This Should Be Interesting

The state legislature has passed a bill that would make it a crime for any person to attempt to implement the PP-ACA -- which is to say that, if Gov. Haley signs the bill, it will be against state law to implement Federal law. She may or may not sign it, but she's on the record as being totally opposed to implementation:

South Carolina does not want, and cannot afford, the president’s health care plan. Not now, and not ever. To that end, we will not pursue the type of government-run health exchanges being forced on us by Washington. Despite the rose-colored rhetoric coming out of D.C., these exchanges are nothing more than a way to make the state do the federal government’s bidding in spending massive amounts of taxpayer dollars on insurance subsidies that we can’t afford.

The article portrays this attempt at nullification as a "viable alternative to secession," but seeing organized resistance to the Federal government at the state level does not make secession less likely. Nullification crises also preceded the Civil War, after all, as well as other very tense moments in early American history that led to the several great compromises of the early 19th century. Another compromise might have put off, or avoided, the Civil War -- but there were some set on having their way, including not just the hot-tempered folks from South Carolina but a president, Lincoln, who was utterly sure of the rightness of his position.

Today we have both aggravating conditions as well as a law that is likely to meet nullification efforts elsewhere as well as in South Carolina. Its implementation may well prove incredibly unpopular given the vast increases in cost and taxes, and the damage it will do to people's ability to find work adequate to making a living. Congress can take no effective action to fix the problems with the law until 2015 at the earliest, and it will be 2017 before there is a chance of repeal. The Supreme Court has upheld the law, twisting themselves in a knot in attempt to find it constitutional. So the states have to be the field of action for the necessary resistance: there's no getting around that.

Well, it'll be an exciting time to be alive, anyway.

Mitt Romney Gives Democratic Advice

Mother Jones is subtly mocking him for his suggestion to new college graduates that they should begin having children as soon as is feasible, but it's the progressives who need to be rethinking their opposition to young marriage and child-rearing. More than they have yet realized, their beloved social insurance programs depend on solid families. For one thing, a married couple raising their own children is the one group least likely to drain the coffers of such programs. For another, a married couple is statistically likely to be far richer, and thus capable of paying higher taxes to support such programs. Finally, large families provide the seeds for more such families in the future -- more taxpayers, and taxpayers whose upbringing in successful marriages mean they are more likely to sustain successful marriages themselves.

The day is coming when they will no longer be able to pretend that is not so. The loudest calls for family and children will be coming from the Left: before you know it, now that the Baby Boomers have begun to retire, the young will be hearing that this is their patriotic duty.

A Finding

It's in the passive voice, but the percentages are about equal to those who felt the same way in, say, 1775.

May Day

The joys of spring and the greenwood to you, as we enter the cathedral of May.

Prison Couldn't Happen To A More Deserving Couple

It's rare to see our justice system produce so poetic a result.

“Your statement that I have disgraced my judgeship is true. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame.”

The two judges face up to seven years in prison under a plea agreement made with the state.

If the result were fully poetic, of course, they would not have been offered a plea deal. They'd be railroaded into prison for an excessive period of time, having been kept away from legal representation. They benefit from the prosaic concerns of justice that they so often denied to others, in order to enrich themselves.

More amazing music

At AVI.

Democracy May Have Had Its Day

So argues a hero of the academy, in his final hour.

Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in "Pericles of Athens" (1991), is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience." It relies on "free, autonomous and self-reliant" citizens and "extraordinary leadership" to flourish, even survive.

These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."

As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech. Those who see liberal education in crisis return to those ideas. "Crisis suggests it might recover," Mr. Kagan shoots back. "Maybe it's had its day. Democracy may have had its day. Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy."

Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny. The Founding Fathers took on their criticism and strove to balance liberty with equality under the law.

In just the last few weeks I have come to a realization about the way the Founders structured our system of government. As we have discussed here many times, Aristotle argued that there were three basic forms of government, each of which could become perverted by self-interest among the ruling class. Each of the three had characteristic strengths and weaknesses. The three forms of government are rule-by-one, rule-by-few, and rule-by-many: you can call them monarchy, aristocracy, and polity. If the monarch comes only to care about his own thoughts and interests, he becomes a tyrant; the aristocracy, an oligarchy; and the polity, on Aristotle's terms, a democracy.

