[Then] Abraham said of Sarah his wife, "She is my sister." So Abimelech king of Gerar sent for and took Sarah. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, "You are a dead man: the woman you have taken (there's that word again - El B) is another man's wife."

But Abimelech had not come near her, and he said, "Lord, will you also slay a righteous nation? Did he not tell me, 'This woman is my sister'?" And did she not herself say, 'He is my brother'? I did this with an honest heart and innocent hands."

And God said unto him in the dream, "Yes, I know you did this with an honest heart. That is why I kept you from sinning against me by not allowing you to touch her."

Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. Now she had a household slave, an Egyptian, named Hagar**. And Sarai said to Abram, "The LORD has kept me from bearing children, therefore I ask you to go in to my maid; perhaps I may have children by her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai."

"...Kelim-ninu has been given in marriage to Shennima. If Kelim-ninu bears children, Shennima shall not take another wife; but if Kelim-ninu does not bear, Kelim-ninu shall aquire a woman of the land of Lullu as wife for Shennima, and Kelim-ninu may not send the offspring away. Any son that may be born to Shennima from the womb of Kelim-ninu, to these shall be given the lands and buildings of every sort..."
-- ANET p. 220, Published by E. Chiera, HSS, v(1929), No. 67, Translated by E.A. Speiser, AASOR, x(1930), 31 ff

Labels: bible

Labels: christianity

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Confounding the Confused

The wife of future First Lady Bill Clinton tries it again:

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who last month suggested giving $5,000 "baby bonds" to every child born in America but later backed away, called yesterday for a new retirement plan that would boost individual savings with federal tax credits.

Clinton's plan would match the first $1,000 of retirement savings for families making up to $60,000 per year. The proposal would provide a 50 percent match for families making between $60,000 and $100,000.

"I believe that if you work hard and contribute to our country, you should have the opportunity to save and invest," Clinton said during the last of a four-day campaign swing through Iowa.

It's a strange mindset that presumes that it takes a government program to give people "the opportunity to save and invest." Hell, I thought we had banks in this country. But what I really like about her plan* is the outrage toward it at the Democratic Underground, many of whose denizens think that it's a) simply a ploy to boost the stock market or b) that it sounds like a Republican plan.

And while they may or not be correct that it is a "ploy," it certainly would boost the stock market. Any time you encourage more people to invest in stocks that is bound to happen. And it *does* sound like a Republican plan. It is, in fact, the partial privatization of Social Security. It's just done too stealthily for most to see it.

Work with me here a second:

The "real" inflation rate is at least three times the government's reported numbers. They exclude food and energy (food prices are increasing at a tremendous rate, oil prices are at an all-time high) and for the most part housing. For what is left government statisticians apply hedonic** price adjustments to trim the increase.

But SocSec increases (including distributions, which are gauged proportionally to how much one contributed but unadjusted for inflation) are based on the phony-baloney number, which means that as the years pass, Soc-Sec gets smaller and smaller relative to the actual money it costs to eat. It is also actuarially unsound, demanding that if current promises are to be kept the government must eventually break either the promises through means-testing, the economy through taxation, or the dollar through inflation.

So to avoid that triple-cross, Hillary would create a mobile 401(k) that would provide everyone with similar retirement income that would probably grow faster than SocSec monies. But it could still be counted a government benefit. It is functionally the same as GWB's SocSec plan, except that he made the mistake of calling it part of SocSec. Hillary's plan simply replaces SocSec while pretending it's still whole.

So as the years pass, SocSec begins to fade out, replaced by an individually-directed***, non-benefit-defined accounts. No wonder those at the Democratic Underground hate it, even if they don't understand it.

* Not that I particularly like the plan itself. It would be far easier and safer to simply eliminate taxation of interest and then stop driving interest rates to sub-market levels.

** Their word, not to be confused (too much) with hedonistic.

*** within government-approved bounds, i.e. the stock and bond markets, but one can still get around that by purchasing ETFs or royalty trusts as I do in mine.

Labels: democrats

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For Snoop

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But does it leak blue water if you tip it over?

Maybe he's afraid Olympics-seeking Johnson Countians will mistake his car for a Zhang-on-the-spot:

BEIJING (Reuters) - Some Beijing motorists are flushed with anger over new license plate numbers that contain the letter combination "WC," saying it gives them "unpleasant images."

