Moral non-relativism

From Sam Harris via Bookworm Room:

Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. . . . The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants.

Hamas is not just a rogue terrorist organization.  It was elected.

Keep it simple

Gavin McInnes advises hewing to tradition unless you've got a much better idea.  In marriage, we're allowed to alter the gender-role rules slightly to take reality into account, as long as we don't go too crazy:

If a woman is conservative in some duties, she should be liberal in others. To the non-married much of this talk will sound like rape. There is no such thing in marriage. It’s more like if your sibling was a vampire. If things got really bad, you’d cut yourself so he could eat.

100 Years ago today...

...the middle ages ended. The Empire of Austria-Hungary, with a pedigree stretching back nearly 1000 years, (remember that the Duchy of Austria was created by Emperor Otto III in AD 996, the Kingdom of Hungary in AD1000), declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia (established AD1217, conquered by the Ottomans in AD1459, and reestablished in AD1882), and starting the first world war.

By 1918, Three of the 4 big monarchies in Europe, Austria, Russia, and Germany, were gone. The British survived, but began to yield it's global supremacy to the USA.

The old European civilization, and it's notions of societal order, hierarchy, and supremacy,  were all overthrown.

And while it took another world war to completely settle the matter (and get rid of even more of the remaining monarchies in Europe), the die had been cast, and there was no going back.

The war's effects are still being felt today, most obviously in the middle east and the Ukraine.

There's A Small Problem With This Idea...

Let's see if we can spot it.

“Radical regulations strangle small business and increase the costs for hard-working taxpayers,” said Congressman Scalise. “This much-needed legislation makes unelected bureaucrats think twice before proposing job-killing rules and regulations by increasing transparency and accountability. If our economy is ever to recover from six years of the president’s failed economic policies, we must rein in the out of control costs of this Administration’s radical regulations. I applaud Congressman Collins for joining me in introducing this bill and for being a leader in the House on holding this Administration accountable.”

“Our federal budget tells Americans how much money the government spends. The national Regulatory Budget would tell them how much the government is really costing them,” Congressman Collins said. “Too many regulations, however they were intended, cost hardworking Americans in money and in opportunity. We can’t bring about reform and relief if we can’t identify the roots of the regulatory burden, and this is a straightforward and transparent way to do that. Congressman Scalise is a trusted leader on regulatory reform and I know with his leadership, we can get this moving.”

“Regulations are another impediment to investment. For free enterprise to work, it needs a reasonable regulatory system that ensures safety, protects consumers and achieves fair competition,” said U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Putting the federal government on a National Regulatory Budget will help restrain the job-killing impulses of regulators and reduce obstacles to innovation that creates jobs."

So far, so good. What's your plan for addressing it?

Specifically, the National Regulatory Budget Act would establish the Office of Regulatory Analysis (OAR), which would be required to provide an annual regulatory analysis of federal rules for the upcoming fiscal year and their estimated cost on the economy. The legislation also creates a National Regulatory Budget, which allows Congress to set a cap on the total economic cost of new federal regulations to be implemented in the coming fiscal year. Congress would also set caps on the regulatory cost allowed by individual agencies.

The legislation requires that all newly proposed regulations receive an OAR estimate before being implemented. Agencies that fail to comply with the OAR will be subject to a 0.5 percent reduction in their appropriation based on their previous budget amount.

The solution you propose is to establish yet another Federal agency?

Failure to comply with which means a half-percent cut in appropriations?

Back to the drawing board, boys.

Perhaps You Have Never Heard of John Kerry

The Times of Israel has a piece called "John Kerry: The Betrayal."

It seemed inconceivable that the secretary’s initiative would specify the need to address Hamas’s demands for a lifting of the siege of Gaza, as though Hamas were a legitimate injured party acting in the interests of the people of Gaza — rather than the terror group that violently seized control of the Strip in 2007, diverted Gaza’s resources to its war effort against Israel, and could be relied upon to exploit any lifting of the “siege” in order to import yet more devastating weaponry with which to kill Israelis.

