Stupid "International Astronomical Union"!

Ugh! I so hate the IAU (International Astronomical Union). Well, that's too broad a statement, really. The only thing I know about it is that it has proclaimed for itself the sole sovereign power for naming anything in space. Who designated it the authority to do so? It did it, itself. As far as I can tell. Aside from naming things, I never hear the IAU mentioned. They hold some meetings and publish conference proceedings that I've thumbed through, but I don't see them as actively involved as the American Astronomical Society, for instance. Or the Royal Astronomical Society, in Great Britain. Maybe because these publish important journals, they're more on my mind. It also makes them more useful to astronomers.

My latest screed against the IAU comes because of this article in the New York Times (free registration required) about the discoverer of a likely tenth planet around our Sun. Michael Brown is also behind the discoveries of Quoaur and Sedna, two big Kuiper Belt objects (like giant comets-in-waiting) in the past few years. Well, foolish Dr. Brown (I'm being sarcastic, here) made the near-fatal mistake of publicly announcing his tentative name for these after he discovered them. Hold your horses, there, Tex! The IAU has strict rules against this kind of lawbreaking!

How dare the discoverer think that he has any business suggesting a name?! Why, that's solely up to the all-powerful IAU. Sure, the IAU will take months or years to debate the thing before it comes up with its sovereign decision, but it's important to get these things right. After all, chaos would break out if the name were imprudently chosen. And so, in its infinite wisdom, the IAU has passed rules against mere mortal astronomers who "discover" a planet, asteroid, etc., from publicly announcing their suggestion for a name. Why, what evil would happen if the public's tender ears were to hear this name before it had been properly vetted by the IAU? Once again: chaos!!!

Dr. Brown has crossed the IAU twice. Few do this once and live. His fate is hanging by a thread, as it is. He must chose his next move wisely.

When Brown mentioned his idea, "Sedna," to the press after "his" latest discovery, there was such an outcry amongst the right-thinking minions of the IAU that they wanted the Union to spite him by rejecting his proposed name. One janissary even went and pre-empted Brown by submitting the name "Sedna" for an insignificant asteroid.


My conservative/libertarian attitudes make me chafe against the overbearing actions of government, especially in things that are none of the government's business. They also make me chafe against the overbearing actions of any private organization that seeks to rule over people and take for itself the powers of a government.

Actually, I have seen oblique references to some international treaties that set up the IAU. I don't know exactly what they encompass, but for the life of me, I don't see why there has to be a government treaty on the names of asteroids. For goodness' sake, astronomers can set up our conventions on our own time, without needing laws to tell everybody else what we've decided. And no law can force the public (in a free country, like our own) to call anything by any name. I can call "Sedna" by the name "Qvitzelflik," if I feel like it, and nobody can stop me. Of course, no one else will know what I'm talking about, but that's my problem. And that's why conventions are established from common usage, or in this case, from the IAU's decision. But they can't force eveybody else to live with their decision.

Groot Broer

If I did this right, the headline reads, "Big Brother," in Dutch. A chilling news story about the Dutch government opening comprehensive electronic files on all children at birth. The files would contain health, education, family, and police records, and they would track each citizen from birth to death in a centralized database that would let officials look for "red flags" in order to "protect troubled children." Of course. I'd emmigrate, if I had to live under that kind of official nosiness.

Volokh: hero of Scotland?

I was looking up Wallachian in my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (don't ask why), and I was intrigued to find its roots. OK--first, Wallachia (or Walachia) is the southern region of Rumania. We're talking all the way over in Eastern Europe. And yet the dictionary says that the name, as we have it in English, comes from Mediaeval Latin (Wal(l)achia), from Slavic forms representing Germanic (specifically Old High German) *Walh- (which meant foreigner). Then it says, "cf. Welsh."

Hmmm! OK, under Welsh, we find this word (I mean Welsh, here) is related to Walloon (Interesting! They're the French-speaking Belgians, if I remember right.) and comes from Germanic *wal[kh]az (I'm using [kh] to represent the Greek chi symbol in the pronunciation.), meaning foreign--especially Celtic or Roman. (The Old High German version of this was Walh, as above.) And the Germanic comes from Latin Volcae, the name of a Celtic tribe. It finally notes that the Anglo-Norman version of this name was waleis, which survives today in the personal name Wallace. (Side note--the -wall part of Cornwall comes from the same word as Wales.)

OK, and then it refers us to Vlach. Vlach is a variant spelling of Wal(l)ach (from Wallachian), above. This entry tells us that the Russian spelling of this name is Voloch. I presume that the ch the dictionary uses here is the sound more commonly (and currently) transliterated as kh. Then we've arrived at the name of the lawblogger, Eugene Volokh.

OK, all of this has been a bit convoluted. But the conclusion? Volokh = Wallace. That means Eugene and his brother (etymologically) share a surname with William Wallace, immortalized in the movie Braveheart. I think the Volokh Conspiracy, being the good libertarians that they are, ought to play this up and adopt as a motto, "They may take our lives, but they will never take...our freedom!!!"

What I'd like to hear at the Roberts hearings

"Senator, please put your accusation in the form of a question."

Advice and consent

One other little grammatical point. I read and hear a lot of my fellow conservatives, when criticizing the Democratic senators for fillibustering judicial nominations, say that the senate has the duty to "advise and consent" to the President's nomination. Well, no. The Constitution states that the President shall nominate judges, who take their positions with the "advice and consent" of the Senate.

But that does not mean that the Constitution requires the Senate either to "advise" the President on the nomination or to "consent" to the President's choice. The Constitution's wording means that the nominee becomes a judge if the Senate consents to him. But the Senate is not required to give its consent.

On a minor point, it also does not mean that the Senate is required to give its advice, for that matter. "Advise" is still part of the conditional statement.

Language Pet Peeves

I've been hearing some of my pet peeve words pop up on TV lately, so I'm writing a list of them here, just to spout off.

impact--Two problems: (1) this a noun, never a verb; (2) it refers to something physically smacking into something else--please don't use it to mean "effect"!

partner--noun, not verb.

dialogue--noun, not verb.

...hmmm...I've forgotten the others I wanted to put on this list. I'll post others when I think of them.

Why New Orleans is Below Sea-level

Talked with Figulus last night about why New Orleans is below sea-level in the first place. Turns out (unsurprisingly) that it wasn't below sea level in the first place. Until around the turn of the century (early 1900s), the city was bordered by a lot of swamps (oh, I'm sorry--the environmentally correct term must be "wetlands"!). Every time there'd be a flood, the swamps would turn into a breeding ground for massive numbers of mosquitos, and the city would be hit with a yellow fever epidemic, with lots of people dead. Needless to say, the town fathers were getting a little tired of this. So they drained the swamp early in the 20th century.

Now, they realized that the former swampland would subside after it was drained. Since it was barely above sea-level to begin with, it now sank slightly below sea-level. Rather than let Lake Ponchatrain spread into the newly-dried land, which would defeat the whole point, they put a system of dikes in place to hold the waters back.

OK, so now you have a section of dry land at the edge of New Orleans, not being used for anything. The city hit a boom period, and there were lots of immigrants moving into the area. They often couldn't afford to buy land in the developed area of town, but the reclaimed land was cheaper, so they'd move there and build their houses.

The reclaimed land, having only some minimal dikes, would still flood occasionally, so in 1947(?) they got together with the state and Federal Government to work out the present system of levees, built to withstand a hurricane.

Figulus says they withstood a category 4 hurricane before Katrina and held, so they're pretty good. The risk assessment at the time calculated the chance of a major hurricane hitting them (and breaching?) at being around once in 250 years. That's not bad odds, is it?

The point of all this is that New Orleans wasn't acting stupidly, as some commentators have insinuated, by being (in part) below sea-level. It's not as if the city took a look at the Gulf of Mexico and said, "Hmmm...we'll build...there!" No. They were solving a worse problem. I'd like to sea the relative death tolls from the diseases spread by the swamps and the flooding of this hurricane. I know which caused the larger human suffering.

More on guns in New Orleans

Thinking of my previous post, I saw on Fox News last night a clip of the police trying to force some nice old lady to leave her home, which is above water. She told them no, she wasn't going. That she has food and clean water, and her house is dry. And furthermore, that she has a pistol which she can use to protect herself from looters.

Well, then! They'd had about enough of that!

The next thing I saw, they'd taken the pistol from her, in her own home, and were examining it, as if to see if there was something wrong with it. (It was apparently a small-frame .38 revolver. It's not a technical challenge to examine the thing.) Then they were showing it to the TV camera. And finally, I saw them "escorting" her out of her house, sans pistol. I don't know if they stole the gun or what they did with it. They seemed to be holding onto it an awful lot, though.

So I don't know for sure what happened at the end, but I was certainly left with the impression they'd taken a citizen's own gun from her, from within her own home. I hope this isn't really the case, but I'd have to see more to find out.

Gun Rights Violated in New Orleans?

The Volokh Conspiracy has an ominous-sounding story from the New York Times regarding police in New Orleans seizing legally-owned firearms from refugees, as they evacuate them. Eugene Volokh cites the relevant passage from the Louisiana Constitution, guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms, with the proviso that the state can regulate the carrying of concealed weapons. And it appears that they're letting private security guards carry openly, so why not regular citizens? This is why you don't trust the government with your guns.

