thinnest part of the ice.  A good rule of thumb if you think you're in taking-the-Fifth territory is, "Am I making this statement in order to get my side of the story on record?"  If so, shut up.

What happens if Lerner refuses to testify in spite of Congress's insistence that she waived her right to remain silent?  My guess is not much.  Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress.  Remember what a big deal that wasn't?  He didn't even lose his job, let alone do time.  Dershowitz claims that Congress has a little jail cell somewhere down in its basement and that it can arrest a recalcitrant witness, but I'm not holding my breath.

So is Lerner quaking in her pumps?  Is she being mistreated for ugly partisan purposes?  Tell it to Scooter Libby.

Punkpipes

Origins of Life

Two articles on the origins of life suggest that it is extraterrestrial, and happens in the cold of space.

Fifteen Stone

In a piece on C. S. Lewis, we learn that he once tangled with a very ornery British philosopher named Elizabeth Anscombe. She was a legend in her time -- the older gentleman I dined with a few weeks ago knew her at Oxford, and was still telling stories about her. One of his stories that I happen to remember was of an occasion when they attended church together at the university chapel. As the priest began to speak, she stage-whispered: "Another Pelagian sermon, my dear?"

So anyway, apparently she once took down C. S. Lewis in a debate over naturalism.

The point at issue concerns a famous occasion in 1948 in which Lewis debated, at the Oxford Socratic Club of which he was president, with a young Catholic philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe. In his book Miracles, Lewis had attacked what he called “naturalism”, the thesis that there is nothing that exists that is not part of nature. He maintained that naturalism was self-refuting, since if it was true, any statement of it would be irrational. Predicates such as “true” and “rational” could not be attached to any thought or belief if it was simply the undesigned product of cerebral motions. Anscombe contended that Lewis’s argument involved a confusion between reasons and causes: if a weighing machine that spoke one’s weight said “you weigh fifteen stone”, that statement could well be true, even though produced entirely by mechanical causes.

The summary must not be fair to her argument, because it's not a very good argument as presented. If a weighing machine speaks your weight, the weight it gives may be accurate. It may, in that sense, be true.

But it is not produced 'entirely by mechanical causes.' The machine is able to "speak" this fact only because it had a designer, and the designer had a rational standard. "Stone" sounds like a natural kind, but it is in fact a rational and not a natural measure. It's not that you could pile up fifteen stones -- the sort you find in the world -- and it would be equal in weight to the man on the scale. Rather, the measure is a mathematical object, which is to say that it is a logical and not a natural object.

One could still defend the idea of naturalism if you can show how a capacity for the creation of logical objects arises naturally. Yet even that wouldn't be sufficient: believers above all people should expect reason to be embedded in the structure of the world. Even if the point were better defended than the author here presents, then, it need not be a danger.

The Onion Strikes Again

Headline: "Eminem Terrified As Daughter Begins Dating Man Raised On His Music."

Yeah, I bet. But don't read the rest, which includes descriptions of some of his lyrics. You'll be glad you didn't.

The White City

This article on Tolkien and his companions is especially excellent. It begins with the Somme, and ends with the unity of truth and beauty.

For it was in the trenches that Tolkien realized the significance of faerie and myth. “The war made me poignantly aware of the beauty of the world I remember,” Tolkien said in 1968. “I remember miles and miles of seething, tortured earth, perhaps best described in the chapters about the approaches to Mordor. It was a searing experience.”

For men such as Tolkien, World War I only increased their belief that England must save western civilization.

For Tolkien, remembrance of beauty undid much of the horror and terror of the world.

Read the whole thing. There's a great deal here that is worth your time, and careful thought.

With thanks to Dad29.

Judicial Hubris: Confer

Justice Ginsburg, dissent from the VRA decision:

[T]he Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making... Quite the opposite. Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA.... Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today... The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled.

Justice Scalia, dissent from the DOMA decision:

We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America. The Court is eager — hungry — to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case.... Some will rejoice in today’s decision, and some will despair at it; that is the nature of a controversy that matters so much to so many. But the Court has cheated both sides, robbing the winners of an honest victory, and the losers of the peace that comes from a fair defeat. We owed both of them better. I dissent.