Israel and the US are meant to be allies; the US is meant to be committed to the protection of Israel in this most ruthless of neighborhoods; together, the US and Israel are meant to be trying to marginalize the murderous Islamic extremism that threatens the free world. Yet....

I can understand your confusion. The Secretary of State is the position of highest honor in the United States government, the highest-ranking position that is appointed instead of elected. Now any demagogue can get elected; but to be appointed the head diplomat, whose word speaks for the nation, is to be entrusted with a position of extraordinary honor.

Nevertheless, you must understand, this is John Kerry. This is a man who swore he had seen and participated in great crimes of war in Vietnam, which he was obligated to report to his chain of command: but he made no such reports. So he is either a criminal of the worst kind, a murderer most foul who broke his nation's most sacred laws against his sworn oath as an officer; or he is a liar who has slandered his brothers in arms, for personal advantage.

Either way, by his own words he deserves a scoundrel's death. Instead he has been elevated to the position of highest honor in our nation's government. That is our fault. I can understand your confusion. I can. It should never have been this way.

The military-industrial complex

In 1798, we scarcely had one, or even an ordinary industrial complex.  Something I didn't know about Eli Whitney was that his famous cotton-engine, or "gin," was a bit of a financial bust; patent protection was hit-or-miss back then, and the idea was easily appropriated by an enthusiastic public.  Broke, he managed to finagle a defense contract with an uneasy young U.S. government for 10,000 muskets.  He used the progress payments to set up a new kind of factory from scratch, not yet owning so much as the mill he intended to use to power it.  He held off his nervous government contact for years, until four months after the original due date, with reports of how he was assembling a team of workers and first building the tools that would facilitate the new steam-powered assembly process.  Then he blew his client away with a demonstration of interchangeable parts:

[In January 1801,] Whitney made his entry into a room of dignitaries in blue coats, knee breeches and silk hose, assembled most likely in the newly occupied president's mansion. He took a large box with him and laid out its contents on a table. It was not a musket but all sorts of anticlimactic bits and pieces--or so it seemed for a few moments. Then he surprised the observers, including [his original mentor's] more skeptical successor, by quickly assembling the bits into fine new muskets. He picked apparently at random among ten different firelocks and with a screwdriver fitted them to ten muskets. On the testimony of Thomas Jefferson, he also assembled the actual firelock mechanism from a random selection of the internal pieces (tumbler, sear, hammer, lock plate, etc.), a far more impressive accomplishment, since it was the most delicately calibrated part of the weapon. In a letter introducing "Mr. Whitney of Connecticut, a mechanic of the first order of ingenuity," Jefferson told Virginia's governor, James Monroe: "He has invented molds and machines for making all the pieces of his locks so exactly equal that take 100 locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first piece that comes to hand. This is of importance in repairing, because out of ten locks e.g. disabled for want of different pieces, 9 good locks may be put together without employing a smith."

"They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators," by Harold Evans, Gail Buckland, and David Lefer.

X-ray vision

It's not a matter of making things transparent, just of routing the information from cameras to a helmet.  Pilots will be able to look around, even straight down through the aircraft, and "see" what the skin of the aircraft "sees."

The cost of going bare

This is the first article I've ever found with hard numbers and analysis of the real cost of medical care, including how it's borne by a combination of consumers, taxpayers, and providers in the absence of health insurance.  I know you'll be shocked to learn that the ACA's solution of universal expensive subsidized coverage makes absolutely no sense, regardless of whether you're concerned about medical bankruptcy, erosion of life expectancy among the uninsured, the profit margin of doctors and hospitals, or the burden on taxpayers.  On the subject of life expectancy, by the way, we'd all do better to stay married, go to college, lose weight, and quit smoking--all of which are at least as effective as being insured, if not much more so.