What I've realized very recently is that the Founders took some pains to give us all three forms of government. It isn't just that the branches of government have checks and balances. It is that they are different forms of government, on just Aristotle's terms. The Congress is a polity (or democracy). It is popularly elected, and enacts decisions by majority rule. It is susceptible to both the goods and the harms of rule-by-many.

The judiciary is an aristocracy (or oligarchy). It is built around an elite class with barriers to entry. It has the strengths and the weaknesses of rule-by-few.

The executive is essentially a monarchy (or tyranny). One man dominates it, selects its leaders, and orders its functions. It has all the potential benefits and hazards of rule-by-one.

What the Founders did was to give us a system that not only checked three branches with three separate functions against one another. They also provided us with a system in which the three basic kinds of government were all present, and counterbalanced. We could get every good Aristotle saw in every system; and when one branch went bad, there was the hope that the competing interests of the other forms of government might right it.

It was a good idea. There is only one problem, and it is one Aristotle did not consider: the problem of scale. More and more, I think a government must adhere to a human scale in order to be just. I mean by "a human scale" that maximum set of people such that the members can all know one another, and care about one another. At levels beyond this, a fundamental aspect of humanity is lost: we don't love each other any more, and are content to treat the unloved members as less than the beloved ones.

Whether such a government can practically exist on earth, I do not know: much of that depends on the difficulty of being able to defend yourself against the other humans outside the order, who do not love you in any case. Unless we find a way to achieve it, though, I cannot imagine a society that will escape Jefferson's requirement: that of periodic overthrow and replacement, in order to keep the tree of liberty hale.

The worldwideweb

We lost our internet connection briefly this morning, which deprived me of access to essential information like this:



Update:  I guess that first link was broken.  This one is from YouTube, and should inspire you to check out the other offerings from these total nutcases.

Long 'Ere We Came to the Streets of Aberdeen

In the comments to one of Tex's posts, I mentioned having dinner last night with an older gentleman who had been in Iraq as a British soldier just about fifty years before I was there. He is of English origin, but at one point he had spent significant time teaching in Aberdeen. The Scots of Aberdeen, he said, feel about the same way about their English visitors as Southerners do about Yankees.

He told a story to illustrate the point. An Englishman is driving north from Edinburgh toward Aberdeen, when he comes to a fork in the road. The signpost pointing to the left fork reads "Aberdeen, 30 miles," and the sign on the right fork reads the same thing. Puzzled, he pulls off to ponder the situation until he sees an old Scot working his field.


Grim faces a similar dilemma.
The Englishman gets out of the car and steps over to where the Scot is laboring, and calls down to him from the road. "Excuse me, good man," he says, "but does it make any difference which road I take to Aberdeen?"

The Scot ponders the question in a dark silence for a moment. Then he replies, "Nae ta me!"

Kicking the anthill

Minor excitement in my neighborhood this morning as a fellow who was either off the right meds or on the wrong ones gave several people the alarmed creeps over the course of the morning.  He ultimately followed my next-door neighbor right up to her house, making inappropriate conversation, and increasing the "eww" factor by choosing to take off his shirt as they approached the door.  She went inside, locked the door, armed herself, and called for help.  Presently her husband and his co-worker arrived (armed) to block off our "loop" on both ends, while various other neighbors ventured out (armed) to see what was up, the phone tree having reached most nearby households by that time.  Two sheriff's deputies arrived to take him into custody at about the time more distant neighbors started driving up (armed) to look into something they'd heard on the scanner.

Once he'd been hauled off, my neighbor's husband came home to hear the details from her.  When she got to the part about the guy taking off his shirt, her husband's face assumed a dead-eyed expression I'd never seen on it before.  He's normally the most amiable of fellows.  His face made me want to back up a step.

