The American Chestnut -- History and Hope

When the first European settlers arrived in the new world, the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) was the dominant tree species in the area that would later be the eastern United States. Ranging from the panhandle area of Florida to the forests of Maine, the American Chestnut accounted for one in four trees in the forests it inhabited. Tall, fast growing, and resistant to drought and shade, the Chestnut competed very successfully with the other trees, such as Oaks, that shared its range. With a precolumbian population of 4.5 billion trees, (my estimate) many of them over 100 feet tall with a diameter of up to seven feet, the nut-bearing American Chestnut was a critical part of the ecology of the eastern Unites States. Chestnuts bear nuts reliably -- unlike Oaks which only bear acorns abundantly when the weather is suitable -- and, in their day, Chestnuts were the primary food source for a wide variety of wildlife species.

Strong, light, fine-grained and straight, the American Chestnut was used for everything the early settlers made out of wood. It was especially prized for use as masts for ships and, since the wood is highly rot-resistant, it was used for all applications where wood was in contact with the ground, such as fence-posts and foundation timbers. The nuts were eaten, used to fatten livestock, and were a significant export product for the colonies. Tannin from the wood and bark was used to make leather. The Chestnut was as central to the economy of the colonists as it was to the ecology of the area.

The first blight to hit the American Chestnut was the introduction of Phytophthora cinnamomi, an organism that causes root rot, originally from the far east. Phytophthora cinnamomi affects an large number of plant species, among them the American Chestnut. (In the Chestnut it is also called Ink Disease because of the discoloration it causes to the roots.) It is impossible to know exactly when or how it was introduced, but it probably came with a shipment of goods or ornamental plants, and a good guess of when would be around the time of George Washington's presidency. By 1825, when the problem of root rot in agricultural planting began to be discussed, the infestation was widespread.

Phytophthora cinnamomi is most damaging in warm, moist areas at lower elevations and it attacked Chestnuts in the lowlands of Georgia and the Piedmont area of the Carolinas and Virginia. Phytophthora attacks the roots of the tree and the whole tree dies. By the time of the Civil War the Chestnut was largely extinct in the low lying areas of the southern states but it continued to thrive in the mountains and the northern states where the altitude or the cooler weather offered protection. At the turn of the twentieth century it was still the dominant tree of the Eastern Unites States but its range had been reduced at the southern end and its population had dropped to a mere 3.5 billion trees.

The second blight hit a century after the first. In 1904 a second fungus affecting Chestnuts was discovered in the Bronx Zoo of New York City. Cryphonectria parasitica, also an import from Asia, spread quickly, carried by wind and animals, and over the next 40 years American Chestnuts across the entire range of the species were infected with the blight and died back to the roots. The spread of the Chestnut blight fungus to the US was one of the greatest environmental disasters in recorded history. Its impact to the ecology of the area cannot be overstated.

The blight fungus cannot live in contact with the soil and does not attack the roots. Today, the American Chestnut is still quite common in easterm forests where it is an understory species that sprouts from the roots of trees that were killed three quarters of a century ago. The sprouts grow for a year or two and then are killed by the blight. There are a very few flowering adult American Chestnut trees that, through luck or some slight resistance to the blight, grow large enough to produce nuts. These surviving "mother" trees are the key to the efforts to reintroduce the species.

Selective Breeding of these surviving American Chestnuts is one approach to to restoration. The American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation (ACCF) is an organization dedicated to restoring the American Chestnut by selectively breeding resistant, pure-American trees. Since their founding twenty years ago they have made some progress in developing methods to keep the trees alive using a combination of selection for resistance, physical management of the trees and biological management of the blight (which will be discussed later). They remain hopeful but are far from having a tree that can be used to restore the wild population. Sadly, there is little reason to hope that the genes for substantial resistance can be found in the pure-American gene pool.

Cross-breeding with more resistant species is another approach to restoration. The American Chestnut has a number of relatives with which it is interfertile and several of them are highly resistant to the blight. In the 1940s and 1950s the federal government sponsored a program to produce a blight-resistant hybrid of the American and Chinese Chestnuts that would have the blight resistance of the Chinese and the vigorous and straight growth characteristics of the American. This program was, by and large, a failure; Strong blight resistance requires the combined effects of several genes and most of the trees with enough Chineese genes to resist the blight also shared other Chinese characteristics such as crooked growth and short life.

