Walls

There is no fundamental difference between the NSA’s data mining and eavesdropping operations and a live in agent listening to all your conversations and downloading your browser history. We are all harboring a governmental presence in our homes, without our consent, in what I believe to be a direct violation of the Third Amendment; if our founders were here today I believe they would agree.

The obvious objection is that you have consented to bringing in the internet into your home, by taking the positive action of purchasing services to do so. You've agreed to impossible-to-read Terms of Service that may even say, "...and we'll spy on you relentlessly and sell your secrets to the government," for all you know because no one actually reads those things. On the other hand, nobody can prove it was you who clicked "OK," which makes it pretty dodgy as a contract.

Or maybe they can, since they can track your cellphone in real time to the room in which the "OK" box was clicked...

I don't know that there's a straight Third Amendment claim that can fix this, though I laud them for the attempt. But we do need walls. We need to think about just where and how to build them. The government is always more dangerous to us than our enemies are. It has already all the power over us that they only dream of winning at the conclusion of a long and painful war.

It's not a "defeat" defeat

Mark Steyn on the extended spectacle of the prosecution of the Fort Hood shooter:

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban.  Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.”  The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse.  After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse:  “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.”  And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on. 

* * * 

Unlike the Zimmerman trial, Major Hasan’s has not excited the attention of the media.  Yet it is far more symbolic of the state of America than the Trayvon Martin case, in which superannuated race hucksters attempted to impose a half-century-old moth-eaten Klan hood on a guy who’s a virtual one-man melting pot.  The response to Nidal Hasan helps explain why, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this war is being lost — because it cannot be won because, increasingly, it cannot even be acknowledged.  Which helps explain why it now takes the U.S. military longer to prosecute a case of “workplace violence” than it did to win World War Two.

Rick Santorum on Art

Rick Santorum speaks on art and America.

Santorum quoted the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, reminding the audience that he once said, “Give me the storytellers and I will control the nation and a generation.”

“For us to sit here and think we’re going to win the country back politically when the culture continues to show your children when they watch that people like them are weird, people that hold your values are bigoted or hateful, it’s no wonder young people overwhelmingly are supporting the other side because they don’t know the truth,” Santorum said.

Santorum admitted that Christian-themed films and art were often times “inferior productions” even though they reflected traditional values.

As recently appointed CEO of EchoLight Studios, Santorum said his new mission was to go out and make “faith and family films” to affirm social values.

“I say to you: Can’t we make God beautiful?” he asked as the crowd applauded. “Why can’t we tell the truth the good and the beautiful in a way that’s compelling and entertaining and inspiring?”

Santorum said he would stay involved in politics but that true success would come from something outside of the political battle.

You've heard much the same thing here. He's quite right about it.

'Stop And Frisk' Partially Stopped

I remember being taught in school about the "Stop and Frisk" concept, also known as the "Terry Stop," although in my entire life I've never actually encountered or witnessed it. It is chiefly practiced in big cities of the type I don't especially enjoy beyond the briefest of visits, where it is alleged to be necessary.

It would need to be necessary to be acceptable, because it sounds pretty dodgy on the surface, at least as I was taught to think about it. Apparently your 4th Amendment rights weren't being violated by being physically stopped and physically searched, including having the police order you into a humiliating stance and pat you down. This was supposed to be true even though the standard for such a search -- supposedly not a "search" for 4th Amendment purposes -- was not probable cause or a warrant, as the 4th requires. It was a lesser standard called a "reasonable suspicion."

New York took it a step further, to hold that police could stop and frisk you without any cause at all. Sounds like a Federal judge has decided she doesn't buy the expansion.

During the trial, Judge Scheindlin indicated her thinking when she noted that the majority of stops result in officers finding no wrong doing.

“A lot of people are being frisked or searched on suspicion of having a gun and nobody has a gun,” she said. Only 0.14 percent of stops have led to police finding guns. “So the point is suspicion turns out to be wrong in most cases.”

It's good to see the expansion rolled back, at least.

Medieval Women in (Criminal) Court

The Medieval Feminist Forum (a peer-reviewed journal located at the University of Iowa) has an article that I hope will be the first in a series, as it is highly entertaining as well as enlightening. (H/t: Medievalists.net.)

Unfortunately it is in a PDF format, but it's an engaging piece by a young scholar who is captivated by her subject.

UPDATE: Apparently this is crime and punishment day (week?) at Medievalists.net. Here's an article on forgery, and another one on more severe crimes in early Irish law.

The police blotter always makes for interesting reading, now as a thousand years ago.