Furthermore, it looks like the Federal forces will have a hand in evacuation. Will they be taking citizens' guns away from them, too? Even scarier.

Actually, the most chill-inducing line is this quotation from P. Edwin Compass, the superintendent of police: "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons."

Right.

Federalism in disasters

I'm disappointed in some conservatives I've heard, cavalierly throwing out the idea that the Feds ought to order the states around, in these kinds of disasters. This talk is pretty limited, to be fair. Rush has pointed out the folly of this idea; I think I'm hearing it from some of the second-tier commentators, or maybe it's just the callers.

I looked up the relevant section in the Constitution, and it says that Federal guarantees of protecting states from "domestic violence" can only come upon request from a state's legislature. (Or the governor, if the legislature cannot be convened.) The Feds are put in a secondary role, here. The state is the one to take the initiative.

Disaster relief is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, and I'm not actually in favor of the Federal government providing it, in principle, but since we've been doing it for so many decades, and everybody expects it, so I'm not going to demand we stop right now. But the state must remain the one in charge. City vs. state...that's a debate for each state to have. The city should make the decisions, I believe, with the state providing the material aid and manpower, if necessary. Always remember--the local (city or county) government is the closest to you, and they're the most likely to really care about how you're treated. The state is more remote than your county, but still not too far away. The federal government only cares about you in the abstract.

That being said, and despite some bureaucratic mistakes the Feds made this time, I think the Federal Government still did their own (limited) role better than the city or state did in New Orleans. But that doesn't mean I want them in charge.

More on pets and evacuation

I meant to link to this in my post on pets, below. Instapundit mentions this problem in an update to a long post on "lessons learned." He's not too concerned about leaving pets behind, himself, but he does recognize that other people are. I still think the people forcing refugees to dump their pets are being incredibly cruel and callous. Yes, there are going to be cases where you don't have time to accomodate animals, but clearly we're not in that situation. Not when we've spent over a week dillydallying around with getting people out. There's been plenty of time to help the pets, too.

Below Sea Level Cities

Having just returned from Holland, I have been thinking about this whole fact of New Orleans being built partly below sea level. Lots of people point at this as being a stupid idea, but let's not be so hasty. Large parts of Holland are also below sea level, and I don't hear anybody calling the Dutch names over it.

I am curious why New Orleans did this, though. I have not heard any comprehensive explanation (nor much in the way of partial ones, for that matter), so I'm speculating, here. I see three likely possibilities:

1) It was above sea level when it was built, but the land is slowly sinking.

2) They took a lake and drained it to create new land, then built on that.

3) They took part of the Gulf of Mexico and did a lot of engineering to enclose it, and then they drained that.


In case (1), it's not their fault they're below sea level. In case (2), there are sometimes reasons it's safer to drain such a lake than to leave it as is. In case (3), you take the action with the most known risk, but it's still not necessarily foolhardy.

The Netherlands has done a combination of (2) and (3), from what I understand. As early as the 1500s (I think), four inland lakes had merged into a single, big one, as the result of peat mining (a relatively treeless country, peat was their best source of fuel and heat). This new lake, Haarlemermeer (sp?) ("Lake Harlem"), being close to the sea, picked up and exacerbated weather patterns from the North Sea, and was a real problem for the nearby inhabitants. It started flooding and wiping out lots of villages near its shores. So they decided to drain it. Windmills couldn't easily drain one that big & deep (an early plan conceived of something like 500 windmills), but by the 1800s, steam pumps made it practical. Only three were needed by then. The newly recovered land was below sea level, but a system of canals and dikes kept the water at bay, and pumps kept the land dry. Prime farmland, there. The Amsterdam airport, Schiphol, is in the middle of this former lake. (Schip-hol = ship-hole...this was the spot where a lot of ships kept getting sunk in Lake Harlem.) Now, yes, you do have some flooding risk by building anything there, but they've had less trouble since they drained the lake than they did before.

More recently, the Dutch, I am told, have also expanded their land out into the North Sea, enclosing and then draining sections that were actually in the ocean. In this case, you do put yourself at some risk that you didn't have before, but I think their troubles have been many years between.

So. Which of these are true in the case of New Orleans? Before people arrogantly call those citizens stupid, they should find out what reasons there are for the situation.

Pets and Evacuations

My family and I were talking about the problem of abandoning pets in the Katrina evacuation. Once the hurricane hit, and evacuation was mostly of people who didn't have their own means to leave, the rescuers were forcing people to leave their pets behind. Many were refusing to, and there is one case I've read of a little kid who was so upset he got physically sick and threw up. The person making him evacuate was forcing him to put down his pet.

As my sister and mother both said, if I were told that, I would simply refuse to go at all. "They'd have to shoot me instead," I think one said. I agree. If I were leaving on my own power, and I had plenty of food and water (and...um..."facilities") to provide my pets for the entire time I'd be away, I might consider keeping them inside the house on their own, but that would be a last resort, and it's unlikely anything larger than a cat could hold out long enough on the amount of supplies I'd have stocked. And what if you wind up away for months? They'd all die. If told, "You are coming with us, period, and leave the pets to their fates," I'd simply refuse. "Simply" might be an oversimplification, itself. More likely, it would involve a physical struggle.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that rescue efforts need to make some accomodations for pets. It's not only that the pets should objectively be saved for their own sakes, but also that this is in the people's best interests. Think of that poor kid who actually threw up. You have people who are in a terrible state to begin with, and they're mentally and physically drained and at risk of bad health. They're feeling desperate in many cases, and you want to take away the little kid's dog?! What do you think that's going to do to the kid??

I can imagine this as the tragic ending to some wartime melodrama, in which a miserable refugee family is burned out of their home, set upon by marauders and straggling soldiers, flees on foot with their few remaining possessions, nearly starving as they trudge across hostile land in Eastern Europe...and in the final, depressing act, as they're about to reach the safe haven of a neutral country...some idiot border guard shoots the six-year-old girl's kitten.

Annoying comments on Katrina and New Orleans

I'm ticked off by the comments out of some, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert and a number of callers to radio talk shows, that Federal relief money shouldn't be going to rebuild New Orleans, since much of it is below sea level. Actually, I think Speaker Hastert's comments weren't exactly that, but it is still an inappropriate time to be saying what he did. It's awfully easy to go around suggesting that somebody else should move away from his home and land. I see these kinds of comments occasionally from people who have few or weak ties to any place, and who do not understand how people can feel bound to a place, and I don't have any respect for that flippant attitude.

Yes, much of New Orleans is below sea level. Yes, that involves certain risks. Holland has been doing this for...what? half a millennium? (Gee--let's just tell all the Dutch they should up and move to higher ground, too. Say...Germany.) New Orleans has been around for hundreds of years (I don't know the founding date, but I'm guessing it would be the early 1700s.), and somehow it's after it gets hit with this one hurricane that these Monday-night quarterbacks come forward with their helpful advice that people in New Orleans are stupid for living where they do and that the rest of us shouldn't be helping out, or that the help should only come with strings attached.

Why, just make them move somewhere else! What a simple solution! Who could possibly object? After all, they knew it was a bad idea to live there in the first place, right?

Serious devastation once in 300 years--that's not a suicidally high risk factor, in my estimation. People who go around saying that nobody should live in a place that was liable to this kind of damage aren't thinking all that clearly. Again: I'm going on a risk factor of 1/300, yearly. What about other cities along the Gulf Coast? Galveston was hit in 1900, with 8,000-12,000 dead (let's pray the toll from this hurricane isn't that high). Florida is a regular target of hurricanes, as are the coastal cities of the Carolinas and even Virginia. What about the Caribbean islands? I mean, how many times do people have to rebuild Puerto Rico before they figure out they should just move to someplace away from the ocean, like Fargo? (Heavy sarcasm here, of course.) Oh, of course, we also need to think of other disaster-prone areas. All the region along the Mississippi River should be evacuated, because it floods. Why live in a flood plain? For that matter, there are rivers all through the country that flood and wipe out people's houses. So no cities near rivers! That cuts out downtown Pittsburgh. What idiot builds a city near a river?!! (Again, with the sarcasm.) Then there are earthquakes. No human habitation should be allowed in California generally. Man, are we going to be asked to rebuild San Francisco every time it gets hit? After 1906, nobody should have been so dumb as to live there! And don't forget the New Madrid fault. Memphis is just asking for it. In college there, we had an earthquake prediction scare (not fulfilled, thankfully) that was getting lots of us to make escape plans, making parents want to bring their kids home, and the school was not counting attendance! And the fault is still there and ready to let loose The Big One before too many years! So no fair living anywhere between Saint Louis and Memphis, inclusive. And Anchorage, Alaska, too. I mean, they had a magnitude 9 hit them back in the '60s, and there was hardly anything left in some neighborhoods. So away and done with the main city in the state! Volcanoes. How many Washington state cities are threatened by at least mudslides if their volcanoes erupt? National Geographic had a revealing map showing where flooding, mud, ash, and lava would go if one of these erupted. Other mudslides--California. Boy, that's almost seasonal, there. And the fires, too. Don't let anybody in this country live near trees. You're simply asking for it. I mean, should firemen have to risk their lives to save yours because you had this frivolous desire to have shade on your house? That goes for the whole country. No trees near houses. Or better, no houses near trees. Tidal waves: I remember seeing warning signs all over Hawai'i about these. It's not only Indonesia that gets them, remember--other areas of the Pacific are much more threatened. And I hear that if one island volcano in the Caribbean goes, most of the Atlantic is in much bigger trouble from a tidal wave. Who wants to take bets on their safety? And as far as not structural damage, but human deaths goes, keep in mind heat waves and blizzards. Oh, oh--I almost forgot tornadoes! That eliminates all habitation in the midwest and much of the South. Thank goodness those people in places like Pittsburgh and Maryland are safe...no, wait, both have been hit with tornadoes in recent years, too. So cut them out, as well. I mean, even College Park had one come right through campus. Better to relocate UMd to Denver or someplace. Also, there's terrorism. Everybody knows al Qaeda would love to hit D.C., being the capital and all. Who thinks it's unlikely that over the next 300 years, no terrorist will kill much of anybody (dirty bomb, biological agents, what have you) in our country's capital? Show of hands? Then move out.