About the time it was becoming apparent that the cross-breeding approach was more difficult than previously hoped, another possibility presented itself: A virus was discovered that infected the blight fungus, rendering it less damaging. This virus, called hypovirulent because of its tendancy to reduce the damage done by the fungus, was shown in many cases to allow blighted Chestnut trees to heal the lesions caused by the fungus. Given the poor results of the hybridization efforts and the promise offered by combatting the blight with the virus, the federal cross-breeding program was abandoned and the government effort was focused on the use of the virus.

The work on controlling the blight using hypovirulence continues today, as does a degree of federal sponsorship. The ACCF and researchers at Virginia Tech are working to control the blight with hypovirulence. In Europe the slightly more blight-resistant European Chestnut is showing some recovery, in large part because of the spread of hypovirulence. In the United States the results to date have been less encouraging. Researchers have shown that, by inocculating trees with a combination of several strains of hypovirulence, individual trees can be made somewhat resistant to the blight but the resistance does not seem to spread to adjoining stands, as it does to a greater extent in Europe. You can read more about hypovirulence, including considerable information that I have simplified or omitted, in a master's thesis that I found online: (Nancy Robbins, VPI 1997) PDF.

The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) is a private organization that was formed in 1983 to pick up the cross-breeding effort, more or less where the government program left off. Looking at the results of the initial effort they re-evaluated the genetics of blight resistance. From the lower than expected number of blight resistant offspring in the American/Chinese hybrids they concluded that blight resistance requires the combined effect of more than one gene, probably three, and that the resistance was "partially dominant." Partial dominance means that a tree that received all three resistance genes from one parent, but none from the other, would exhibit some resistance to the blight but much less than the fully blight-resistant (Chinese) ancestor.

Armed with this new understanding of the genetics they developed a multi-generational back-cross method that would result in a tree that was indistinguishable from its American ancestors except that it was highly resistant to the blight. To accomplish this multiple generations of hybrids are produced with one of the parents in each generation being American.

The first generation is half Chinese. These trees are infected with the blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) and the ones that live (about one in eight) will be the ones that received all of the resistance genes from the Chinese parent. These trees are then crossed back to pure American stock giving offspring that are one quarter Chinese. Again they are infected with the blight and only those trees with the genes for blight resistance will live. This process is repeated twice more giving trees that are fifteen sixteenths American but still have the resistance genes from their Chinese great-great-grandparents.

These trees should have very American characteristics but will only be partially blight-resistant since the resistance is only partially dominant, and one parent did not have the genes. These trees are then crossed with other trees from their generation. Some of their offspring will get resistance genes from both parents and should be as resistant to the blight as their Chinese great-great-great grandparents. This intercross is repeated one more time, selecting for trees with strong blight resistance and the fewest Chinese characteristics, and the resulting trees should be true-breeding, highly resistant, American Chestnut trees, for all practical purposes.

Since each generation takes slightly less than six years, and since the entire plan requires six generations, the expected time to complete the plan from the start is approximately 35 years. The good news is that the initial breeding effort produced trees that could be used for the second (one-quarter-chinese) generation so when TACF started in 1983 they could skip the first twelve years. If you do the math, that suggests they should have nuts ready to start reintroduction very soon now. They appear to be on schedule and they hope to have nuts for seed to start the reintroduction in the next few years. The last intermediate generation is being planted now.

But, we may not have to wait... A number of researchers are working on the American Chestnut problem using a more modern, “genetic engineering” approach. From the results obtained in the classical genetics breeding effort they know that the resistance to the blight requires three genes. A number of researchers are trying to map their locations on the chromosomes. Once the exact genes that confer blight-resistance are known a number of things become possible. The most obvious step is to speed up the hybridization effort already underway. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to raise trees to the age where they can be screened for blight resistance by inoculating them with the blight fungus. With genetic screening a much larger number of offspring could be evaluated in a much shorter time. Time and effort would not need to be wasted on trees that would die when inoculated with the blight.

Another approach –- one that is more difficult but potentially offers a better result -- is to create a transgenic American Chestnut that contains only those Chinese genes needed to confer resistance. A tree so produced would be 99.999% American -- as opposed to the TACF hybrids that are targeted at about 94%. TACF hopes that their 6% Chinese trees will be indistinguishable from their American ancestors but that is not guaranteed. The transgenic trees would be almost certain to have an entirely American phenotype.

