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"Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves." –- Norm Franz My Stuff Safe in the Fire Swamp Amazon Profile Old Silver Articles Blogger Profile Blogs of Friends and Heroes 3 O'Clock AM A Tenor's Tale Code Monkey Ramblings Elusive Wapiti Giraffe in a Compact Car Hart's Heart Jayhawkers and Red Legs JD's Evolution Jedi for God Jim Sinclair John of Argghhh! Kawaika Magic Negro Watch Metal Dad Mish Roland Drake Rollin' Like Sisyphus Something Feral Vox Popoli Vikings Blog ...will not be televised Required Reading 7 Lesson Schoolteacher Aliens Cause Global Warming Fire and Ice Is the USA Bankrupt? Neutral Power FTW On the Reading of Old Books The Subprime Primer The Toledoth of Genesis Archives November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009
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Never ask a woman In Roman History today as Witch Hazel* was discussing the Sibyl, a priestess who lived in a cave and occasionally gave advice** (though mostly to men), I had my second politically incorrect thought of the week***:Women should never ask other women for advice, especially as it relates to relationships, which is the advice they most often request.I'm quite serious. In fact, tonight as I packed up all 7 of my copies of "The Rules" (a book by women that purports to tell other women how to snag the man they want) for shipment to unsuspecting women buyers/victims, I thought about it again and reached the same conclusion. The problem with women asking other women for advice is simply this: most women asking for advice do not really want a solution to the named problem; they want sympathy and affirmation. And most**** women who give advice understand this and respond accordingly. The correct answer to most women's relationship problems (assuming, for the moment, that they are actually looking for a solution) can come from one of two places: either she should ask a man - studiously ignoring all advice from her woman friends, especially those that have proved themselves inept in regards to this particular problem - or, in the case that a trustworthy one is not available, she should take Vox Day's advice to search her feelings and then do the opposite. The reason is simply one of biology, IMHO. Most men, if you ask them about a problem, will analyze the problem - we are engineerish that way. Most women, on the other hand, will foremostly empathize with your place in the situation*****. Thus if the problem is not being able to find a husband, the man will often recommend changes you can and should effect to make yourself a more attractive mate. The woman will reassure you that you are worthwhile. Of course, if the real problem is just that you feel bad about a situation, then go ahead and ask a Sibyl. You'll feel far better knowing that the problem, while remaining insoluble, is at least everyone else's fault. * My professor looks just like the picture except that her hat is green. ** She did provide a good bit of history as well, such as this Roman remembrance of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11): "But when the judgements of Almighty God*** and thus Misty, in using the sole triple-dog dare in her repertoire to get me to post the Aztec rant on Lawrence.com, missed the opportunity for me to post this one, which would have undoubtedly caused several of the feminista brigade to burst their ovaries in blind rage. **** Except my wife, who will say flat-out, "If you're just looking for sympathy, look elsewhere." She is very unwomanly in that respect. ***** When I once suggested that if a woman wanted to find a good man her bioclock and children were issues, a certain KU professor replied with "Wow. I've never felt so objectified before." One solution is based on an objective analysis of the situation, the other on a subjective evaluation of feelings. Both were unsurprisingly stereotypical responses. Labels: feminism   It's snowing outside right now... but not enough.  CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- A congress wholly loyal to President Hugo Chavez approved a law Wednesday granting him authority to enact sweeping measures by decree.Dictatorships are seldom started by men who are unpopular, and if one looks back to the dictators of history, whether elected ones like Hitler or military ones like Caesar Augustus, one will find that at the beginning of their reigns - usually following a period of political chaos or national humiliation (or both) - the vast majority of people under their rule have no problem giving the dictator all the power he needs to get things fixed. Chavez has several real advantages as he begins single-handedly organizing the details of millions of lives: 1) the current price of oil gives him lots of bread and circus money, and 2) the people he is ruling have a long and glorious history of suffering dictatorships and, when given a chance, creating them. The first, of course, won't last forever. Venezuela will either devolve into an enormous welfare state that will starve to death once their oil peaks or the price falls, or it will develop into an industrial beehive that will stop exporting oil altogether, wasting instead its vast internal resources on busywork. Either way, a good time will be had by all while it lasts, and when it collapses there will be lots skulls piled up - that's what "Socialism is Democracy" means when you apply it to real people. The second is precisely the reason GWB's Iraq dreams will never, ever come true. No matter what we do, and probably no matter what we could ever have done.  There are few time-wasters more enjoyable than a quiz that can't get the questions right*. Here's one such presented by that media outlet known affectionately as the Beeb: 5 questions, multiple choice, with several throwaway answers to reduce the chances of you getting a wrong answer and to ensure that everyone feels good about their scores, and one question that you can get right only by being completely ignorant of its subject.For those who actually want to take the quiz, I won't reveal ahead of time which question is wrong (I'll put it inthe comments). You'll just have to fight it yourself. * That seems to be a common problem in history quizzes. Labels: history  I'm glad the Aztecs are dead. Seriously. I'm glad their empire fell, glad their kings and nobles died bleeding through their pores, glad the Spanish put an end to what was the most bloodthirsty regime that ever soiled the face of the planet, bar none. People who lament that the coming of the Spaniards resulted in the destruction of Meso-American culture* are, in my opinion, fools. It was unalterably evil to the core.When the Aztecs rededicated their main temple in 1448ish, they ripped the living hearts out of 80,000 captives, a process that took 4 days and resulted in blood streaming down 20 stories of stone steps. The blood smeared on the walls inside their temples was so thick you could slice ribbons of it off with a sword. When they went to war they often fought merely to wound so they could return thousands of live captives in order to rip out their beating hearts in public celebration. Their gods** demanded the living blood of millions of human victims to drink, the priests and nobility their raw flesh to eat, and they cast all of Central America into a two centuries' long orgy of ritual murder. It is quite unsurprising that Cortes and his few Spaniards were able to gather hundreds of thousands of allies on their march to the halls of Montezuma: those neighbors hated the Aztecs with both passion and good reason. So while my professor is of such sterling quality that I can pretty much say anything without fear of political reprisal so long as it's adequately footnoted, it's still probably a good thing my research paper is 15 pages on Cortes' supply train. * Sure, I wish more history had been preserved, too, but the Aztecs purposely destroyed that before the Spaniards even arrived. ** Terrible gods make for terrible people, and the gods of the Aztecs were the most evil imaginable. Labels: history  What kind of goth are you?  The Theological Ninja drops an interesting plumb line:Lots of people ask me, “Hey Ninja, how do you come to your conclusions about what’s proper to do in a worship service?” To which I reply, “Silly grasshopper, I use the Bible. Sola Scriptura!”Of course, that means that dedicated church buildings, personal bibles, even closed windows (Acts 20:9) are somehow forbidden Christians in their places of worship. Anyone who attends a church service that is not held in someone's house is in big trouble with God, because the original churches did not meet in churches, they met in homes (Ro 16:5, 1Cor 16:19, Phi 1:2). Don't go to church: you might be damned*. But why stop at worship? After all, if the Regulative Principle** is fit for worship, it ought to be fit for the rest of life. And since as Christians we are to walk in Christ (Col 2:6) it ought to follow that we ought never do anything the Bible doesn't say he did or was never done to him, right? Therefore we ought never put diapers on our babies (Jesus was never potty trained in the Bible), change our socks, or condition our hair. We ought never wear underwear, flip a burger, or pet a dog. And we certainly ought to never use a computer, drive a car, or save money. After all, if these things were good, certainly the Lord of Life would have done them. And the Bible never once, not one single time, says Jesus went to the bathroom. So don't ever talk to a man about a horse or bury a quaker: that's surefire damnation. After all, God will "cut off ... him that pisseth against the wall" (1Ki 14:10). It's quite easy to claim that because the scriptures are able to make us wise to salvation (2Tim 3:15) that the scriptures are an