Category Archives: View

View 713 Thursday, February 16, 2012

Liberalism and neo-conservatism share some key elements; in particular, while their specific beliefs differ, each is convinced that they have the gnosis, the key knowledge that allows them to manipulate society to their benign ends, They also share the notion that when they do take action they ought to be judged on their intentions, not on the outcome. When things don’t work as planned – and usually they don’t – there are always good reasons.

I was reminded of this by a short article by Gene Callahan in the February issue of The American Conservative magazine. Entitled “Know Your Gnostics”, it is a short exposition on the concept of modern Gnosticism, with emphasis on the work of Eric Vogelin.

Back in my professor days I assigned Eric Vogelin’s New Science of Politics as one of the books to be read by my senior political philosophy students. Vogelin thought the world threatened by modern Gnostics, and predicted much from that analysis. As for example, when an economic policy, such as TARP, or the Keynesian economic stimulus program doesn’t work; or when the invasion of Iraq freed the people from Saddam Hussein but did not build the stable democracy of free men, there are always good reasons, and the blame must not fall on those whose honorable intentions failed in their noble missions. These are the men of action, who march in step with the flywheel of history. They are the midwives of the new and beautiful world – and when their actions fail, they must not be blamed. They meant well, and the world didn’t cooperate.

Of course there is another view: that we don’t understand the world all that well, and that our social sciences are mostly voodoo rituals. Neoconservatism grew out the Trotsky interpretation of Marxism, and modern Liberalism has deep roots in Fabian Socialism which was once known as Marxism with a human face – but which was able to overlook many of the horrors of the Soviet campaign to build a great society to transform the human condition. Young people now don’t remember that at one time communism was the hope of the world. Marx truly understood the world, and that knowledge was available to guide the actions of the Party as it sought to make a more beautiful world.

And when things didn’t work, there were always good reasons.

“The gap between intended and real effect will be imputed not to the Gnostic immortality of ignoring the structure of reality but to the immorality of some other person or society that does not behave as it should according to the dream conception of cause and effect.”

Eric Vogelin, The New Science of Politics

Of course Vogelin himself was the first to say we did not have a true science of politics. Gnosticism is alluring, but no one has ever discovered the gnosis; and many of those who, like Lenin and Mussolini thought they had, produced results they would not have chosen.

If you want more examples, you can find them among the architects of our current economic policies; or among those who sent the Legions to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many have called my attention to this story:

Why are the food police inspecting school lunches?

It makes a great story – or at least a great headline:

• Food Inspector Confiscates Kid’s Homemade Lunch
• Preschooler’s lunch rejected by official
• Food police reject preschooler’s homemade lunch… in favour of chicken nuggets
• Food police confiscate 4-year old’s lunch, bill parents
• Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Confiscated by Food Police
• Nanny state report: NC school officials confiscate preschooler’s homemade lunch

Another version

A North Carolina elementary school forced a preschool student to eat cafeteria chicken nuggets for lunch on Jan. 30 after officials reportedly determined that her homemade meal wasn’t up to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s standards for healthfulness, according to a report from the Carolina Journal.

The newspaper reported that the four-year-old girl brought a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, potato chips and apple juice in her packed lunch from home. That meal didn’t meet with approval from the government agent who was on site inspecting kids’ lunches that day.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Child Development and Early Education requires that all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs must meet USDA guidelines. Meals, the guidelines say, must include one serving each of meat, milk and grain and two servings of fruit or vegetables. Those guidelines apply to home-packed lunches as well as cafeteria meals.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/02/14/nanny-state-report-nc-school-officials-confiscate-preschoolers-homemade-lunch/#ixzz1mcE8ofvg

I have other versions, and lots of mail.

I was first told that an official inspected the child’s lunch, found it defective, forbade her from eating it, and instead provided her with a lunch of “nuggets” in the name of nutrition. If this all sounds vague, it is indeed, because the story had no details I could find. I searched but found no definitive account. We are told that the inspector was a “state agent” or a “federal agent”. If Federal there is often detail of which office of the Department of Agriculture except there is a variant in which the agent is from the Department of Education. We not only do not know the name of the agent, but the sex of the agent.

The story went viral, and a number of talk show hosts of different political opinions were outraged, but I still couldn’t find details, although I did get a lot of mail drawing it to my attention. Then, a few minutes ago, I found:

RALEIGH, N.C. — It was a tale of government meddling that outraged radio talk show hosts and a pair of Congress members: A 4-year-old was forced to dump her packed lunch and eat a state-dictated cafeteria lunch of chicken nuggets. Now school officials are blaming a teacher’s error in making sure the child had a nutritious meal.

