Whispers in the airstreams

There has been mention of the need for an anchor in disparate essays recently. Both involve culture and society.

Anthony Dick wrote in Constitutional Torture, Standard judicial malpractice at NRO:

One of the central purposes of a written constitution is to bind future generations to certain fixed standards and principles of justice that stay constant in the face of shifting winds. In order for this system to function, provisions such as the Eighth Amendment must have some fixed substance that exists independently of changing social attitudes. If nine out of ten Americans woke up tomorrow believing that we should start drawing-and-quartering jaywalkers, the meaning of the Eight Amendment would not suddenly “evolve” to facilitate the new consensus. The text and meaning of the Constitution prohibit such cruelty today, and will prohibit it tomorrow.

Then there is Mark Roberts about some difficulties in the Presbyterian Church.

A grown up church interacts responsibly with the world in which it lives, yet without buying into that world’s latest fads and fancies. It responds to the community in which it has been sent by God, but without merely echoing that community’s values. A mature church takes seriously the cultural trends of its milieu, but always weighs these trends in the scales of God’s truth. Such a church is relevant, but not pandering as it responds to its neighbors.

On the contrary, a church of spiritual infants rides the wave of the moment, celebrating its apparent relevance while rushing toward the rocks of its destruction. It abandons God’s timeless truth in favor of timeliness. It chases after whatever is hot, whatever is fashionable, whatever promises not to offend. It models itself after social institutions, arguing that the church should imitate the ways of business, or government, or the media. The immature church is rudderless, moving all over the place, yet never getting anywhere.

Two of the fundamental institutions of our society, the church and the courts, are noted as causing worry about their abandonment of fundamental guiding principles and their shifting in the winds of popular culture. The Bible? The Constitution? Mean what they say? Say what they mean? Appropriate guidance for today?

It appears that some think the anchor is shifting as we are buffeted in the winds of human desires.

It’s the ranchers versus the environmentalists working through government agencies this time. The Washington Times Commentary describes the Huffman case.

Wayne and Jean Hage bought a 7,000 acre Nevada ranch, made some improvements for cattle, and encountered harassment and lawsuit from the government. “Mr. Hage filed a lawsuit in 1991 claiming his property rights had been taken without just compensation in contravention of the Fifth Amendment takings clause.”

There is no mystery why the nation’s leading environmental groups weighed in against the Hages. They find property rights and productive use of the land anathema to their antidevelopment, preservationist agenda. But shouldn’t we expect better of our government?

“It is a fundamental duty of government to protect, rather than to destroy, personal property,” wrote Court of Claims Judge Loren Smith. For good measure, Judge Smith quoted John Locke who wrote that “[w]henever the legislators endeavor to take away, and Destroy the Property of the People … they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are there upon absolved from any further obedience.”

Seventeen years to judgment is a lifetime fighting for a fundamental right. It is an example of how ideological battles can be fought with a strategy of attrition. You may spend a lifetime trying to establish your claim to your own property if some group is able to swing the government to its view that their ideologies have more right to it than you do.

Kenneth Anderson describes a tactic being implemented by the lawfare brigade at the Pajamas Media:

one way is never to announce an actual policy yourself, something that might in fact be implemented, with measurable results, for better or worse. Better, instead, to force the executive to return to the Court over and over again, and then each time play the spoiler, sending the political branches back to the drawing board, sorrowfully, regretfully, so to avoid responsibility if anything untoward actually happens. … It is hard to resist the conclusion that the real point of this game is to force the executive publicly to dance to the Court’s changing music.

The idea is that of taking the offensive but never being clear about your goals so you cannot be held to account for whether or not you achieve them. It is always easier to criticize and condemn than to create and define. In this case, the offensive means declaring the ‘other side’ as being wrong but not defining what is right. Whatever the ‘other side’ does can be declared wrong and that cannot be contested because there is no clear definition of what is right.

In the Boumediene case the SCOTUS declared the methods it earlier instigated as ‘wrong’ but left open exactly what it would consider proper. That way, anything done could be subject to further examination and criticism.

That is a core tactic of the lawfare brigade - argue but do not define standards or policy or referent. Keep the argument going so you can impugn and denigrate the ‘opposition’ rather than construct a solid basis for judgment.

Sid Schwab illustrates just how disagreeable disagreement can be. He is trying to deal with his own feelings and perhaps should take a careful look at his own post.

The derision. And the take-no-prisoners attitude — the downright hatred, so it often seems — toward “liberals,” suffused throughout.

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But reading some ER blogs, unlike any other category in the healthosphere, is like listening to Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. It’s a polemicist’s playground.