What are we left with? Not much. Everybody with a risk factor greater than 1 in 300 years should pack up and move to whatever places I haven't already mentioned. Or at least don't come crying to the rest of us and expect us to bail you out the same way we do other places when they're hit. We have no mercy for people who have such sentimental attachments to their homes, their land, their cities, or regions, that they won't immediately pack up and move to someplace that will never, ever be damaged. Or if we do bail you out, it's only on the condition that you move away or put your house up on stilts or something.

Sorry for the angry sarcasm of this post, but I absolutely hate the "Well, they had it coming" remarks of a lot of people I'm hearing this week. Mark Levin on NRO's The Corner had it right. Let's relieve New Orleans, Mobile, Gulf Port, and the area as we have other places in other disasters, and not carp on how they shouldn't be living there. I have Constitutional objections to certain kinds of Federal relief, but we have gotten used to providing it, and we shouldn't decide ex post facto that no, now is the time we're going to start going by the book on these things, especially when the agencies that do this are already set up. I have no objection to the Feds going in and helping, in practice.

They shouldn't override state efforts, of course, but should be in assistance of them, with the state being the one in charge. Note that even in the Constitution's provision that the Federal Government protect a state from domestic violence, it can only come upon petition from the state's legislature (or executive, if the legislature cannot convene)! The Feds can't just barge in on their own and take charge.

Furthermore, this aid should not come with strings attached. None of this idea that if we help out, people have to leave and move to higher ground to rebuild. OK, so now you want the Federal Government to order the depopulation of an entire major city? It's none of our business where somebody else decides to live. Yes, we're giving aid, but we do it elsewhere already, and you can't go and demand conditions after the disaster, when you didn't lay them out before. If "everybody knew" this was coming, and that's your excuse, then why didn't you make these conditions beforehand? Sounds like the people carping on this now really weren't thinking this would happen, either.

Enough of this.

Hurricane Relief--where to donate

I have little original to contribute to the discussion of hurricane Katrina. The most useful thing I can do right now is to write about where people can go to contribute to the relief efforts. In this, I can do no better than link to Instapundit's excellent list of charities and relief agencies. Our great thanks to Glenn Reynolds for posting such a helpful list.

Being a Southerner and having gone to college here, I of course have a lot of friends from the devastated area. Let's all help out in what ways we can, and do not forget your prayers for all those who have died, those who have survived, and those whose fates are not yet secure.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is Habitat for Humanity. I expect that their services are going to be called on heavily in the months and years to come, along the Gulf Coast. Here is a link to their home page, and I see that they do have something up already on hurricane relief work. Remember that they take both money and volunteers. There's a lot of manpower involved in building a house.

Galileus

There is a rather unusual take on the Galileo affair here. While some of this rings true, Steve keeps retelling the old myth that it's all the fault of the Aristotelians. I suspect that that's more myth than truth. But I do agree that it was for the most part Galileo's fellow scientists who were after his head rather than the clergy.

The Meteorite

Hat tip: Laodicea.

Among the hills a meteorite
Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,
And wind and rain with touches light
Made soft, the contours of the stone.

Thus easily can Earth digest
A cinder of sidereal fire,
And make her translunary guest
The native of an English shire.

Nor is it strange these wanderers
Find in her lap their fitting place,
For every particle that's hers
Came at the first from outer space.

All that is Earth has once been sky;
Down from the sun of old she came,
Or from some star that travelled by
Too close to his entangling flame.

Hence, if belated drops yet fall
From heaven, on these her plastic power
Still works as once it worked on all
The glad rush of the golden shower.

C S Lewis

Astronomy Photoblogging

These are two photos of the aurorae over Ohio in October or November, 2003. The green emission was visible to the eye as a pale haze, almost colorless, while the red was entirely invisible. Imagine my surprise when I had the film developed and discovered that half the sky was lit up in a brilliant red curtain!

The rods and cones in the eye are responsible for the different scenes perceived by our eyes and a camera. Our eyes are tuned to respond best to the yellow (or yellow-green, I think I've heard) part of the visible spectrum, and we are less sensitive to the red. So if there are equal numbers of red and yellow photons hitting your eye, you will see the yellow as brighter than the red. Camera film is more sensitive to red light than our eyes are, so it showed up nicely on the pictures.

Also note the blinking lights of airplanes I caught in both of these pictures. The first image (with the broad green cloud) was 30 sec., while the other was 45 sec. or so.

My First Photoblogging!

Blogger has just started up the ability to add photos to your blog, free of charge. Unfortunately, this does not support the Mac version of Internet Explorer, so I'm switching to Safari for this. Yes, yes, I can hear y'all mumbling that I should have done that a long time ago...

This is a timed exposure of the fireworks over the duck pond in Alcoa, Tennessee, a night or two before Independence Day this year. In keeping with Instapundit's discussion of his equipment, I'll say that I used a 35 mm SLR film camera, a Nikon N65. It has a nice infrared remote control for the shutter, so I don't have to touch the shutter release on these timed shots and make the camera shake.

Issues of Christian unity

Frederica Mathewes-Green has a useful article in last Friday's Opinion Journal on talks and debates on unity between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.

I say it is a "useful" article because of how she lays out some issues involved, from both perspectives. She is an Orthodox who appears to be leaning to the Roman Catholic side of the argument. But I disagree with the underlying attitude of the argument she puts forward.

I think it is great for all of us Christians to be able to cooperate with each other on the kinds of things a Christian voice is needed--cultural issues, moral problems, standing up to radical Islamists, and so on--but...(did you see that "but" coming, too?)...I see no need to merge any demoninations.

The whole discussion strikes me as an irrelevant (irrelevant at best, but possibly dangerous) bureaucratic exercise. There are, today, thousands (I am sure) of separate Christian denominations around the world. To see the Great Goal of Christianity to be the merging of these separate administrative bureaucracies into One Unified Hierarchy seems to me one of the last things people ought to waste their energies on. We can get along perfectly well as Christians in our separate churches.

In fact, I guarantee that we can get along better in our separate churches, with our freedom to believe differently. As it is now, dissent over the proper interpretation of scripture is something that can be safely debated between different churches, without danger of one interpretation being forced on everybody. United [giggle!--ed.] Methodists can't excommunicate Southern Baptists, and the Roman Catholics can refuse to believe in predestination without endangering the souls of Presbyterians. This is the kind of arrangement that works best. It goes hand in hand with a free society.

I think it's great for different denominations to have arrangements that recognize each others' clergy, though. That see each other as legitimate. That's the kind of interdenominational unity that is important.

It is an odd mindset that thinks the bureaucracy is the really important thing.

"Honey, would you move the capsule out of the driveway?"

I just saw on Fox News that the space station astronauts (By the way, could we please come up with a name for that station? And not that stupid "International Space Station" or the even worse "Space Station Alpha." I'm still mad that they dropped "Freedom" so the Commie Chinese wouldn't be offended. Grr.) are moving the attached Soyuz space capsule from one end of the station to another, to give them some room for a space walk.

I missed the first half of the report, so I might have that wrong. I got the impression that the capsule was blocking some spot that they wanted to get to in the space walk. It's impressive that we have a station big enough that we can simply move the parts around. And I get this image of it being a space version of moving the car in the driveway, so you can get some work done in that spot.

National Review space cruise

Well, not yet, but I like the idea:

RICH LOWRY'S WATERCOLORS... [JPod]

...inspired by the advice of the avuncular Paul Johnson, will be on sale on the first National Review High Atmosphere Cruise aboard the Space Shuttle. Also available: Doric and Ionic columns carved by Victor Davis Hanson, Jay Nordlinger's "Piano Concerto #1 in Honor of a Free Cuba," K-Lo fronting the reconstituted Duran Duran for her version of "Hungry Like the Wolf," and a part on Warren Bell's final Hollywood sitcom, "Everybody Doesn't Love Stalin." Act now! Be the first to book your trip! You'll only need three weeks of training on how to survive in zero-G gravity!

Does being an astrophysicist give me a leg up on "applying" for this cruise, like it does for the astronaut corps?