The incident happened two weeks ago at an elementary school in Raeford, near Fort Bragg. The girl’s parents anonymously tipped off a Raleigh TV station and a conservative blogger after the girl brought home her packed lunch uneaten.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nc-school-teachers-mistake-at-school-lunch-led-to-upset-calls-of-government-overreach/2012/02/16/gIQAof8NIR_story.html?tid=pm_national_pop

Alas a tempest in a teapot. A teacher or teacher’s aid at a local school was overly zealous, and those who first heard it were eager to find another example of the horrors of the nanny state.

Alas, while this one was blown up, horrible examples are not that hard to find. The bunny inspectors are real – and I note that no budget of any kind looks for silliness to eliminate. The budget is always larger, all the departments get more money, and the deficit grows. And the beat goes on.

I am still recovering from my afflictions. I should be in Boston for BOSKONE, but I am here at home. And I still owe you some mailbags. Perhaps I’ll get up a bit more energy before I go to bed.

Thanks to all those who subscribed or renewed subscriptions. The Pledge Drive continues. This place operates on the public radio principle. It’s free, but you should subscribe if you like it. And I only bug you about it when KUSC, the Los Angeles good music public radio station, has its pledge drive. That will end in a couple of days, so here’s your chance. Subscribe now. It’s easy.

View 713 Wednesday, February 15, 2012

I have a ticket for a flight to Boston for tomorrow morning at O Dark Thirty, but I won’t be using it. I am scheduled to be an honored guest at Boskone, and I was planning to go for weeks, when I came down with this. Yesterday afternoon I decided I was still contagious, and given the way I felt I would be far more a burden than an asset to my friends, so I regretfully informed them I wouldn’t be coming. Given the way I felt all day it’s clear that this was the right decision. I don’t know what this thing is, but it has laid me out. The good news is that I feel better – not good enough that I would contemplate getting up tomorrow for a trip with anything but dread, but better, meaning that I was actually able to get an hour’s work in on clearing off my desk. If that doesn’t sound like much, it’s a positive triumph compared to what I’ve been able to do for the past week.

I want again to thank all those who have responded to this weeks’ pledge drive and sent in subscriptions and renewals. This place operates on the public radio model. It’s free to everyone but it won’t be around if it doesn’t get subscriptions. Taking my cue from KUSC, the Los Angeles good music public radio station, I don’t bug people very often about this, but from time to time I have a week long pledge drive. I do this when KUSC has its pledge drive. They spend a week, all day each day, telling people that it’s time to pay, and if you were thinking about subscribing but hadn’t got around to it this would be a great time to do it, and all the rest of it. So there. I’ve told you, and if you haven’t subscribed, or you haven’t renewed your subscription in a year or two, now’s the time to do it.

I have been thinking about the logic of providing free birth control pills and other such stuff to women as part of the Obamacare package, and I don’t really understand. The story is that the Obama package provides for preventive health care, and birth control pills are justified under that. This apparently presumes that pregnancy is an illness. It’s an illness that happens only to women, but given the existence of the human race it’s a fairly common condition at one or another point in a woman’s life. That doesn’t sound much like an illness.

I suppose the logic is that unwanted pregnancy is the illness to prevent. It’s certainly true that unwanted pregnancy is a life changing experience, and having an unwanted baby can be a disaster for any family. Of course there are plenty of instances in which it turned out not to be a disaster at all; you can find those stories in both fiction and non-fiction. But yes, unwanted pregnancy often has bad effects, and thus I suppose could be classified as an illness, and something to be prevented.

The question is how it should be prevented, and that gets us into religious matters. Clearly the simplest way not to get pregnant is not to engage in sexual intercourse. That really works, and we were at one time told that if all the girls were taught that in school, and made aware of all the mechanics of sex, the number of unwanted pregnancies would go down and down. It may come as a surprise to many readers, but for most of the history of this Republic, right up into the 1950’s and beyond, sex education was considered a family matter, and the public education authorities didn’t supply it, Moreover, it wasn’t considered polite or proper to talk about sex, and girls were brought up to enforce that as a social taboo.

