I came to the decision to run for local office with much reluctance. (And you should hear my husband on the subject. I think we can be sure he won't be standing around on podiums gazing at me with admiring support, or pressing the flesh at community gatherings. I get the impression he doesn't enjoy crowds.)
Nevertheless, having concluded I had to step up and that was that, I have found that there are some compensations. There's an endless fascination in finding out how things work. Whether it's getting a chance to look inside a water treatment plant or learning where local government gets its powers and funding and seeing how the roads get paved and the trash gets picked up, the hidden mechanisms all around us are a constant source of joy and learning. God made me a curious person and a quick study. It's good to put it to use.
What I'm seeing is that the ramshackle machine that makes the trains run is staffed with equal amounts of people who have no clue and people of amazing competence and good character. You have to find the latter and minimize the damage from the former. The trick of politics seems to be to encourage a system that makes both of those tasks easier.
Texas has a funny wrinkle in its criminal prosecution system. Normally a State District Attorney handles criminal cases for several rural counties, while a County Attorney in each county handles civil matters, including advising the County Commissioners on their contracts and their statutory duties and powers. The Texas State legislature can, however, grant a county's (inexplicable) request to opt out of the local State DA system and give criminal prosecution powers over to the County Attorney. From then on, the local DA will stay out of your county and perhaps lose interest in your problems. If your County Attorney's background is, say, real estate, that may not seem like such a great idea. If in addition she is given to obscure, intractable quarrels with the local police force and suddenly announces that she will prosecute no further cases referred by that body, things come unwound pretty quickly. Suddenly we all have to turn to the thorny question, "How does one remove a sitting County Attorney, especially without any cooperation from a Commissioners Court that apparently doesn't see the problem?" It's become a lively Facebook discussion, which I call a healthy thing.
My campaign is largely summed up in what is supposed to be George Washington's warning about fire being a dangerous tool and a terrible master. We get a lot of droughts here; people who let their "controlled burns" get out of control come in for a lot of squinty-eyed ill humor. I tell my prospective voters that, when you're thinking of handing over a new power to your elected officials, it's like setting a fire. You don't do it until you've cleared a little area around the fire pit and gotten a water hose charged and ready. Before we elect someone, not only should we find out a lot about his character and abilities, we should get conversant with the procedures for booting him back out of office. Do we have recall elections? What about impeachment? Who has standing to get one of these procedures started? How hard is it? Do we have to go to court? When will he be up for re-election? How long does it take to get ready to run someone to challenge him?
From Facebook I judge that most people look at a situation like this and think "I'll write to the Governor," or may "to the Attorney General." No great harm in that, but it discharges a sense of urgency without being very likely to produce results. I keep coming back to the old lesson that there is not, and never will be, any substitute for people to organize and rule themselves, starting locally. We can govern ourselves, or we will be governed. As Benjamin Franklin said, "A republic, if you can keep it."
It's also occurred to me lately that there's a swath of the Republican party that divides the world into "golf cronies" and "pool boys." For me that's the GOPe in a nutshell. What I want to know about a neighbor is: Does he take responsibility for himself? Can his neighbors count on him? I have many neighbors I can count on, and it's not their incomes or their wardrobes that make the difference.
Scott Lynch's "Locke Lamora" Novels
One of my regular laments is that the genre of Sword & Sorcery has withered in recent years. This genre, which predates Tolkien's High Fantasy, grew out of some turn-of-the-last-century stories "set in exotic locations" and therefore mixing physical adventure with dark powers. By the time of the Great Depression, it has blossomed into its most famous flowering: the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard, which were only a small part of a whole world and deep history of his imagination. About the same time, the other great master of the genre began crafting the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. The genre was related to another offshoot of the earlier tales, the Horror genre characterized by Cthulhu; but in Sword & Sorcery stories, the heroes could overcome eldritch beasts through steel, wit, and courage.
Sword & Sorcery lacks most of the moral force of the Tolkien's High Fantasy, but it is in a sense more joyous and primal. It is that quality that, sadly, is lacking in the works of Scott Lynch, the first writer I've run into in a while to attempt it. His stories are almost entirely lacking in the joy that gave Fafhrd 'the laugh of the Elder Gods,' or the primal confidence that gave Conan the ferocity to contest demons with cold steel. I read Lynch's three books, hoping he might discover the power of the thing as he played with it; I am sorry to say that he did not.
