Meet My Little Friend, Crotalus viridis

I almost stepped on this Prairie Rattlesnake last night around sunset.  In fact, I would have if it weren't for his sudden and furious rattle.  What a startling sound!  Literally:  It gave me a huge startle response.  It starts out like a triple forte blast on some weird kind of percussion instrument and just keeps going.  I jumped back before I knew what was going on.

Odd that exactly the same thing happened to me almost thirty years ago, in almost exactly the same spot.  This little fella is cooling off on the floor of Indian Creek, Bufflalo Gap National Grassland.  Last time, it was much bigger one, who was slithering through the prairie grass, about 100 yards away.

That was also at sunset -- rattlesnake time!  That's when the are out and about.  Though I should have been wary, both times they took me completely by surprise.

BTW, this one isn't as big as he probably looks to you -- a little bigger in girth than my index finger.  I wouldn't want to be bitten by him just the same. Even if a rattler bite doesn't kill you, it will leave you gruesomely maimed and disfigured if you don't get antivenin soon.  The nearest hospital to where I was at this moment is probably in Rapid City, about 40 miles away, and some of those miles on some really bad roads.

So the best medicine in this case is not to get bit in the first place.

'The Penaltax: A Problem Here?

As I was driving through western South Dakota yesterday evening, this blog post by Dave Birge set off such a mental fugue in my head that I forgot to look at my fuel gauge and almost ran out of gas.

Here is what I haven't quite figured out.  First, the facts:

The Affordable Care Act at one time, so they say, had language that described the penalty for refusing the buy health insurance when the government says you can afford it as a "tax."  That was taken out, many people think, because the bill could not have become law if this charge, cost, impost, whatever it is, is a tax. If it was, it wouldn't have gotten through Congress. It had to be a penalty, not a tax.

Then, in the Supreme Court, it became a tax again.  Why?  If it were a penalty, it would not have gotten through the Supreme Court.  This is certain.  Unless Chief Justice's discussion of the Commerce Clause argument was a blatant lie, he was bound to side with the three other conservatives and Anthony "Swing Vote" Kennedy and strike down the individual mandate.

So in order to get through Congress, it was a penalty, and in order to get through the SC, it was a tax.  All the Republicans seem to have to say about this (not including Romney in this case) is something like "Aha!  So you did raise taxes!  So there!! Nyah nyah!"  Am I the only one who sees a deeper problem here?  Does anybody see any "checks and balances" issues here?  Something about the rule of law?  Anybody?  Anybody?  Hello?

I haven't quite put my finger on it yet, but I think there's a problem here:  A law means whatever it has to mean in order to get passed and stand.

Top Five Reasons Not to Write a Nasty Obit

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. The idea is so old its classic expression is in Latin: Speak no ill of the dead. After Andrew Breitbart's sudden death at the shockingly young age of 43 has provoked a chorus of nasty tweets and blog posts from the left, a lot of folks are rethinking this ancient aphorism.

I've never been quite sure what to think of the practice. H. L. Mencken, one of my heroes, wrote an obit of William Jennings Bryan that was so brilliantly vicious that, according to legend, a colleague thought HLM didn't realize that Bryan was dead (I guess he missed the memorable first sentence of the piece). I could be accused of having committed a similar sort of offense when Ted Kennedy died (though in my defense I was really objecting to the way the whole country was going way too far in the other direction - adulation for a "lion" who was obviously a seriously flawed person). (See also this.)

For the moment I'm leaning slightly toward the nihil nisi crowd -- though not out of fondness for Breitbart, whom I came to regard, after the Sherrod affair, as a polluter of the civil forum.

1. Respect for the family and friends of the deceased. Someone might well be hurt by what you say. I found this writer's apologies to AB's family for his harsh word-choice actually quite touching -- and probably appropriate.

2. Don't kick them when they are down. Until moments ago, you were carrying on a spirited argument with someone who made you angry. Suddenly they have been silenced and can't answer you. It feels unfair. Later, when you discuss them as someone who receding into history, that is a different dialogue, with a different tone. Take some time to calm down and switch gears. If all you are going to do is continue the screaming match in a one-sided fashion, maybe you should consider silence.