exhaustive list of "do"s and "don't"s*** for every area of life. But the scriptures are written for examples (1Cor 10:11) for our living. It is then up to us to live wisely in whatever world we find ourselves. * There seems to be a certain type of Christian whose God is always looking for some excuse to toss him into hell. ** Which, I note, is not in the Bible. *** and especially the latter, apparently. Labels: christianity  Ronald Reagan once noted concerning liberals that, "It's not so much that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that ain't so." But I think there are plenty of cases that show that they are not only ignorant, but that they are so because they refuse to accept obvious data that contradict their worldview:Labour has been accused of losing control of gun crime as new figures show a sharp rise in armed robberies.Read that last paragraph again, pondering, just briefly, the word "unexplained." It's not remotely unexplained to anyone with the ability to consistently get "four" when two twos are added together, and those who insist that the result is unexplained either lack mental firepower or simply choose not to believe the truth. The truth is that the more onerous Britain makes gun ownership (recommending rather that those whose homes are invaded by armed thugs "retreat to a secure room,") the more brash those who disobey the laws become. Armed criminals need no other reason to be emboldened than the knowledge that their intended victims are less and less likely to be able to defend themselves. It is so always and everywhere. In 5 years since 2001 (a year in which the BBC noted that handgun crime was already up 40% since handguns were banned just 2 years prior) armed home invasions have increased fourfold. Yet the liberal politicians' consistent answer is to make the problem the solution: Home Office minister Tony McNulty ... added: "We have some of the toughest firearm legislation in Europe."It seems that another aphorism is quite correct in the case of liberals who assert that gun crime can be stopped by passing laws against gun ownership: there are truly none so blind as those who will not see. Labels: guns  I wrote a post last month called "Wave Goodbye to Subprime Mortgages," in which I confessed the fact that I had completely overlooked the real problem with the subprime mortgage market:"I missed the paramount danger, which was not that someone who's today in a home owned by the bank will live tomorrow in a home owned by a landlord. It's what happens when lots and lots of similarly-classed people are forced from their mortgaged homes in a very short period. In other words, the true danger in the housing market is not that 1% or 2% of people can't pay their bills, it's that an entire class of assets, upon which trillions of dollars in other assets is suspended, has created a massive and potentially disasterous undercurrent that all manner of do-gooders did not foresee."The real danger to the economy is not what happens when a lot of people can't pay their mortgages, but when a lot of people in a defined class upon which is built an entire sector of the economy and financial markets can't pay them. The first thing we should expect as the subprime mortgage market implodes is the death of specialist companies in that market. Thanks to the Implode-O-Meter (link added on the left as this will be an ongoing problem*) we can see that such is exactly what is happening: Count of US Mortgage lenders that have croaked in the past 30 days: 2007-01-24: Mandalay Mortgage - Subprime lendingI note with interest that many are followed by the notation "No Story**," though the details are usually linked to company websites that all list in official legalese that the company is tats up so don't bother to call. What those who are looking are seeing, however, is a massive and immediate change in the subprime lending market, driven by rising interest rates, delinquencies, and the fact that Americans have simply borrowed about as much home equity as they can borrow. Consumers are tapped out, and in the short term it will not get any better. We are nowhere near the bottom of the housing market, but we may very well be reaching the limits of the current housing-driven economic expansion. Rogue mentioned to me last week the surfeit of stories she has seen recently about the need for Americans to save money. This was right after I read her quarterly retirement newsletter that - while it has a vested interest in people saving - was remarkable for the fact that it was almost pleading with its customers to spend less and save more. Someone is very scared about the economic near future***. I don't think these stories are accidental. Something wicked this way comes. * The Implode-O-Meter also has a list of lenders that may be on the brink of shutting down. ** This is a story that is not in the regular press yet. *** besides me, I mean. UPDATE: 1/25 2 more lenders fled the market today, Millennium Bancshares and Summit Mortgage. That makes seven in the last week. A number of people (okay, just 1) have written telling me that from 12/20/06 to 1/24/07 is more than 30 days. You're correct, it's 35ish. So sue me. Labels: economy  Except when it forgets to, apparently:A type of shark, rarely seen alive, has been captured in Japan.The phrase "living fossil" has always intrigued me. It sounds as if there's a secret time vortex leading from the Paleocene Epoch directly to the modern coast of Japan where Gamara and Godzilla are just waiting in the wings for that nuclear blast to melt their frozen prison so they can come ashore near Tokyo for a really good time**. What it really means is far more mundane: in the time it took man to evolve from rats, mice, and squirrels***, this guy evolved from a frilled shark into, well, a frilled shark. Way to keep up with the pack, buddy. * Circa 3000bc, as "prehistoric times" are properly defined as the time before written history. ** Whew! That was quite a sentence. *** Don't laugh. Squirrels are some of the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodents you ever laid eyes on. Labels: evolution  This would actually be funny in an over-the-top, laugh-at-the-Utopians sort of way if Democrats were not completely in earnest about it. "Why Mommy is a Democrat" might not be the official Democratic party platform*, but it does capture what the Democrats who endorse it call the party's "core values."Because most people already teach their kids the nice things the book promotes, the distinctive Democratic core value here seems to be that there is no difference between families and governments: government is, in effect, just a big Mommy. And the real reason Mommy is a Democrat is because she wants the government to coerce people into doing the things she would make them do if she had all that power herself. Other people ignore her will because she's not really their mommy, so Mommy works hard to build a government that can make them obey her anyway. * They would need to add at least five pages suitable for coloring. (hat tip: Misty) Labels: democrats  Or is the Associated Press pushing an agenda:State inmates outlive people on outsideCheck me if I'm wrong, but isn't the number of inmates dying in prison completely unrelated to the length of people's lives simply because a) most prisoners are younger than the general population*, b) most prisoners are released - alive - after a few years, and c) excluding people aged 65 and older from your sample is a damned poor way to tell who's living longer? The vast majority of people who do time do not die in prison simply because they serve a term and then are released**, while everyone on the outside dies eventually. Comparing the number of people dying in any given year from such disparate statistical samples seems to me quite unlikely to lead to the conclusion the AP reaches. I do notice, however, that the one number that would prove the headline and conclusion true beyond a doubt - the life expectancy of a life-without-paroler - is absent from the article. In light of that missing number, what's the AP trying to accomplish by implying we'd live longer if only we could all be prisoners? * "...people ages 25 to 44 are overrepresented among prisoners compared to their share in the general adult population; older people are underrepresented among prisoners. " -- "Who's in Prison? The Changing Demographics of Incarceration" p.4 ** It's seemingly only those waiting to be executed who die of old age.  So I was moving around a couple of icons on my desktop and accidentally dropped the Recycle Bin into my My Documents folder. But since Windows does not allow the Recycle Bin to be moved from the desktop, it placed a shortcut in the folder instead. I found the shortcut and tried to delete it, but Windows asked me, "Are you sure you want to send 'Recycle Bin' to the Recycle Bin?"And I thought, if I do that, where would it go?  