Along with "OK," "hello" and "bye-bye," the abbreviation for the Victorian "Water Closet," or toilet, has became one of the most well-known English expressions in China...

"I will not make myself a laughing stock among my friends by adding such a weird abbreviation to my new car," Xinhua quoted car owner Zhang as saying.

Authorities, however, were not sympathetic.

"We will not change our policy," a policeman in charge of issuing license plates said.

A few years ago here in Kansas, a number of dazzling urbanites* were also offended by a controversial homophone that they did not wish displayed on their cars. Standard-issue Kansas plates come with three letters followed by three numbers, and it was the three letters that were causing the folks at the DMV to say, "No ma'am, that's not what that means." In fact, its homophonic equivalent is not even a real word, or if it is, it's not spelled with three letters.

But rather than put up with all their tales of woe and suffering**, the Kansas DMV simply reorganized their distribution system, sending all the license plates with the offending letters to the western part of the state. Those people may not be as educated, rich, or good-looking as the people of Johnson County, but at least they know what a HOE is.

* Not in the "Blazing Saddles" sense, but in the "I live in Johnson County so I'm sophisticated, unlike other Kansans" sense.

** Another true story of suffering: when I was living in Johnson County in the mid 90s, we had a snowstorm one October. We got more than 6 inches of the stuff over the course of about 4 hours, and since the leaves were still on the trees, every branch more than 3 feet long was ripped to the ground, the power line was completely torn out of my house (my meter, which had been attached to the house, was some feet away, hanging on the dead line), and electricity was out in some areas for more than a week. The Johnson County Sun had a story a few days after the storm, which featured an interview with one lady in Prairie Village, and they had a picture of her, sitting on a rocking chair in her gorgeous house, with a shawl over her lap. A brand-new SUV peeked over her shoulder from her driveway. And in it she wished dearly for the power to come back on because she was, and I quote, "tired of living like Daniel Boone."

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Maybe my Care-O-Meter is busted

A left-coast dentist has a common problem of his own now:

WOODLAND, Calif. - A dentist accused of fondling the breasts of 27 female patients is trying to keep his dental license by arguing that chest massages are an appropriate procedure in certain cases. Mark Anderson's lawyer says dental journals discuss the need to massage the pectoral muscles to treat a common jaw problem.

But that's not the funny part. I'm going to skip his obligatory denunciation*, and just get to it:

Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Phillips gave [the judge] three new complaints, including one from a 31-year-old woman who said Anderson fondled her at least six times over two years.

She took to wearing tight shirts with high necklines, "and Anderson would still get in under her shirt and bra," according to a police report.

Why on earth, with no less than forty dentists in that town, would any woman continue to visit this one three times a year? Sometimes it's hard to be sympathetic...

* Just consider him properly denounced. Since no one would disagree with such a denunciation, it has devolved into a ritual anyway.

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How to not hire Americans

This is about 5 minutes long, but worth the time.

Labels: immigration

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And since she's from New York

She'll sell you a bridge, too:

Senator Hillary Clinton said yesterday that if she is elected president, she intends to roll back President Bush's expansion of executive authority, including his use of presidential signing statements to put his own interpretation on bills passed by Congress or to claim authority to disobey them entirely.

"I think you have to restore the checks and balances and the separation of powers, which means reining in the presidency," Clinton told the Boston Globe's editorial board.

Presidents do not voluntarily reign in the Presidency*. It's not only a fact of history but a simple matter of common sense. Presidents propose an agenda, they are elected to implement that agenda, and they use all means at their disposal to do so. This is especially the case with progressive politicians, like GWB and Hillary, who believe that it is the government's responsibility to solve societal ills. There is never a dearth of problems to be solved, nor a lack of hypothetical programs with which to solve them**. And since it is expected of the executive that she will "do something" about every one of them, the idea that Hillary is going to voluntarily decrease her power in the face of them is laughable.

Unfortunately then, it is up to the other branches of government to rein in executive power, and most notably that branch in which currently sits more than half a dozen of the dwarves currently seeking the Presidency***. Yet aside from all their noise about doing so, they consistently vote to empower the executive, whether they believe in a "Unitary" presidency or not.