Lynch's cities are well-drawn, and he has a place for eldritch magic that somehow comes to play little role beyond providing interesting architecture. His heroes are riddled with guilt and loathing, of themselves if they are male. Lynch is of the current fashion that has wholeheartedly adopted feminism as moral truth; female characters are invariably confident and accomplished in a way that his men never are, and yet retain adequate bitter loathing to lecture at length -- whole pages at a time in the third book -- on how unfair the world is to their sex. The books are blurbed by George R. R. Martin, and for good reason: they share his penchant for killing off sympathetic characters in horrible ways, but to no real point.
As a consequence the books are a slog to read rather than a pleasure, and I am sure I will not return to them the way I have to the classics of the genre. I am planning to give the whole set away in the hope that someone else may like them better.
Sword & Sorcery lacks most of the moral force of the Tolkien's High Fantasy, but it is in a sense more joyous and primal. It is that quality that, sadly, is lacking in the works of Scott Lynch, the first writer I've run into in a while to attempt it. His stories are almost entirely lacking in the joy that gave Fafhrd 'the laugh of the Elder Gods,' or the primal confidence that gave Conan the ferocity to contest demons with cold steel. I read Lynch's three books, hoping he might discover the power of the thing as he played with it; I am sorry to say that he did not.
Lynch's cities are well-drawn, and he has a place for eldritch magic that somehow comes to play little role beyond providing interesting architecture. His heroes are riddled with guilt and loathing, of themselves if they are male. Lynch is of the current fashion that has wholeheartedly adopted feminism as moral truth; female characters are invariably confident and accomplished in a way that his men never are, and yet retain adequate bitter loathing to lecture at length -- whole pages at a time in the third book -- on how unfair the world is to their sex. The books are blurbed by George R. R. Martin, and for good reason: they share his penchant for killing off sympathetic characters in horrible ways, but to no real point.
As a consequence the books are a slog to read rather than a pleasure, and I am sure I will not return to them the way I have to the classics of the genre. I am planning to give the whole set away in the hope that someone else may like them better.
The new fascists
Sebastian Gorka on the bizarre treatment he gets from the press:
My father, as a young boy at the age of 13, escorted his fellow schoolmates to school in Budapest during the German occupation because his fellow schoolmates were forced to wear the yellow Star of David as Jews. And my father, as a Catholic young 14-year-old, protected them from getting beaten up or spat on by the German forces occupying Budapest.
And for them to then accuse me of having some kind of extreme right-wing tendency … you don’t get to call yourself a journalist and lie that badly, but it tells you the state of journalism in America today. But I think that’s going to change.
A Quiet Day in the Country
So today I went out to a farm that raises fallow deer and emus, as well as horses, and enjoyed a nice walk. Later the wife and I went to a leather shop to look at hides and plan some Christmas gift projects -- she's quite talented at many sorts of making, including leatherworking. Following that we had a dinner of home-made chicken soup.
A very quiet, uneventful day. Did I miss anything?
A very quiet, uneventful day. Did I miss anything?
Not Quite My Grandfather's Story, but Close Enough (Plus, Tchaikovsky)
The funny thing here is that, although I think country music like this best tells the story of his life, my grandfather was never really a country music fan. While he didn't go to college and lived much of his life out in the sticks, he mostly listened to classical music. He'd probably rather I play Schubert or Tchaikovsky in his honor. Here's something he might have enjoyed more than the Alan Jackson I've been playing.
(The story the 1812 Overture tells is of the Russian defense against Napolean's invasion, an interesting read in its own right.)
Harvard Law Profs Explain Conservative Dislike for Elite Colleges
Continuing the evening's trend, here's a WaPo article by two Harvard Law professors about why conservatives dislike elite universities. They offer four reasons:
Not bad.
First is the obvious progressive tilt in universities, especially elite universities ...
Second, the distinctive progressive ideology of elite universities is relentlessly critical of, to the point of being intolerant of, traditions and moral values widely seen as legitimate in the outside world ...
Third is the rise of anti-conservative “mobs,” “shout-downs” and “illiberal behavior” on campus ...
Fourth is the public contempt of so many university academics for those who fund their subsidies ...
Not bad.
Stanford Student Sam Wolfe: "Yes, Congress, Tax Stanford's Endowment"
Notable mostly because the Stanford Review published it:
The rest is Wolfe's justification, put in terms of simple economics and the left's own arguments for distribution of wealth. Worth reading.