3. You won. Death after all is a sort of defeat, and you're still here. Maybe you should show some magnanimity.

4. Concern for your own reputation. By kicking a warm body you make yourself look petty and vindictive.

5. Respect for the awful mystery of death itself. Death puts things into perspective, and here you are showing a complete lack thereof. Try growing up a little.

Of course, none of these considerations amounts to an absolute prohibition. Let your conscience, your taste, and your concern for the feelings of others be your guide.

Police Surveillance Drones: Time to Draw a Line?

Like or not, domestic use of those surveillance drones that were developed by the military is coming. Many potential users are interested in them, in many cases for uses that are plainly legitimate, but according to this article the "hungriest" these by far are "the nation's 19,000 law enforcement agencies."

Is this anything to worry about? Of course not, says big business and their friends in big government:

"Today anybody— the paparazzi, anybody — can hire a helicopter or a (small plane) to circle around something that they're interested in and shoot away with high-powered cameras all they want," said Elwell, the aerospace industry spokesman. "I don't understand all the comments about the Big Brother thing."

The idea is that the only relevant difference between a helicopter and a drone is expense, not privacy. This statement is plainly false, as you can see from the following quote from the same article:

Drones come in all sizes, from the high-flying Global Hawk with its 116-foot wingspan to a hummingbird-like drone that weighs less than an AA battery and can perch on a window ledge to record sound and video. Lockheed Martin has developed a fake maple leaf seed, or "whirly bird," equipped with imaging sensors, that weighs less than an ounce.

Recording sound and video from the vantage of a residential window ledge is treated as criminal when done by a civilian. We are looking at something that potentially carries information-gathering capacity of the police way beyond what is supported by helicopters and planes.

There are clearly forms of surveillance that are okay. Though some object to them, I don't mind fixed recording cameras at busy intersections and turnpike tollbooths. I am glad that they have helped in the apprehension of vicious criminals and have documented police brutality as well.

Is there a principled line to draw here?

As we ordinarily understand it, the right to privacy is very flexible: it is easy to give up. At the moment I am putting on my necktie tomorrow morning, I will have a right, good against everyone in the world, that the not see my tie. As soon as I open the front door and step out onto a public sidewalk, I have given up that right.

A legal phrase you often see here is "reasonable expectation of privacy." I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a busy intersection, which is why both private citizens and government officials may observe and even photograph me there.

If the system gives the cops the right to freely use these drones, as it has allowed them to freely use military-style armor and weapons and freely administer devastating electric shocks in the field, then the area of your life with a reasonable expectation of privacy will shrink and, with it, your right to privacy may be greatly constricted.

Unless people make an effort to stop it, this is most likely what will happen.

In current law, the cops may search your home without a warrant if evidence of a crime is "in plain view," and "plain view" includes seeing it (for instance, a marijuana plant in your back yard) from an airplane or helicopter. Shall we extend that to include seeing it via one of those hummingbird drones buzzing around in your yard? If we do, there will be a lot more things they can do do you without convincing a judge that they have probable cause, and without getting your permission.

The Contraception Mandate

So the president has put forth a "compromise" version of the H & H S decree that health insuranceproviders, including Catholic schools, hospitals, and charities to pay for all female contraceptives, (including sterilization surgery and what some people regard as abortion-inducing drugs).

According to the New York Times, the compromise is an attempt to "make the new rule more like that offered by the State of Hawaii, where employees of religiously affiliated institutions obtained contraceptives through a side benefit offered by insurance companies." However, they explain somewhat helpfully: "The result differs from Hawaii in that it shifts the cost to insurers, instead of employees. It also differs from Hawaii in that it requires companies — and not the religious institutions — to inform employees about how to arrange coverage."

I'm having trouble understanding what this change amounts to. It sounds like religiously affiliated employers

will no longer have to pay directly for employee's contraceptives: instead, they will only have to do so indirectly, through the insurance they will be forced to pay for. Under both arrangements, individuals (as opposed to institutions) are compelled to pay for other people's contraceptives via the insurance premiums they are forced to pay.

I'm also having a huge problem seeing how this is an improvement. It sounds like what the administration is thinking is that the original objection was that Catholic institutions are holy and can't get any birth control cooties on them. If the connection is sufficiently indirect, that's not too icky and so everyone can be fine with it.