Yet another approach does not depend on identifying the three elusive genes that confer resistance in the Chinese Chestnut. Many genes tend to perform the same function in different species, and the genes that confer resistance in one species will often work in another. A great deal of research has been done on the genetics of food crops (corn, wheat, fruit trees, etc.) because the return on investment in such research tends to be large and immediate. A number of the genes in the "toolbox" that genetic-engineers use for working with other species come from this research on food crops. Researchers at the State Univeristy of New York are working on an American Chestnut that contains OXY, a gene from wheat that encodes oxalate oxidase. Oxalate oxidase breaks down oxalic acid, the compound exuded by Cryphonectria parasitica to kill cells. They hope to begin test plantings this fall. There is good reason to be hopeful about the SUNY effort because on Arbor Day last year they planted two transgenic Elm trees that they hope will be resistant to Dutch Elm disease.

With the TACF's blight-resistant near-American trees entering the last generation and SUNY's even-more-American transgenic trees to be planted in the fall we can reasonably expect to begin reintroduction of the American Chestnut in the next decade -- not long at all for breeders of trees.

Victory is at hand, except... There were two different blights, remember? The efforts we have examined so far only address the more recent (and more serious) blight. These new blight-resistant trees will still not grow in parts of the original range. In most of Georgia and in the Piedmont of the Carolinas and Virginia they will be killed by Phytophthora cinnamomi, root rot disease -- the first blight.

The Carolinas Chapter of TACF is working to solve that problem, too, but a bit more time will be needed. One of the more active members of the chapter was eager, a number of years ago, to participate in the TACF breeding effort. He has a 200+ acre farm near Clemson South Carolina that he wanted to use to help with the effort. The problem was that most of the trees he planted would die of the root rot before they grew large enough to be tested for blight resistance. He could grow Chinese and Japanese Chestnuts but Americans would die. He consulted with some geneticists and experts on plant diseases and discovered that the problem was a Phytophthora infestation.

Resistance to Phytophthora cinnamomi is also present in the Chinese Chestnut -- another two or three genes -- not the same genes that confer blight resistance. Working with a genericist at Clemson he came up with a method for screening for Phytophthora resistance. He has six big tubs out in front of his house and he plants hundreds of carefully labeled nuts in each one. He plants Pure Americans and nuts from a number of different TACF hybrids. When all the nuts have sprouted and seedlings are coming up he infects the tubs with Phytophthora cinnamomi, looking for resistant individuals.

He has not yet found any resistance in the latest generation of TACF trees. Since they are only one fifteenth Chinese and their ancestors were not selected for Phytophthora resistance it is highly unlikely that they would have the needed genes, and indeed they don't -- they all die. But he has identified a number of individual trees from a few generations back that do have good resistance to Phytophthora as well as to the blight.

In the same way that the TACF was able to use the work of the federal breeding effort to skip a generation, the Carolinas Chapter is hoping to use the national TACF effort to skip a few more generations in the effort to produce an American Chestnut that resists both Cryphonectria and Phytophthora. This requires selecting for a larger number of genes which means that a much smaller percentage of each generation will qualify but, since the Phytophthora screening can be done in bulk with seedlings just out of the nut it should be feasible. But it will take a while -- figure 2025 for true-breeding trees with resistance to both blights and a strongly American phenotype -- unless the generic engineers can find a gene for root rot, too.

Wire Service Photos, Yet Again

On the same day that the wire services run this bizarre photo of the president, their lead story for the day shows Bush being crowded out of the frame by the black podium while he clings desperately to the edge trying not to disappear altogether.



It must be fun to be the AP photo editor. I am reminded of the cartoon "Duck Amuck" where Daffy is tormented by the animator who in the end turns out to be Bugs Bunny. Bugs ends the cartoon with the line "Ain't I a stinker! He He He."

Other interesting observations on wire service photos, here and here.

Calling Olympic Committee

I need to contact the Olympic Committee. While walking my dogs I came up with an exciting new sport for dog owners that I think they should consider. It is a timed, competitive sport and the play goes like this: The contestant, with two unruly dogs on extensible leashes, stands on a sidewalk facing a small hill with a line of bushes at the top. The blow of a whistle starts the clock and one of the dogs runs up the hill and retrieves a two-week-dead, roadkill rabbit that has been placed in the bushes. Using only his feet and tugs on the leashes the contestant must first get the dog to drop the rabbit, and then kick the rabbit back up the hill and into the bushes without letting either dog get to it. Each contestant gets three attempts and the best time decides the winner. The contestant is allowed to kick the dog but only while it is holding the rabbit. Once the rabbit has been dropped a three-tenths of a second penalty applies for each dog kicked.