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I consider George Bush the worst president we’ve ever had (and no, Mr. Bush, history will not vindicate you).

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it’s just that the rightward ER docs blog, and the leftward ones go home and tie-dye.

The issue is one of judgment versus opinion. All too often it seems that those who do not see things as they would are perceived to not only disagree but to be wrong or, even worse, criminal. Groups are created and bad behavior assigned to everyone in the group.

Here, the use of polemic implies a negative yet the entire post fits the definition of the word. The choice of people to label with polemicists as an epithet is indicative of significant ignorance of the actual behavior of those people. Seldom do you see the health blogs engage in polemics such as in Dr. Schwab’s own entry and the commentators he cites, while definitely engaging in polemic discourse, do not engage in the sort of dishonesty and detachment from reality he illustrates.

Dr. Schwab sees hatred but does not illustrate what he sees as such. His perception of the prosecution of “liberals” does not fit any rational observation and, as such, indicates that his own perceptions may be suffering some bias from his feelings about things. If there is any hatred to be seen, look no farther than his comments about the President. The pulling in of prognostication about history is quite indicative that emotion is at work and not rational thinking.

What you have here is not a “I disagree” but rather the expression of disagreement as a judgment. This is a confrontational approach that indicates a closed mind driven by emotion. It is an approach that does not indicate a high level of intellectual integrity.

The lawfare brigade of the 5th column is prompted to explain the value of its latest victory. Epstein Etc. About Boumediene is a good resource for information about the ‘explanations’,

One key that appears is that of the identity of the prisoners. Some seem to think the military prisoners are not individuals captured in combat with US military personnel but rather citizens swept up off the street - sometimes even US streets. The idea is that, since the military prisoners are not combatants they should be treated as civilians, therefore the Boumediene decision was correct. This presumption needs to be exposed and qualified but those activies are often not undertaken when they would not support desired outcomes.

Another key is the acceptance of a military justice system as separate and independent of the civilian justice system. This is the idea that the military has its own areas of jurisdiction and its own identity and its own methods.

A third key issue is the separation of powers in the US Constitution. This one gets to the core of the lawfare brigade’s tactics. It is only by erasing lines of authority and responsibilities that controls can be established to achieve strategic objectives. The implications of this activity are subtle and need careful consideration by the ultimate authority.

For any entity to maintain its health and vigor, it must be able to discriminate between self and other. In the bloodstream white blood cells detect what is not ’self’ and attack it so removing invading disease. Cancer is a case where the body is less able to determine what is self and what is not. If the cancer is not removed, it will grow and invade and cause death.

There have been two high profile court cases recently where the social body has refused to discriminate between self and other. One is a California case that set aside the will of the people as expressed in referendum and law to allow a new definition of marriage. The other is the Boumediene case at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Chief Justice Roberts said this about the now-unconstitutional Detainee Treatment Act (“DTA”):

“The majority rests its decision on abstract and hypothetical concerns. (The Supreme Court Wins, America Loses by Henry Mark Holzer, FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, June 13, 2008)

In other words, the words sound comforting and oh-so-nice in their appeal to the sensibilities. They have psychological comfort. They do not deal with the reality on the ground and they hide some things that seem rather ugly.

One of those ugly things is the assertion of the supremacy of the judiciary over the legislative and executive. The Boumediene case sets aside two acts of Congress as well as the precedent of the court and centuries of common practice. The judgment sets the Federal court as above the other branches and as the sole determiner of what the law is or must be. It did so in a matter that clouds the distinction between the US citizen and any other person.

The self to be identified in this case is that of the society. To date, the law has recognized the distinction through delimiters of territory, citizenship, and state of conflict in its view of apprehended persons. The immigration debate has focused on the loss of citizenship as a matter of interest. The Boumediene case attacks the use of territory or state of conflict as matters of interest. The result is that it becomes more and more difficult, in a legal sense, to determine who is a part of the self of society and who is not. The court has reduced that means by which we can determine what belongs and what does not. That is why the decision was narrowly decided and has particularly strong dissent.

TechDirt describes an example of modern battle technique in a look Inside Craigslist’s Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers???????? ????? ????????. The strategy is the destruction of value. The tactic is obfuscation. The goal is often no more than just the thrill of battle and a perverse enjoyment of the suffering of others. The collateral damage is the value of the links we have to communicate common needs.

One of the messages that needs to be heard in all of the advertisements trying to loan you money is that there are a lot of investors trying to find a return on their wealth. There is a giant global pool of money (GGPM) looking for a good investment. Get Rich Slowly will get you up to speed on this describing The Giant Pool of Money: Anatomy of the Subprime Mortgage Mess.