Update: Or maybe it's not so surprising the Stanford Review published it. The Review claims to be "Stanford's Independent Newspaper" and some current headlines there include:
It's Time to End Net Neutrality
Rally Against Islamophobia Exposes the Double Standards of the Campus Left
Stanford Students Pretend to Support Free Speech, Stumble at Final Hurdle
Why America Still Needs Guns
Wolfe's article seems to be typical. Nice to know.
After the Presidential election cleaved the country in two, pitting Trump’s “poorly-educated” deplorables against Hillary’s college-educated elites, it was probably only a matter of time before Republicans went after their tribal opponents. To this end, both the House and the Senate have proposed tax plans that include a 1.4% tax on the investment income of college endowments. ...
The Republicans have announced no serious rationale for this plan. With college campuses becoming increasingly liberal and the college-educated leaning more heavily Democratic than ever, it is a fairly transparent attempt to hit their opponents where it hurts. The justification that it treats colleges in line with private foundations, which currently face a 2% tax on investment income, rings hollow given that the proposed tax will only apply to about 140 institutions. The plan has faced backlash from liberals and conservatives alike ...
But please, Congress, pass it anyway.
Most income is taxed in some form, whether it be salaries hit by income tax, business revenues that face corporate tax, or private investment earnings slugged by capital gains tax. By failing to tax Stanford’s endowment at all, the government is effectively handing us a large subsidy (in addition to the government funding we already receive). The government is implying that it is happy to tax working Americans more than it otherwise would in order to give Stanford students, and their endowment, a free ride. In light of the damage that elite colleges do to the world, there’s really no excusing this.
...
The rest is Wolfe's justification, put in terms of simple economics and the left's own arguments for distribution of wealth. Worth reading.
Update: Or maybe it's not so surprising the Stanford Review published it. The Review claims to be "Stanford's Independent Newspaper" and some current headlines there include:
It's Time to End Net Neutrality
Rally Against Islamophobia Exposes the Double Standards of the Campus Left
Stanford Students Pretend to Support Free Speech, Stumble at Final Hurdle
Why America Still Needs Guns
Wolfe's article seems to be typical. Nice to know.
At the Harvard Crimson: "100 Years. 100 Million Lives. Think Twice."
Nothing new to us here, but the fact that this is currently the second-most read article at the Harvard Crimson might be news.
Laura A. Nicolae, an undergraduate in applied mathematics at Harvard, writes:
Worth reading the whole thing just for her perspective. It's short and to the point.
Also, I didn't realize the English translation of The Black Book of Communism was published by the Harvard University Press.
Laura A. Nicolae, an undergraduate in applied mathematics at Harvard, writes:
In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.
My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens. His childhood friend disappeared after scrawling an insult about the dictator on the school bathroom wall. His neighbors starved to death from food rations designed to combat “obesity.” As the population dwindled, women were sent to the hospital every month to make sure they were getting pregnant.
...
Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.
Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. ...
Worth reading the whole thing just for her perspective. It's short and to the point.
Also, I didn't realize the English translation of The Black Book of Communism was published by the Harvard University Press.
The Feast of St. Andrew
Most of St Andrew is still [in Italy] today but bits of him have been moved over the years to Scotland.... Legend has it that St Andrew’s first bits ended up in Scotland thanks to St Rule or St Regulus, a Greek monk who had a vision in which he was told to take the bits to the ends of the earth for safekeeping. His journey took him to the shores of Fife, which is easy to mistake for the ends of the earth.
Granddad
This evening I got a call telling me my grandfather had passed away. He plowed behind a mule as a boy, learned to drive in a Model T, served his country in World War II, farmed and welded and did odd jobs to support a devoted wife and a bunch of great kids, told some pretty good stories, and kept working long past the days he needed the money, well into his 80s. I will never be as good a man as he was.
Not the Worst Idea
We all know that the Founders crafted a Constitution that expected imperfect leaders. All the same, character still does count. Virtue is properly honored, and the honors of political office are unwisely given to the vicious. These things were true in Aristotle's day, and they remain true in our own.
An Unwanted Companion
I'm not too surprised to see the news about A Prairie Home Companion maestro Garrison Keillor. Exactly like Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, he is a physically unattractive man whose talents located him in a position of controlling access to show business. Both men really were talented in their way, and both appear to have succumbed to the temptation to use their position to obtain more sexual pleasure than they'd have gained if they had relied upon their physical charms.