We get the occasional passers-through who irritate us mildly by loitering on our loop for the apparent purpose of drinking a six-pack and dumping the cans before driving home, or perhaps waiting for a chance to ditch an old appliance rather than spend the time or money necessary to leave it at the dump.  We invite them to clear out, but we don't go ape.  This guy didn't do or say anything overtly threatening.  Nevertheless, he punched every button we own, inducing that atavistic reaction of "snake.  Kill it."  The sheriff's deputies were giving his truck and his person a thorough searching the last I saw.  If he was carrying, he picked the wrong way to call attention to himself.

More rituals that bind

A friend's father died a few days ago.  It was not a tragic death; he was very old, had been miserably ill for years, and badly missed his wife of 57 years, who died a couple of years back.  He got a proper send-off yesterday.  A preacher spoke briefly and to the point.  We sang hymns.  The Masons conducted their elaborate, touching ceremony, then an honor guard of Marines from Corpus Christi delivered a 21-gun salute, folded the flag properly for delivery to our friend, and finished up with a very fine "Taps."  The Masons put on a lunch for the visiting family.

Ray Brashears joined the Navy in 1944, then again in 1945, having been ousted the first time when they discovered he was only 17 years old.  He served in the Bikini Islands during the atomic testing there and was one of the few surviving members of that cohort.  He settled in our neighborhood in 1974, which by local standards made him quite the old timer.  He left nine great-grandchildren.

Television News

As most of you know, Grim's Hall has been without television since 2006 -- originally as a cost-saving measure, and later because we found we didn't miss it. I didn't have a lot of time for television before that, and one reason it made so little impact on us was that we were always too busy to watch it anyway. I mostly used it to watch old movies that happened to be on late in the evening as I was winding down for bed, but that can be done more cheaply in many ways. In addition I've often been out of the country, in places where television wasn't necessarily available or in English.

For these reasons I've been largely immune to many of the worst trends afflicting society these last twenty years: reality television, the general decline of standards of obscenity, the general rise of libertine standards on displays of sexuality. But I had thought I was more or less engaged with the news, because I keep up with the news carefully as a citizen ought to do.

These last few days have disabused me of that notion. Visiting a relative in the hospital, I've been exposed to television news as it is now done on both local and cable networks. I am appalled.

We used to watch the news at home when I was a boy, and I remember that it was nearly always bad. But I don't remember the obsessive focus on getting and displaying footage of those whom the overwhelming force of tragedy has momentarily turned to screaming, crying, emotional wrecks. At some point the news has become genuinely wicked, preying on disaster for the pure voyeuristic pleasure of seeing a human being reduced to an animal.

This is horrifying and shameful. I dread to consider what it says about our culture.

All's not lost in the world of architecture

A collection of weird architecture.  Most of these are great. Not crazy about the hotel in Dubai. Two are by Gaudi, just about my favorite architect.

 

Eggshells

If you've ever raised chickens, you know how long the eggs stay fresh in their shells even without refrigeration.  Some clever people are working on a genetic trick to get vaccines to form their own calcium shells so they can more easily reach remote populations lacking refrigeration.

H/t Rocket Science.

My kind of bishop

I'm amazed Grim hasn't posted about this yet.

Update: Hey, c'mon! No one likes this story? It's got it all: damsel in distress, neighborhood comes together instead of going all Kitty Genovese, and a Mormon bishop is a full-on Ninja hero with a sword. Definitely not what the bad guy expected.

Eric Blair's Problem on Display

A few places, really.

Assumptions

In his ongoing quest to give migraines to Cassandra, James Taranto has written again about women and the workplace. His argument isn't the one that interests me, though, but the one to which he is responding.

The headline is a grabber: "Female Ivy League Graduates Have a Duty to Stay in the Workforce." In the piece itself, Goff actually stops well short of endorsing that position wholeheartedly. She acknowledges that "most sane and fair people can agree that any woman has the right to make whatever choice she believes is best for her family--whether that is choosing to stay home full-time or work outside of the home," but in the same sentence she suggests that "women have a definite responsibility to make choices for the good of all women, such as putting an elite degree to use outside of the home."