Another Defense Department fairy story crumbles beneath the unbearable weight of mockery:WASHINGTON: Reversing itself, the Defense Department now acknowledges that a U.S. government espionage report it produced warning about Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside was not true.Technology challenges aside, it would take a pretty stupid spy to place a tracking device inside an object that the person being tracked is unlikely to carry with him. Seriously, how many American defense contractors do you suppose carry around Canadian nickels in their pockets and never spend them? If you're carrying it, it's to get rid of, if you're not likely to get rid of it, you're not going to carry it. Use of coins as a "tracking device" doesn't even make good fiction. Try placing them in tooth fillings or eyeglass rims next time. The Defense Department's response to questions about the revelation, "The story is true but the details are classified," was as unoriginal as it was entirely predictable. It wasn't until defense experts reacted with open scorn and derision that the DoD decided to admit that the "report" was merely an urban legend from the beginning. But remember kids, if Canadian spies ever try to make you witdraw money from an ATM, you can summon the police immediately by entering your PIN number in reverse. Really. Labels: money, technology  The Democrats apparently don't like French cuisine all that much:The House of Representatives last year passed legislation to ban federally inspected horse slaughter in the U.S. Federal inspection of meat from slaughtered horses allows it to be exported to countries like France and Belgium where horsemeat is considered a delicacy. The bill died in the Senate after farm state lawmakers blocked it. But now its back, as lawmakers re-introduced the measure in both chambers of Congress this week...When all is said and done, Democratic and treehugger arguments against horse consumption boil down to "horses are pretty" while pigs and chickens are not. Horses that are not eaten by people will simply be eaten by something else, most likely flies and maggots and coyotes in the ditch behind the barn, or will be made into glue once again. If Frogs want to join the feast, so what? As this bill gets tabled in the Senate once again, I fully expect to see Lady Clintdiva* riding naked on a horse to protest the injustices visited upon these august beasts, who deserve taxpayer-funded nursing homes and Social Security benefits rather than the ignoble death of a meat-packing plant. * Actually, I just threw up a little bit in my mouth at the thought of a naked Hillary riding through my village. The imperial bust thing was bad enough. Labels: politics   La Shawn Barber wraps up her argument on the immorality of illegal immigration with the totalitarian's* favorite scripture, Romans 13:1-4:Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.Now while I have no problem with any of Ms. Barber's points about whether the government has the right to limit immigration (it does), I have a very large problem with using these 4 verses, without context, as a universal command**, because to do so ignores a great deal of biblical teaching and leads very quickly to a slippery slope that has been followed too many times in human history. But before I get into that, I feel a Moral Quandary Interlude(tm) coming on Moral Quandary Interlude: assuming that all acts mentioned below are done in perfect accordance with the law, if the government was rounding up illegal immigrants and commanded that every citizen turn in those they were aware of, should the Christian turn in immigrants: a) knowing they would be severely scolded and set free?In all probability, each one of us probably started out with a yes and at some point stopped going along. And yet the average pro-government conservative who uses Romans 13 to submit the Christian to government in all cases cannot logically stop*** at any of those points, because it's all legal. If the government is to be obeyed in all things, then it would be morally required to turn infants over to be flayed and salted if the government says so, and there's no sense bothering over Anne Frank, either. There must be something wrong with that interpretation, and there is. What is wrong with it is that it makes the assumption that when Paul talks about "right" and "wrong," he really means "legal" and "illegal," that "those who do right" are the selfsame as "those who obey the law" and do the former by doing the latter. But arbitrary laws - immigration laws, import laws, speed limits, and the like - seldom have anything to do with morality at all; they are negotiated (or purchased) standards. Saying "It's against the law" in reference to any of them may be a fact, but it is not and cannot be a moral argument. When it comes to moral arguments, law may intersect with morality or it may not. There are certain things that are right and must be done irrespective of whether they are against the law. When commanded by the authorities to stop preaching the Gospel, Peter and John simply went on doing what they were doing, "obeying God rather than men," and accepted the consequences of that. Jesus healed on the Sabbath in violation of the law and virtually dared the Pharisees to stop him. And there are certain things that are wrong and ought not be done whether they are required by the law or not. A soldier commanded to kill an innocent person is a murderer if he obeys, no matter how high up the chain of command his orders originate. He can avoid the wrath of his commander by following the order, but he'll not avoid the wrath of God in this life or the next. In short, morality overrides law; it always has and always will. While Paul seems to be making a universal statement if we take it in isolation, too often we ignore the fact that it is simply one rhetorical point in a larger teaching on peaceful Christian Living within a larger non-Christian society. So how do we balance Paul's seeming universal "no authority but from God" with Peter's "obey God rather than men"? We don't balance it, as if each is half right. Rather we discern, based on the law itself, whether it is a legitimate exercise of God's authority through men or not. If the law commands a moral wrong that law is illegitimate, and the Christian is not only right in ignoring it but must do so no matter the cost. If the law forbids a moral good it is illegitimate, and the same results must occur. In short, when it comes to law, even arbitrary law, we ought to follow Paul's admonition to submit to government, for such contributes to order and peace, and Paul's admonition is a recognition that the rules of government generally promote peaceful interaction and should be given the benefit of the doubt. That is, up to the point that there is some moral demand or responsibility that requires us to discard it. Then we must ignore it and obey God instead. So all that said, what has it to do with immigration? Bloody little, actually, because immigrants are individuals who may have legitimate moral reasons for ignoring the law or may not. One simply cannot make the argument that being an illegal immigrant is a de facto moral offense, yet that forms the basis of Ms. Barber's accusation of "un-Christ-like behavior" by those who break immigration law: Kindness ... (is) about holding people accountable and encouraging them to make amends for their wrongdoing, to alleviate the suffering they’ve caused others. Why don’t I ever read a Christians-and-illegal-aliens news story that mentions the moral and legal obligations of Christ-following illegal aliens?It is silly to try to make a case that illegal immigrants are necessarily "wrongdoing" because they are living peacefully on the wrong side of an arbitrary line. If the immigrant is truly doing wrong or causing suffering to another person, then such person ought to be called to account under the same laws as any other person. But if (for example) the immigrant has children to feed and the only way to meet this real moral responsibility is to break the government's unenforced and arbitrary standard - and is in no other way harming his neighbor - I'm certainly not going to criticize the morality of his doing so. And without knowing the specific moral responsibilities of the Christian immigrant, neither should anyone else. (hat tip: Snoop) * This is not calling names, it is recognizing that the totalitarian has no more powerful weapon than in convincing the Christian citizen that the ruler's will and God's will are one and the same. If the government is the final arbiter of right and wrong, government is for all intents and purposes God. ** In all fairness, big-government religious conservatives admit it's not universal, like when they protect and take part in the law-breaking, "un-Christ-like behavior" of bible-smugglers in China or write letters to save Christians in Afghanistan. However, so long as it is in reference to laws they wish to see enforced, they consistently promote it as a Christian's undeniable duty. *** Not being able to logically stop does not keep people from stopping, thank God, because most people innately understand that governments on occasion and with some regularity oppose God rather than acting as his regent. Logic, when built on false premises, is often a hindrance to life rather than a help. Labels: christianity, politics  you're the mullet:Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The third-poorest city in Pennsylvania is a lot poorer because of a 28-year bet on interest rates that already has gone awry.The loss, of course, is not remotely over, because the position is not closed out and is almost certainly highly leveraged. That means that there may be many more quarters without heat in the schools until Reading passes a bond issue to pay off the bankers. It also means that in addition to being the third poorest city in Pennsylvania, Reading ranks among the tops in credulity**. Hey, we all need to excel in something. A few simple questions (that are seemingly never asked) could have completely avoided the situation above: a) What is a school board doing investing in interest rate swap derivatives in the first place? b) Where did they think the magical $16 million was going to come from? A Nigerian prince? Unless they could answer those two questions, the Reading School Board had absolutely no business pretending to be investors***. But rather than just mocking the foolishness of one elected school board****, the important points here are that there are no risk-free transactions and that the bankers who issue these derivatives are more than happy to sell that risk off to the credulous to get it off their own books. There