Now all that didn’t work perfectly, but when I was in high school teen-age pregnancy was rare. It was more common in certain parts of the city than in the middle class areas where I lived, but it wasn’t all that common even so; and a good part of the time the result of an unwanted pregnancy was a fairly hasty marriage. There weren’t that many illegitimate children. There were enough that it worried social scientists, who thumped the drums for sex education as the remedy. There were classes involving condoms and cucumbers, because in those days condoms were the only real contraceptives. Condoms were pitched to both men and women, not only as protection against unwanted pregnancy but also as protection against sexually transmitted diseases. The Army gave out pro-kits to soldiers since it was a lot cheaper to give them condoms and antiseptic wipes than to treat the various STD’s they might come home with. Officers and non-coms were urged to make sure men thought about the subject, and one story that was always told was that you could be in a combat zone with no possible contact with women and sure enough in the morning report the sergeant would have to tell the company commander that Private asdfasdf had a fresh dose.

In his 1953 novel Childhood’s End Arthur Clarke wrote of a future in which there was reliable contraception and an infallible paternity test. This ended the sexual taboos, there were no more unwanted pregnancies, and mankind evolved to a new state of being. We invented the reliable contraception and paternity tests, and they certainly changed the social order, but not in the manner that Sir Arthur described. Moreover, the number of unwanted pregnancies went up and up, and the paternity identity capability didn’t do a lot to change things either.

In any event, Obamacare mandates that women be given free conception prevention stuff, which generally means pills. One may be certain that there is some lobbying going on: those who make the pills certainly want to sell them. So contraception prescriptions are now a mandated entitlement, and you get them free. Or women get them free. Men don’t need them.

Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the Obama health care bill mandating free condoms for me, although it’s certainly easier to show that using a condom will not only be an aid in preventing pregnancy which may or may not be an illness, but also STD’s which certainly are and can be transmitted in both directions. The Army didn’t care so much about soldiers getting girls pregnant – in those days the remedy for that would be a transfer of the soldier to someplace far off – but it certainly did worry about a fresh dose of clap.

Of course once we start thinking about preventive medicines we can come up with lots more. Toothbrushes and toothpaste certainly prevent some fairly severe conditions that would be costly. What are not toothbrushes and toothpaste given as a free entitlement? Once we concede that someone else is responsible for paying for our health care prevention aids, and we are not our selves responsible for our actions – after all, there is a sure fire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy – then what are the limits? What is it that we are NOT entitled to? Perhaps every school child should be given tofu and broccoli for free? Actually, there appear to be places where that is argued quite seriously, but there’s a problem getting the kids to eat the broccoli.

So I do wonder: why the great emphasis on contraceptives for females? Why is that an entitlement of such great importance? Are free condoms next? And how long until you must eat your broccoli under pain of being paddled in the principal’s office?

Perhaps my afflictions have caused me to take leave of my senses? Sometime I think so.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a short article “Killer drones are science fiction” that takes an operations research approach to the situation: we don’t need automated drones because they won’t be any more useful or effective than what we have now.

“The key is to understand that regardless of whether a military strike is conducted autonomously or with human involvement, it is not an isolated act. The actual launching of a weapon onto a target is one step in a sequential process that the military refers to as the "find-fix-track-target-engage-assess" chain.”

The author looks at each of those stages and concludes that the decision to engage doesn’t take much time compared to the others; humans are useful in some of the other stages of the process; QED. It’s not a bad non-mathematical OR argument.

“Ready for another rotten highway bill?” asks Jim Demint in todays Wall Street Journal; and he explains why the bill is very likely to be rotten, and why there’s little possibility of anything else.

Of course the real question is why are highways a federal matter to begin with? When Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway system, it was largely proposed as part of a national defense system, and although it is forgotten now, part of the justification was the this would make it possible to build a large number of civil defense shelters – bomb and fallout shelters. At one time every major Interstate Highway intersection would have a shelter built into it. The Soviet Union went mad, and declared that the US was setting itself up for a first strike on the Soviet Union, and civil defense was actually an act of aggression against the USSR. Of course the USSR had civil defense as compulsory training for all its citizens, and built and designated fallout shelters, but they didn’t talk about that much. In any event the civil defense aspects of the Interstate system were abandoned (although some “demonstration” shelters were built in various parts of the country); but the highways were a federal matter because of their national defense necessities.

That’s no longer needed. The easiest way to handle the highways is to leave them to the states, or let the states form authorities and regional compacts; leave federal taxes out of the system. Of course that won’t happen, so yes, prepare for another rotten highway bill, in which money is put into a “trust fund” and then spent on something other than highways and all will be built by Union labor (Davis Bacon Act, a primary means of financing the Democratic party) and the beat goes on. And on.