Similarly, Goff disavows the belief "that every woman should be made to feel as though [she] must choose between being committed to [her] children or committed to the sisterhood of women's advancement," then in the next sentence affirms that a woman with a Harvard Law School degree who forgoes a lengthy professional career has "wasted" an "opportunity."

What I'm curious about is this assumption by Goff that women in the workplace can be assumed to be, even in part, doing something that advances "the good of all women." That could be true, but why ought it to be assumed?

There are lots of men who get degrees from Ivy League schools, but it has never occurred to me to think that their degrees do me (or men generally) any good. In fact, the opposite is true: men ordinarily think of other men as competition, and so a man obtaining an advanced degree from a school with a high reputation means that my opportunities are in a certan sense going to decrease, not increase. This is because any job that we might compete for he is more likely to obtain, given the respect his credentials will enjoy.

That is not necessarily true, of course: he could use the knowledge gained while seeking his degree to start a business that could employ me, and that would increase my opportunities. But entrepreneurs don't usually require advanced degrees, let alone from famous schools: given the expense of obtaining such a credential, most seekers understandably put it to use in competition for positions in government, finance, or in universities. That's where the big advantages of high starting pay favor them most. So normally, then, a man (or a woman) who gets an Ivy League degree is occupying a space that is then not available for others to occupy.

Of course, there's a sense in which whatever they do (apart from government), they're contributing to an economy whose expansion increases opportunities for everyone. But if you're a man (or woman) who wants a job, the less competition the better -- and the fewer people with Ivy League degrees seeking the job you want, the more likely you will get it.

Now, Goff might be arguing that women have a duty to get into positions to hire and promote women; but of course discriminating in favor of women is illegal, so surely she doesn't mean to advocate for that. After all, a business who made it a policy to hire and promote only or especially men would be in danger of large lawsuits. Certainly she can't be advocating for women who obtain such positions to put their company at risk. That would be a violation of their duty to their employers.

It used to be said that women being present at all in a job opened opportunities for women, simply because getting their first made the point that women could do it. Surely, though, that is at least a generation past: there aren't any jobs left in the economy that women don't do, except the ones they don't choose to do. We haven't had a female President, but not because anyone thinks we couldn't possibly have one: rather, it is only because Democrats in 2004 preferred then-Senator Obama to then-Senator Clinton. If she had won the Democratic primary that year, it is all but certain she would have been elected to the Presidency.

So maybe Goff's assumption is outdated. It could be the mark of a true equality if women began to regard other women with advanced degrees the same way they think of the men who compete with them: as competitors out for their own good, and if hired, the good of their employer. Expecting them to help you is an expectation misplaced. Not only will they probably not, they probably ought not. Their duties in the market lie elsewhere.

Lars Walker's Problem On Display

The very issue that I had wanted to discuss, in Lars Walker's Hailstone Mountain, is on display today in TIME Magazine.

It's an attractive view. An educated and thoughtful man wrote it.

The little girl smiled. "Nobody hurts anybody anymore."

There are worse things than this in the world, I thought.

There are, aren't there?

From Jim Geraghty:

From the Daily Caller: The bill Rubio has been pushing isn't as bad as you might have expected. For one thing:

Congressional Democrats wanted Obamacare exchanges to cover all immigrants.  However, in addition to putting all illegal immigrants who legalize under the same constraints as legal immigrants with regard to benefit-seeking (i.e., they are legally barred from seeking or receiving welfare), the immigration bill also prevents access to Obamacare.  As Sen. Marco Rubio said on Fox News Sunday, “[T]hey don’t qualify for any federal benefits….  This is an important point.  No federal benefits, no food stamps, no welfare, no Obamacare.  They have to prove they’re gainfully employed.  They have to be able to support themselves, so they’ll never become a public charge.”  This is a point on which President Obama was forced to concede, and a make-or-break point from conservatives’ standpoint.

That's what I call visiting the sick

Maybe the greatest morale boost these two ever got.

Update: I forgot to credit Bookworm Room.