Don't Visit the Emirates

Today's news includes a note that a Georgian has been arrested in the UAE for taking a photograph. When I went to read the article, I was thinking: "Oh, I've heard of this -- young foreigners get in trouble for too-revealing bathing suits, and the photograph is just evidence." No, not at all. The Georgian is a older man, seventy years of age, and what he photographed is... unclear.

The article eventually posits that certain buildings 'such as palaces or embassies' are off limits, but we don't know just what it was he photographed that got him in trouble. His family says any trespass was unintentional, which is easy to believe since even they don't seem to know what it was he photographed that got him in trouble. No one seems to know what charges he might face, when he might face trial, or when he'll see an attorney. Our government has apparently had access to him, but won't comment on the case for 'privacy reasons.'

If there is anything amusing about the case, it's that he was invited to the UAE to attend a conference on creative thinking. I'm creatively thinking that the UAE is a very bad place to have any such conferences in the future, or for anyone to visit for tourism.

When You Read Kindle, Kindle Reads You

A list of the most popular phrases in popular books, as determined by Kindle.

The popular Bible verse, surprisingly to me, is Philippians 4:6-7.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

I would have expected it to be something from John.

"Strategies" for Poem-Reading

I wasn't aware that the reading of poetry required a strategy, but a writer at the Atlantic has twenty of them to offer. Some of them are good -- I especially like the one about always reading the poem aloud.

On the other hand, I'm bemused by the assumption that poetry is probably going to be something like a locked box or safe: so difficult to understand that it might require a dozen or more readings to come to the "slightest" understanding. Poetry need not be anything of the sort. The greatest poems -- the Iliad, say -- may well reward a dozen readings with continually new and deeper understandings. Yet though they have secrets and depths, they are first and foremost a form of communication. They speak to you. That is what they are for.

If they fail in that, in that first duty of poetry, they are poor examples of the art.

The Height of Victory

A good story from the boys at RangerUp about teaching rappelling to new recruits. One of the times I went rappelling was at Camp Frank D. Merrill, home of the 5th Ranger Training Battalion and the "Mountain Warfare" phase of training. Having been rappelling a time or so in the past, I tied up my Swiss seat and came off the wall good and hard, intending to bounce just once on the way to the ground. My belay man, seeing me coming down so fast, apparently dropped the rope and fled. No problem: I hit the brakes just right, stretched the rope to a feather-light landing, and backed off the rope with aplomb.

That belay guy did some push-ups off the Stone of Pain they happen to have nearby.

Wonder Women

Arts & Letters Daily isn't really daily: over the weekend, they post up a few things and then walk away until Monday. For that reason, I ended up reading an article on a topic of almost no interest to me -- comic books. Specifically, the highly feminist history of Wonder Woman.

Marston’s Wonder Woman might have worn a bustier, hot pants, and “kinky boots” (as Lepore puts it)—not a bad way to ensure that you’re wildly popular in the ’40s—but her actions were undeniably feminist. In one episode, she organizes a big demonstration against profiteering industrialists, inspiring poor mothers and children alike to march in protest against the “International Milk Company.” In another episode, she ties up a department-store owner with her golden lasso and challenges her unfair labor practices.

Wonder Woman stood firmly against societal ills, from low wages to pointless aggression to bossy husbands who expect to be served by their docile wives. (For his part, Marston was married to an educated, confident woman, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, and as to the question of domestic docility . . . well, read on.)

Yes, let's.

But just as the mind reels at how progressive and bold Marston was, we spin the disappointment wheel yet again. Because soon, people naturally began to ask, Why does Wonder Woman, in her kinky boots, end up tied up or chained in every story? According to Marston, Wonder Woman—like all women—loved to be tied up.... As a Tufts professor, Marston had discovered an undergraduate student named Olive Byrne, whose pep and unbound force impressed him enough that he involved her in his studies into whether women find being bound pleasant or titillating. (Guess what? They do!)

Soon after, Marston brought Byrne home to his wife, so that her pep and unbound force might be put to good use in a more domestic setting. According to Lepore, Marston told Holloway she had a choice. “Either Olive Byrne could live with them or he would leave her.” Holloway consented, Byrne moved in, and five children arrived over the years, three by Holloway and two by Byrne.

Ok, well, how did that work out?