The Unitary theory is hated by the left (they being out of executive power for a few more months), but its essence is clear in the Constitution. The first sentence of Article II reads, in full: The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. Period. The President IS the executive branch, and Congress has no authority over it. It is almost the height of irony for Congress to claim they are going to restore the separation of powers by telling the President how to run his part of the government.

But in actuality the Congress has almost complete power in the government because a) they control the power of the purse, and b) they write the laws the executive is supposed to enforce****. Their mistake has been in creating, via legislation, departments and branches by which they have ceded that power to the President. Why, for example, if the 16th Amendment gives the Congress power to levy taxes on incomes, is the IRS a part of the executive branch? Because Congress set it up that way. Why, if the Constitution gives Congress the power to borrow money, is the Treasury Department part of the executive branch and the Fed answerable to no one? Because Congress set them up that way. In short, the President has the power he has because Congress has given it to him. They wrote the laws that put all this power in the President's hands and now they have the audacity to complain that he's too powerful? All they have to do to get rid of a department is to de-fund it. Yet they don't.

So long as the Congress continues to push its regulatory powers off to agencies located in the executive branch, the separation of powers is a moot point. But I don't hear any Congressmen talking about that, especially ones who don't like what Bush is doing with all the money they give him.

* though they can be ineffective, which amounts to very much the same thing in the short term.

** The only true limitation is money, which Hillary recognized when she said, "I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all." But I'm sure Helicopter Ben might have a few ideas to solve that one.

*** Relying on a court that declares the growing of plants for personal use subject to the Interstate Commerce Clause while admitting such is neither inter-state nor commerce is an exercise in futility.

**** Or worse, write broad outlines and then delegate to the executive agencies power to fill in the blanks.

Labels: politics

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Meet the new boss

same as the old boss:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 — Two months after vowing to roll back broad new wiretapping powers won by the Bush administration, Congressional Democrats appear ready to make concessions that could extend some of the key powers granted to the National Security Agency.

Bush administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened wiretapping authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess, and some Democratic officials admit that they may not come up with the votes to rein in the administration...

Of course they won't rein it in; if they can extend domestic spying powers for 18 more months, they will in all likelihood inherit that power. What's not to like about that?

One of the more interesting things about my American Revolution class is looking at British politics of the 18th Century. Sure, the issues were different and the speeches far better, but one important parallel is not the issues so much as the fact that they were interchangeable among parties. The issues were, in fact, a means to an end, summed up by my (fantastic) professor as "place and pension." The important issue, the one that all politicians in 18th Century Britain could agree on, was that it was imperative that they rule. The specific rules they implemented were secondary.

The parallel to today is obvious, and as I once noted in regards to the filibuster after the GOP and Dems switched positions and took on precisely the same arguments their opponents had used when the other party was appointing judges, these are arguments of convenience rather than conviction. The Democrats will go along with domestic spying not because they lack votes (they run both houses of Congress for crying out loud, what part of 'majority' do they not understand?) but because it increases government power, power that they hope to (and in all probability will) soon wield.

The wonderful thing about history is not that it repeats itself (the fact that most ignore it makes any societal benefit that might bring moot), but that for the person who pays attention to it, it makes mankind so darned predictable.

Labels: politics

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Labels: republicans

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Still less than Al Gore

	CATEGORY ACRES FOOD 6.2 MOBILITY 4.2 SHELTER 4 GOODS/SERVICES 7.4 TOTAL FOOTPRINT 22
	IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON. WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.
	IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.9 PLANETS. Take the quiz

Labels: environmentalism

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In search of ancient quotations

Two creationalist works share a similar theme. Can you find it?

Thanks to modern archaeology, these Biblical Hittites were confirmed to be non-mythological, and were discovered to have also had a legend about the global Flood, the same Deluge recounted in a legend from the Tamils of southern India which was survived by again eight people, Satyavrata (Noah), Sharma (Shem), Charma (Ham), Japati (Japheth), and their wives.
-- Northwest Creation Network, The Ancients Knew of the Global Flood

Aristophanes claims Japetos as the ancestor of the Greeks and in the "Institutes of Manu" dated about 1280 B.C., one of the ancient Aryan histories, it is said that a certain individual named Satyaurata had three sons, the eldest of whom was named Jyapeti. The others were named Sharma (Shem?) and C'harma (Ham?).
--Arthur Custance, Noah's Three Sons

You may be surprised to discover that the interesting similarity is not the claim that the ancient dot*-not-feather Indians knew about Ham, Shem, and Japheth, but rather, it is in the vague manner in which such relatively explosive information is delivered. Custance notes that such a story exists, and the NCN notes that the tale is "a legend from the Tamils." Neither of them provides a footnote, which one might expect unless such important information were common knowledge.