Shuttle launch delayed

Yeah, yeah, I'm late on this. Saw on Fox News that the delay was from a failure in a fuel leak sensor (I think I'm repeating this correctly). I haven't seen the 4:00 press release, but they had a source telling them at 3:00 or so that Monday would be the earliest launch date now. I'm curious why Monday--how long to fix it? Specifics of the Space Station orbit? After all, they have to wait for the Station to pass over Cape Canaveral in order to be able to dock, and that doesn't happen every orbit. The spacecraft orbits precess, relative to a map of the Earth.

Well, we'll just see...

Shuttle launch not delayed

I'm still hearing on the radio that we're set for 3:51 PM today. Apparently they've fixed the tile damage that happened yesterday or decided it was minor. Fox News is starting their coverage at 3:00 PM.

Space Shuttle damaged

I just saw from Drudge that the Space Shuttle Discovery has been damaged on the pad. According to the AP,

[...] a window cover fell off the shuttle and damaged thermal tiles near the tail. But the space agency said it probably could fix the problem in time for Wednesday's launch.

Now, the plastic/foam cover hit the cover over one of the Orbital Maneuvering Engines. These are not the big engines that power the ship during launch, easily visible sticking out below the ship on the pad. Instead, these are smaller nozzles that turn the ship while it's in space, in lieu of using ailerons and the rudder. I'm not sure how far back this spot is, but if it's not a leading edge surface, I expect it's not as critical as the damage that led to Columbia's crash in 2003. And of course, they're going to fix it. I hope we're still on for tomorrow...

The last I saw a launch time specified, it was 3:51 PM EDT, Wednesday. Let's keep an eye on that.

Thoughts on the Kelo decision--an angle that hasn't been mentioned

Like most everybody else, it seems, I am mad about the US Supreme Court's recent Kelo vs. New London decision on eminent domain. Before I get to my full-throated rant, let me first add one caveat to how some of my fellow conservatives (and liberals, too, for that matter) are interpreting this. That is, that this decision did not establish that the government can condemn your property. It has always been able to condemn it, at least under certain circumstances. But the US Constitution presumes eminent domain is done for "public use," and this decision so widened the meaning of "use" to mean "benefit" that now pretty much any excuse could fall within the boundaries. Just keep in mind that this decision didn't create the power of eminent domain--it expanded the situations under which it can be done.

OK, now on to my own thoughts. Well, they still have to pay you for the land, keep in mind. In practice, though, the value they'll reimburse you for it might be well below what it's worth. Or what it would be worth if you didn't have the government announcing they're going to condemn it. Still, they have to pay you, and they have to get that money from somewhere, which is to say, from tax money.

Here's where things get interesting with Kelo. In the past, the government could not condemn the land of person A to give it to person B. It had to be for "public use," generally meaning government property--a courthouse, a road, a fort, a park... There were a few exceptions (I was about to link to a great article from last week on the history of "public use" at Opinionjournal.com, but it's not online anymore. Nuts.), but just a few.

The fact that (aside from these exceptions) the condemned land had to be held by the government meant that the government would have to come up with its own money to pay for it. Simple enough. So if you're dealing with a county or city government with limited resources, the cost alone might be an impediment to their ambitions. If they really need that road, maybe they'll have the support to spend the money. But a vanity project is going to be tougher to pull off, purely as a matter of expense.

Now, however, the court has essentially allowed the government to transfer title from A to B. "A" still has to be compensated, but that can be taken from the money "B" will pay the government for it. The money no longer has to come out of the government's pocket! Expense is not a barrier any more, as long as there is a private group who wants (and is willing to pay for) the land.

So while in the past, if a city wanted to level an inconvenient neighborhood and put something else on it, they'd have to scrounge up the money to do so, now they just have to find a developer willing to buy. Problem solved.

The possibilities of social engineering seem unlimited now. Others have commented that churches are inviting targets, as they pay no property taxes. Having anything else on the land would be a "benefit" to the city, under the Kelo logic. So we'll have our model city kick out all churches and synagogues.

What next? Farmland. Yeah, I know--all you city slickers think there are no farms within cities, anyway. Not always true, although it's not extensive. And we could use this little exercise with a model county, for that matter, so bear with me. Farmland is often assessed at a very low fraction of its value for property tax purposes, we 'll get rid of the farmers, next.

Poor neighborhoods come after that. Low property values, and do you really want these poor people around, acting like parasites on society if they don't have jobs or pay taxes, but they use public services? (I'm using Communist terms here sarcastically, of course.) Raze their homes and bring in the rich, or at least middle-class.

Come to think of it, businesses are better for the city's tax base than people of any economic level at all. What do people really contribute, themselves? Property taxes. That's it (unless you're in one of those unfortunate cities with an income tax). And people sap up that tax money like crazy! Schools are a huge expense, and you've got residential water and garbage services... Businesses don't have kids to put in school, and their water and garbage use is, I suspect, smaller than the houses they would replace.

So clear out the people all together! Dynamite their houses, bulldoze the smoking ruins, and put in a lot of industry, quirky coffee shops, and interesting little specialty stores with cute names. A city full of nothing but businesses! It's perfect! The people can live out in the county (or the next county--better) and still work in your stores and pay your sales taxes. But they won't burden you with kids and schools and their paying those lower tax rates and such.

Sigh.

To be honest, I had grown up thinking that Gatlinburg, Tenn., a town the next county over from me, was just this. An entire city with only businesses and no people. I was probably in high school before I found out that anybody actually lived there!

Movie review Monday

Terrorist bombings in London, a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast, and what do I choose to write about after my hiatus? Movies.

Sorry, it's just that I didn't think my opinions would contribute anything original or particularly enlightening to the discussions of the London attacks. What I have to say is being said by countless others on our side. And I preferred to read what others had written about them.

What's gotten me motivated this morning, though, was seeing Disney's "Brother Bear" the other day. I used to make a point of seeing all of the Disney animated movies at the theater, and I did, from whichever one followed "The Little Mermaid" (saw that first on tape, freshman year of college), to maybe past "Pocahontas." "Atlantis," too, come to think of it.

The first few of these were great. Disney's return to its strengths after years and years (Decades, maybe?? Was the last of the old ones "Robin Hood"?) of neglecting animation. "The Little Mermaid" was wonderful and made a real impression on me and all of my friends back in college, after it was out on tape. We were watching it all the time and had the soundtrack memorized.

"Beauty and the Beast" had a slightly annoying feminist subplot at the beginning--the dumb-as-a-brick Gaston with the whole "women shouldn't read!" bit seems a lame Hollywood caricature of the supposedly typical, insensitive male. (And thinking of Gaston, that scene where he dances around the pub and fires off several shots to show what a man he is? You can't fire a muzzle-loading flintlock as a semi-automatic, as he does there. Those three shots would have taken him at least a full minute to get off. I know, I know--it's a cartoon...still...) But aside from this, it was still a great movie.

"Aladdin" didn't have any politics to it, that I could tell (thank goodness!). And aside from that, it was a great movie. I didn't mind the anachronisms with the Genie's lines, and Robin Williams was great in the role. Some divergence from the 1001 Arabian Nights, but that's fine. The story has long had a life of its own in the West, anyway. Well-done.

"Pocahontas" I really wanted to see, for family history reasons. What I got was a lot of anti-white, politically-correct tripe that made me cringe so hard I was having to grip the cupholders to keep from verbalizing my disgust. And I'm part Indian, at that. I still enjoyed many parts of the movie, but there were just so many the-white-man-is-evil scenes in there, that it grates on me, even now. That, and the big plot hole on language. Couldn't they at least have come up with a pretext for having Pocahontas learn English really, really fast? She's fluent the instant she meets a white man! And one other thing is minor, but it stands out to a mountain boy like me: rivers don't fork going downstream! Unless you're hitting an island, that is. OK, that, and the mystery of exactly which mountain range is on the southern Virginia coastline...

"The Hunchback of Notre Dame"...(sigh). There's the anti-religious angle, but for all I remember, maybe that's in Hugo's book. Not sure. Then the changing of the ending... Well, they did that to "Mermaid," too, but here it just seemed more blatant. And I think you have more leeway to play around with fairy tales, which are folklore and therefore often have a lot of variants, anyway. Seminal works of literature, however, are harder to justify changing from tragedy to semi-comedy. Still, it wasn't enough to keep me from having a good time at this movie.

"Atlantis" was a little cheap for Disney. Not cheaply-drawn, I'd say, but a cheap plot. Magic crystals powering a society? Come on, that's a cliche of bad Japanese cartoons. Really bad ones. Disney's fantasies have tended to be better grounded in their pretexts. Drawn from elements of legends and myths that are, if not plausible as reality, at least don't seem wildly out of place.

"Hercules"--not bad. Nice touch with the Muses, too. Well-done as a Greek chorus. It showed some education on the part of the writing team. Huge contrast with "Atlantis."