For the contestant the sport requires agility, speed, strategy, a great deal of upper body strength and a strong stomach; and for the dog: speed, agility and sturdy ribs. It is a bit of a rough-and-tumble sport, but the dogs (who get the worst of it in that regard) enjoy it immensely.

The R Factor Diet

There are signs that the Atkins phenomenon may have peaked and that the dieting community may be ready for the next big thing. Atkins had a good run -- Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is teetering on the brink of Chapter 11 -- but one sees more and more baked potatoes on people's plates where last year it was broccoli. The sense that Atkins is declining in popularity cannot be denied. Generally, when one hyper-popular diet wanes there is a hiatus of a few months while the people who failed with the old diet sulk, and the people who succeeded with it gain back all the weight they had lost. Finally, when everyone is once again plump and determined, the scene is ready for the next final solution to flab.

We are in that hiatus now and it may be slightly prolonged this time by recent research that suggests that being slightly overweight is healthier than maintaining ones "ideal" weight. Still, sooner or later the time will come and I mean to be ready. As it happens, I am currently trying to reduce my tonnage and I have worked out a method for selecting foods so that I am not excessively hungry and I lose weight at a sensible pace. I call it the "R" factor. I think, with proper promotion, the "R" Factor Diet could easily be the next big thing in nutrition.

So, what is the "R" factor? I'm not telling. Once you know what the "R" factor is it becomes childishly simple to pick out healthy, slimming foods. If I post the "R" factor in my blog, who will buy my book?

But I will give some hints -- as a a sort of a teaser. Consider this list of foods*: beans, cauliflower, onions, seeds, broccoli, corn, peas, soy, cabbage, lettuce, peanuts, whole grains, carrots, peppers, oat bran. These foods are all high in the "R" factor. They tend to be high in fiber, in complex sugars and high order carbohydrates. They tend to be bulky compared to their caloric content and have lots of indigestible or partially degestible components that encourage the growth of helpful flora in your gut. Many of them tend to be vegetables but the "R" factor diet is not necessarily, or even particularly, vegetarian. There are a number of sausages or other prepared meat products that are high in the "R" factor.

With the Atkins diet there was more to it than just picking out foods that are low in carbs, and there is more to the "R" Factor Diet than just the "R" factor. The "R" Factor Diet is a moderately low fat diet and one must pick foods that are both low in fat and high in the "R" factor. But the "R" Factor Diet does not require, or provide, specific menus. There is no need to carry a calculator to the grocery store. Instead, as you go up and down the aisles you can evaluate foods based on two simple rules: 1) the ratio of total calories to fat calories should be at least 4 to 1, and 2) the food should be high in the "R" factor. As I said, to learn about the "R" factor you will need to buy my book, but I promise: you already know which foods are high in the "R" factor but you don't know you know it.

So, watch the shelves at your favorite bookstore for my new book: The R Factor Diet. "R" factor food is real food you can buy in real grocery stores -- not specially branded pressed sawdust kibbles or beeswax wafers dusted with dryer lint. It's stuff you already eat and like, but you don't know that it can make you thin -- because you don't understand the relation between weight loss and the "R" factor. All you have to do to lose weight is cut out the foods that make you F. A. T. and choose foods that add the "R" factor -- foods that make you F. A. ...

But, for that you need to buy my book.

* List of "R" factor foods courtesy of GlaxoSmithKline, distributors of Beano.

Update: 1 May 2005

I have been asked for more information about the "R" factor -- inquiries motivated undoubtedly by impatience for the release of my as-yet-unwritten apocryphal book, "The R Factor Diet." A full answer, of course, will have to wait for the book but I will provide this further hint: I often have the pictured product for lunch. [I have lightly obscured the brand identity since they have not yet offered to pay me to advertise their product.] It makes an ideal "R" Factor lunch -- 25% calories from fat, high in protein, and very high in the "R" Factor. Being an "R" factor food I don't really worry about portion control as that takes care of itself. When I finish a big bowl I hear this little voice saying "That's enough. No more." I like to think this voice is my inner dietician speaking to me about moderation and health. It could also be the guy in the next cube muttering under his breath.