I can't speak for the NCN - for other than this piece I have never read any of their work and I only found it because I was checking up on Custance - but Doctor Custance, a PhD in Oriental Languages (University of Toronto**), is a man whom I have always found to be a very careful scholar.

So why the weasel-wording?

Since this might be rather important for those studying the post-Babel dispersion of peoples from the Middle East, I went looking for the original source. After all, it has to exist somewhere for all these*** people to quote it. So where is it?

Actually, the earliest source I could find was almost exactly 200 years old, in the works of philologist Sir William Jones, a Briton living in India at the turn of the 19th Century. Jones was neither fool nor naif; in fact it is because of his work that we speak today of the Indo-European language group, for he was the first to note that Sanskrit and European languages share many of the same roots and features.

From there I discovered another, Thomas Maurice's 1840 History of Hindoostan, which quotes Sir William and leans on his authority fairly heavily. Jones had an authority that could be leaned on, in fact, I discovered 8 or 10 different published papers coming from the period between these two works which quoted him more or less verbatim. Jones' authority in the field was unquestioned by his contemporaries.

But then it stopped. I mean dead. Other than a few stray pieces, almost no scholar after 1840 touches the quote, and rare is the one who does who provides a source.

Now Custance provides a source, the "Institutes of Manu," which he dates at 1280bc and others date earlier. Unfortunately, one can peruse them at the Indian Sourcebook in vain. They do not contain the quote or anything like it. Another work, the Critical Review (1802), claimed it to be from a literal translation of the Padma-Puran. Though I cannot locate the whole thing online (at least not in English), I did locate a summary, which assuredly talks about creation but lacks this particular flood narrative.

However, I did discover that Custance's Satyavrata is also called "Manu"**** and is considered by the Hindus to be the progenitor of mankind and the man who survived the world-wide flood, so Custance's "Institutes of Manu" is not so far off as it seems - he may simply be talking about a collection rather than one specific work. Another ancient Hindu document, the Matsya Purana, tells the story of how Manu spared a little fish, who told him about the flood and then guided his ark to safety while the rest of the world perished. So we do have a flood and an Indian Noah, but we are still sans his three sons.

So I'm sorry to let you down right here, but I do not have a conclusion. I really don't even have a theory other than that Sir William was mistaken and everyone figured it out but neglected to say so. I simply note that this single piece of evidence, still bandied about - mostly but not completely by creationalists - has simply disappeared from the earth, if in fact it ever even existed. Maybe it's time to stop mentioning it without providing a decent source, or at least a pretty significant caveat.

* no relation, I'm sure.

** Which I mention for two reasons. The first is to counter the accusation that creationalists do not get degrees from real universities and the second is because his doctoral thesis (which I have mentioned before) traced the linguistic descent of the people of Ashkenaz, the grandson of Japheth.

*** I realize that two is not "all these," but there are many more, from Madame Blavatsky's ridiculous "Isis Unveiled" to this book from the current decade which tries to demonstrate how the Jews stole everything from the Hindus.

**** Which apears to be a title rather than a personal name.

Labels: bible, history

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Christians and hypocrisy

Progressive U asks* the big question:

Are we all a little bit hypocritical?

It depends on one's definition of hypocritical... According to the Collins English Gem Dictionary, hypocrisy is "assuming of false appearance of virtue; insincerity." If one chooses to follow the latter, then realilistically everyone is a bit hypocrytical.

I, however, don't define hypocrisy as insincerity. I think it's more along the lines of saying one thing yet doing the other... Contradicting your own beliefs or values.

But hypocracy, to me, isn't always easy to combat. For instance, and this is something I don't love about myself and something that not many people know, I'm a self-proclaimed agnostic but I'm the youth representitive on my Presbyterian church's session. I'm aware that this is possibly the epitome of hypocracy and I'm aware that it's kind of disgusting, but it's a difficult situation. I'm not going to go into all the details because that's not the point of this blog, but I enjoy the community. I don't belive in "God" but I find the community of my church comforting. I grew up there.