In the early 2000s, there were $70,000,000,000,000 ($70 trillion) of global capital looking for low-risk, high-return investments. This giant pool of money discovered the U.S. mortgage market, which drove demand, which led to relaxed rules, which led to a boom in subprime lending. And here we are today.
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Why did the crisis occur? Because all along the financial chain — from bankers to brokers to borrowers to investors — people deluded themselves. They thought they could throw out the old rules of money. They thought they could cut corners to make a quick buck.

The old family value was to purchase a house one could afford and then build up equity in that home until retirement. If career advances provided for being able to pay more for housing, you might upgrade the house. You did not depend upon inflation of the house value to help you with your cash flow. You made sure you could handle your lifestyle cash flow needs with career income.

The new family value, for some, is to buy more house than one can really afford by taking advantage of the GGPM and an expectation of gains in the house value. As the gains occurred, refinancing and home equity loans were used to supplement a lifestyle more extravagant than the career income would otherwise allowed. Building equity was sacrificed for lifestyle. That worked as long as the house value continued to appreciate at a good rate.

That GGPM seeking a secure and high rate of return investment ‘bought’ into some people’s dreams. Those dreams were for housing they could not really afford. The result was in reducing the number of people per household and also in the luxury of the housing for those people owning houses. Eventually the investments started seeking actual cash returns and when that occurred, the ability provide it was found not to exist for many who overextended their risks.

So now we have a market adjustment that provides the media the opportunity to highlight the misery and misfortune of a few plus the business losses of those who helped them get into that position. It’s a two’fer for the doom and gloom propagandists! Be sure to see through the hype, provide appropriate reference, and avoid being mislead yourself.

Categorization comes after recognition of existence. Frank Gaffney describes four categories of fifth columnists against the GWOT in Shielding official leakers. The subject is the “Free Flow of Information Act (FFIA) of 2007″ (S. 2035) perhaps better known as the “media shield” law. “It would be more accurate to call it the Leaker and Other Enemies Shield Act.”

It uses the rubric of openness and freedom of the press to rationalize its barriers to prosecuting the divulging of information that government would rather not be paraded on headlines.

In short, the Free Flow of Information Act is not about freedom of the press. It is about freeing government officials of their legal responsibilities and enabling those who would do us all harm — whether intentionally or in the name of “the people’s right to know.”

You cannot conduct any sort of successful operation against criminals, terrorists, or other enemies if you broadcast the details and intent first. This proposed bill is another example of pushing the line between the need for accountability of government action and the, sometimes competing, need for governmental effectiveness. The effort is particularly hypocritical when it is attempting to protect leaks that have impaired effectiveness so that the lack of effectiveness could then be used as a political weapon.

Paranoia and suspicion can only go so far before they become an illness. The US government structure was formed as a balance between the reality of human frailty and the need for effective governance. It may be that the paranoia and suspicion that motivates bills such as S2035 may be getting a bit too far.

There have been recent news reports about guidelines prepared for medical staff in emergency situations with a lot of casualties. The issue is triage. The headlines are about how those at the tail end of the line are going to be neglected.

Planning for the unthinkable is critical for successful planning. Having guidelines to follow promotes making decisions based on factors that may get shoved aside in the heat of the moment.

One of the consequences of prior planning and preparation is that, like all good management, it makes the extra-ordinary seem ordinary. Scalpel or Sword describes how this was the case with emergency medical management in the 9/11 and Katrina disasters.

mebelifurniture VidenovmebeliRead the details here, Dr. Mattox explains how it’s done:

“The local response to any disaster is more a function of management of people, ideas, supplies, and strategies, and less a matter of practiced drills for chemical, biologic, radiologic, and blast conditions.”

Besides taking some comfort in the invisible success of recent episodes, one should also note how the media reported the triage guidelines and how events such as hurricane Katrina get used for political purposes by playing up fault finding and hiding effect reference frames. Perhaps the Burma disaster, another hurricane situation like in New Orleans, can serve as a reference.

Yuval Levin in the New Atlantis

But if this notion of a “war on science” tells us little about the right, it does tell us something important about the American left and its self-understanding. That liberals take attacks against their own political preferences to be attacks against science helps us see the degree to which they identify themselves—their ideals, their means, their ends, their cause, and their culture—with the modern scientific enterprise.

In other words, we struggle with dissonance about how we understand ourselves and the world in which we live.

The notion that this planet is running out of oil is one of the great misnomers of our age

Vasko Kohlmayer explains why in The Truth about Oil (FrontPageMagazine.com).