Uncertainty

A joke making the rounds:

Heisenberg and Schrodinger are on a road trip, when a cop pulls them over. The officer walks up and asks if they know how fast they’re going. Heisenberg replies that they do not, but know with high precision where they are. The cop thinks that’s weird, and begins to search the vehicle.

He opens the trunk and asks, “Did you know you’ve got a dead cat in the trunk?”

Schrodinger says, “Well, *now* we do.”"

Against Progress

John Gray writes another assault on a basic idea of our cosmopolitan world, the idea that people are getting better. This is fundamentally wrong, he writes:

[T]he underlying problem with this humanist impulse is that it is based upon an entirely false view of human nature—which, contrary to the humanist insistence that it is malleable, is immutable and impervious to environmental forces. Indeed, it is the only constant in politics and history. Of course, progress in scientific inquiry and in resulting human comfort is a fact of life, worth recognition and applause. But it does not change the nature of man, any more than it changes the nature of dogs or birds. “Technical progress,” writes Gray, again in Straw Dogs, “leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.”

I've always argued that a claim of moral progress -- as opposed to scientific progress -- was unlikely to be a true claim. It shouldn't be surprising that we see things that look like moral progress, because civilizations that are more distant in time are like civilizations that are more distant in space: we have less in common with them because we are more widely separated. If you travel away from home, people will share your views less and less the further you go. On your return trip, you'll find people are more and more like the way you think people ought to be, because they're more and more like the people you grew up with who think more or less as you do yourself. As La Rochefoucauld said, "We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us."

Of course then we should see things that look like progress as we move from a civilization of a thousand years' distance to one of five hundred years', then two hundred years', then fifty, then ten, and then to our neighbors of last week and this afternoon. Why, those people nearer to us in time are much more like us than our more distant ancestors! They must be better people, because they agree with us.

A clear example of this problem was on display yesterday afternoon on Erick Erickson's radio program, which I was listening to while on the road. He made a claim of exactly this type about the Voting Rights Act: he made an analogy to braces for your teeth, which you need until you get them straight. We needed the VRA in 1965 because we were -- I believe I have the quote right -- "a morally corrupt people." Now that we're all straightened out, we get rid of the braces and make do with more gentle remedies to keep us on the straight and narrow.

That is of course complete nonsense. The people of 1965 weren't morally corrupt compared to us, neither the white people nor the black people of that era. They were more likely to get and stay married. They were more likely to attend church. They were far more likely to keep their families together and fulfill their duties as parents. They dressed better than we do, on average. They had more robust standards of politeness and courtesy and manners. They had no tolerance for pornography in public life.

We disagree with them about race policy -- indeed, many of us disagree with them about the existence of race as a real category. They disagreed with us and with each other vehemently, but look at what they accomplished in their disagreement. We have the world we are pleased to think of as morally superior to theirs precisely because of what they did, not because of what we did. For or against the VRA, no matter to what lengths they went to support or oppose it, they held together a civilization that wrote and enforced a hard law against itself.

It's preposterous to say that we are better than them.

Are we worse? Well, we are different. We're worse in all the ways described above, if indeed it is worse to fail to attend church, or to break up marriages, or to pursue self-interest instead of duty to family. We're worse if it's worse to dress worse, or to be rude in public over trivial matters.

I'd like to believe there is a final standard that could measure progress, but it can't be any human standard. We lack the perspective, and we are too given to self-flattery. If there is an objective standard it must be divine, as Socrates held against Protagoras, and as Aquinas held against us all. By that standard, though, we are an objectively worse people than our ancestors, and getting worse yet all the time.

If you reject that, then there is no reason to believe that we are better or worse at all. Difference is all there is.

Ich bin ein RPI

Not the literal kind, which is a "Registered Provisional Immigrant" as defined under the new comprehensive but incomprehensible Senate proposal to combine open borders with a welfare state.  Nevertheless, I'm one of the new army of workers who can be hired without subjecting my employer to the choice of either providing me with expensive health care coverage or paying a hefty Obamacare fine.  That's because I adopt the quaint old technique of using my own wages to pay for my own health care.  Starting soon, unless the House blows this thing up, many workers formerly known as illegal immigrants will join me in this enviable state and discover its competitive advantage.  Maybe we'll see people renounce their citizenship and come back over the border.