are untold trillions of dollars' worth of such risk, and as this systemic risk spreads, so do the nooks and crannies into which it must be tucked to keep the game going. The world is full of idiots who are willing to spend your money to buy a seat in this rigged casino. But don't complain, you elected them. It's not surprising, of course, that the banksters took their cut ahead of time and made off with a million in taxpayer funds. That's what they do. What will be a big surprise is when school boards nationwide create classes in what Sir Alan Greenspan called "cascading cross defaults"***** to explain what happened when the fools who bet more than they had on whether interest rates would go up or down could not pay, leading to other fools who could not collect and therefore could not pay, leading to other fools who could not collect and therefore could not pay, leading to a lot of people who didn't understand much about economics eating dog food to survive. And if you don't know who those people are, they may very well be you. * "May" is the most dangerous word in finance. ** The two are almost certainly related. *** They should stick to pretending to be educators. **** Why beat a dead horse? ***** He said about Long Term Credit Management - a hedge fund run by two Nobel Prize (economics) winners that went tats up when a couple "sure thing" bets went bad - that "... it was the FRBNY's judgment that it was to the advantage of all parties--including the creditors and other market participants--to engender if at all possible an orderly resolution rather than let the firm go into disorderly fire-sale liquidation following a set of cascading cross defaults." The Fed rushed in with handfuls of free money to stop the dominoes that had begun falling. It worked in 1998, but today the problem is just a bit bigger than it was then. Hey, maybe it'll work again. I sure as hell hope so, too: my dog is not big on sharing.  Neal Boortz goes looking for war in all the wrong places:Iran is saying they shot down a U.S. spy drone that supposedly flew into their airspace. Just how long are we going to put up with this nonsense? First they send Islamic terrorists into Iraq to make trouble and now they're shooting down our planes? In another time, this would amount to a declaration of war.The first thing that ought to be noted is that the US Military is denying any such shootdown, and since the claim was made by some otherwise unheard-of MP for publication in Iran's state-controlled newspapers, it is in all probability nothing more than propaganda, and poorly-done propaganda at that.* However, assuming it's true for just a moment, does it amount to a declaration of war? Let me ask it this way: if we shot down an Iranian plane overflying American territory, would they have any casus belli? If they were violating our territorial airspace, I suggest that we would be well within our rights to shoot them down. If that's the case, then we truly have nothing to complain about. We had such a plane shot down over the USSR once (it was called the U-2 Incident**) and Old Ike didn't go crying on the radio about how those mean old Soviets were blowing our hardware out of the sky and he didn't apologize, either. He just built better hardware. Note to Neal: if you break into somebody's house and they shoot you, you don't get to complain. If you overfly someone else's country and they shoot you down, you don't get to complain. Guys with funny beards have property rights, too, and if we're going to ignore them, we just need to build better planes. * At the very least al-Reuters or AFP should have taken pictures of a burning tire dump so they could pretend it was a plane. ** Not to be confused with the U-2 Indecent, which wasn't, so much. Labels: Iran so far away  I'm no friend of Vermont, but that was a bit uncalled-for.  I'm not sure if this headline is the best pun of the day or the worst:Castro Reportedly in 'Grave' ConditionEither way, who says there's never any good news in the paper?  Here's a paper that was not to be missed:"Feminist studies, followed by gay and lesbian studies, and to a certain extent queer studies have opened up the ancient world in new and fruitful ways. The newest feminist work foregrounds borders, and their permeability. Transgender studies puts into high relief the resiliency of gender and the constructability of the physical body. Transnationalism studies different regions, comparing them and taking into account the speaker’s position and power differentials."I'm not sure which is the worst part of Feminist Studies courses: people actually writing crap like this, or people pretending it's meaningful. Labels: feminism  The only current presidential candidate to appear on Queer as Folk and Saturday Night Live in drag, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III (Dwarf Name: "Hizzoner") aspires to frolic in the footsteps of George W. Bush as the next Future ex-President of the United States by repeatedly impersonating Bush's mother, Barbara.Hizzoner is a son of Italian immigrants (as Mike Dukakis would say, "My parents were little people - little swarthy people") who first made a name for himself as the US attorney prosecuting Marc Rich, who fled the country and was subsequently pardoned by Bill Clinton, and Pincus Green, who fled the country and was subsequently pardoned by Bill Clinton. He also prosecuted Ivan Boesky, forcing the financier to surrender almost half of his profits, and bond trader Michael Milken in highly-publicized show trials. The latter faced 520 years in prison and $11 billion in fines, but settled* for significantly less than that. A favorite of the "Family Values" wing of the GOP, Hizzoner recently tied Newt Gingrich by marrying a third future ex-wife (Hizzoner currently leads the tiebreaker round because he and his current future ex-wife, Whatsername, have 5 marriages between them, one more than Gingrich and his current future ex-wife, Whatsername). A firm believer in the sanctity of non-incestuous marriage, Hizzoner had his first marriage annulled after 14 years when he discovered that he and his first future ex-wife were second cousins. He informed his second future ex-wife, Donna Hanover, of their upcoming divorce in a news conference, but after an expensive extensive geneological search, it was discovered that the happy couple were not actually second cousins, so Hizzoner paid Hanover $6.8 million to be once removed. An even more extensive expensive geneological search is expected to be conducted shortly after Hizzoner meets his next future ex-wife, the timing of which can only be speculated on as of this writing. When America's Last Great Liberal retired in 2000, it was widely expected that Hizzoner (who had not yet received his Dwarf Name, answering instead to the unlikely moniker "Rudy") would face off against Second Dwarf Bitchy to replace him. However, at the last moment, Hizzoner contracted prostate cancer, upgraded to a hotter future ex-wife, and threatened to sue the town of Farmersville, New York, for believing his promises** instead. Hizzoner received his official Dwarf Name while serving as mayor of New York City after accidentally defeating*** incumbent mayor David Dinkins. While in office, Hizzoner led a jury considering the case of Oliver Johnson, who sued his landlord because a scalding shower burned his Oliver Johnson. Hizzoner's widely-hailed leadership under boiling water led to his christening as "America's Future ex-Mayor." He was named Time's 2001 Future ex-Person of the Year, preceeding El Borak in that honor by a full five years****. Since becoming America's Current ex-Mayor, Hizzoner has spent his time selling Nextel phones, being played by James Woods on video, becoming an ex-member of the Iraq Study Group, and locating a future ex-running mate who is hot but not his cousin. * Milken served 22 months in prison for the crime of "making money while between Hizzoner and fame." He is currently ranked #382 on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. Sadly, Hizzoner is not on the list. ** Hizzoner publicly boasted that any community that wished to refuse NYC's trash (Al Sharpton excepted) was free to do so. In response, the tiny town of Farmersville (pop. 350) announced cancellation of a trash contract with NYC that was not in their interest and banned Rev. Al from entering its city limits. Hizzoner threatened to personally drive Sharpton to the town to falsely accuse its police officers of kidnapping and rape, resulting in a backlash against the GOP in upstate New York and the election of Bitchy to the Senate. *** Hizzoner was the first Republican elected mayor of New York City since Pericles pounded Testicles in 461bc. **** I'll admit I did my best Faith Hill impression at the time. But I'm much better now that Time has fixed the oversight. Labels: politics  We've had about 3 days of freezing rain, sleet, slop, and more kinds of snow than Eskimos don't have words for, so the whole world seems a shimmering, shining, beautiful place - so long as you don't have to drive anywhere. And as we haven't had much snow this year (one earlier storm gave us a winter wonderland for about a week), this winter thing is still fairly new to my foster kids* for whom everything seems to be a new thing, and filled with wonder.So once Rogue awoke from her nap, the kids all ran to the glass deck door, as I had promised them they could go outside and play in the ice (don't laugh, it makes for GREAT sledding). After a quick glance outside, the three-year-old looked at me with all seriousness and said, "Look, Dad, it's Narnia outside." * Three of our four will be leaving us at the end of February (after being here for 14 months). This house will certainly be a less magical place when they're gone.  