Happy Day, Earth!

One Cheer for Earth Day: yay.

The words "conservative" and "conservationist" sound like they ought to be synonyms. You'd think that, since my right head* is a conservative I would be some sort of an Environmentalist, but I'm not. That term has been pretty well captured by the Eco-Obstructionists and is probably beyond recovery.

This is a bit of a pity, actually. There is a strong conservative case to be made for good stewardship of the environment and there is a good libertarian case to be made for holding polluters responsible for the damage they do to other people. But most of the celebrated environmental issues tend to boil down to finding an infinite list of "environmental" objections to some activity one opposes (often for political reasons) and having absolutely no interest, whatsoever, in helping to find a way that the activity can proceed and the damage be avoided or mitigated.

There are, for instance, things that can be done to allow oil exploration and production in Alaska with minimal environmental damage. One example is moving heavy equipment only in the winter using roads built entirely of ice that thaw in the spring so you can schlepp stuff around without damaging the permafrost. Is this a celebrated environmentalist idea? Actually, no. They are all about preventing oil exploration altogether, the ice roads are someting the oil companies thought up with no help from the environmentalists.

There ought to be more non-left-wing "environmentalist" groups. There are a few. Here is one. But there should be more.

Yes, I have two heads. My left head is a libertarian. Being a Fusionist is occasionally irritating (and expensive when one is shopping for headgear) but, what are you gonna do?

One of these men

... is in the news because he has trouble controlling his anger.




Can you guess which one?

Mimetics

+

=

The other night at dinner we were discussing "memes" -- the infectious ideas that circulate in society, replicating themselves from mind to mind, that, taken as a whole constiute the 'DNA' of our consciousness. Memes of which one disapproves are sometimes called "mental viruses" because of their harmful nature and their viral-like propagation. Meme Central is a good resource for more than you want to know about memes.

One of the ladies present had never heard the term before and we tried to fill her in. The conversation drifted to other topics (memes are interesting but not that interesting) and by the time we finished eating we had discussed dozens of things of which memes were a small part. Nonetheless, during the meal the facinating idea of memes, which is itself a meme, had taken up residence in another mind.

After supper most of us went to a nearby pub where they hold a weekly "Pub Quiz" -- with a hundred dollar prize -- to increase busines on an otherwise slow day of the week. One of the questions was an excellent example of a meme. The question was "Which of the following is it illegal to do in California?" I don't remember all the choices but the "answer" was "Eat an orange in the bathtub."

I'm not sure if we got that question "right" (as the quiz was scored) -- all of the other foils were equally absurd -- but it left me curious about the law, its history and motivations. I did a bit of Googling and I now belive that the "illegal to eat oranges in the bathtub" law is a baseless, viral meme. It appears on a number of sites, often crediting someone named Meagin Caza as the source. Sometimes it's a California law, sometimes Florida.

All the pages I found about the law have headings about "stupid" laws. I'm sure the people who compiled these lists got a great deal of satisfaction adding it. Look, Meagin Caza says it's illegal to eat oranges in the bathtub! -- they think -- Haw! Those dumb political assholes! and with perfect credulity they add this unsourced "fact" -- just something that blew in from the internet -- to their list of evidence that lawmakers are morons.

To be fair, I did find one forum that explored the background of the orange-eating bathtub prohibition. Here is part of the exchange --

Brainiac A: if you're a real bad ass...you'll eat an orange in the bathtub in florida. anyone know why that is against the law?...and who eats oranges in the bathtub anyway?

Brainiac B: It is illegal, because oranges actually carry slight electrical charges, picked up from the actual tree it grows off of.

If enough orange is in the bathtub, a shock can be caused to knock you out for a short period, where usually the victim will drown.

Florida police were sick of this and sick of picking dead, naked people out of their bathtubs, so they enforced the law.

Brainiac C: David, I must say that I'm impressed you knew that

Brainiac B: Discovery Channel.

Brainiac D: Jeeze, wouldn't that be a freakish way to go...

Brainiac E: that would be a sad way to go.. but would the trouble be of having a glass of oj, especially in the tub. its much easier and if you dont like it, you could dump it in the water, if you did that with an orange you could get killed

Brainiac B: Oranges, electricity or not, are still healthy. This is not meant to scare you from eating you favourite fruit.