In the long run, is it considered hypocritical if you're aware of the hypocracy in the situation? I belive that it is, but it's difficult to deal with nonetheless.

Progressive U's dual definition takes two parts, but I must defend the one that he finds universal: saying one thing and doing another.

Imagine if you will, a wide receiver on a football team: it is his primary job to catch the ball**. Catching the ball is his "good" and there are no ifs, ands, or buts and no gray areas when it comes to his performance: he catches the ball or he does not. Either he lives up to the demands of his position or he does not.

On one play he is wide open and the ball is perfectly thrown to him, but he does what so many other receivers do: he runs before he has the ball. It bounces off his fingers and falls incomplete. He has no excuses, he simply failed to live up to his calling. Is he a hypocrite? We would all say he is not, even though he did not do what he was supposed to. He failed and it's his own fault, but he is not a hypocrite.

Now, let's take that from a game to real life. The same man has a religious belief that he ought not have sex with someone he's not married to, but he finds within himself a desire for whatever reason to do so. Or maybe it's to steal. Or to lie. Or whatever other sins he is wholly against. He does them anyway. He has said one thing and done another. Is he a hypocrite? Most of us would say that he is.

We excuse the receiver because he did not mean to drop the ball; he simply made a choice - to look downfield just for a second - that resulted in him not catching it, and we do not excuse him in the field of morality because we assume that he has more control of himself in that field than he had on the football field.

Because of that assumption we conclude that if he does X, then he must think X is alright for him. And if he's saying X is wrong for everyone else, he's a hypocrite. But what if he does not think X is alright for him? What if he knows it's wrong and does it anyway? Is he still a hypocrite?

Therein lies a significant problem for the Christian***. The underlying base assumption of Christianity (and to be honest, its main accusation against men), is that there exists an external code of morality and that none of us can live up to it. And we don't even have an excuse, because Paul states in 1Cor 10:13 that God, in every temptation, offers us a way out. If we believe that, then we have no excuse for sin: if we sin then we rejected God's way out. And yet as Paul, the author of 1Cor, wrote in Romans 7:15, "what I hate, that is what I do." The need for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ arises from the fact that all men sin, even when we have the power not to.

So is failure to live up to an external code that I know I cannot meet to be counted as hypocrisy? If it is, then as Progressive U notes we are all hypocrites****, but if we are all hypocrites then the word has lost its sting: you might as well accuse a man for sleeping. Therefore I think we have to set that aside, Progressive U's plea notwithstanding: the only way to avoid hypocrisy in that case is to jettison any morality I cannot live up to. Since it is not in my power as a Christian to jettison that, I must conclude that all, especially me, are simply sinners rather than hypocrites. We fail to live up to our morality like the receiver fails to catch the ball.

That drives us inexorably back to Progressive U's first definition, the one he rejected, as the real hypocrisy. If I pretend that I am not a sinner when I am, if I cultivate some moral reputation that does not belong to me or that I have not earned, then I am a hypocrite. It is not saying one thing and doing another that makes me a hypocrite, it is looking down my nose at a man who struggles with a temptation while ignoring my own moral failures that makes me such*****.

"Pride goes before destruction," Solomon said, "and a haughty spirit before a fall." If I am condemning sin, even though I'm a sinner, then I convict myself. Even so, I must condemn sin, for it is what it is. But if I am condemning the sinner while presuming that I, through my superior moral qualities, am exempt from such condemnation, then I am branded a hypocrite by my own words.

Hypocrisy is one of those accusations that is easy to level, because as soon as men set up an objective standard of behavior we will fail to live up to it. In that sense we are all hypocrites, it is simply part of the nature of what we are. But true hypocrisy arises when we convince ourselves that it is only others who fail, when we tell ourselves and then begin to believe that sin is something the other man has to deal with and that we are somehow exempt from the foibles common to man, then that our actions are uniquely pleasing to God, and finally that God ought to be proud to have chaps like us hanging around him.

Hypocrisy arises when we begin to believe that we are better than our fellow man - not that we have a superior moral code, but that we are morally superior. And we ought not be surprised at the fall that follows closely behind such pride.