Marston’s wives seem to dote on him. Marston’s children don’t believe that bondage was part of the sexual routine in their happy (albeit unusual) household. Byrne, the daughter of hunger-striking feminist Ethel Byrne and niece of contraceptive-rights crusader Margaret Sanger, gave no indication that she felt demeaned by her role. Indeed, she wrote repeated, rapt profiles of Marston for Family Circle magazine, in which she “visits” Marston’s house (i.e., her own house), marvels at the well-behaved children (whom she is actually raising), and is charmed by the man of the house (her life partner).

Yes, this is truly a household of bullshitters. Even so, although only a few trusted friends knew of Marston’s strange domestic arrangement, those who visited the house spoke in glowing terms of the joy and fun they witnessed there. Holloway and Byrne must have agreed; they lived together for more than forty years after Marston’s death from cancer in 1947, at the age of fifty-three.

Well, then. I suppose all's well that ends well, as the saying goes.

Deferred Reprisals

There's a poll out on what brands are most esteemed by Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Craftsman Tools appears on all three lists in a respectable position: never lower than #3, and the top brand of all for Republicans.

The thing is, Craftsman -- like all of Sears -- is not nearly as good as it used to be. The last time I took a Craftsman tool in for replacement, I traded a tool that had "CRAFTSMAN" stamped into the steel for one made in Mexico, with a sticker that would hopefully wear off before the cheap thing broke. At the recent Highland Games, where many of my comrades are motorcycle enthusiasts and workmen, part of the conversation turned on how much worse Craftsman tools are than they used to be. They are blocky, fragile, cheap: an attempt to garner a short-term profit by charging a premium price for a once-premium product that you are now obtaining as cheaply as you can manage.

You destroy a company, or a nation, in just this way. The label still bears some residual respect. It won't last forever. Experience will prove that the thing has changed, and the old strength has been washed away. When that happens, it will all fall apart.

Beware, for it is not only Sears that has made this mistake.

The Feast of All Saints

The purpose of the feast is to honor all saints "known and unknown," but it was originally especially for martyrs. Given that ISIS has created many new unknown martyrs this very year, you might give it a thought.

Our Country, 'Tis of Thee

These are college students.



The contrast between the early questions and the last ones is painful.

Happy Halloween

That should scare those goblins away.

Have a good one.

Check Yourself, Yahoo

Wrong.

Right.

It's a small point, you might say: merely a matter of custom and tradition. Those matter more than Americans today often understand.

It's Good To Be King

I can't remember which ex-President said it, but one of them was asked what he missed most about holding the office and answered that he had loved always winning at golf.

Emma has taken a keen interest in the career of Charles Brandon, a man of relatively modest status who joined the court of Henry VIII and became Duke of Sufolk, marrying Henry’s sister, Mary Tudor, despite little or no involvement in the warfare, theology or politics – the normal arenas for advancement.

“The only thing he is any use at is jousting. This is something that has been completely overlooked,” said Emma. “I have used the score cheques to look at him and they show that he is the best jouster in Henry’s court and he often jousts against the king.

“However, it seems that he manipulates the scores. When he jousts against everybody else, he will win. When he jousts against the king, he will lose."

Just bad luck, probably. Just like it was good luck that he was elevated to the upper nobility, and allowed to marry into the royal family.

The Quest for Philosophical Rigor

Drunk Frenchmen are psychopaths, which for some reason this study confuses with accurate philosophy.

His team found a correlation between each subject's level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person—the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many.... There's a fabulous irony in the idea that drunk people are emotionally steeled rationalists who are willing to do whatever it takes to save lives. But Duke and his research partner, Laurent Bègue, aren't necessarily arguing that drunk people are ace philosophers and logicians; it's more that their findings challenge common assumptions about how people make decisions.

The trolly problem doesn't have a right answer. The point of it is to test moral intuitions, which we find differ. Some people really believe that the right thing to do is to take the action that will save the most people. But not everyone believes that. Some people have a deep intuition that they are personally responsible for killing the one innocent that they have taken a positive action to kill, but not responsible for the accident that will happen if they do nothing. They feel that their clear moral duty is to do no evil.

The question is suddenly more urgent, since we are starting to think about how to program robot self-driving cars. But the idea wasn't to come to a solution; it was to explore differences in how we think about the problem. Those who are increasingly unconcerned about causing harm in the pursuit of some ideal are not necessarily the best moral thinkers.