Ted Cruz tried to address this quirk yesterday, but found the subject too hot for inclusion in the floor debate.  From his website:

Nobody in this body wants to see African-American unemployment go up.  Nobody wants to see Hispanic unemployment go up, youth unemployment go up, union household unemployment go up, legal immigrant unemployment go up.  Yet every one of those will happen if this Gang of Eight bill passes without fixing this problem.  If that happens, all 100 members of the U.S. Senate will be accountable to our constituents for explaining why we voted to put a federal penalty on hiring U.S. citizens and hiring legal immigrants.

It's only fair, I guess. They need the jobs more than we do.  Besides, this isn't the first legislative initiative that's been eagerly adopted despite it's inarguable tendency to drive up unemployment.  If more people are thrown out of work, we can buy their votes all the more readily with unemployment benefits.

Way to go!

Chinese postal workers think fast and break the fall of a toddler from an upstairs window.

A blow against prejudice

The Supreme Court rules 5-4 (Roberts, C.J., joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito):

The Fifteenth Amendment is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future.  To serve that purpose, Congress—if it is to divide the States—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions.

The Court struck down the Voting Rights Act's singling out of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, in addition to a few counties and municipalities in other states, as political units so likely to engage in ruses to prevent blacks from voting that they cannot be permitted to alter even the most trivial aspects of their voting procedures without pre-clearance from the federal Justice Department. This marks an end to pre-empt redistricting proposals and voter i.d. laws in the states the powers-that-be love to hate, though it still will be possible to sue to change procedures after the fact if the procedures can be demonstrated to violate the Voting Rights Act, according to standards that apply equally to all states.

The Court did not directly strike down the "pre-clearance" section (Section 5) but the section that sets out the formula for maintaining the permanent list of enemy states (Section 4).  The Government admitted that the formula was reverse-engineered; it identified the miscreants and then dreamed up a formula that would snag them.  The Court felt that any attempt to identify evil states should be based on current information, not 50-year-old grudges.  Whether or not the Justice Department has noticed, voter registration and voting patterns have reached something very close to parity in the states previously identified as hopelessly racist.

Maybe the Justice Department will have time now to consider the prevalent of racism in other contexts.  Not to mention important issues of transgender discrimination.  Is there room to hope they'll address the abuse of bureaucratic discretion to target the politically unsound?  As long as we're worrying about equal protection under the laws and all that.

Police State, part whatever number I'm up to now:

Radley Balko has an interesting observation on Police culture:

"What Cop T-shirts Tell Us About Police Culture"

When I was a child, you'd never have seen stuff like this.

The Death of Democracy

This article is right about a whole lot.

The post-monopoly world

I'm enjoying Kevin D. Williamson's new book, "The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome," a proposition from the cheerful end of the TEOTWAWKI spectrum.   Williamson begins with these questions:

Why is it that the [iPhone] in my pocket gets better and cheaper every year, but many of our critical institutions grow more expensive and less effective?  Why does the young Bengali immigrant [who served me coffee this morning while using her own iPhone] have access to the same communication technology enjoyed by men of great wealth and power, but at the same time she must send her children to inferior school, receive inferior health care, and age into an inferior retirement?  And how is it that Apple can make these improvements while generating so much profit that one of its most serious corporate challenges is managing its "cash mountain"--about $100 billion at this writing, and headed toward $200 billion by some estimates--whereas government at all levels is running up enormous debts to fund stagnating or declining services?

The author's thesis is that monopolies always crumble, to be replaced by smaller units whose performance improves under competition, and that governments follow this same trajectory.  I'm curious to see if he can make it stick.

The Tragedy Is They'll Never Understand

Via DL Sly, a gaffe. That's what we call this kind of thing these days. But it's not a gaffe, not really. It's a massive philosophical error. It's a failure to understand the facts of the world. I wonder after it. I do.