* Spelling errors in original. I thought about correcting them but a whole bunch of "sic"s might come off as hypocritical, since I make such (and don't apologize for them) myself.

** Sure, he may block on occasion, but no one would define a wide receiver as a person who is on the field to block.

*** It is also a significant problem for the Jew, the Muslim, and anyone else who has a moral code that is defined by someone other than himself. I'm concentrating on Christians here because our religion tells us flat out that we don't live up to our own rules.

**** There is one specific exception even to this definition: people who define their morality as simply what they desire to do. One who has no external code of morality can be criticized for many things, but never for hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is unique to people who promote externally-defined ideals.

***** which is why the word Jesus uses to describe such is 'hupokrites,' "actors," or "stage players." A hypocrite is first and foremost not a failure, but a pretender.

Labels: christianity

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Remember, Dollar, thou art mortal

CFR has a firm grasp on the inevitable:

The Council on Foreign Relations also has supported regional and global currencies designed to replace nationally issued currencies.

In an article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, entitled "The End of National Currency," CFR economist Benn Steil asserted the dollar is a temporary currency.

Steil concluded "countries should abandon monetary nationalism," moving to adopt regional currencies, on the road to a global "one world currency."

In this case, the CFR is absolutely correct: the dollar is a temporary currency. It might be better to say that it's a mortal one that has been dying since the introduction of a banking cartel known as the Federal Reserve. The dollar was shot by Wilson, stabbed in the back by FDR, curb-stomped by Nixon, and it looks like El Presidente Dobleve has issued it a coup de grâce*. All we are waiting for now is for it to stop twitching so we can tear out its fillings.

But even though CFR can see the death of the dollar coming, they display an endearing naivete in proposing that a regional currency or even a world currency would be any better or last any longer. If American clowns, Mexican clowns, and Canadian clowns** can't create a currency that holds value, what possible synergies could they together capture that would allow their failed scheme to work on a trans-national scale?

National and international fiat currencies suffer from one fatal shortcoming: they have no external control other than the will of politicians. Since it's easier to print money or issue credit than to tax, fiat currencies are inevitably inflated to death by politicians who get elected by promising something for nothing to the credulous masses. It will always be so***. Always.

Therefore the only world currency that could avoid that problem is one that politicians can't create from nothing: gold. But since the whole idea of a currency is to avoid using gold for money, we can resign ourselves to outliving our currencies. And therefore our bank accounts.

* Is it in poor taste to mix Spanish mockery and French metaphors?

** No small number of whom are members of the CFR.

*** Even the Fed, designed as it was to keep the issuance of money away from politicians by turning it over to a private banking cartel, suffers from this failure. In order to have legal control of the money, the Fed has to agree to create as much of it as Uncle Sam wants. And Uncle Sam's desires are infinite.

(hat tip: Huck)

Labels: money

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Labels: demotivators, economics

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God in the luggage

BS4A is a confusticated if not bebothered by a petty theft in Gen 31:

I'm confused by verse #31. Jacob seems to be confessing to taking Laban's "gods" (idols). That's before he says the thief must die (not knowing that the culprit was Rachel).

Odd that the punishment for stealing graven images should be so severe...

The background is this: Jacob, after marrying two of Laban's daughters and working for him over the course of two decades, decides to head back to Canaan one dark night with all his stuff, wives included. Upon discovering that Jacob has scarpered, his twice-over father-in-law catches up to him and accuses him of pilfering the household idols.

Now I take Jacob's immediate answer, "Because I was afraid you might take your daughters by force," to be answering Laban's first question ("Why did you flee away secretly?") and his second to be dealing with the issue of the idols. But why would Laban care about a couple pieces of badly-carved stone that could probably be replaced for less than the animal on which he rode?

One document recovered in the archaeological dig at Nuzi (beneath the modern Iraqi city of Kirkuk) might explain both Laban's anxiety and Jacob's agreement that whoever took them should die*:

"The tablet of adoption belonging to Nashwi, the son of Ar-shenni: He adopted Wullu, the son of Puhi-shenni. As long as Nashwi is alive, Wullu shall provide food and clothing; when Nashwi dies, Wullu shall become the heir.