This is a Good Idea

Craigslist is one of the great tools of the internet. I've bought all my motorcycles off of it, and my wife uses it extensively for things we need. Just the other day, I bought a load of hay for the horses from a guy we found on Craigslist. But when you roll up to seller who knows you're coming with lots of cash, or a buyer who knows you're bringing an expensive piece of equipment, you always feel a little like you're going to meet a rival crime family and wondering if it's an ambush. Fortunately (for those of you who know my wife!), no one has been foolish enough to attempt to ambush us. Unfortunately, for some people, that doesn't hold true.

The local police in Montgomery County, PA, have set up a place in their parking lot and the lobby of their police station just for Craigslist transactions. There's no interference, and you aren't required to use it, but it's available at no charge if you wanted a safe place to meet up where you'll have friendly eyes making sure you don't get robbed.

That's the kind of peace-officer policing I really respect.

An American Philosopher

This piece will probably help you understand a number of arguments that you have often heard in American politics. They're usually not well presented, and end up sounding like contradictions: but they were the product of one mind, who meant something coherent by these ideas.

What Employer?

Congressman Doug Collins of Georgia's Mighty Ninth District writes:

Wow. I got a text from a constituent who's just seen the new insurance premiums he'll have to pay as a business owner under ‪#‎Obamacare‬.

$47,000 could have been a great salary for a great new Georgia job next year. Instead, it's off to the insurance companies as a direct result of the "Affordable" Care Act.

Do you think your employer can stand an 87% increase in insurance premium payments?

I may have mentioned that Georgia has the worst unemployment in the nation. Not helping: all these demands on start-ups and existing businesses that are slated to come online in the next few years. Why would any sensible investor start a business in the United States until the full effects of the ACA are knowable, and a business case can be evaluated with something like reliable cost estimates in front of you?

"War on Women!", Part Whatever

This is a bizarre statement from our Stanford scholar. It's on the importance of a conference to deal with pursuing drugs to treat low female libido.

"This is a really important time, because the FDA is realizing that women deserve the same sexual rights as men," Dr. Leah Millheiser, director of female sexual medicine at Stanford University, told Yahoo Health.

What exactly is the right here?

The 'male sexual dysfunction' they are likening to low female libido is erectile dysfunction. So you have someone who wants to have sex, but physically cannot. Does he have a right to have sex if he wants to? Is that being argued by anyone?

Meanwhile, by definition, low libido means that you don't want to have sex. So it seems like the analogous right would not be to have a drug to make you want to have sex, but to have your wishes on the subject respected.

The only thing that makes any psychological condition a "dysfunction" is that it causes some sort of trauma in their lives. So the reason this is a dysfunction is that it is causing women some relationship problems with, presumably usually, the men in their lives who want more sex.

I can understand how some women might come to the conclusion that it would just be great if they could want more sex too. Still, others might just as reasonably decide that they want to have their wish not to have sex very often respected. Declaring this condition a dysfunction means telling that second kind of woman, in the name of 'equal rights for women!', that they're sick and need to be medicated until they can better match their male partner's level of desire.

After all, if women aren't exactly like men in some way, it's injustice.

Scared to vote

How is Harry Reid's strategy working for him?

You have to wonder if Harry Reid feels like an idiot yet. For years now, the Senate majority leader has been cynically protecting Democratic senators — and President Obama — from difficult votes. The rationale was pretty straightforward. He wanted to spare vulnerable Democrats named Mark — Arkansas’s Mark Pryor, Alaska’s Mark Begich and Colorado’s Mark Udall — and a few others from having to take difficult votes on issues such as the Keystone XL pipeline, EPA rules, and immigration reform.

The problem for the Marks and other red- or swing-state Democrats is that, having been spared the chance to take tough votes, they now have little to no evidence they’d be willing to stand up to a president who is very unpopular in their states.

Thanks to Reid’s strategy of kicking the can down the road, GOP challengers now get to say, “My opponent voted with the president 97 percent of the time.” Democrats are left screeching “war on women!” and “Koch brothers!”

For instance, Reid killed bipartisan legislation on energy efficiency in May by denying senators the right to offer amendments. This was a wildly partisan and nearly unprecedented move, blocking the Senate from debating important issues. He did so because he feared that GOP amendments — on the Keystone pipeline, for instance — would pass with Democratic support, angering the White House.