While surreptitiously running for president, John Edwards accidentally proposes the elimination of welfare, transfer payments, and farm price supports:I think they've got it just backwards. What needs to happen is we have to shift the responsibility to them. If you think about everyday life, people are more likely to take responsibility when no one else is helping them or propping them up.Which of course is one of the primary libertarian arguments against programs that guarantee results regardless of efforts. Such programs create, in insurance parlance, a "morale hazard," an indifference to behavior because no loss will be suffered no matter the choice made. Wise public policy seeks to reduce the occurence of personal irresponsibility, and there's usually no simpler, cheaper, or more effective way of doing so than to stay out of the way and let the vast majority of people take the medicine they have mixed for themselves. When they find they don't like it, they will generally mix something better next time. Responsibility is the flip-side and necessary consequent of freedom. That not being the Democrat way*, however, we must be missing something. Who in the world is John Edwards, Democrat extraordinaire, talking about? It's time for the Iraqis to do this.Oh, yeah. Good advice. * Liberalism, of course, is the opposite of wise public policy. It removes the natural consequences of stupid behavior, and since in the short run acting stupidly is often more fun than acting wisely, this separation of cause and effect increases stupidity. Labels: politics (hat tip: Stormhound)  There appears to be one reason to vote Republican next year:HOUSTON - Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic, nine-term lawmaker from southeast Texas, took the first step Thursday toward a second, quixotic presidential bid — this time as a Republican.I met Dr. Paul during his last campaign when the Libertarian party bus stopped at DeVry/KC. He's a geniunely good guy and I often wonder how he managed to get elected to Congress in the first place. For those who don't know, Dr. Paul was a GOP congressman from '78 to '85, when he voluntarily* returned to his OB/GYN practice and was replaced by Tom DeLay (not exactly a trade up, in retrospect). He was elected to Congress again in '96 after the Texas GOP redrew districts. It says a lot that when he ran, the GOP party machinery supported his opponent in the primary, Greg Laughlin, a former Democrat who switched parties** about 10 minutes after the GOP took over Congress. Apparently opportunistic Democrats are more welcome in the GOP than are Libertarians. In reality, I don't suspect Dr. Paul has a snowball's chance in hell, and I hope that he's able to keep his current seat in Congress. But to make up for the sin of not voting for him last time (I voted for Bush; I'm such an idiot), I'd even switch my party affiliation just so I could vote for him in the primaries. Of course, I'd switch it back as quickly as I could. Wouldn't want to make a habit of voting that way, after all. * Dr. Paul believes in term limits and applied them to himself. It's called 'integrity.' ** Actually, the GOP bought Laughlin's switch by promising him a seat on Ways and Means, the most powerful house committee. And I guess they'd hate to see that investment lost. Labels: politics  In pondering tonight why there seems to be such a perverse joy in making false numbers as large as possible, even far beyond any limit of reasonableness or reality, I was reminded of a quote from CS Lewis' "Mere Christianity" that might shed a little light on it:[S]uppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, or even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible?Take it for what it's worth. And pity the fools who populate such a universe.  Andrea Dworkin displays the typical feminista disrespect for the integrity of numbers:"In Europe, women were persecuted as witches for nearly four hundred years, burned at the stake, perhaps as many as nine million of them...."And Ruth Wildes Schuler puts some flesh back on the burned bones: The Judea-Christian concept of women as the original criminal has resulted in the slaughter of millions of people in a period of three hundred years. Since the late 1400's it has been estimated that at least nine million people have been executed for the sin of witchcraft. The majority of these victims have been women, for witchcraft seems to have been a female crime. Men were generally protected from such accusations because they were considered to be of superior intellect and virtue in both the Judean and Christian cultures.Now the first question one must ask about what MikeT (in an earlier comment) called "Burning Time propaganda" is, "How good is that number?" Feministas throw around a whole assortment of numbers of witches burned in Europe during the late middle ages - 9 million, 11 million, some even higher. Do they hold up? As one might expect when exact numbers are accompanied by pleas that "very little is known," there is very little fact underlying the charge. In fact, as historians have started to actually count the number of trials recorded in medieval and Renniassance records, the number been shown to be laughable. Today there is not a single reputable historian who quotes a number more than 2% of Dworkin's. For a little perspective, consider that 9 million is 50% higher than all the people living in Europe when the "Burning Times" began in 1400. It was never remotely a realistic number. W.J. Bethancourt, whose estimate is 3-5 times that of historians, provides an impressive list of names and a number of "unknowns," with such specifics as the names and places of such burnings. Unfortunately for the list, the specifics list less than 500 and the "unknowns" are encompassing to the point of uselessness, including 100+ male Templars who died under Phillip V's destruction of that religious order and suspected werewolf shot by German police in 1925. Also included are 30,000 burned during the Inquisition, which number is 5 times the total capital punishments many modern scholars assign to the entire episode, including Jews, Muslims, and Albigensians. The 300+ burned at Carcassonne, France, probably never happened. So where did the number come from? Many historians trace it to 19th century feminista Matilda Joslyn Gage. Where she got it from is unknown (I'd bet it left a hemorrhoid in its passing though). While several methodologies have been suggested, they all suffer from the weakness that they must take a particularly virulent period in a small place and then extrapolate it over the entire continent for the entire period. In other words, the number itself is simply propaganda. So how many witch trials were there in Europe from 1400 to 1800? Estimates vary, and modern historians have been as high as Brian Levack's 110,0000 trials (The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe) and ~60,000 executions, to Ronald Hutton's (The Pagan Religions of the British Isles) 40,000 executions. It should be noted that in each case, actual trial records were extrapolated to make up for information presumed lost. Actual counted executions add up to less than 15,000. But that's still enough witches to prove that Europe was consumed with witch fever for 4 centuries, right? Well, 40,000 total adds up to 100 witches every year over the 20+ nations that make up Europe, or about 5 executions per nation per year, and of those many were men, from 25% in England to ~90% in Iceland. Throw in the fact that they tended to happen in groups (there was only one Salem, after all, accounting for the vast majority of American witch deaths), and one reaches the conclusion that it was hardly the ongoing 'gynocide' promoted in feminista mythology. You deserve every bit of this.  Sometimes, you have to admire the audacity:Atherton police are looking for 177 bottles of wine, valued at $531,000, that were reported stolen from the basement of a home on Fair Oaks Lane in Atherton on Thursday, Jan. 4.Sure, there's a market for wines of this nature, but it's small and intimate; these wines will most likely not be sold on it (even giving rare wines a "street value" is nearly as insulting as calling Seabiscuit a pony or the USS Ronald Reagan a boat). The number of people who could even estimate the value is astonishingly small, and they all know each other. Selling the wines now, the thieves would never come close to realizing a half-million from the heist. On the other hand, as when someone steals other great works of art, there is often a buyer waiting in the wings already, someone who knows the merchandise intimately. I would not be surprised to find if, in the unlikely case that there is ever an arrest, the wine was purchased even before it left the basement*. * Well, either that or it's insurance fraud. But that's so terribly unromantic.  Physorg says they might be getting another bad rap:(AP) -- Mexicans have long been taught to blame diseases brought by the Spaniards for wiping out most of their Indian ancestors. But recent research suggests things may not be that simple.Well of course some historians are offended. Making the diseases native removes a popular and convenient scapegoat, and effective scapegoats are rare treasures which are not to be abandoned without a fight. I mean, if the Spanish are not wholly to blame for wiping out the indigenous population of America, what other things might they not be to blame for? It will be interesting to see if the theory is opposed (and it will be) using historical evidence or identity politics. I strongly suspect it will be the latter, because in addition to being easier, it makes the victims feel better about themselves. Which is, alas, one of the main goals of modern secondary education. Labels: history  Those of you using the XML feed probably noticed a whole bunch of old posts republished this morning. As part of the new Blogger upgrade I decided to eliminate the old monthly archives and replace them with labels. That should create a far more useful archive, and I can also avoid archiving ephemeral junk (like this post) and just keep the good stuff.But in order to add labels I had to republish a lot of posts, thus the XML feed was a) busier and b) more redundant than usual.   