I'll skip lightly over most of the straight-to-video sequels they've spent most of their time making in the past few years. They're never as good as the originals, either in the drawing or the plot, and it usually shows. I rarely object to a movie sequel at all, unlike a lot of professional critics. Sequels have been made since the beginning of Hollywood, and I like seeing the characters I enjoy coming back to the screen. But having a sequel to "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" just seems corny. Forget the fact that at the end of the book, he throws himself from the church and dies. I object really on the grounds that it doesn't work. Detective movies are perfect for sequels--our hero takes on another case. Similarly superhero movies and cop movies. Lots of action/adventure movies lend themselves to this. I've been eagerly waiting the fourth "Indiana Jones" film for years, now. Some comedies work that way, too--National Lampoon did a good job with the first three "Vacation" movies with Chevy Chase. The family goes on a different whacky vacation in each.

But "Hunchback" was centered on the characters and their interrelationships (as I remember it). If that's completely explored in the novel/first movie, then you wind up taking the characters as-is in the sequel and putting them (without their complexities) into some cheesy plot device that doesn't take advantage of their characteristics. Well, not that you have to do this, but for some reason it seems to happen an awfully lot. As a result, the sequel seems dull and artificial. Even the sequel to Pocahontas, which is at least loosely based on historical facts, fails. Probably second-rate writers are too blame, though. The jokes were simply too goofy and unbelievable, for one thing. Too contrived.

"Mulan" was fun to watch (avoiding the feminist angle, here), but while the sequel, the creatively-named "Mulan II," is unusually well-made for a Disney sequel, it has one of the worst "moral" lessons I've seen in a kids' movie. "Follow your heart." That's it. Have other duties, morals, loyalties, etc.? Hey, follow your heart, man. I could see telling kids to be guided by their head, by compassion, by morality... But this squishy, un-thought-out "follow your heart" doesn't mean anything but "do whatever you feel like." I think there's a line in there about "my duty is to my heart." What does that mean? Duty is the thing that makes you act despite your self-interest! Ugh!

OK, on to the movie that inspired this post: "Brother Bear." I thought this might be a little PC on the Indian angle, but it's not. It's prehistoric; no racial clashes. Just man and nature. Rather, the problem is that it has a weird view on the classic "man vs. nature" theme. It takes nature's side. First, it has prehistoric Indians, probably one of the Eskimo-related tribes (I say "Indians" because I think this was supposed to be in Alaska or the northern Canadian Rockies, a few thousand years ago, but there might be other places with similar populations and geographies, like any non-flat parts of northern Siberia) making unrealistic comments about not killing animals. Bear kills your brother. So you want to hunt the bear. An animal you hunt for food and skins already. And your other brother tells you it would be immoral to kill the bear? No, he wouldn't. These Indians were not modern, crystal-worshipping, New Age vegetarians from Los Angeles. Secondly, after you're changed into a bear after killing your prey, you roam among them and learn that bears are more human and kind than humans are? And you decide you'd rather stay a bear, when you have the chance to change back?

This is actually a more insidious philosophy to put into kids' heads than the don't-kill-the-bear thing is. The movie really does present all the bears as inherently good, kind, friendly, and harmless. Humans are portrayed as both good and bad, but it's the bad side that gets more screen time. A really dumb lesson, here.

Is there any hope Disney will go back to the early-1990s style plots any time soon?

Space Shuttle to Launch Wednesday

Well, the post title says it. I haven't read the articles yet for any details, but I will be covering NASA's vaunted "Return to Space" this week. I'm looking forward to it, but I just hope we don't condemn the Shuttle to space station ferry service. Rather, I want it to go back into action to conduct a manned mission to repair and service the Hubble Space Telescope. We've been waiting for SM4 (did I count right?), Servicing Mission 4(?), for years, now. Hubble's dealing with the looming loss of another gyroscope, and this time it will actually degrade the image quality. So let's scrap this robotic mission solution and get a man up there with a wrench.

To misappropriate Michael Ledeen, "Faster, please!"

John the Baptist

Today is the eve of the Feast of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, one of Christianity's oldest Holidays - St Augustine of Hippo composed eloquent homilies for this solemnity. The date June 24th was chosen because it came three months after the Annunciation on March 25th (i.e., six months before Christmas). This is about the date you'd expect based on Luke 1:36 - "And behold, thy cousin Elizabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren." So if Mary conceived when Elizabeth was six months pregnant, you'd expect her son to be born six months after Elizabeth's.

So why isn't St. John's celebrated on June 25th? After all, Christmas and the Annunciation both fall on the 25th. This is due to the old Roman custom of counting dates down. The 25th of March is the 8th calends of April, the 25th of December is the 8th calends of January, so the birthday of the Great Forerunner of the Dawn is on the 8th calends of July, a.k.a. the 24th of June, since June is one day shorter than both March and December.

Defence of Marriage

Here is an excellent article on the value of tradition from an unlikely source. In sum, Lee Harris makes an excellent case for the value of marriage.

NPR, PBS, and the Soviet approach

Ken Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is getting a lot of heat from the Left for his criticisms of leftist bias at NPR and PBS. The most hysterical reactions I've read so far come from our perennial favorite, Bill Moyers, and "On Point" host Tom Ashbrook. I'll skip over Moyers' remarks right now, because they're too long for the brief comments I have in mind. But Ashbrook recently wrote an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, in which he stated, "When government media masters ask broadcasters to replace news with music, watch out. That was the Kremlin's way on bad days in Soviet-era Moscow."

Wow--a leftie using "Soviet" as a criticism? It must be a first! But seriously, Ashbrook has stumbled onto a good analogy, although not in the way he meant. (As my dad often says, "even a blind hog finds an acorn every once in a while.") As I see it, Tomlinson's attempts to change the public broadcasters are like Gorbachev's ("May his name be praised") attempts to change the Soviet Union. Gorbachev wanted to save Communism by reforming it. Make changes to strengthen the Soviet Union and socialism, even if it meant losing some of those precious restrictions on personal freedom.

Tomlinson has explicitly said this is his intent with regards to the public broadcasters: "It was my responsibility as CPB chairman to preserve public support for public broadcasting by doing something about the bias."

As for me, I want the government to cut off all funding for NPR and PBS, period. Let them survive on their own. I like listening to NPR, despite the bias (and it is smothering, at times), but they have no right to my money.

Incidentally, as Ashbrook claims that NPR listeners are perfectly evenly distributed in politics, and that fewer than 15% of listeners hear any bias in war coverage or reports on the Bush administration. Right. For my own impressions, let's make a list of NPR shows I'm familiar with, along with their biases:

Morning Edition: LEFT

Weekend Edition: LEFT

Weekend Edition Sunday: LEFT

All Things Considered: LEFT (This is the show that got my dad and me to speculate that "NPR" stood for "National Pinko Radio")

The Diane Rheem Show: leans LEFT, but with a good fraction of conservatives as guests.

Day to Day: leans LEFT

Talk of the Nation: (don't listen often enough to know)

On Point: LEFT (So far left even my liberal former girlfriend says it's out of touch)

On the Media: LEFT. Hilariously far left. A parody of the Left. Absolutely ridiculous.

This American Life: LEFT Hilariously far left. And boring. I did hear a nice show they once did on life aboard a Navy carrier, though. Still boring, and it was the lone exception to the leftism I hear on the other episodes of the show.

The various BBC news shows they import: LEFT Anti-American Left, at that.

The CBC news show they import (what's it's name...? I used to hear it late at night in D.C.): LEFT Caricature of Canadian Leftism. Also, just weird.

Car Talk: Thankfully, this one avoids politics. Whew! And who would have thought that a couple of Massachussetts Yankees would have good taste in bluegrass?!

What Do You Know?: LEFT

The Prairie Home Companion: LEFT (I love the show, but it's on the Left.)

Fresh Air: LEFT (Terri Gross does a great job as an interviewer, though.)

For comparison, here is the prime-time lineup at Fox News:

8:00 Bill O'Reilly: RIGHT (right-leaning populist)

9:00 Hannity & Colmes: two opposing hosts--takes both sides

10:00 Greta van Sustren: leans LEFT

Now, I do think FNC is a right-leaning station. The prime-time lineup isn't all they broadcast, but it's what most viewers see. Here are some of the other shows I can think of:

Fox & Friends: RIGHT

Special Report with Brit Hume: leans RIGHT (but with a balance of politics in the "Roundtable" panel)

Fox News Sunday: leans RIGHT (but with a balance of politics in the "Roundtable" panel)

Whatever the name of their all-day newscast is: RIGHT

In Fox's case, I think the conservatism of their news broadcasts comes through in the choice of stories. They're the ones we conservatives are more interested in. This is also prevalent in NPR's news reporting. But in Fox's case, they have a prime-time lineup that is amazingly balanced. Not so at NPR. Any equivalent set of shows you put together (there's not the same "prime time" on radio) at NPR comes out solidly liberal.

Yikes!

The Anchoress reveals a disturbing new "translation" of the New Testament. "Corrected to Reflect that Christ Was a Woman" (that's from the title)

I'm imagining the title page. Know how editions of the King James Version have that "and compared with the most ancient documents in the original tongues" line under the title (I'm paraphrasing from memory, here)? I'd love to see this edition put "and compared with the most recent fashions and politically correct nonsense." Yeesh.

