Complexity and Silly Predictions

I'm trying to avoid the rash of end-of-year retrospectives and New Year's predictions, with only partial success.

Michael Crichton, who has written some good and some bad books, and grandfathered many films, gave this speech, illustrated, about complexity, predictions gone awry, and feckless meddling in complex systems, such as Yellowstone Park. He has struck a rich vein of human stupidity.

Among other things, YASPE ("Yet Another Skewering of Paul Ehrlich").

RTWT: Read the Whole Thing.

A New Years' Thought From Ben Stein

Here:

And my favorite moments now, lying in bed in front of the fire, wind blowing through the palm fronds outside, with the dogs and my wife, napping while the dogs snore and my wife reads her mysteries: and all while far better men and women than we are fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families live in terror back home.

A glorious moment: speaking as valedictorian of my class at Yale Law, '70, talking airily about peace and love and gardens of Eden, and all the while, as I chattered in my bubble, high on something, I am sure, with my coterie of girls watching and oooh-and-ahhing, far better humans than I, with far better claims to human decency than I, with far closer relations to the Almighty, were being held in prison camps and torture chambers in Vietnam.

Now that I think of it, every moment that's great in my life shares the same foundation: we live large thanks to those who serve in difficult, life-threatening places and ways.

Amen.

And Happy New Year to our troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever.

The Grammar Police Nail the Gray Lady

In this piece about the latest twists and turns of the Padilla case, New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau writes:

Ms. Newman said she expected that the Supreme Court might decide at its Jan. 13 conference whether to hear Mr. Padilla's case, which the Bush administration argues is now mute because of the pending criminal charges against him.

It's a sad day when the "newspaper of record's" legal reporter doesn't know the difference between "mute" and "moot." "Mute" just means "silent, unable to speak," while "moot" in this context means "no longer a matter of controversy."

The layers of editors who are supposed to insure accuracy must be on Christmas break.

Ninety days in jail, stayed; one year on unsupervised probation and 50 hours of community service.

A Syllabus of Contemporary Conservative Errors

Jeffery Hart, Professor Emeritus at an unlikely place (Dartmouth), has long been one of our important conservative writers.

In this piece, he summarizes the key featues of post-WW II American conservatism, and makes a pointed critique of current political "conservatism."

Among his points are these:

• Conservation. Although the free market has great merit, we should not make a utopian fetish of it. In particular, the glories of nature are part of the "unbought grace of life." The preservation of the environment should not be the sole province of liberal Democrats.


• Wilsonianism. This, to Hart, is a dangerous and destructive form of utopia. By implication, Hart, at the very least, would not make the spreading of democracy by force, as in Iraq, a centerpiece of our foreign policy. Perhaps, given what we now think we know about the lack of an imminent threat from Iraq, he would not have had us go in at all.


• The Republican Party. Although this party was the main home of conservative politics. But Hart observes:

  The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt, now the solid base of "Republicanism." The consequences of that profound shift are evident, especially with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture. It is an example of Machiavelli's observation that institutions can retain the same outward name and aspect while transforming their substance entirely.



• Religion. Hart distinguishes, in religion, between faddish enthusiasm and "traditional forms of religion--repeat, traditional, or intellectually and institutionally developed, not dependent upon spasms of emotion." The latter is likely to be ephemeral, but the former is one of the bases of Western civilization.

Finally, Hart posits that a knowledge of history is essential to policy, and knowledge of the great books of our tradition is essential to its preservation.

Food for serious thought.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

Tammy Wynette wrote one of the most famous Country songs, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, rather poignantly singing of a mother's reluctance to tell her son his parents were breaking up.

On Christmas Eve I saw our neighbors across the street. The mother, who lives there, was handing off their kindergarten-age daughter to the divorced father. The parents divorced when the daughter was a baby, after having arranged a child through a surrogate. No, I'm not making this up.

Although no one was crying or seemed particularly unhappy, the moment was very poignant to me. Both parents seem like intelligent, pleasant people. It seems unutterably sad that this child should be divided this way, shipped back and forth.

I don't say this out of pride. I, too, was divorced when a daughter was young, for what seems in retrospect no good reason. At age five, she came to visit me for a month. At one point, she said to me, "I wish there were two."

"Two what?" I asked.

What she meant was, she wished there were two of her, so one could stay with me and another go off with her mother. Very cogent for a five-year-old.

Eventually, I ended up raising her, which was a pleasure, and if anything did, made a man of me. She grew up into a woman I love and am proud of.

Now, though, in my old age, the frequency and ease of divorce seems both sad and symptomatic, and like my neighbors' cleavage, unutterably sad.

Barone On NSA

Michael Barone is one of the most thorough and thoughtful political columnists arounds.

He's given his take on the revelations about the feds' warantless culling of electronic communications. It's one of the more thoughtful commentaries on the issue.

This will likely blow over unless the Dems take over the House or the Senate next year.

Ho Bleepin' Ho

Actually, this is my last opportunity to wish those of you who stop by a Merry Christmas.

Have one. And a Happy New Year.

YAFV (Yet Another Fake Victim)

The Boston Globe reports that a UMass Dartmouth student fabricated a story that the Department of Homeland Security had visited him after he checked Mao's Little Red Book out of the library. (HT: Hugh Hewitt.)