It's sick, I know, but I was reading a textbook today, Dr. Kenneth L. Feder's Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Psuedoscience in Archaeology. It's a fascinating exploration and rebuttal of any number of questionable archaeological assertions and discoveries*, including Piltdown Man, the Turin Shroud, Atlantis, prehistoric astronauts, and even young-earth creationism.I started to get excited about doing a "blind spot" post on the book about 2/3 of the way through it, but the author saved himself on the last page so he won't be the subject of it. And the reason I was going to do it is because the Bering Strait theory of American population - which is pretty much assumed throughout the book - is both hated by Native Americans and asserted by many history books to be historical fact. As I've mentioned before, I've never seen the evidence that allegedly underlies that assertion. Now I have (or as the case turns out, haven't and probably won't). Feder is very direct about how science is supposed to work: "we predict what new data we must be able to find if a given hypothesis is correct.") And the land bridge hypothesis is laid out clearly as well: what we must (his word) find in order to conclude that the native population of America crossed via Alaska is "a trail of successively older sites ... leading from Chile and Western Pennsylvania back to the land bridge." So is that what we find? Feder follows the last quote immediately with a bit of bad news: "Virtually all researchers would agree that such a trail - at least an unbroken trail - has yet to be discovered.**" We do not find what our hypothesis says we should find. In the words of my son Tommy's favorite TV show, "This myth appears to be busted." So why do we still teach it? Because we have a blind spot, and that's the often unconscious assumption that if we can only imagine two ideas (they got here by walking across Alaska or they got here by ship from Asia) and we eliminate one, we can automatically rely on the other. Since the ship idea is deemed less likely, "they walked across a land bridge" makes its way into our history books as an assertion*** but it remains only one possibility with no underlying conclusive evidence. So how did the natives get here? I don't know. And neither does your history book, no matter how confidently it asserts otherwise. * Yes, the Runestone is mentioned and gets a 2-paragraph brushoff because one archaeologist - who is neither a linguist nor a geologist - "points out that the language on the stone is a modern Swedish dialect spoken only in the American Midwest, and the runes are of recent vintage as well." Of course, the geologist who core-sampled the stone differs on the latter and the former is questionable as well, but whatever. I just thought it cool that Feder included it. ** I would suggest that the accepted theory - that the migration took 8000 years due to "normal processes of migration and population explosion" - is quite unlikely, because it is unimaginable that natives spent 400 generations moving from Alaska to Pennsylvania (a distance of 3600 miles, less than half a mile per year) and left nothing behind, only to build huge structures once they arrived. A population that was moving with purpose could cover that distance in 1% of the time (the Mongols did it in 70 years, warring all the way) so the lack of evidence argues for a fast migration rather than a "normal" one, if in fact it occurred. But arguing from a lack of evidence is strictly a no-no, for obvious reasons. Science is not an exact science. *** It's not until the last page of the book that Feder admits that the whole thing is still a mystery. And I was pretty disappointed, but decided to do this post anyway and let him off his own petard in a footnote. Labels: archaeology, science  NBC discovers that it doesn't really matter after all:WASHINGTON — Democrats say they were returned to power in part because of corruption and ethical lapses of the Republican Congress. They promised to clean up the swamp and crack down on lobbyists.There are plenty of decent ideas being floated around by Democrats; ensuring all members have the time to read the FINAL version of proposed legislation is one of them. But lobbying is a result of one immutable fact of our republican system of government: people have the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. And the one thing Congress cannot do through toying with house rules or issuing press releases is to reduce the power of lobbyists, because the power of lobbyists is always in direct proportion to the power of Congress. Politicians need to raise money to get re-elected, and to raise money, they need to make it worthwhile for people to give them some. That's why a politician's ability to raise money is often directly proportional to his ability to do the things people with money or who want money wish to talk him into doing. Politicians create lobbyists by doling out favors (in both markets and programs) and they need those lobbyists to remain politicians. If Congressmen truly wanted to reduce the number and influence of lobbyists, all they'd need to do is to reduce the number of areas in which they meddle and the number of dollars lobbyists can secure through government programs. However, in doing so, they would simultaneously reduce their own ability to get re-elected. That's why no matter what party runs the committees, they won't even try. After all, if they did that, who would pay $1000 to have dinner with them?  Got a strange package in the mail today, sort of: it had apparently blown down the National Avenue and a stranger picked it up and delivered it to Nick. Inside was an 18" long laminated gold certificate called a PPI Educational Bookmark, though to be honest, I can't imagine reading a book the size necessary to use this monstrous thing.Enclosed was a note from reader Jerry V, who enjoyed reading my articles "on different websites" and thanking me for my contributions to the subject of money. Well, Jerry, if this is one of them, you'll get my thank you. I appreciate you thinking of me. A belated (or very early) Merry Christmas to you, and may God bless you throughout the coming year.   Nancy Pelosi promises not to let all that power go to her head:"In more than 200 years of history, there was an established pecking order -- and I cut in line."The only thing more fun than watching Pelosi over the next two years is going to be watching the catfight that will break out when President Rodham is coronated and Nancy becomes #2, so to speak. Who ever thought national decline could be so entertaining? UPDATE: NBC's Andrea Mitchell axes the question that's on everyone's mind: "Are you happy with this big celebration that Nancy Pelosi has planned for herself? Isn't it a bit unseemly to have Stevie Wonder and Tony Bennett and the dinners and the lunches and the brunches and the trip to Baltimore to rename the street in honor of her. Isn't this a little bit too, um, imperial?"Too Imperial? Oh my dear Andrea, you ain't seen nothing yet...  How many were feeding the homeless down at St. Ives?The people they cook for love it too. But there's a problem. It was "criminal activity." The Fairfax County health department points out that -- horrors -- Mary and Ruth are actually preparing food and serving it to people! Without a license!Excellent article from John Stossel, though not much of a surprise to anyone who knows anything about regulatory government: it would sooner have people eating out of the trash bins behind Starbucks than a meal served in an unregulated kitchen. The story contains all the familiar elements of govern-stupid drama: someone tries to do something good, government forbids it because someone could conceivably get hurt, everyone hears about it and laughs, government slinks away for a little while. Even though it's a familiar story, there were three items in the article worth noting: 1) The homeless know more about economics than governments do. That's not a surprise when you think about it, because the homeless don't have a licence to steal and therefore must manage scarce assets carefully. But it's not something that generally gets mentioned in articles because no one talks to the homeless. Usually the homeless just sort of shamble off the edge of the page. 2) There are a few churches with juevos: Rev. Kathleen Chesson said her First Christian Church would not obey the rules. "Our agenda is to feed the hungry. We're going to feed the hungry."It's a very powerful stand when a church does what it's supposed to do in the face of a government that would forbid it. Good on 'em. It would be nice if more churches worried less about influencing government and more about how government influences them. 3) There is more than one kind of rat in the slums. What got the churches, who were simply feeding people who needed food, in metaphorical hot water with county regulators in the first place? The county received a little tip: an "advocate for the homeless" noticed that church kitchens...didn't meet "code."And while the saddest fact in the article, it is probably the least surprising of all.  (hat tip: my silly girl)  The reality-based community apparently doesn't like all science as much as it likes harvesting cells from dead babies:Martina Navratilova, the lesbian tennis player who won Wimbledon nine times, and scientists and gay rights campaigners in Britain have called for the project to be abandoned...And just what is the hideous neo-nazi research program that liberals across the world must put an end to? Injecting hormones into the brains of rams to make them attracted to ewes. In the real world, this is known as 'fixing a problem,' because in the real world rams are supposed to be attracted to ewes. But to the left, it's the return of Hitler*. The "anti-gay" right has claimed for years that homosexuality is primarily a lifestyle choice and therefore a moral problem. In response, the left in general has asserted that the origins of homosexuality are biological and that it is therefore amoral if not normal. When we find the answer, I expect we'll discover both of them are at least partially right. Or left. Whatever. But in making homosexuality a matter of biology, liberals dug themselves into a hole from which there is no escape, because if sexual orientation is solely a result of biology, then biology can change it, and it's only a matter of time before someone with a vested interest in straightening out what is biologically crooked figures out a way to make that change. To keep that change from becoming an option (which would, ironically, prove the right correct by making homosexuality fully a matter of choice) the Reality-Based Community must hang around their own necks the very albatross they've been hanging on the right for years: being opposed to the advancement of knowledge because they are personally frightened of what someone looking for truth might discover. Well, that, or they can call people Nazis. * in all fairness, as his fellow totalitarian socialists they should generally be the first to recognize him. UPDATE: at least one emailer thought that "harvesting cells from dead babies" was simply a cheap shot. It was actually not, as Udo Shuklenk, the bioethicist who above does not want people to make rams desire ewes, has also written: "Given that the embryo does not have the capacity to suffer, we fail to see how such a being could possibly be harmed when it is destroyed in the process of stem cell research. Accordingly, we reject arguments defending the moral status of the embryo, for we believe it has none."Not that I want to get into that argument, I just wanted to show that it was not something I simply made up...   I really should let the Grand Canyon thing alone, but my favorite feminista actually said something about it I agree with. And since such is a rather rare event, I figured I'd share it:The latest squalling in the temper tantrum is over putting this stupid book that argues that the Grand Canyon is only 6,000 years old into the National Park Service bookstore at the Grand Canyon.See how good that is? It's tight and to the point. Very well said. There has been an incredible temper tantrum in the past week over a single book, for sale for the last 3 years, that does not toe the line of politically acceptable science. Following Amanda's links or mine from my prior post on this also reveals that all the squalling comes very consistently (and insistently) from people who don't like or believe the message of that one book*. "Squalling in the temper tantrum" is as good a description as I've seen of it anywhere. Tell me it doesn't perfectly fit comments like these: Sharia law at the park and women will be forced to wear full-on burka-garbs and have to walk 4 paces behind the men? These "Noah's flood created Grand Canyon" people are as crazy as the islamics. - on AlternetThere's only one problem, and that's that I'm not allowed to agree with Amanda in totality on any post. But she takes care of that like a champ. After linking to numerous articles by the anti-creationist authors and commenters screaming about how el stupido everyone but them is and how other people should not be allowed to say what they are saying, she titles her post "Creationism is one long temper tantrum" Classic. Such a valiant - and seemingly effortless - conquest of logic and evidence must surely rank as one of the Great Moments in Feminism. * Following the links also reveals that the related story that the Park Service is "not allowed" to age the canyon is in all probability bogus, but that doesn't stop the squall even when documented by multiple posters on multiple threads. Moral outrage is too emotionally rewarding to let facts get in the way of. UPDATE: The "reality-based" timeline that Amanda links to has some interesting info. And taking into consideration my agnosticism on the canyon, it's interesting to see what the reality-based community has to say occurred 5.3 million years ago (give or take a half-dozen years on each side - our instruments are good but not that good). You can read it yourself, but here are the important words (with my summaries in the parentheses): ~5,300,000: Geologists will disagree in the early 21st century as to what happens now. Some will say (this one story happened, and) other geologists will maintain that (the other story doesn't work and their story is better). Either way, a catastrophic flood takes place, and the carving of the Grand Canyon begins in earnest.Here's a hint for the scientifically ignorant: stories are not science, they are stories, and they are worth what you pay for them. Geologists don't really know what created the Grand Canyon, either. Well, other than lots and lots of water. On that there seems to be nearly unanimous agreement*. * Of course the heretic in me wants to assert that is precisely the point most likely to be wrong for that very reason. But I didn't say that... Labels: grand canyon, science  My mother (who reads this blog but who does not leave comments, nudge, nudge) recently bought me a book. Well, actually she bought it for herself and, aware of my long-lived interest in obscure history, passed it to me (thanks again, Mom). Called, The Kensington Runestone / Compelling New Evidence by Richard Neilsen and Scott Wolter, it is exactly that: a 500+ page tour-de-force of evidence concerning one of the strangest (and most vilified) archaeological finds ever.I first learned of the Kensington Runestone from a 1915 3-volume history of Minnesota I discovered in my uncle's basement one Christmas. Since that time I have read and collected everything I could about it (mostly thanks to my mum mailing me everything that appears in the Minnesota press - we don't get a lot of runestone news in Kansas). 10+ years ago I created the first website dedicated to the stone and luckily for you all it's still up, though I no longer host it. On the big question, "Is the stone geniune?" I concluded the following: "the inscription is not blatantly spurious in the unanimous opinion of scholarship." That statement says very little, because even after reading 80 years' worth of scholarship, that was all I could honestly conclude*. In the century since its discovery academic support for the stone's authenticity has waxed and waned, with one period where it sat in the Smithsonian and a much longer period where it has anchored the "Kensington Runestone Museum" in Alexandria, Minnesota. That is to say, it has fallen from fame into almost complete obscurity. Now the stone seems to be making something of a comeback thanks to modern scientific methods being applied to it. As I was reading the book, however, I came across a paragraph, written by the geologist co-author, that illustrates one of the great blind spots (and one of my greatest frustrations) not only of historical science, but of all the speculative sciences. I'm leaving out the context because its complaint is applicable across the spectrum: The conference was quite a learning experience. I had my first taste of the passion and the politics involves in the controversy, my first lesson on the complex issues surrounding this stone. I was beginning to understand the differences between the scientific process that is my world as a geologist, and the way of doing businss in the fields of archaeology, history, and language. There are not just subtle differences; the disciplines are often worlds apart in the way they approach things...Surprisingly, the most important part of the quote is not the distinction between hard and soft sciences, it is the phrase, "the way of doing business." Most people do not realize that science (even hard science when money or reputation is at stake) is in many cases a way of doing business. It is not always a search for truth, but is just as often a way of building reputations, protecting sacred cows, and acquiring the grant money that enables careers to advance. If I may say so, the author makes an error in attributing this difference to the fact that he is a geologist. IMO, he discovered what he did because he was coming without a reputation riding on the stone's authenticity into an area where the current combatants had already staked out sides. They were not going to accept his conclusions because their reputations as scholars depended on the stone remaining a fraud. It takes more courage than most people have to admit that they were completely wrong on something in their acknowledged area of expertise. I first noted this propensity in one of my favorite evolution books, Donald Johanson's "Lucy," in the section where Johanson compares his find's claims to "first ancestor" with those of Richard Leakey's "Skull 1470." In order to cement his own claim, Johanson re-dated Leakey's find in such a way as to take it safely out of the tree. Leakey, of course, disagreed with Johanson's methods. "These two are competitors," I realized (sometimes the obvious is lost on me, or at least its implications are) and they were competing for fame, for lecture dates, for television appearances; in short, they were not primarily "doing" science, they were doing business like competing laundry soap companies. It does not mean that they do not believe