The Anchoress also notes in passing the existence of Nativity sets you can buy with “'Mary and Josephine' figures and a 'Baby Christine.'” For goodness' sake, why?! If I were a male chauvinist (of a parallel with the female chauvinists involved with the above), should I throw out the Mary from my Nativity set and replace her with a "Mark," or some such thing? None of this really makes any sense.

Logic, people, logic!!

Breaking news: Possible hijacking

Virgin Atlantic Airlines flight 45 from London to New York (JFK) has been diverted by Canadian authorities to Halifax, Nova Scotia. I'm hearing this live on G. Gordon Liddy's show right now. Honestly, I've half been thinking he's setting up a rather elaborate joke, but I don't really know.

From what Liddy's said, the pilot has activated the hijacking alert signal. The procedure is for the authorities on the ground to ask the pilot once whether he intended to activate the signal. If he says "yes," that's it, and they'll scramble jets to intercept the plane. Liddy says that by Canadian law, they have to scramble two jets--one with an English-speaking pilot and one with a French-speaker. That's why I wonder if Liddy's making a joke. But...who knows...maybe Canadians really did pass such a law.

UPDATE: The Virgin Atlantic spokesman says it's a false alarm. The plane will still be diverted, of course, just in case.

Interesting language blog

Mirabilis.

Figulus, you ought to check this one out. Among her general and wide-ranging language posts, she includes a healthy dose of obscure Latin (especially Catholic) items.

Weekend

Got back from a weekend trip Tuesday afternoon and delivered a public talk in the planetarium on Einstein and relativity's influence on modern culture. I drew in a handful of people outside of my students, which is encouraging enough, given that this is the last week of classes. A newspaper reporter came to interview me about this, with the angle of how we use the planetarium in our classes.

I tried to have the talk make more use of the planetarium than merely projecting Powerpoint onto the dome, by putting the stars and celestial sphere up there at a point in the presentation. My point was to show how the classical and mediaeval world-view of a geocentric universe was fairly reasonable, given their understanding of physics. But then once that model was shown (by Copernicus and Galileo) to have unresolvable internal contradictions, there was a period of crisis. The old physics (Aristotle's) was shown to be wrong, but there wasn't anything to replace it. Galileo made some progress on this, but it wasn't comprehensive by any means. There was about a 200 year period before Newton managed to save physics with his Principia Mathematica, an apparently comprehensive replacement for Aristotle.

I finished by making the point that we're in a similar period today. Einstein, with his theory of relativity and his contributions to quantum mechanics, helped to overthrow Newton's "classical" physics. But now we're in a period in which the replacements, relativity and QM, don't play well together. Each works fine in its own realm, but they don't work with each other. What we're looking for now is a new "comprehensive" theory of physics, and this is the fabled "Grand Unified Theory," in whatever form it will finally appear.

This talk was a dry run for this Fall, when three of us will give a series of public lectures on the centennial Einstein's annus mirabilis ("year of miracles"), 1905. At least now I've got something to start with for my part of it.

***

Got back to my place late that night, pretty exhausted. Earlier Tuesday, I had stopped by a Barnes & Noble and seen their buy-2-get-1-free deal on DVDs. Happily, I found two DVDs I'd been looking for, Metropolis and Forbidden Planet. Since I've gotten an early German silent film before (Frau im Mond) and liked it, and I'd already seen how good Metropolis is, I decided on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for my freebie.

I zonked out on the sofa before midnight, with Dr. Caligari still playing. Man, that is one weird movie. Interesting, nonetheless, and I'll have to rewatch it in the daytime to take it all in. The film was in black & white, technically, but they'd tinted it, so in some scenes it was blue & white, others orange & white, and some other shades elsewhere. The English intertitles are more recent, and they use black, blue, and white in very subtle shades. Wild lettering styles, and really amazing to look at.

The scenery is intentionally nightmarish and totally unrealistic. I only knew of the term "German expressionism" from discussions of this movie, so now I've got some idea what it meant. "Houses" are set off at crazy angles and forced perspective. Odd curlicues are painted on "walls" and alleyways.

The whole thing is really amazing, and it goes far beyond any art film of today. I wonder if this was commercially viable at all, back in 1919.

Against "Click it or Ticket"

Am I the only person left who still hates these seatbelt laws? I always, without exception, use my seatbelt in the car, and I always make sure my passengers do, too. It has nothing to do with the law. My parents made sure all of us did as kids, emphasizing that they wouldn't even start the car moving until everybody was buckled in. And that was before Tennessee passed that stupid law.

I am an adult. I am a free man. I am not a ward of the state. I have the right to make my own decisions regarding my safety.

Now, I've seen people try to make the argument that the state should outlaw non-use of seatbelts, because it's not just your business--after all, if you get hurt in an accident, and you don't have medical insurance, and you can't pay for your treatment...well, the taxpayer is going to. So the taxpayer has a legal interest in prohibiting your risky behavior.

First. The problem is, then, that the taxpayer has to get involved at all. I have insurance. Does that mean I could get an exemption from the law (if I were inclined to)? Of course not. They would say it has to be the same for everybody. Bull. It's a false argument.

If we accept this logic, we must accept the right of the state to legislate against any behavior that carries a physical risk with it. Not using your seatbelt is risky, if you get in an accident. But there are plenty of risky activities out there in the world. There's riding a bicycle--oops! They've required kids (adults, even?) in some places to wear helmets while riding bikes. %^()!!!

OK, think of how many household accidents occur in the kitchen. I've had some (mild) accidents there. Slipping in your shower? Changing a lightbulb while standing on an unsteady chair? Carrying too heavy a ladder/package/something? All of these carry risk. There is probably not a nice, clear dividing line between the physical risk involved in not wearing your seatbelt and a lot of the other risks we take as part of normal life. That means there is no clear limit to how far the state could go in outlawing private risk.

On this topic, I really don't like those "click it or ticket" TV commercials. They're insulting, condescending, and paternalistic. Ads promoting seatbelt use are a good thing. Ads with this sneering tone, telling you the eagle eye of Big Brother is watching your driving and will fine you for not wearing the belt? UGH! I actually have to change the channel when these come on.

Now "knife control"?!

The BBC's reporting a bunch of British medical doctors want that country to ban long, pointy, kitchen knives. (link via Drudge) You know, I used to sarcastically use this as a comeback to liberals who wanted to ban guns. After all, people stab each other with knives, so do you want to ban those, too? Well, now a bunch of control freaks are going for it.

Britons had better watch out, before they come for their pitchforks, too. Then there'll be nothing left to revolt with!

The meaning of "irony"

I just got this e-mailed from a friend. I'll add a link as soon as she sends the source to me.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Tennessee's deputy finance commissioner spent 13
hours stuck in an elevator at the state Capitol after no one paid a
phone bill.

Jerry Adams, who oversees Tennessee's $25 billion budget, was working
alone a few weekends ago when he stepped into an elevator, which
promptly broke and left him stranded between floors.

Adams picked up the phone in the elevator, but it didn't work because
the bill for the phone hadn't been paid and the service was
disconnected, officials said.

Finance Department spokeswoman Lola Potter said the bill was mistakenly
sent to the Department of Human Services. Officials there had no record
of the line and didn't pay the bill.

In the elevator, Adams said the only thing he could do was push a button
that rang an emergency bell. He did that every five minutes for hours,
but the building was deserted.

At about 4 a.m. the next morning, the cleaning crew heard Adams stirring
and rescue crews finally freed him.
"It was not the way I wanted to spend a Sunday evening," said Adams, who
lives alone.

Anthrax incident

We had a little excitement at my university yesterday. A few minutes before my class was to begin, a student came by my office, telling me that the building where I teach was being evacuated because of a suspicious package. Sure enough, we found a crowd of people just outside the doors. The secretary was still in, though, and she told me over the phone that there was an anthrax scare, and we'd be shut down for the rest of the day. Most of my students, bless their hearts, didn't just leave but came by my office to ask what we'd do. I told them we won't be stopped by a little thing like a bioterrorism threat, so we carried on with class in my building's lobby and eventually found a spare lecture room.

Today I have found out there was a plastic baggie with a "white powder" in it and a card reading "anthrax." The police advised us to evacuate the building and to shut down the ventilation system. Tests showed it wasn't anything dangerous, thankfully.

A few years ago in grad school (while I was at Space Telescope), my office at Johns Hopkins had a bomb threat phoned in around finals time. We were advised a day or so in advance (the threat had a specific day mentioned), but I don't remember if we had an actual evacuation. It was just a hoax, too.

Runaway Bride--make her pay for search party?

No, no, no, no, no! I'm hearing in the news again (can't cable news channels find real news to talk about, or is it going to be all celebrity trials and sensational kidnappings, real or imagined?) about this so-called "Runaway Bride" case. The county apparently wants her to pay for the cost of the search party. Maybe $40,000 or something similarly high.

The thinking seems to be, hey--she lied about being kidnapped, so she's liable for the cost of searching for her. No. She lied about being kidnapped after she turned up. She didn't fake a kidnapping (from anything I've heard), she simply disappeared without telling anybody she was leaving.

Back in December, I was on a search party for a woman missing since the previous day. This lady had seizures, and her family was worried she might have had one while outside and could have frozen to death if she spent the night trapped out in the cold. There also might have been a small amount of money missing, but her medicine seemed to be all there. Kidnapped, perhaps? She wouldn't have left without her medicine.