There's an idea

From a Korean history I'm proofreading:

One of this king's most interesting edicts was in connection with the census. Having ordered a numbering of the people, he found that objections were raised, because it would mean a more systematic and thorough collection of taxes. So he put forth the edict that whenever murder occurred, if the murdered man's name was not on the list of tax payers, the murderer would be immediately pardoned. Of course everybody hastened to get their names on the books and to let it be known.

Looking familiar

Demagogues have no trouble employing the ideology of identity politics to stir up a sense of grievance against the festering injustice that is Amerika. What's odd is that they're comfortable doing so in support of people who want to get to Amerika because their own cultures have failed, and that they're using the favorite tropes of fascism to do it:

Does Representative Gutierrez have any notion that the reason why tens of thousands of what he refers to as “our people” are risking their lives to enter the U.S. is that because, unlike their home nations, America’s prosperity is ultimately based on the sanctity of racially-blind and politically-blind laws, laws that cannot be simply created or dismissed for particular interest groups by someone shouting to an assembly, convening under the banner of “The Race”?

Strip away the very thin leftist veneer of all this and we can see the old demagogic and ethnic fascism of the European 1930s.

Ein Volk, ein Land.

Community & isolation

Via some sort of link I was following from (probably) Maggie's Farm (which I don't want to omit, in light of discouraging recent stories about plagiarists who don't understand what's wrong with pretending their ideas are original):

Stella Morabito wrote the other day here at The Federalist about how personal relationships threaten the power of the state – and they do, because in their absence, the state inevitably seizes more power. We have a good example of this from the experience of Mexican society, as described in Jorge Castañeda’s book “Mañana Forever”:

“In the United States, there are approximately 2 million civil society organizations, or one for every 150 inhabitants; in Chile there are 35,000, or one for every 428 Chileans; in Mexico there are only 8,500, or one for every 12,000, according to Mexican public intellectual Federico Reyes Heroles. Eighty-five percent of all Americans belong to five or more organizations; in Mexico 85% belong to no organization and, according to Reyes Heroles, the largest type, by far, is religious. In the United States, one out of every ten jobs is located in the so-called third sector (or civil society); in Mexico the equivalent figure is one out of every 210 jobs. [internal citation omitted] In polls taken in 2001, 2003, and 2005 on political culture in Mexico, a constant 82% of those surveyed stated they had never worked formally or informally with others to address their community’s problems.”

Castañeda is describing a nation with nothing resembling the “little platoons” of Burke or the network of free associations that de Tocqueville credited with American democracy’s vitality. It is a nation which lacks lateral social bonds. Instead, it encourages a patronage society where the force of government surges in response to the clamor of the masses. [Rick] Santorum seems to think that is the American destiny in the wake of the current societal shifts, or barring some series of the enactment of pro-family policies. But that’s not necessarily the case, in part because American individualism in the modern sense is not what Santorum thinks it is.

The number of true individualists is still relatively small – they are the people who spend holidays staring vacantly into space. If you buy or sell things, consume popular culture, or have anyone in your life you say “I love you” to, you’re not a true individualist. [Abortion selfie-ist] Emily Letts is the furthest thing from an individualist – her confused expression of the destruction of the life growing inside her comes across as something between a struggling actress craving an audience and a human being craving someone to hold her hand through a difficult time.

The Morabito piece linked within the link is a fascinating look at how progressives fear families as the primary source of inequality in our society, and the primary competition for government influence.

Unexpectedly

Faced with food price inflation, Panama's new president has a brainstorm:  "I know!  Let's try price controls!"  Because no one's ever tried that one before, and experienced empty shelves.  Must be those hoarders.

That business with printing money like crazy in order to create prosperity with a magic wand is working like a charm, too.  Anything to take the focus off of production and free exchange, I guess.

Friday Night AMV

Every movie trailer you've ever seen.

Congress Banned from Editing Wikipedia

Again.

Also, apparently Donald Rumsfeld is not an alien lizard.

New math

No matter how it's taught, it's still too hard.