General Motors, which is now owned by the UAW having been taken from the stock and bondholders, is now about to cut pension benefits – for white collar salaried workers. The regular union workers will still get the same defined benefits pensions that drove GM into what should have been bankruptcy in the first place.

And the beat goes on.

I’ve said this often enough, but it’s still worth repeating: the easiest way to get some economic growth going is to exempt more people from the regulations that prevent small businesses from hiring more workers. Double the exemptions, and see how the economy grows. That is, if your business is exempt from various regulations because it has 10 or fewer workers, you will have powerful incentives not to hire and eleventh worker. If Congress simply make that number 20 or fewer, those at the limits of growth will very likely hire more. There are similar regulatory exemptions at other numbers of workers. Double all those numbers. Watch the economy grow.

It might even start an American economic miracle. And how much harm could it do? We’re in trouble.

Our nation’s fiscal situation is perilous. At $15.3 trillion, our national debt (as measured by the Treasury Department) has already overtaken our national economy, which at the end of 2011 came in at $14.95 trillion (according to the Congressional Budget Office). Bipartisan compromises on spending got us into this mess, and we’ll never get out of it if Republicans don’t offer a fiscally responsible alternative to the out-of-control spending that Democrats endorse.

We should devolve the federal highway program from Washington to the states. We can dramatically cut the federal gas tax to a few pennies, which would be enough to fund the limited number of highway programs that serve a clear national purpose.

In return, states could adjust their state gas taxes and make their own construction and repair decisions without costly Davis-Bacon regulations and without having to funnel the money through Washington’s wasteful bureaucracy and self-serving politicians.

In order to avert a fiscal catastrophe in the near future, we’re going to have to get a lot more serious about curtailing unnecessary federal spending. These highway bills—both Democrat and Republican—are anything but serious.

Mr. DeMint is a Republican senator from South Carolina.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204795304577223421060960612.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I owe you some mail bags. I’ll get to them shortly. This debilitating cold/flu (Yes, I had my flu shots as did Roberta) have taken all my energy, and I don’t like doing short shrift mail with essentially no comments. I am recovering. It’s a lot slower than I thought it would be.

View 713 Monday, February 13, 2012

A day thoroughly devoured by locusts. I woke up with the same condition I’d had – feeling as if I were recovering, but with no energy to do much. I had resolved to get through that when the locusts arrived. First I had errands and shopping. Then Roberta, having reported her symptoms to her physician, was advised to go out to the clinic. She’s got what I have but she got it a bit later than I did and it’s been pretty severe, and there seemed to be some other problems, and, anyway I put the groceries away, filled the dishwasher and turned it on, and took her out to Kaiser Urgent Care. Urgent Care was stacked – it always is on a Monday – and they decided to send her over to the Emergency Room.

That was stacked too, literally people on gurneys in the hall, but they got to her fairly soon and did a lot of tests, She got one of the last rooms before the real stack up started. And then I had to go find her something to eat and she has diet restrictions so that took some time, and everyone was busy, and then there were prescriptions, so having left the house at 3 PM after two and a half hours of shopping — well, we’re back now at 2145. Some good came out of all this.

First Roberta is all right, but she did need some attention. We have the prescriptions, All will be well. Second, I found that if I have to I can do things meaning that I need to focus a bit more will power on getting things done. I may not feel wonderful, but I am not disabled. Almost, but not quite yet, anyway.

Third, I know how to solve the American health care problem. Well, not really: the “solution “ would be to clone Kaiser often enough that everyone can get in on it. Alas, I have no idea how to do that. Kaiser is unique among bureaucracies in that I have yet to meet a typical bureaucrat there, someone more concerned with the rules than with just doing what the outfit was made for, which is to make people feel better. Sure some people are nicer and more efficient than others, but none of them seem to have that bureaucratic attitude that proclaims “I don’t care. I don’t have to.” Everyone was harried, it couldn’t have been much busier, there were lots of extraneous distractions, including us since the ER was somewhat more power care than we needed – and it would be hard for the people I met there to have been more cheerful or helpful. Of course any attempt to simply expand the organization would very likely ruin it. It ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.

I am no expert on health care systems. I have no ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of making other people pay for people’s health care. It seems to me that what people get free they despise, and the economic principle that there is no limit to demand of a free good holds in spades with big casino in the health care field. Kaiser’s co-payments are enough that I’d prefer not to have made them, but not so stiff I can’t afford them; seems about the right level to me.

And finally I came back to find that the subscriptions and renewals are coming in. If you haven’t subscribed, this would be a good time to do it. If you haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a good time to do that. This is Pledge Drive Week, and I won’t let you forget it.