So we were looking in barns, under outbuildings, in brush piles (crawled in to find some shelter?), and simply out in pastures. The volunteer fire departments, the sherrif's deputies, rescue squad, and the like were all out. We had ATVs running grid patterns through fields, and we even brought in a helicopter to search large spaces. The county's mobile search headquarters was driven in, and the sherrif's department organized the search from there.

Suspicion was starting to fall on some of the family--the husband seemed to react oddly to the deputies' questions, but it wasn't clear why.

After dad and I and another volunteer fireman had spent some hours searching our part of the grid, we got a call on the radio to come back. The lady herself had phoned in. She was fine, she said, and wanted us to stop searching. No explanation.

So we did. I must have said something to Dad about whether she'd get charged for anything. He said no, that after all, when you're an adult, you're not required to tell anybody where you are. You can disappear all you want to.

If this "runaway bride" lied to the police about being kidnapped, then charge her with making false statements. Fine. But she's not liable for the costs of the search party. She didn't fake her kidnapping, phoning in a ransom demand or anything. She simply disappeared, and people made the assumption she'd been kidnapped. It was a reasonable assumption, of course, but it didn't come from her deceit. That was later.

For once, a worthwhile offering from the Ad Council

I remember a Saturday Night Live fake commercial from back in the late '80s or so. This guy is walking through fields, past nuclear plants, woods, etc., narrating something aimless and ultimately pointless, although at every moment you think it's going to turn into an ad for "clean nuclear power" or wise investments or something. Finally it ends with an off-camera narrator solemnly intoning, "Brought to you by...the Ad Council. Wasting your time for no good reason."

That's been my general impression of the Ad Council ever since. Every time I see their logo on some "public service announcement," I notice it's usually something that makes my eyes roll. Well, public service announcements are inherently that way.

But in the last few days, I've been seeing/hearing this new ad on TV and radio that makes a break with these honored traditions. It has this young black girl quickly recounting a story of her organizing a protest against a chemical-spewing company that was polluting a river and making people sick. The protests work, the company is shut down...and now half the town is out of work, because that was the biggest employer there. And the river is still polluted, and now the kids are even sicker, because their out-of-work dads don't have health insurance any more. Law of unintended consequences.

You don't see where this is going, until it ends with a call for blood donation. Saving the world is tricky, it explains (see aforementioned story). But donating blood does good, without the worry of these unintended consequences. Brought to you by the Ad Council.

Interesting. In a way, a conservative/libertarian public service ad. Maybe the only one I've ever seen. Except for some pro-Bill-of-Rights ad a few years ago. (Well, the liberals believe in a few of those rights, too, I imagine.)

The War Between the States, revisited; the filibuster

Southern Appeal's Steve/"Feddie" linked to my WBtS posts below (thanks, man!). More good debate going over there on the comments, today. Happily, the insulting tone of a few of last week's commenters is gone. This seems to be more on the merits of the arguments.

Most of it now is on the merits of secession. Some are still saying Confederates and anybody who supported secession were "traitors." Only if you call our Founding Fathers "traitors" to the crown, folks. I sure don't. The United States seceded from Britain, after all. If you're going to insist they were traitors, then don't expect to insist it's an insult, or even a criticism.

Incidentally, somehow my brain just thought of a connection here to the judicial filibuster today. But now I don't see where that was going. Maybe something about "Unamerican!" getting tossed around more today.

Regardless. I have decided I'm reluctantly in favor of breaking the judicial filibusters by changing Senate rules. I can see amending the rules to prohibit filibusters for these nominations, but I would prefer simply bringing back the *real* filibuster--long-winded speeches by Robert Byrd and all! Where else can we get those great clips for the Laura Ingraham show?

Unfortunately, I heard Quinn In the Morning today (radio show syndicated out of Pittsburgh) arguing against *any* filibusters--legislative or for nominations. He's lost me at this point. He argued that the majority should simply get its way in the Senate. The minority should realize they've lost the election and simply play dead.

No, folks. I want my Senate to have minority protections in place, like the filibuster. Sure, make it a tougher job again. The wimpy kind they use now doesn't really cut it with me. But there should be *some* kind of filibuster available. I'd even favor going back to a 2/3 majority needed for cloture. (Currently 60%) Some argue that this is one of the "checks and balances" in our Federal government, and others (unfortunately many on my side) say they're misusing the terms. Well, yes, we usually talk about checks being between the three branches of government. If the Dems are trying to cofuse this with those, they're wrong. But a "check" in general means a block on someone else's power. And this is a check (a minor one, at that) on the power of the majority in the Senate. It's a perfectly appropriate term.

Removing this wouldn't turn us into a Parliamentary system, it's true (I'd hate to live in a place where the majority automatically gets everything!), but let's not be so hasty to steamroll the minority. Just stick with small changes for judicial nominations and be happy with that.

Turning Biblical Literary Criticism On Its Head

I think this post by Mark Shea is hilarious. (Link via The Corner)

He takes some of the (to my mind) looser techniques of literary criticism applied to the Bible and turns them loose on The Lord of the Rings. The result? He discovers that this "Tolkien" fellow ("if he ever existed") didn't write LOTR but merely assembled a bunch of pre-existing accounts, frequently altering the original sources to suit his needs, whether covering up the original meanings harmful to his interests or adding glosses to promote different interpretations.

I'm a bit ambivalent on the interpretation of the first books of the Bible being assembled from the J, P, and so on sources. In some places, it seems to make sense. In others, I think the analysts have simply taken different-colored pens and circled every incidence of "YHWH," calling it a "J" insertion and every incidence of "thou shalt not," calling it a P insertion. You know, sometimes a man can write about different things. Even in the same book! Really. I'm sure I've seen where James Michener has written about ice-age archaeology and modern culture in the same novel. Is he really an amalgam of two authors?

Again, in some places I can see this. But others it's taken too far.

Three Posts on the War Between the States (III)

Concluding my comments at Southern Appeal.

And another thing:

The CS wasn't an "evil regime." It allowed its states to legalize slavery, but so did the United States at the time. How can the CS be evil and the US not be, simultaneously? Some of y'all say it's because the CS existed entirely to protect slavery. As my explanation of Tennessee's vote above [Here at Hypotheses Non Fingo, it's the post below this one. --ed.] shows, that's simplistic. Yes, slavery was the immediate issue, but it rose up out of a deeper well of legal, political, and even cultural disagreements between the states. Absent those, slavery wouldn't have gotten to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

Incidentally, not only were there states within the US that had legal slavery until after the war, but even states like New York and Connecticut had had legal slavery just a few years earlier. I have a pre-war geography book that gives the 1820 (maybe 1810?) US census data, including a breakdown of slave and free populations. It shows that many Northern states still had slavery. Was the North then a monstrously evil place? (N.B: I've got a modern source that claims N.J. was the last Northern state to emancipate, with a "gradual freedom" act in 1804. With the possibility of gradual emancipation, I'm not sure how long slavery remained legal, but that textbook of the time does record slaves in several Yankee states as late as 1810 or 1820.) [My dad has since informed me that either New York or New Jersey had slaves until 1827. Considering that the "gradual emancipation" laws often specified an adult age for the slave to be freed on, that sounds about right. That would mean slavery would completely end in these states about 20 or so years after passage of the act. --ed.]

Let's be clear--slavery wasn't considered such a moral problem much of anywhere until the 18th century. And it was really only in the 19th that anything started changing. Britain had not outlawed it domestically until the end of the 18th c., and not in their colonies until the 19th.

Southerners ourselves saw a moral issue in the slave *trade*, because of how badly the traders treated the slaves. It was a matter of your treatment of people, rather than their legal status, that was seen as the moral issue. Southern states started outlawing the importation of slaves on our own, years before the Federal Government was allowed to, in 1808.

Virginia outlawed importation in 1778 (hmmm...just as she was getting her independence!), Maryland in 1783, South Carolina in 1787 (although she reopened it from 1803-1808), North Carolina in 1794, and Georgia in 1798.

And who was it who carried out the importation? Aside from foreign shippers like the Dutch and British, it was New Englanders who shipped the slaves over.

And what of how blacks (slave or free) were actually *treated* by whites? A French writer of the 1830s (quoted in Hummel, "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men," 1996) said of America, "race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known."

By repeating this, I do not mean to treat the existence of slavery as no big deal [Nor to justify its existence, by the way! I wouldn't justify slavery as some way to have good race relations, for goodness' sake --ed.], but only to point out that as far as the moral issues of race relations, Yankees have a lot to answer for. [...as well.] Their 19th century compatriots were not without great sins on these accounts, and I won't take these claims of Southern "evil" lying down.

Yankees of that day were often intolerant of blacks, as the contemporary accounts show. And they had themselves allowed slavery just a little previously. So I reject the sanctimonious, narrow-minded harping on the South, Confederate or otherwise.