their own press, but it does mean that the amateur, who has very little ability to check the true facts, is often justified in turning a jaundiced eye on whatever pronouncements "science" makes today, as they are liable to be completely overturned as soon as the next scientist comes along looking to make a name for himself. And that does not always mean we are progressing toward a truth as the proponents of "science as all knowledge" assure us; just as often we are simply watching a prize fight without knowing the "rules" under which the contest is being held. In their review of the previous scholarship concerning the runestone (in a chapter aptly titled "Scandals in Scholarship,") Neilsen and Wolter point out a statement from "Mr. Minnesota History" Theodore Blegen, from his 1968 book on the stone, that bothered me no little bit when I first read it: The total on the runological and historical side is, in my judgement, conclusive. The inscription is a fake. It's an honest conclusion with two problems: Blegen ignored the geological evidence, dating back 70 years, which contradicted his conclusion, and Blegen used his conclusion to smear an innocent man - the finder of the stone - as a fraudster, without a single piece of evidence. That accusation was necessitated by his prior conclusion. If the inscription was a fake, Olaf Ohman must have faked it. And Ohman, being long dead, was not in a position to defend himself. Now it appears that the runological evidence may not be on that side at all. But Blegen, who died within months of the book's publication, is no longer around to apologize. The blind spot is, of course, not wholly on the part of scientists who draw firm conclusions on partial evidence or who use science to "do business." It is as much on the part of the rest of us who accept the conclusions of scholars as settled fact, even without realizing that they are part of a business we may not understand and that as men they have the ability, and often the motive, to make their own blind spots ours. As the sordid history of the Runestone illustrates, it pays to be skeptical - especially on those occasions when our experts are skeptical mostly because it pays so well. * FWIW, my own opinion remains that the stone is more likely to be geniune than not, but I do not (as I did not then) hold a firm opinion one way or the other. I consider myself completely unqualified to hold one. Labels: archaeology  MikeT scopes out the limits of a personal morality:The Golden Rule is great for a personal guide in some cases, but sucks as a universal rule which is not coincidentally why it is actually of relatively minor importance in Christian scripture. The reason is that it just cannot answer the moral of question "why is X wrong" in a way that is satisfactory. If you say "I don't murder because I don't want to be murdered," you are not saying why murder is wrong. You cannot come to a point where this becomes a moral attack on murder unless you think your opinion carries the weight of a deity's. All you have done is said why you choose to not become a murderer, which is hardly a way of declaring why murder itself is inherently wrong.The Golden Rule also cannot prevent those immoralities which are mutually pleasurable, for the person who lusts after his sister (for example) will not be prevented from jumping into her bed late at night, as he would probably like it very much if she were to jump into his. It would also, if taken literally and exhaustively, kill us all, since as I would not like to be eaten by a head of lettuce or a cow, I must necessarily starve as I am forbidden to eat them by the Rule. As Mike notes, it is not the end-all of Christian morality, but merely a summary that must be applied to specifics and will not fit them in all cases. And as illustrated by the above poster, every land and era has hosted great moral teachers who explained the Golden Rule in countless ways. The Golden Rule is in no way unique to Christianity, nor should the Christian (if he thinks about it) expect it to be. Great moral teachers do not introduce new morality, but pull us back toward the morality that we inherently know. "Mankind," Chesterton noted, "needs to be reminded more than it needs to be instructed." Which is why the Golden Rule also forms the basis of the proclaimed morality of even many of non-religious persuasions, as the poster "Bobert" laid out on Vox Day's blog a bit back: When I see something that hurts or harms a fellow human being--or myself for that matter--I can assume that it is not good, most likely bad, and should probably not be allowed.All of which illustrates the utility and ubiquity of the Golden Rule, yet none of it explains why one should follow it other than that it works well for us personally. In isolation it is as utilitarian as "Do unto others before they do unto you." We have simply chosen what to do based on our own perceived benefits. That is economics, not morality. But I snuck something in on you a moment ago, as CS Lewis snuck it in on me years ago, and that is the problem that we inherently know these things. And it doesn't mean that there's not some person who never considered them, but that everywhere and always this rule, this "morality," is hanging over our collective heads, and pops up nearly everywhere and at any time in history we care to look for it. There are two possible explanations (maybe more, I just can't think of any more) for the fact that there appears to be a rule that we all know. The first is that it was built into us because we are part of a creation that has real moral rules, the second is that it is somehow part of a naturalistic evolutionary process. In other words, this moral rule is either established by a creator or it is a naturally-selected survival mechanism (it could also aid the latter because of the former, which is my position, but that does not explain its origin any more than the other two choices so in the interest of simplicity I'll drop it for now). But there is one other thing about this rule or law that sets it apart, and that is unlike other rules or natural laws* we see operating in the universe, we are free to disobey it. None of us can choose to disobey gravity or centrifugal forces; we must simply wear our harness if we do not wish to be thrown from the roller coaster. Yet we are free to disobey the moral law, and most of us do so much of the time. Well, I do much of the time. I don't know about you. Which of course leads us to perhaps an origin. The fact that we are free to disobey them and to argue about them leads me away from the idea that such laws are developed spontaneously as a corporate survival mechanism, because they are of no use when we do not follow them - like a cave man with a steel spearhead he uses only as a good luck charm** - and most of our history is made up of episides in which we did not follow them. We have survived and thrived while ignoring a thing that was passed down (according to the story) to enable us survive and thrive. The other explanation - that these rules are purposely built into the universe in which we inhabit and are a part - makes far more sense to me because it explains why everyone knows them, explains why it would work as a survival mechanism (we survive best when we follow the purposes of the universe) and it explains how it can be "passed down" even when we ignore it. It is passed not person-to-person mostly, but from universe-to-person. We can teach one another, yet none of us is the origin of the thing. But that doesn't necessarily explain why we are free to ignore the Golden Rule in the first place, unlike other natural laws which act on us without our consent. This natural law is so unlike other natural laws that I am wont to say that it is not a natural law at all. It is a law inherent in the nature of human beings, yet human beings appear to be such creatures that can ignore their nature on occasion; either we are somewhat unnatural in that sense or the law itself is. If human beings have a free moral will, then they could conceivably use it to ignore the moral laws of the creation of which they form a part. But the law itself may still have real consequences - it is bigger than them individually, after all - and they may not be able to ignore the consequences***. But that leads us to a dilemma even as we reach a tentative solution: if the moral law is woven into the fabric of the universe, then it must have been placed there by a creator, and since that creator created the universe, he has the right of ownership over it to make it do what he wants. And we must assume he created this moral law because he wants us to follow it, that it directs in part how we as part of the universe are "supposed to work." So it comes down to the very thing we try so hard not to say, we should obey the moral law because the one who created us wants us to do so. In other words, we should do unto others as we would have them do to us not because we are going to get something from it (though we may) but because God says so. * Lewis would argue that such "natural laws" are not really laws at all. They are simply our explanations of what things, in fact, do. ** Since he does not use it correctly it would not help him survive at all. Passing it down to his descendants won't help much either unless they use it for what it was meant to do, and eventually one's going to get tired of lugging it around and will chuck it in the lake and then where are we? *** For example, if we kill someone, his next-of-kin might kill us in response. And being killed is a hard thing to ignore. Well, in the short term, anyway. |
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When you need a picture of 'the one that got away,' try Lyin' Your Bass Off. |
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