Now I’m going to go relax. I had an In ‘N Out burger for dinner, and got the no-bread wrap version for Roberta. Good stuff.

View 713 Sunday, February 12, 2012

I spent the day thinking well, I am recovering, why am I not working? But I didn’t get much done. I do think I am recovering and I hope to wake up tomorrow without the sore throat and headache and just get on with it.

Tonight’s Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece Theater George V soap opera, had an outbreak of the Spanish Flu go through the mansion just after the end of the war. At least we don’t have that here. But it has not been a cheerful weekend.

With one exception. Thanks to all of you who have responded to the Pledge Drive with new subscriptions or renewals. I talked a lot about pledges and subscriptions last night, and if you really need a sermon you can go there and read it. It is of course the same message you always get. This place operates on the KUSC Public Radio model. It’s free, but if I don’t get subscriptions and renewals it won’t stay open. I don’t talk constantly about money and subscriptions, but I reserve the right to hound you a bit during the week when KUSC, the LA good music station, is running its pledge drive, and this is the week, so you get that message. If you’ve been around a while and you’ve been meaning to subscribe but just haven’t got around to it, now would be a great time to do it. And thanks to all those who do subscribe.

The Pentagon is opening up the question of women in the military, and as usual the debate is generally over the wrong questions. It’s one thing to say that women can be at combat headquarters, and quite another to say that with current regulations women can be combat infantrymen. The current physical qualifications are different for men and women; and there’s the rub.

It takes great physical strength to carry a comrade in full kit any distance at all. It’s difficult enough for men. It’s impossible for a great number of women who have passed the women’s physical qualification tests. There are other reasons. It’s one thing to review the physical qualifications for some occupational specialties to see just are the physical requirements, and quite another to simply declare that they aren’t relevant. I don’t want to open a big can of worms here, but it seems obvious that some combat occupations simply take strength, and general infantry is one of them. I think of some artillery posts that require upper body strength as well. And while we aren’t likely to have bayonet charges in modern warfare, it’s pretty clear that women aren’t going to be as good at close combat as men.

There are no rules that prevent women from playing in the NBA, although the rules don’t let men play in the WNBA. I presume that women boxers could step up and try to participate in boxing, or professional football, and I expect that some might be as good at it as some men are now, but still –

We’ll see what happens, but I do not think that imposing some kind of entitlement strategy on the legions is a good idea.

We have had a developing situation that puts a spotlight on the Los Angeles education system. On the one hand there is incontrovertible evidence that at least one and probably several teachers in a Los Angeles grade school were involved in some very strange perversions involving third grade children. On the other we have the memory of the McMartin case and its accompanying witch hunts in Los Angeles. At one time everyone believed any child who accused any adult, to the point where, in the McMartin case, impossible events were taken as true. The way the children were questioned made it almost certain that they would accuse someone of something, since they would be hounded until they did; and no, I am not making that up. And in the McMartin case at one point there were stories of bodies being buried on the school grounds, and archeological teams went out digging. Some investigators took seriously charges that the children were transported to Forest Lawn Cemetery and made to witness burials, although the logistics of transporting an entire class, many of whom had no memory of the event, and getting them to Glendale and back to Manhattan Beach in LA traffic were never discussed, and no one could be found who actually saw the busses – except of course the children who were telling the story.

For those who don’t know about the crazy witch hunts of the 1980’s this may make no sense, but believe, me, they happened, and in those days the voodoo scientists – excuse me, child psychologists – had elaborate theories about how the children weren’t really able to make up stories like that, so there had to be grains of truth in them. There were also implanted memories. The notion that a psychologist could implant memories in young children was met with scorn until one defense psychologist showed that the child witness could actually be induced to remember being molested – by the judge, whom she had never seen before the trial began. Actually, the technique of implanting memories in young children is fairly simply and easily accomplished, although the ethical implications of implanting false memories as a means of demonstrating the technique are severe enough that few want to do it.

The problem then is that on the one hand the teachers need some protection from slander – they are after all facing professional ruin if not jail – and on the other the children need protection from pederasts who have managed to get into classrooms. In the latest LA case it gets even more complicated. It’s unlikely that some of the teachers in this one school were unaware that something strange was going on. It’s even less likely that all the teachers in that school had their suspicions.

I doubt that this mess will result in a real reform, because the LA school system is so corrupted that it almost certainly has to be abolished and rebuilt from scratch, but it may be that we will learn something from what’s going on here.

I suspect I am rambling. It hasn’t been a pleasant day.