A City of Two Tales

Don't get too supercilious about Detroit, warns the Huffington Post--the same thing could happen to your city.  Pretty much like "we're all Trayvon," if you can't identify anything about his behavior that fateful night that might have contributed to his problems.  Detroit was just doing what a city's gotta do.  Which is true enough, if you believe that a city's gotta have a unionized workforce that votes for more pension benefits than the city can possibly fund out of a combination of local taxes and sky-high borrowing.

Chicago is facing the same problem, so no doubt the refrain will soon become that you shouldn't get too supercilious about either Detroit or Chicago, because the same thing could happen to your city.  It might be a good time to look into what cities are doing to bring fiscal disaster on themselves and stop doing that.  Because one thing is true enough:  nearly all of them are flirting with fiscal disaster.  The thing is, flirting with disaster doesn't just "happen."  There's no natural law that forces cities to pretend they can borrow indefinitely to fund more services than their taxpayers can or will pay.

In a sign of the opening of one of the seven seals of the Apocalypse, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is proposing that his city should give its unionized workers the option of a 401(k) instead of a pension.  The big difference between the two is that a 401(k) amounts to a "defined contribution" plan instead of a "defined benefits" plan.  "Defined benefits" pensions are roughly a synonym for "a plan in which we promise to contribute some funds later even though you know and we know that we're lying through our teeth and couldn't do it even if we wanted to, which we don't very much, as long as you're falling for it."

We've got competing narratives for why certain cities implode.  Detroit's apologists have been trying out the narrative that includes a string of bad luck that no one could have foreseen.  It will be interesting to see Chicago try it on for size, too.

Attack of the Perseids

The Perseid shower peaks tonight.  The Perseid meteors are debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle.  The best viewing will be after midnight, especially just before dawn, coming out of Cassiopeia.  (Really out of nearby Perseus, but I couldn't pick Perseus out of the night sky if my life depended on it.  It's just north of Cassiopeia.)  Cassiopeia is in the Milky Way, on the far end from Saggitarius (the Teapot), which in turn is right next to where the tail of Scorpio intersects the southern end of the Milky Way.  Cassiopeia and Perseus are just above the horizon in the northeast right now (10 p.m. Central), but will be near the horizon just before dawn, a bit south of west.

The moon is near dark tonight, so it should be a good show.  You can expect to see a flash about every 45 seconds near dawn.

Be sure and secure your triffids before you turn in for the night.

Good News!

Soon, things like this won't be a problem anymore.

Former president George W. Bush, widely regarded as a model of physical fitness, received a coronary artery stent on Tuesday. Few facts are known about the case, but what is known suggests the procedure was unnecessary....

Although this may seem like an issue important only to the former president, consider the following: Although the price of excessive screening of so-called VIPs is usually paid for privately, follow-up tests, only “necessary” because of the initial unnecessary screening test, are usually paid for by Medicare, further stressing our health-care system. The media coverage of interventions like Mr. Bush’s also leads patients to pressure their own doctors for unwarranted and excessive care.

We'll make sure nobody gets more care than they "need," as determined at a distance by experts like the author.

We were recently talking about how biotechnology struck me as a possible driver of jobs and wealth on a large scale, provided we could overcome the problem of ensuring that the elderly (and near-elderly) continued to be able to consume new biotech products and services at a rate that would justify heavy and continual investment. Now socialized medicine is one way that we might be able to ensure that, although hopefully not the only nor the best way.

If we were going to accept some sort of government-led health care system, then, it should be more like Bush II's "Medicare Part D expansion," and less like Obama's system of rationing care -- targeted at the elderly and near-elderly, and designed to enable them to consume the products of biotechnological innovation. The young would pay higher costs for this in taxes, but they'd at least have jobs out of which to afford these higher costs -- unlike with the current system, which is destroying jobs rather than encouraging investment in new jobs. As a kind of side benefit, the young would also get to use the advances in medicine themselves when they are older.

What we'll get instead is death panels, higher costs, fewer jobs, and a system designed not to enable but to limit the consumption that would lead to greater innovation and investment.

In other words, as usual with this crowd, we'll get the worst of both worlds: everything we didn't want, in exchange for nothing we might have wanted.

How did that get in my cart?

The WaPo purchase explained.