If Nashwi has a son of his own, he shall divide (the estate) equally with Wullu, but the son of Nashwi shall take the gods of Nashwi. However, if Nashwi does not have a son of his own, then Wullu shall take the gods of Nashwi.

Furthermore, he gave his daughter Nuhuya in marriage to Wullu, and if Wullu takes another wife he shall forfeit the lands and buildings of Nashwi.

Whoever defaults shall make compensation with one mina of silver and one mina of gold."
-- ANET pp. 219-220, Document published and translated by C.J. Gadd, RA, XXIII (1926),49-161, No. 51.

The Nuzi documents are generally 16th-14th Century BC and cast no little illumination on the times in which Jacob lived. For example, in this document a man named Nashwhi adopts one named Wullu to be his heir, and it's quite possible that Laban's exhortation to Jacob to "abide with me" (Gen 29:19) is the same sort of agreement.

Note the parallels:

Nashwi provides a wife for Wullu / Laban provides a wife for Jacob (29:19)

Wullu cannot take another wife / Laban charges Joseph to take no other wives than his daughters (31:50)

Wullu shall divide the estate with the natural sons only after the death of the Nashwi / Laban claims all that Jacob left with is still his (31:43)

But the most interesting one is this:

If Nashwi has a male heir, he inherits the 'gods' and Wullu cannot take them, but if he does not have an heir, then Wullu gets them. It seems the gods are not simply carved stone idols that could be replaced at the corner idol shop, but are tied up somehow in the familial rights of inheritance.

Before Jacob left, Laban's natural sons were concerned (31:1) that Jacob was horning in on their inheritance, but his daughters were afraid (31:14) that they were being cut out as well. So when they leave, Rachel steals the idols, by which she may have some legal claim over her father's property and Laban for obvious reasons freaks out. As inheritance rights were among the most important of all rights during the period**, it is unsurprising that Jacob defends his own honor by agreeing to support the ultimate penalty against the guilty.

The Israelite people would obviously have no knowledge of the legal significance of idols - items banned in their own culture*** - in pagan Mesopotamia 500 years before Genesis is alleged to have been written. And the fact that this strange episode is not explained is best explained by the idea that this portion of Genesis dates to a period in which the significance was widely understood, i.e. in Mesopotamia long before Moses. The discovery of the Nuzi tablets in 1925 is just one more stake in the heart of JEDP and the idea that Genesis was written hundreds of years after Moses.

* As Genesis notes, Jacob did not know his wife had stolen them, so this may just be a bit of bravado on Jacob's part as well.

** Unlike today of course, where inheritance never sets family members against one another. Except one guy with whom I worked back in the 80s. He had three jobs: cooking in the morning, cutting lawns all day, and passing the wee hours in a donut shop. I asked John one day why he worked so hard. His answer was that his brother had stolen all his money when their mother died, so he was saving up enough to retire. That way he would have time to hunt down his brother and kill him. I don't know if he ever did.

*** That doesn't mean that they didn't have them - they did, a fact that Moses indicts them for any number of times - but with inheritance rules set by law they did not serve the same purpose.

Labels: bible

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Stolen from Huck

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Missing his own point

In a somewhat roundabout response to Ann and Vox, Pintopolis pipes up on Votes for Women:

The very notion that the women's vote is responsible for irresponsibility is crude at best, wildly absurd at worst. Consider that it's women who support abortion ... It's women who far more than men support an economic safety net...one of the most moral developments in the history of America.

Actually, in order to decide whether that particular notion is crude, absurd, or right on, all one has to decide is whether abortion and welfare (the morality of both aside) are more likely to cause responsible behavior or irresponsible. I think that one can make (and in the case of the former, I have made) a very good case that abortion and the safety net can be directly linked to increased personal irresponsibility. Pintopolis addresses neither, of course; he just declares that expecting such things to have real-life consequences that fall outside the desires of liberals to be "the stupidest thing possible."

But even in doing so, Pinto has inadvertently proves (or at least buttresses) one of Vox's more provocative arguments against women suffrage, because if women can always* be counted on to support government paternalism as Pintopolis here admits, then it follows that women suffrage is a useful tool for male politicians who want that increased government power for themselves. As Vox loves to point out, the very first plank of Mussolini's Fascist Manifesto is, "Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility for women." And it was, in all probability, not because the Fascists felt limited franchise was so terribly unfair.