I commented on the phenomenon of faked incidents of racial victimization. It appears that if some lefties can't document oppression, they find it necessary to invent it.

The retort, no doubt, will be that it's fake but true, that is, the incident was trumped up, but the threat to civil liberties is real. Mebbe so, but facts can be stubborn things.

Correction

In November, I made this post, supposedly linking to a photograph showing an Iranian boy being punished for stealing bread by having a car roll over his arm.

Apparently, it wasn't what I thought, but some kind of street show. An odd one, but no weirder than some of Evel Knievel's exploits, whose subtext is the mayhem that would result when he missed.

Oops. I try to avoid promoting urban legends. Especially when they demonize our adversaries. The current Iranian scene is grim enough, without misrepresentations, unjustified alarums and excursions.

The Doc Was On To Something

One of my favorite blogs is The Doctor Is In, written by a Seattle urologist who goes by the name of "Dr. Bob."

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans floods, Dr. Bob wrote a piece about allegations of euthanasia in one New Orleans hospital, Memorial.

At the time, as I recall, there was much discussion in his comments section about whether this report was genuine or something akin to an urban legend. I was a bit skeptical.

It now appears, though, that fire may be causing all that smoke. At least Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti thinks so, because there is an ongoing investigation.

I'm not going to prejudge the investigation. But even the fact that the stories arising out of this event are so plausible leads one to ponder a society that increasingly has a purely instrumental view of life and death.

Ideas, as Richard Weaver argued, have consequences. What if our "enlightenment" is in fact "a covenant with death and a treaty with Hell"?

Silent Cal, Where Are You When We Need You?

“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”

In 1919, the Boston police force went on strike. Calvin Coolidge, then Governor of the Commonwealth, and later President, called out the entire state militia. The strike collapsed, and war veterans were rehired to replace the strikers. Coolidge later made the pronouncement quoted above.

Now the transit workers in New York City are on strike. This strike is not one by a downtrodden and exploited minority, but a strike by a strategically placed group seeking to augment its monopoly rents, mostly at the expense of modestly paid working people who don't own cars and can't telecommute.

The Democrats are increasingly the party of government workers and the "knowledge workers" and "helping professios." Governmetn workers nowadays are overcompensated in many places, because they have the motivation and the clout to dominate the political machinery, about which many are too apathetic even to vote. California, where government unions' dogged defense of their power defeated the Governor's modest reform initiatives last month, is a prime example. Cities such as San Diego face bankruptcy because of unfunded pension liabilities won by public employees through collective bargaining and their motivated intervention in the political process.

Another Coolidge would know what to do. Alas, New York politicians are notable neither for taciturnity nor adherence to principle.

Things being how they are, however, don't look for a total union victory.

NB: For an interesting use of Coolidge's image, read, as I just did, John Derbyshire's novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge In a Dream.

El Jutespa

It seems that Mexican President Vicente Fox is outraged, just outraged that the House (not the Senate, yet) has voted to build additional walls along the border to prevent illegal border crossings from Mexico to the US, and the outrage is general in our neighbor to the south.

The outrage is apparently not confined to El Presidente:

Many Mexicans, especially those who have spent time working in the U.S., feel the proposal is a slap in the face to those who work hard and contribute to the U.S. economy.

Fernando Robledo, 42, of the western state of Zacatecas, says the proposals could stem migration and disrupt families by breaking cross-border ties.

"When people heard this, it worried everybody, because this will affect everybody in some way, and their families," Robledo said. "They were incredulous. How could they do this, propose something like this?

And there's also outrage that the proposed legislation will make illegal entry a felony, rather than a misdemeanor:

The sense of dread connected with the measures is hardly restricted to Mexico. Immigrant advocacy and aid groups in the United States are worried about provisions of the House bill that upgrade unlawful presence in the United States from a civil offense to a felony.

"It would have a horrific impact on immigrant rights organizing and immigrant communities" in the United States, said Jennifer Allen of the Tucson-based Red de Accion Fronteriza.

There is, of course, a great deal of hypocrisy about this issue. Many businesses thrive on paying the low wages that immigrants from Mexico will accept, which is why many in the GOP have paid lip service to stemming the tide of illegal immigration, but done nothing about it, and why Pres. Bush tries to straddle the issue with his non-amnesty amnesty.

This country has been pretty good at assimilating immigrants, and has in many ways benefitted from immigration. Nor can it be said that most illegal Mexican immigrants are anything but economic refugees, seeking work to support themselves and their families. The particulars of current cross-border immigration--large numbers, no control, domination of the immigration by one ethnic group, the threat of terrorist infilitration--have, however, changed the picture.

A fundamenntal aspect of sovereignty is control of the borders, of who and what enters. That we have lost such control is clear.

Whether the walls are wise or foolish, then, is for this country to decide. How to punish illegal entry is also a sovereign decision. For Mexican politicians, coming from a country that makes a fetish of sovereignty, to howl in outrage at these sovereign decisions, is el jútespa in a big way. For a professional agitator like Jennifer Allen to complain that for this country to punish a violation of its laws should be rejected because it makes her agitation more difficult, is priceless.