More unreasoning hostility to insects

I do like insects, mostly.  Just not leafcutter ants and malaria-carrying mosquitos.  Dr. Stephen Hoffman of Rockville, Maryland, has developed the first really promising malaria vaccine, which with luck will be in production in four years or so.  It suffers from the disadvantage that it requires five intravenous doses and must be refrigerated in transit, but it's a lot better than the nothing we had before.  While we're on the subject, here is some amazing video of a mosquito's "needle" rooting around for a blood vessel under the skin.

Like AIDS for chocolate

We try not to use pesticides here at Texan99 Farms, but we draw the line when we get an outbreak of leafcutter ants, which can strip a citrus tree overnight and kill it.   Hands off the grapefruit crop, you six-footed marauders!  For that, we deploy the dreaded broad-spectrum pesticide Orthene, because we've tried everything else and it's the only thing that seems to work.

A similar scorched-earth policy seems called for when parasites threaten the world's chocolate crop.  That's just picking a fight the ants are going to wish they hadn't picked, or at least I hope so.  This post from Ed Yong (who writes Not Exactly Rocket Science) examines the troubling state of the globe's plant pathology field, with a special focus on the imperiled African cocoa crop.  Since one of the few things that grab my interest as tightly as chocolate is the technique of crowdsourcing, I was drawn to this paragraph about the plant pathogens that continue to challenge modern farmers:

"Farming has always been a community affair but, in the modern era, we’ve lost those connections and knowledge is held by a few," [said David Hughes, an ant-loving evolutionary biologist from Pennsylvania State University].  To rebuild these links, he teamed up with his Penn State colleague Marcel Salathé, a computer scientist who studies the spread of behaviour through social networks.  Earlier this year, the duo launched plantvillage.com, an open-access website where people can ask each other for help with agricultural problems.  Users vote the answers up and down, and accumulate points depending on how helpful they are.  It’s like Quora for gardeners.  "We’ll never invest in people like [Harry Marshall Ward, a 19th-century plant pathologist] again," Hughes said. "The second-best solution is to rely on the crowd." 

*     *     * 

It’s an approach that could have been lifted from an ant’s playbook.  Individual ants are hardly great strategists [or are they?], but through their interactions, they can achieve incredible feats of swarm intelligence.  Some successfully rear bugs, and build tents to defend them from threats.  Others grow a delectable fungus by feeding it chopped up leaves, while killing off other moulds with antibiotic-secreting bacteria.  For millions of years, ants have raised crops, herded livestock and weeded their gardens, all by working together as a large connected society.  Humans could learn a thing or two from that approach.

Interest is evil anyway

More strategies for cratering capital markets:  Venezuela thinks it's a good idea to default on $74 million in interest payments on bond debt because someone else ran up that bill anyway, so it's only fair.  Of course, the debt was run up by the former owners of the steel business that Venezuela nationalized a few years ago, but the economic geniuses in charge of that country don't see the connection or the probable impact on their future access to the capital markets, which figures heavily in their national economic plans.  No problem:  they'll just explain that they really need the money, and the world's financiers will no doubt forgive all.

Welcome spooks

ZeroHedge has a suggestion for swamping the data banks of our surveillance overlords.

The Oseberg Ship

Fascinating news on the subject of the famous Oseberg ship. Like Lars Walker, I had always understood it was thought to be a coastal vessel. Turns out, the reconstruction of the hull got some things wrong... a fact known for a few years, which is only now beginning to filter out even to Viking-age enthusiasts.

Eminent domain or money grab?

Ever since the Supreme Court issued its astoundingly bad decision in Kelo v. City of New London, local governments have been encouraged to use eminent domain schemes to grab private property for the commercial benefit of their well-connected cronies -- all in the name of public welfare.  The schemes are getting more sophisticated now.  An enterprising company called Mortgage Resolution LLC has put together a package that's tempting a number of municipalities, especially in the law-free zone known as California, though nibbles of interest are coming in from Seattle and Newark as well.  The gambit is to identify home mortgages that are underwater but current on their payments.  Mortgage Resolution LLC puts together a local package of these mortgages whose borrowers pass a credit test, then persuades the local government to "condemn" the mortgages at a price equal to 80% of the home's fair market value.  The lenders (typically owners of mortgage-backed securities pools) take a hit equal to the excess of the mortgage balance over the home's value, plus 20% of the home's value.  Mortgage Resolution LLC then refinances the homes through the FHA and pays the local government a percentage of its profits.  It's like a tax on highway robbery:  the more we rob, the more the city collects in taxes!  And the people we rob mostly live out of state, anyway, so who cares?