The real issue is similar to the one involved in this paragraph from Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statue of Religious Freedom (one of the three achievements he asked to be named on his epitaph):

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness; and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind.

Forcing someone to actively participate in an activity that they sincerely believe is wrong is morally problematic. So is forcing them to pay for advocacy of the idea that this activity is in fact not wrong (the case that Jefferson is addressing here). I would also put forcing someone to pay for carrying out this same activity belongs in the same category.

The Mass Media: Polluters of the Human Soul?

I've just re-read Ortega's Mission of the University. Interesting stuff, like everything he wrote, but the best part is the last page, which is a blistering attack on the press -- or what we today would call "the mainstream media." When his colleagues at El Sol, a paper for which he wrote, saw it, they wrote a collective editorial bashing him for it. What's most disturbing is how close to the truth it still is today -- probably much closer than it was in 1930, when he wrote it.

Here we are in the midst of a primary election campaign, and there is a huge amount of reporting on who is going to win (though it's fairly obvious who will win), little reporting on the candidates' positions on the issues, and almost non on the issues themselves. That is exactly the sort of "inversion" Ortega talks about below.

Anyway, here is the passage. Scroll down to get my quickie translation:

[H]oy no existe en la vida pública más “poder espiritual” que la Prensa. La vida pública, que es la verdaderamente histórica, necesita siempre ser regida, quiérase o no. Ella, por si, es anónima y ciega, sin dirección autónoma. Ahora bien: a estas fechas han desaparecido los antiguos “poderes espirituales”: la Iglesia, porque ha abandonado el presente, y la vida pública es siempre actualisima; el Estado, porque, triunfante la democracia, no dirige ya a ésta, sino al revés, es gobernado por la opinión pública. En tal situación, la vida pública se ha entregado a la única fuerza espiritual que por oficio se ocupa de la actualidad: la Prensa.

Yo no quisiera molestar en dosis apreciable a los periodistas. Entre otros motivos, porque tal vez yo no sea otra cosa que un periodista. Pero es ilusorio cerrarse a la evidencia con que se presenta la jerarquía de las realidades espirituales. En ella ocupa el periodismo el rango inferior. Y acaece que la
conciencia pública no recibe hoy otra presión ni otro mando que los que le llegan de esa espiritualidad ínfima rezumada por las columnas del periódico. Tan ínfima es a menudo, que casi no llega a ser espiritualidad; que en cierto modo es antiespiritualidad. Por dejación de otros poderes, ha quedado encargado de alimentar y dirigir el alma pública el periodista, que es no sólo una de las clases menos cultas de la sociedad presente, sino que, por causas, espero, transitorias, admite en su gremio a pseudointelectuales chafados, llenos de resentimiento y de odio hacia el verdadero espíritu. Ya su profesión los lleva a entender por realidad del tiempo lo que momentáneamente mete ruido, sea lo
que sea, sin perspectiva ni arquitectura.

La vida real es de cierto pura actualidad; pero la visión periodística deforma esta verdad reduciendo lo actual a lo instantáneo y lo instantáneo a lo resonante. De aquí que en la conciencia pública aparezca hoy el mundo bajo una imagen rigorosamente invertida. Cuanto más importancia sustantiva y perdurante tenga una cosa o persona, menos hablarán de ella los periódicos, y en cambio, destacarán en sus páginas lo que agota su esencia con ser un “suceso” y dar lugar a una noticia. Habrían de no obrar sobre los periódicos los intereses, muchas veces inconfesables, de sus empresas; habría de mantenerse el dinero castamente alejado de influir en la doctrina de los diarios, y bastaría a la Prensa abandonarse a su propia misión para pintar el mundo del revés. No poco del vuelco grotesco que hoy padecen las cosas -Europa camina desde hace tiempo con la cabeza para abajo y los pies pirueteando en lo alto- se debe a ese imperio indiviso de la Prensa, único “poder espiritual”. Es, pues, cuestión de vida o muerte para Europa rectificar tan ridícula situación. Para ello tiene la Universidad que intervenir en la actualidad como tal Universidad, tratando los grandes temas del día desde su punto de vista propio -cultural, profesional o científico.