Keillor's show had many sublime moments, but it was also marked by nearly continual (and not always at all subtle) mockery of the traditional culture that the show allegedly celebrated. The sophisticates didn't see the value of the old walls, and urged them be swept away. Now we hear that there is no shelter from the wailing wind, and that new walls are needed against it. Plan them well, I suppose, if you are able.
Keillor's show had many sublime moments, but it was also marked by nearly continual (and not always at all subtle) mockery of the traditional culture that the show allegedly celebrated. The sophisticates didn't see the value of the old walls, and urged them be swept away. Now we hear that there is no shelter from the wailing wind, and that new walls are needed against it. Plan them well, I suppose, if you are able.
Landfall
The NYT's Opinion page finally throws away its last shred of pretense to objectivity. This Rubicon was crossed so slowly that you may not even notice that we've finally reached the opposite shore.
What if There are Too Many People?
Fertility rates continue to plummet in the developed world. There are lots of questions about why, and what the long term effects are.
I've thought about this for years, but lately I've begun to rethink my views. Maybe the problem isn't fertility crashing, but overpopulation. The argument for maintaining a larger up-and-coming population than the existing population turns on the need to support the elderly: 8 grandkids can more readily support 2 grandparents than can 2 grandkids. But with automation and robotics, increasingly we won't need people to do the work; and if they become cheaper goods the way other sorts of durable goods do, then we won't need to tap the vast income of the 8 grandkids as much to provide caretaker robots or other things that the elderly need.
Meanwhile, overpopulation has its own set of problems. You don't have to be a crazed environmentalist to see that massive traffic jams don't contribute much to human happiness. In a way, that's not fair: each of the people in the cars in those traffic jams is going somewhere for reasons of his or her own, presumably in pursuit of some individual vision of human happiness. At the same time, any individual one of them would be happier if there were fewer of them doing it.
We should figure out why fertility is declining so rapidly, if we are able. If it's some chemical disorder or disease, that's a problem. But if it's just people making choices to have fewer children, well, maybe lower population is manageable at this moment in technological history in a way it would not have been before. That could be all right.
I've thought about this for years, but lately I've begun to rethink my views. Maybe the problem isn't fertility crashing, but overpopulation. The argument for maintaining a larger up-and-coming population than the existing population turns on the need to support the elderly: 8 grandkids can more readily support 2 grandparents than can 2 grandkids. But with automation and robotics, increasingly we won't need people to do the work; and if they become cheaper goods the way other sorts of durable goods do, then we won't need to tap the vast income of the 8 grandkids as much to provide caretaker robots or other things that the elderly need.
Meanwhile, overpopulation has its own set of problems. You don't have to be a crazed environmentalist to see that massive traffic jams don't contribute much to human happiness. In a way, that's not fair: each of the people in the cars in those traffic jams is going somewhere for reasons of his or her own, presumably in pursuit of some individual vision of human happiness. At the same time, any individual one of them would be happier if there were fewer of them doing it.
We should figure out why fertility is declining so rapidly, if we are able. If it's some chemical disorder or disease, that's a problem. But if it's just people making choices to have fewer children, well, maybe lower population is manageable at this moment in technological history in a way it would not have been before. That could be all right.
Mike Pence and Public Broadcasting
It may be counter-intuitive, but Vice President Pence once won the Champion of Public Broadcasting award.
“Governor Mike Pence is a highly-respected conservative who jealously guards taxpayers’ interests, believes deeply in limited government, values the public service mission of public television, and has recommended an investment of State funds in support of that mission in Indiana,” said APTS president and CEO Patrick Butler. “We are profoundly grateful for his support of our work in education, public safety and well-informed citizenship, and we are honored to present a well-deserved Champion of Public Broadcasting Award to one of the most principled and talented political leaders in our country.”There are reasons to question whether the public interest is best served by a government-run news agency, which will of course be operating in the interests of the government -- not necessarily the same as the interests of the public. Still, the recognition of the role that journalism plays in creating an educated and informed public is striking compared to the current administration's rhetoric towards news even of the market-based sort.
“The foundation of a free society is an educated and informed public,” said Governor Pence. “For decades, Indiana’s public television stations have enriched and engaged the Hoosier public and reflected the state’s values. I am grateful for their service and that of the Association of Public Television Stations in furthering the knowledge of viewers across this great nation every day.”
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