Boston law firm Ropes & Gray has filed a lawsuit challenging the scheme on constitutional grounds.  At issue is the horrendously confused law of eminent domain and "public use" in the wake of the Kelo decision.  That case left open the possibility of relief for eminent domain schemes in which the seizure of property was a mere "pretext" rather than a good-faith pursuit of the public welfare.  Later courts, however, have struggled to develop a workable definition of "pretext."

The Kelo decision spurred action in many state legislatures to curb the power of local government to grab any property they thought might be convenient for the visionary real estate development schemes of their cronies.  These legal fixes evidently hadn't much teeth in California, Washington, or New Jersey.  In any event, the idea of grabbing and reselling mortgages rather than homes is a fresh and exciting abuse that offers up the possibility of ensuring that the loss lands on faceless profit-grubbing lenders instead of photogenic local homeowners.  It still amounts to theft, however, and in the long run it won't help homeowners ensure access to a reasonable mortgage market.

Tactical!

Reader AW from LuckyGunner sends the following ad for Blackhawk Tactical goggles, which has an amusing video showing the many 'tactical' day to day uses to which you might put them. I think he likes one of them particularly because he is expecting a baby in just a few months!

The day-to-day-tactical is played for laughs, but as I was telling him by email, I actually do wear my old tactical goggles on the motorcycle. They were designed to protect the eyes and face from IED shrapnel, so they're good to go for most of the stuff that you might encounter on the highway. As the ad says, "These goggles offer great wind and dust protection thanks to their foam dust filters in the ventilation system." That's just what a biker needs, too.

Of course, like everything designed for the tactical market, "tactical" goggles do cost more than regular biker goggles. But the protection level is higher, and the eyes are worth protecting.

Historical Fiction as Thesis

I'm not sure where the affection for the Cathar heresy comes from, but I can't remember the last time I saw an academic paper that didn't treat it as some sort of wrongly-suppressed, righteous and wonderful movement. If only our ancestors had embraced its complete rejection of reproduction!

This one goes so far as to construct a "historical thesis" that is really a piece of imaginative narrative fiction. If one can get a Master's degree for writing historical fiction, Lars Walker should have a Ph.D.

Weddings back in style

The U.S. military has been struggling with its policy on dependent benefits.  On the one hand, any large, complex organization would like to have a simple rule for who qualifies as a dependent, so it can exert some predictable control over a very large fraction of the cost of its wage packages.  The easiest rule, by far, is to let the bright line of marriage define the family.  On the other hand, the trend also has been to avoid discriminating against gay partners, and requiring marriage is a cruel trick to play if marriage isn't available.

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that gay marriages must be acknowledged, the military evidently is reverting to the assumption that people who want coverage for their partners had better go ahead and marry them.  It's going to be interesting to see how this trend plays out against the countervailing trend, which is against letting the Man make rules about who's a family and who's not.  Can common-law gay marriages be far away?  Will there be shotgun marriages for gays who want to adopt?

Beautiful Crusader Hospital Found in Jerusalem

The pictures are lovely. One of the sorrows of the war in Syria is watching old and beautiful sites like Krak des Chevaliers being damaged by the war. Of course they were made for war, and the region is long troubled.

But how nice that, in Jerusalem, there is enough peace that this site can instead be renovated for happier purposes:

Monser Shwieki, the project manager, explained “The magnificent building will be integrated in a restaurant slated to be constructed there, and its patrons will be impressed by the enchanting atmosphere of the Middle Ages that prevails there”.

I expect it will be a very pleasant place.

How To Raise a Daughter: Two Parallel Views

A lady I know, for whom I have the greatest respect though we often do not agree, sends this video with an approving comment. "My kind of girl!"



The lady in question did raise a daughter, actually, and I'm quite sure she wouldn't have accepted such an attitude from her own daughter. But she wants to indicate that she approves of female self-assertiveness, I suppose.

I have a hard time not viewing this as a kind of child abuse. The child is at an age when she is learning how to treat others, and whether she learns to treat her elders with respect or with a kind of royal disdain is really going to be a question of the sort of feedback she receives. The family has her in a kind of isolation, so that the feedback she gets will initially be contained to what they elect to give her. If they giggle and laugh approvingly at her imperious dictates, she won't be wrong in committing to those habits as demonstrably successful.

When she gets out in the world, however... well.

Naturally I thought of this article from the NYT's parenting section, which I'm sure we all read last week. That child did not learn to spew hate tinged with explicit sexual terminology at the age of ten on her own.

Fate has not given me a daughter, so I can't say how I would raise one with certainty. It's a very difficult problem. I honor those, like my late father-and-mother-in-law, who managed it with grace.