As time passes, we learn more about how to find oil; we learn more about how to get oil from the ground; and we learn more about how to make the most of what we can produce. Pressure on supply makes the price go up and that opens options that were not cost effective with lower prices.

One of the fundamental distinctions any living entity needs to make is whether it is dealing with ‘us’ or with ‘them.’ Who is the self and who is not? When dealing with the self we follow one set of rules. When dealing with others we follow different rules.

It is precisely because of Andy McCarthy’s experience in that capacity that he understands — in a way others can’t — the crippling limitations of law enforcement and criminal prosecutions in combating global terrorism.
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The entire orientation of the criminal justice system is to protect the rights of innocents, affording the accused due process and a litany of other constitutional protections.

But we are at war with an enemy who doesn’t fight wars according to conventional rules. If we
continue to treat them as criminal suspects rather than enemy combatants, they’ll always be many steps ahead of us in a war only they are fighting. While our government frets over their constitutional
rights — rights to which enemy combatants have never been historically entitled — it abdicates its duty to protect American lives. (D. Limbaugh, Washington Times)

The inability to separate self from other is inherent in the terrorist lawfare and propaganda fronts. It is seen by the difficulty in some news agencies about using the word ‘terrorist’ and in the emphasis on missteps. We know how awful ’self’ can be. It is difficult to understand just how awful ‘other’ can be. We lead sheltered lives and do not experience the lives of others except as aberration.

This is exacerbated by the FUD mongering and false crisis assertions - like the fairy tale about crying wolf unnecessarily. We get enured to things we cannot really imagine happening. We loose sight of the fact that it does happen, whether 9/11 or Venezuela or, just recently, Burma. We have trouble grasping that there are criminals (a ’social self’ concept) and then there are malfeasant leaders that can lead a whole cohort awry.

As with anything human, there is no clear line. When does a criminal gang become organized crime? When does a criminal organization become a terrorist organization? When is social unrest a civil war? We have police for problems within the social self and a military for problems with other. When the cancer takes advantage of the blurring of the line it becomes ever more difficult to treat and the treatments will have ever greater risk of collateral damage.

This is why it is every more critical for everyone in the society to know just what the ’social self’ is and to contribute towards the segregation of self from other. Without this discrimination, the society eats its own values and culture. That makes it weaker. That makes it less able to convey its benefits. That can lead to its death. That is what we face in the preservation of fundamental personal freedoms in this era.

At Redstate it is a bit more than a review, it is a testimonial.

Yon’s new book, Moment of Truth in Iraq,
reads as this conversation would: the unflinching staccato of a man who
has seen more than almost anyone else of this war, this absolutely
necessary but unquestionably mismanaged war, and the men and women who
fought and died to win it.

Michael Yon has a lot of his reports online. His reporting effort has been compared to that of Ernie Pyle, the well known WW II front line journalist. That war did not have quite the problem with destructive media bias that exists in this one. Yon is of the new, I’net, era of independent journalism supported by the grass roots. He provides a needed glimpse through the fog of mass media.

This book is a must read for anyone seeking the ‘been there, done that’ perspective that is needed for a proper understanding of the action in Iraq.

RSS feeds can be one way to easily keep up on a lot of stuff. The RSS pages that are called feeds have dated changes with headlines than a feed reader can use to help you see what is new and changed. The Linux Feed Reader Liferea does a good job of providing the tools to categorize and structure your RSS feed page links and present the entries in ways that allow skimming to find items worth deeper inspection. Several features provide good flexibility and utility in keeping up with the news.

First is the ability to create folders containing collections of feeds. The trick is to have folder collections that don’t accumulate more than a hundred or so new items at a time between all of the feed pages in the folder. All of the feeds should be on a similar theme so their feeds tell a common story, too.

Feed pages often have suggestions about how often they should be checked for changes. Liferea allows you to override this suggestion so you can reduce your net traffic. You can also update just one folder and everything in it instead of all of your feeds at once.

Filtering and sorting allow you to see only the new feed entries by date or by headline. With a good folder structure, you can view the unread items in a folder as one big list or open the folder and browse each feed.

The presentation of the entries can be combined as a long list of headlined entries or as a headline list with the selected entry in full below the headline list. This allows you to choose the best way to put the feeds on your screen for how you are perusing them.

There are plentiful shortcut keys and it is easy to launch the web browser with the full entry. You can also launch the full entry page in a Liferea tab if you’d prefer to use it to browse the web pages for the feeds.

Liferea is a straightforward feed reader with sufficient capabilities to be quite useful. Its major drawbacks are in a slow startup and some pauses while it get its database in order.