We wanted to be left alone, and if we had, slavery would have died its natural death, the horrors of Reconstruction would have been avoided, and as a result, so would the subsequent misdirected Southern resentment at blacks. [Which I agree was a real problem. "Is," to the extent it still exists. Happily not nearly as much, anymore. May we see the end of such prejudice in our lifetimes. --ed.] It is this unfair resentment which gave the greatest push to the unjust "Jim Crow" laws and prejudicial attitudes towards blacks. If we'd been allowed to end slavery on our own terms, as the North did, I believe the better attitudes towards blacks noticed by the French writer would have been preserved, and we could have had a 20th century without the entrenched discrimination that caused so much trouble.

Hmmm...what if this had happened? Would we have had a 20th century with Southerners treating blacks fairly, while the North preserved its older discriminatory laws?

Three Posts on the War Between the States (II)

Continuing my comments at Southern Appeal.

One more thing--my family's experience during the War. My family had slaves and had freed them 17 years before Tennessee seceded. We paid the way for them to go back to Africa, to Liberia, which you know was established as a country for freed slaves.

During the war, my great-great grandmother (who was profiled on A&E's documentary "In the Shadow of Cold Mountain" in Dec. 2003!) wrote in her diary of her concern for how their ex-slaves were doing. A neighbor had done the same as we had, and had recently gone to Liberia to check up on things. She reported bad conditions there, of a lack of food, among other things. My grandmother then wrote of her worry over how their own were getting along. This, as she herself had to make do with the wartime privations she faced.

This branch of my family were anti-slavery. They were not simply against it, but they also put this into action, taking on the financial burden of freeing their own slaves, worth a good deal of money. And they were *solid* secessionists! Fought bravely for Tennesse and the CS. She died in 1913, never having forgiven the Yankees for what they did. Her words.

Another branch of my family, the one she married into, still had slaves at the onset of the war. And they were *against* secession. And yet, all of the men in that generation fought for Tennessee and the CS. Why? Because it was their home, and it was being invaded by a foreign country.

Tennessee voted twice on secession. The resolution failed the first time. After Lincoln demanded troops from each state to put down the "rebellion" (incorrect words, there!), Tennessee changed her mind. She wouldn't fight her fellow Southerners and would instead stand with them against this aggression.

Conclusion? Slavery didn't win the argument for Tennessee. Lincoln's aggression did.

Three Posts on the War Between the States (I)

My comments at Southern Appeal.

[This first paragraph responds to the insulting tone of several posters --ed.]
Southern culture is very tied to family and the land. Our state is like a large, extended family, and anyone's verbal attack on our state is like an attack on our family. That is why all of the Yankee and Scalawag criticisms above [on SA's comments section --ed.] come across as personal affronts to us. To me. A post that the writer thinks is calm and dispassionate, but which includes the word "evil" or "traitors" in describing Southern society, will only cause us to take it as a personal insult. You can't carry on a "debate" that way. Keep it in mind.

As for secession. It was and remains not only legal, but a right. Once our states seceded, there was no more "domestic" interest of the United States involved. It was now a matter of foreign relations. And Lincoln invaded the CS in order to conquer a sovereign country. That is the kind of action we rightly condemn, today.

It was unjustified. He made a pretext for war by provoking an attack on a fort [Fort Sumter, of course. --ed.] the US still held. The discussion above on this is incomplete. Keep in mind that South Carolina did not automatically assume it owned the fort. Rather, she sent delegates to Washington to negotiate a payment to the US for it. Lincoln refused even to meet these delegates. He rejected the possibility of any negotiation. The continued, and likely hostile, US military presence within an independent South Carolina was, of course, unacceptable. Lincoln had been warned not to send additional armaments to the fort, but he tried twice to get us to fire on a resupply ship. In sending new weapons in, he had to invade South Carolina (look at a map--the fort is inside the state). South Carolina had to defend its sovereignty. [I'll add here that South Carolina was herself supplying the enemy-held fort with food during this time. There wasn't any issue of letting US soldiers starve. There was only an issue of sending in additional weapons. That would have been--was--a hostile act. --ed.]

Slavery--I am glad slavery has ended in this country, and I'd like it to end elsewhere in the world. [Isn't it interesting how some of the earliest complaints I'd heard about the Sudan were from my fellow Sons of Confederate Veterans members? That was a few years ago, even, before it really made its way into the mainstream press. --ed.] But the post-hoc Yankee justification of "freeing the slaves" doesn't work. Slavery continued to be legal in some states remaining within the United States until after the war. Why didn't the US invade itself, then? The Emancipation Proclamation was nothing more than a cynical war tactic. Read its text. It freed practically no-one. It supposedly freed slaves in a foreign country, beyond the jurisdiction of US law. It specifically exempted those areas occupied by the US Army, which could in theory have enforced its will there.

Where was Jefferson Davis' mirror-"Emancipation Proclamation"? [A commenter had said that, sure, maybe Lincoln's Proclamation was a war tactic, but at least it was done at all, and where was Jefferson Davis' version? --ed.] Davis didn't issue one, of course, but there *were* such proposals before the CS Congress before the war's end. They never got the chance to be debated, before the US erased Confederate independence. These proposals would have been far different from the ephemeral "Emancipation Proclamation," though. They would have applied in the lands actually governed by the country issuing the law. They would have actually freed slaves.
[Incidentally, the Confederate proposals were legally and effectively much better than the Lincoln one. As President, Lincoln didn't have the legal authority to free slaves at all and didn't have the effective power to do so in the only regions listed in the Proclamation--areas outside US Army control. If this freed the slaves, then President Bush should outlaw slavery in the Sudan today--just issue a declaration declaring them free! Clearly, that won't work. --ed.]

Yes, most of the heated feeling in the South was over the specific issue of slavery, or rather the perception that Lincoln would act extra-Constitutionally to end it. But this issue inherently depended on the larger issue of states' rights. Popular sovereignty and the essence of democratic legitimacy require strong local government and keeping the states as the primary legislators, not the Federal government. This issue would not have come to its head, if the Yankee outlook had not been so hostile to states' rights.

[Continued above.]

Three Posts on the War Between the States

Stay tuned today. I'm going to post three sets of comments I submitted to Southern Appeal last week (scroll 'way down on the comments section). I was late to the party, but they had a heated debate going over some writer's anti-Southern diatribe. SA's Steve brought everybody's attention to it, but unfortunately many of the commenters jumped him, siding with this outrageous "Eric Flint" character. One of Flint's more blood-boiling remarks is, "The Confederacy was one of the vilest, most brutal, most disgusting regimes in the history of the world. It was a regime that Heinrich Himmler would have admired."

The sad thing is, some commenters (not only Yankees but some Scalawags, as well) kind-of agreed with him on a lot of things. So. Time for a full-throated defense, not of slavery, but of the Confederate States of America. Most of my next three posts are in response to particular statements by the commenters, so you might get an in media res kind of feeling from reading them out of context. I encourage you to take a look at SA for the whole thing.

Re: Tempore Paschali

Good point about relativity, Figulus. I was talking to C- last night, who reminded me of this same Einstein quote about "invariance." I'm reading up on the cultural effects of relativity right now, preparing to give my students a lecture on this after I introduce the subject next week. I wonder how the history of the 20th century might have been different if Einstein had called it the "Theory of Invariance." Maybe not much. But "moral relativism" and "cultural relativism" and such in the humanities and social sciences certainly have taken some inspiration from the physical "Theory of Relativity." In large part, these are misuses of relativity.

In most cases, maybe all, it's logically incorrect to take the rules of a theory of physics and start applying them to human society. Admittedly, this has been done by physicists, themselves. Pauli (I think it was him) was intrigued by the possibility of applying quantum mechanics, especially the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, to politics, and wrote papers on this.

There was the famous hoax in 1996 in which the physicist Alan Sokal duped the "Collective" (they don't have one of those oligarchic "editorial boards") of the humanities journal "Social Text." He published a paper on how quantum mechanics shows that there is no objective reality, not just in physics, but socially and otherwise. It featured lots of gobbledygook and a generous sprinkling of important-sounding physics terms, but it didn't make any logical sense. The Collective was completely fooled and published it. Sokal then published an expose in a rival journal, "Lingua Franca." Incidentally, "Social Text"'s first public reaction was that Sokal had gotten cold feet about the radical paper he'd published and was trying to take it back. In reality (there is a reality, after all), he did it to expose how these kinds of journals publish nonsense and make fundamental mistakes in trying to apply physical laws to social systems.

I'll have to dig up those articles. They'd make a good lecture, too. By the way, Figulus, did you attend the debate between Sokal and the head of Social Text's Collective, back in '96? I got there for the second half, and it was great.

I'll have to read this article you linked to...

Tempore Paschali

Last Sunday was the final day of the Easter season, so I thought it might be appropriate to link to an article concerning the meaning of Easter by a physicist, Michael Davenport. Davenport rightly has a bone to pick with the Anglican bishop of New Westminster, Canada.

I especially like the term, "Heisenberg's Certainty Principle". It reminds of a quote I once heard attributed to Einstein regarding the spin that believers in Relativism tried to put on his theory of Relativity: "I should have called it the Theory of Invariance".

How would you describe your relationship with Tariq Aziz?

"Friendly." Thus sayeth Galloway.

OK, let's try this logic. He's been a reliable opponent of Hussein's horrible regime since "you" (not sure which Senator he was referring to, there) were a Vietnam-war activist. And he is "friend[s]" with Hussein's V.P. Right.