Dangerous childhoods

I didn't write about the woman who was arrested for letting her kid play alone in the park because the story was too exasperating.  Now, however, I feel compelled to warn all you parents out there of the new looming threat: rubber bands.

Ah, For A Muse of Fire...

On the news I saw the extremists replaced the cross on our church in Mosul with the black flag of the Islamic State. They are doing a call of Islamic prayer from our church. They have turned it into a mosque.

I can't believe it. I wanted to cry when I saw this on the news.

Much is being asked of these. Joy without a cause. Faith without a hope.

Banhus Gebrocen

Later, when Beowulf’s corpse burns on the funeral pyre, it doesn’t gently disappear. He is cooked until the “banhus gebrocen”—the bonehouse was broken. A great hero is reduced to a bunch of bones snapping in a bonfire. A solitary woman sings over his burning body, her lament mixing with the smoke (just as Grendel’s screams had drifted up on the air, “sweg up astag”) as it is swallowed by heaven—“heofon rece swealg.”

The new same old anti-Semitism

From Protein Wisdom:

We thought the Cold War was over, but Hillary’s reset button has rekindled that. Turns out Obama’s policies and attitude may just be rekindling the Second World War, as well.

We can't have that

Merit-based New York high schools are vilified for providing an escape route for poor, hard-working immigrants of the wrong color:

There is no dispute that black and Latino enrollment at the specialized schools, while always low, has steadily declined since the 1970s. Blacks constituted 13 percent of the student body at Stuyvesant in 1979, 5 percent in 1994, and just 1 percent the last few years, while Hispanics dropped from a high of 4 percent to 2 percent today. Similarly, at Bronx Science, black enrollment has fallen from 12 percent in 1994 to 3 percent currently, and Hispanic enrollment has leveled off, from about 10 percent to 6 percent. The figures are even more striking at the less selective Brooklyn Tech, where blacks made up 37 percent of the student body in 1994 but only 8 percent today, while Hispanic numbers plunged from about 15 percent to 8 percent.

These declining minority numbers have not been matched by a corresponding increase in whites, however. In fact, white enrollment at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech has plummeted as well, dropping from 79 percent, 81 percent, and 77 percent, respectively, in 1971 to just 22 percent, 23 percent, and 20 percent today. Rather, it is New York City’s fastest-growing racial minority group, Asian-Americans, who have come to dominate these schools. Asians, while always a presence in New York, didn’t begin arriving in the city in large numbers until immigration restrictions were lifted with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Senator Edward Kennedy. Since then, their proportion of the city’s population has increased from less than 1 percent to about 13 percent, and their share of the specialized school population has skyrocketed. Asian students constituted 6 percent of the enrollment at Stuyvesant in 1970 and 50 percent in 1994; they make up an incredible 73 percent of the student body this year. The story is similar at Bronx Science, where the Asian population has exploded from 5 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 1994 to 62 percent today, and at Brooklyn Tech, where their presence increased from 6 percent to 33 percent to 61 percent.

. . . All this once would have been the stuff of liberal dreams: a racial minority group historically victimized by discrimination begins coming to America in greater numbers because of an immigration reform sponsored by Ted Kennedy. Though many in the group remain in poverty, they take advantage of free public schools established by progressive New York City governments. By dint of their own hard work, they earn admission in increasing numbers to merit-based schools that offer smart working-class kids the kind of education once available only at Andover or Choate.

To modern “progressive” elites, though, the story is intolerable, starting with the hard work. As Charles Murray has observed, while affluent liberals themselves tend to work hard, they seem embarrassed by their own lifestyles and refuse to preach what they practice in an age that frowns on anything bourgeois, self-denying, or judgmental. These liberal elites seem particularly troubled by the Asian-American work ethic and the difficult questions that it raises about the role of culture in group success. While the advancement of Asian students has come overwhelmingly at the expense of more affluent whites, it has also had an undeniable impact on black and Latino students, whose foothold at these schools, small to begin with, has all but vanished.