Identify yourself if you want to participate in society

It looks like the courts have decided it is OK to require voters to identify themselves (WSJ, Fund). The left is not happy (see Big Lizards) but the fact is that the state depends upon being able to verify the identity of those who participate in its activities. This issue not only involves voting but many other interactions with the state. Passports have been in the news recently but welfare, taxation, healthcare, and other programs also depend upon an accountability in identification to prevent fraud and misuse. Right now, it depends upon an individual to carry some certification such as a driver’s license. In the future it may well be that a fingerprint or other biometric will be used as a key to a government list (database) that verifies your identity for a particular purpose. Either way, there is a lot of angst about the leaking of personal information or its misuse either from a personal data store or from a government database.

Doom and gloom frenzy takes a reality check

All the talk about economic gloom and doom and recession got a bit of a wake up call as the first quarter reports indicate an economy that is still growing. We see so much about the rate at which the rate of growth has slowed it is very easy to loose sight of the fact that it hasn’t yet started to go backwards.

Fuel cost inflation and a third world food crisis

The side effects of efforts to move away from oil are being seen on two fronts. One is the substitute front that advocates biofuels and that other is the NIMBY energy sourcing luxury. Biofuels are being seen as competing for basic foodstuffs and leading to food shortages and hoarding. Prohibitions about drilling for oil in ANWAR, oil shales, or off coast have limited the supply of oil and that has tended to make it more costly. Add to that the opposition to cost effective energy sources such as nuclear or hydroelectric and it is easy to see how pressure on the energy supply is increasing.

The effect of improper behavior for change

Some are starting to look at the effect of the anti-war rioting and its destructive effects. NRO notes one that indicates how the Viet Nam effort may have been dragged out by the egotism of the protestsers ad how, with a bit more political finess, the war might have been brought to an end sooner. There have also been some analysis about the opposition to the Iraq war and how it has dragged out the conflict and reduced the effectiveness of the effort.

Is college worth it?

Marty Nemko wonders if the bachelor’s degree is the right goal for the so-so high school graduate.

Whether it is making the opposition criminal or just plain disgusting, a flavor in modern politics is beginning to suffer inspection. Both political decision making and the nature of science provide recent examples.

Glenn Reynolds noted a Jerry Pournelle observation about the effort to promote the prosecution of former office holders. That was followed by a Mark Lardas analogy to the Roman Civil War. The point was made by Pournelle:

The absolute minimum requirement for democratic government is that the loser be willing to lose the election: that losing an election is not the loss of everything that matters. As soon as that assurance is gone, playing by the rules makes no sense at all.

The Attack Machine highlights the science example in Science and the Left.

But beneath these grave accusations, it turns out, are some remarkably flimsy grievances, most of which seem to amount to political disputes about policy questions in which science plays a role.

This last is related to several blog postings noting that the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has published a study about the administration corrupting federal agency science. Those postings fail to note that the UCS is an advocacy group with a long history of rather poor science. As with the NASA scientist who continually claims he is censored by the current administration yet has more interviews on record, much of the proper context and support for the allegation is conveniently missing.

The point is ‘can we all get along?’ We cannot if disagreements are such as to be made a criminal matter or a matter of ethics. A governance of the people must have a means that will achieve decisions backed by responsible people who can accept that decision. Disagreements have to be considered as a need for education and persuasion, not as a matter of prosecution or ethics.

Dafydd offers an essay on Ben Stein’s latest that is a must read. See Expelled: No Intelligence Offered - part 1 (Win Ben Stein’s Monkey Trial!) and part 2 (Ben in the Dock).

What you will get is a basic lesson in the fundamentals of propaganda, how to tell if something is science or not, and a look at the nature of the perception of the diety.

Dr. Ross takes off after the latest hysteria - the fear of the plastic used to make rugged hard sided bottles. He notes a correlation in the source of the FUD mongering:

This new scare is part and parcel of the “back to nature” school of public health. There is no substance to the dogma promulgated by technophobes that “natural is good, synthetic is bad.” All of the great epidemic infections we have conquered are of “natural” origin — and we beat them with technology. The same folks who warn us against BPA — and phthalates in toys and all the other phony threats — tend to oppose gene-splicing technology, which holds the promise of relieving food scarcity now threatening world health and stability. But they’d rather rant about non-existent health threats
they invent than deal with real-life problems. They have been warning us about the dangers of cosmetics, French fries and vaccines — while ignoring real problems, such as smoking and underutilization of interventions such as colonoscopy and adult immunizations.
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I must paraphrase Edmund Burke: the only requirement for the ignorant to triumph is for the informed to remain silent. That’s what is happening now, as voices of alarm become ever more shrill

Maybe we should start a pool on the Next Great Fear …