I’m sure Senator Mary Landrieu, (D., La.) would love to be able to tout such a vote now. But she supported Reid’s tactic, shooting herself in the foot in the process.

Of course, this assumes these allegedly independent Democrats would have broken with Obama. But whether they would have or not, wouldn’t our politics be healthier if we had an answer to that question?

The strategy isn't unique to incumbents. Even non-incumbent candidates are resolute in their silence on the question whether they support the President's policies. They don't want to say "no," for fear of alienating what the New York Times delicately calls the "surge demographic," but they can hardly admit the true answer is "yes," either. They're left hoping their dog whistles will be understood in different ways by different people.

These candidates are in an unenviable spot.  The fact remains that a vote for them is a vote for the continuation of Harry Reid's strategy.

Scary Halloween stuff

Costumes and haunted houses are bad enough, but what about this:

Many Halloween candies contain palm oil, the large-scale, monoculture production of which is driving deforestation, extinction, human rights abuses, and climate change!

According to that 2007 U.N. report, from 2000 to 2005, nearly 50,000 acres of forest were lost every day across the Earth. Some of that forest was cleared to make way for palm oil plantations....

[T]he milk used in the candy bar turns out to be by far the largest component of its carbon footprint—suggesting that dark chocolate may be an environmentally friendlier choice.... [And yet C]ocoa flourishes in many of the world's biodiversity "hot spots"; as a result, cocoa cultivation has resulted in the destruction of millions of acres of environmentally fragile rainforest.

It's not too early to be thinking of ways to spoil Christmas, too:

 

Pope Francis Reasserts the Medieval Position

This apparently sounds radical to many media commentators.

When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so.... He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment.

That is strictly the Aristotelian position. The giveaway is when he speaks of human beings having 'internal laws' that govern how they 'reach their fulfilment.' The question is how things come to be, and Aristotle gives his answer in Physics II.

Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes.... [those that exist by nature] present a feature in which they differ from things which are not constituted by nature. Each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration). On the other hand, a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these designations i.e. in so far as they are products of art-have no innate impulse to change.

So there is a distinction being made between things that exist 'by nature' and those that are products of (human) art. Things that exist by nature have 'within themselves a principle' -- the Pope said an 'internal law' -- that governs how they come to be, how they grow or decline, and how they can change. That's why a bear and a man and a horse are different: they are governed by different natures. The bear and the man can eat more or less the same things, but their bodies will do different things with the food they intake. The bear will grow larger, stronger, faster; the man will develop reason and a form fit for manipulation of his environment to a greater degree. The horse can't eat many of the things that a man or a bear can eat, but on grass alone will grow bigger and stronger than either.

The Medieval Aristotelian position -- not only in the Church, but predating the Church's adoption in Jewish and Islamic Aristotelian philosophers such as Maimonides and Avicenna -- was that God's activity produced the world and its laws. The laws were themselves the mechanisms by which creation was effected. Maimonides goes so far as to give an account of Moses' parting of the Red Sea as a kind of understanding of the laws at work: it happened to be the one night when the wind was going to blow in just the right way, for just the right time, to craft the parted sea. Moses was a prophet, but that meant that he had come through his intellect to understand something about the laws at work.

There are a lot of philosophical and theological issues on this ground that might be hotly debated. But the point, here, is that the position the media is taking to be radical is approximately a thousand years old: and it's based on a position far older still.

"Strange Days"

Last year, in September, my wife suffered a shattered leg. It took her months to heal enough to put weight on it again. At first she was just in the bed, for more than a month, and in constant pain. Later she could sit in a wheelchair, and visit the back deck on a sunny day. She talked a lot about what the experience was like, and this essay has a lot in it that sounds familiar.

How the feel of time changes when all the terms are altered. What on most days had moved with an almost hectic momentum, an ill-choreographed succession of one thing after another, one day just halted, causing the hours to then pool up behind it: the afternoon immobilized, with almost nothing to mark the change or confirm that this is not the world paralyzed into still life.

The experience for my wife was rejuvenating in many ways. Being able to walk again is a special joy, whereas walking before was not special. I can see that she's recovered a pleasure in ordinary life in other ways, too. I hope the author will have a similar experience.