[T]oday, there is no “spiritual power” in public life, other than the press. Public life, which is the truly historical life, always needs to be governed, like it or not. It is, in itself, anonymous and blind, without autonomous direction. Well, then, in these days the old “spiritual powers” have disappeared: the Church, because it has abandoned the present, and public life is always superlatively current; the State, because, with democracy triumphant, the state does not direct it, but the reverse, as the state is governed by the opinions of the public. In such a situation, public life has handed itself over to the only spiritual power still functioning at present: the press.

I have no great desire to abuse the journalists. Among other reasons, there is the possibility that I am no more than a journalist myself. But to close oneself off to the obvious fact that the spiritual powers present themselves as a hierarchy is to delude oneself. In this hierarchy, journalism occupies the lowest rank. And so it comes to pass that the public consciousness today receives no other pressure nor command than those that arrive from that debased spirituality that drips from the columns of newspapers.

So degraded is it that it often does not attain the level of spirituality at all, being in a certain manner a form of anti-spirituality. Due to the abdication of the other powers, the one left with the charge to nourish and direct the public spirit is the journalist, who is not only one of the least cultivated classes that society presents, but who, for reasons I hope are transitory, admits to his profession unkempt pseudo-intellectuals full of resentment and hatred for the true realm of the spirit. With no sense of perspective or architecture, they take for the reality of the times whatever makes a momentary noise.

Real life is characterized by a certain pure currentness. But journalistic vision deforms this truth, reducing the current to the instantaneous, and the instantaneous to the sensational. Hence the world appears to public consciousness by way of an image rigorously inverted. The more substantial and enduring importance a thing has, the less they speak of it in the press while, on the other hand, they highlight in their pages whatever will be a “success” and bring notoriety. Even if they were freed from motives that in many cases are unspeakable, even if money were to remain chastely aloof from infuencing the opinions of the dailies, they would nonetheless pursue their mission of depicting the world inside-out. No little of the grotesque inversion we see today – for some time now, Europe has been going along with its head below and its feet pirouetting above – is owing to the undivided power of the press, the sole “spiritual power.” It is a matter of life and death that Europe should rectify such an absurd situation. To that end, the university must intervene in current affairs. It must do so as the university, treating the great themes of the day from its proper points of view, cultural, professional, or scientific.

Moral Thinking in the Real World

This is a very interesting article on the OWS movement by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

I've been following his work at a distance for some years now. He and his colleagues analyse real-world moral thinking based on "six clusters of moral concerns": "care/harm [eg., compassion for the underdog], fairness/cheating [here, distributive justice has a place], liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation."

Among their findings: liberals and libertarians think almost exclusively in terms of the first three clusters. Social conservatives use all six, extensively. We liberals and libertarians, by comparison, live in a morally truncated world. At a fundamental conceptual level, their moral world is much richer.

The signs at Zucotti park, he finds, are extremely typical of the left-liberal Weltanschauung.

The most interesting thing in this particular article is the Machiavellian advice he offers OWS at the end:

[I]f the protesters continue to focus on the gross inequality of outcomes in America, they will get nowhere. There is no equality foundation. Fairness means proportionality, and if Americans generally think that the rich got rich by working harder or by providing goods and services that were valued in a free market, they won’t support redistributionist policies. But if the OWS protesters can better articulate their case that “the 1 percent” got its riches by cheating, rather than by providing something valuable, or that “the 1 percent” abuses its power and oppresses “the 99 percent,” then Occupy Wall Street will find itself standing on a very secure pair of moral foundations.

When I read this I realized that, by George, equality is not to be found in his six "clusters." What you see is fairness, which (pace Rawls) is not the same thing. Haidt thinks of fairness as a matter of proportionality, not equality. Equality means treating everyone the same. Proportionality means treating people in appropriately different ways.

Then another realization hit me: if he is right, academic political philosophy is even more out of touch with the way normal people think than I had thought it was. Whether you look at Arneson or Cohen or Dworkin - or the vast horde of Rawlsians - it is pretty much wall-to-wall egalitarian. Their big issue is: which kind of eqalitarianism is the right one? The one thing they assume is the fundamental moral foundation for political thinking is something that most Americans, and possibly most human beings, don't really care about at all.