On the other hand, that the introduction of women suffrage was injurious to personal liberty** does not mean that its repeal would have the opposite effect. Smoking may cause lung cancer, but quitting once you have it will not cure it. One does not undo history, and there is little sense in trying.

The rise of the nanny state, rather than being mostly a result of the middle-class, unmarried*** female desire for security over freedom, is far more directly a result of two other trends anyway:

• the rise of capitalistic production, from which there arose enough wealth that some could be redistributed
  
• technology (science and engineering) as an ideology, the idea of the 'technocrat' who could run the government, the economy, and society like a machine - we still apply this foolish idea to the Fed, by far the most expensive and disastrous application of it.

Women have always desired security - that's not a bad thing, it's simply a natural result of their physical vulnerability. Men have always found it easier to plunder than to work. Increasing the franchise simply served as the easiest way for professional politicians to oversee and benefit from the process of institutionalizing both.

* By this I don't mean every woman will at any time, I mean that the majority of women will every time.

** The flipside of the uncontrolled growth of the nanny state.

*** it was not poor married women who were the activists; they were too busy. It is not coincidence that most feminists today are of the same demographic as then.

Labels: feminism

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Quoth the wife: not funny

Labels: feminism

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The herd is not always wrong

Bill Fleckenstein bemoans the loneliness of the long-distance contrarian:

Bottom line: For what's often thought of as a bear's [investment] conference, I did not detect much bearishness. Perhaps it's right not to be bearish. But it does strike me that perhaps to be quite bearish about the economy and the stock market might be one of the most contrary thoughts of all.

When it comes to investment, contrarianism can be loosely defined as "figuring out what the herd is doing and then doing precisely the opposite." And there are many times that the contrarian is correct: in fact, at the turns of great bull or bear markets he is the only one who's correct. He's the last seller when everyone has bought, and he buys the last cheap share of the last panic seller. He is, in fact, the only one who gains advantage when a trend has played out. Unfortunately for many contrarians it is easy to confuse "the herd is always wrong at the end of a trend" with "the herd is always wrong."

Contrariansism is considered the great virtue of the hard-money advocate and the economic permabear*. But in fact, it is the great temptation, the emotional and intellectual seduction that ensures that he will be wrong most of the time**, if only because, while universality of sentiment may exist at great market turns, it does not cause them. Sure, if through pure bullheadedness he holds on to his opinion through the whole trend, his sentiment will eventually be vindicated; at some point every market must turn. Whether he has any money left at that turn remains the open question.

It is no great feat (and therefore is no sure path to investment wealth) to simply decipher what the market is doing and to bet against it. In fact, that is a path to poverty, as markets move in one direction, with nearly everyone on board, for far longer than any rational person can expect. It is hard to kick against the pricks.

Rather, the great feat is to determine what the market must do and then to prepare oneself for the day it finally does that, to anticipate the inevitable and to allocate one's capital correctly when it arrives. Because in the long run, the market does not reward those who are contrary, but those who are correct.

UPDATE: The Dow*** hit a new high today, and as much as people in the hard-money camp believe that this is sufficient justification to renew their predictions of a crash, I would simply say that there are times when it's safest, if one is not willing to jump aboard a runaway train, to at least stay off the tracks****.

* at least in this generation of seemingly-perpetual financial bull markets.

** and, most likely, that he will spend that time protesting that he is correct about the market but that a shadowy cabal, hiding behind three letter acronyms (they might be the PPT - the Plunge Protection Team, they might be the PTB - the powers that be), is the real reason his market calls consistently fail. He may even be right about that. More likely, it is simply not the end of the trend.

*** As I have said until you are bored to tears (c'mon, admit it, I won't call you a wuss for crying in public) if you want to understand our future, the Dow is the wrong thing to be watching anyway. I may do another post on this someday, but the main reason is the phenomenal amount of money that enters it through retirement and mutual funds who, by law, must buy stocks with it. The more the boomers put in their 401(k)s, the more the market goes up, fundamentals be damned. It's simple supply and demand, and demand has been institutionalized. It may not fall until (but will certainly fall when) Boomers start to withdraw that same money in retirement.

**** There. I've just ensured the market will crash. I hope you're happy.

Labels: economy

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Democracy in Action

Labels: politics

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