Also, orange juice, unless it is freshly squeezed orange juice doesn't work. The chemicals will stunt the conduction of electricity, and therefore, the result is totally harmless.

There you have it. Now you know. Orange juice will will not electrocute you in the bath unless it is fresh squeezed. What a comfort. And that Discovery Channel -- what an amazing source of second-hand information that is.

The sad thing is that everyone in the pub that night now "knows" that it is illegal to eat oranges in a bathtub in California. The meme containues to propagate. But, hopefully not to readers of my blog who, by constant exposure to my notions, will have developed a degree of immunity to blather and fluff.

Planet Fidel

A recent post on Sunbreak City -- Fidel Castro is a murdering thug (and other hard to understand thoughts for the left) -- asks the following question:

Why do Woody Harrelson, Kevin Costner, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Chevy Chase, Leo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppola, Kate Moss, Matt Damon, Naomi Campbell, Robert Redford and Ted Turner think Castro is so great? Don't they ask questions, think about things, read books?

After observing that "Childhood doesn't prepare you for how obdurate and foolish adults can be" he goes on to recommend three books on Castro that he thinks these celebrities ought to read. I plan to add them to my reading list and I am particularly intrigued by Como Llego la Noche by Huber Matos because his bio reads like a Cuban version of Solzhenitsyn.

But back to the question: why do some celebrities tend to fawn on Fidel? I have a couple of theories about that and they start with the mysterious phantom planet that orbits the sun exactly opposite the earth. For the benefit of the men in white suits who are starting to wonder where they put their nets, I should state that I do not believe such a planet exists. But it is a recurring theme in Pythagorean cosmology, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Astrology and a number of interesting paranoid delusions. Much of its appeal in these realms comes from the fact that it is mysterious by definition (being always behind the sun so we can't see it) and it can be just about anyting you want it to be.

Sometimes the attributes of the phantom planet are selected at random; In 1969, Japanese Daiei studios imagined it to be populated by scantily-clad alien women with antennas who kidnapped small boys from earth, planning to eat their brains, only to be foiled by Gamara, the giant flying turtle. More often though, the position of the planet -- Anti-Earth, Contra-Earth, Vulcan, etc. -- on the opposite side of the sun suggests that it is also opposite to Earth in some other way, such as politics, gender roles, alternate history or in the charge polarity of subatomic particles.

For the Hollywood left Fidel Castro's Cuba is much like the phantom earth -- it is mysterious, forbidden and difficult to observe. It can be anyting they want. Almost all they know about it is that communist Cuba occupies a position that is somehow opposite to the capitalist US and they naturally assume that Fidel must be a jovial, bearded, antimatter Republican. Their imagined Fidel, then, would be someone they would like for the same instinctive non-reasons that they hate George Bush.

As to what those non-reasons might be, I wrote a bit about that in Savant Idiots where I paraphrazed Ludwig von Mises argument (from The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality [chapter 1 section 9]) that entertainers are tormented by the fickleness of a market that values their work today but may simply lose interest tomorrow. This is especially true for those who are currently enjoying the fifteen ninutes of fame that Andy Warhol promised them. They are the ones who want to smash all clocks and who fear change above all things.

And, although it pains me to admit it, from that perspective they have some reason to admire Castro and his Cuba. Fidel's great accomplishment is that he has pretty much stamped out progress in Cuba. Things suck there, to be sure -- pretty much in every way -- but they suck today in exactly the same way they sucked yesterday, and tomorrow everything will suck in exactly the same way it does today. Rust accumulates and things fall apart but this happens slowly and gradually and nothing gets replaced. If you're on top of the heap today you'll be on top tomorrow. I can see Ted Turner liking that.

Tax Day

Since today is tax day, a few thoughts on the income tax.

From time to time one hears wealthy liberals putting on airs about how their support for a progressive income tax reflects some sort of spirit of civic-minded self-sacrifice. What you need to remember when they start, is that "income" is another word for "new money" and there is nothing that annoys old money more than having to share the country club with the nouveau riche.

The IRS are the overseers who are dispatched to keep uppity runaway wage slaves working on the plantation.

A Better Answer, Somewhat After the Fact.

Early last year there was a thread about Same Sex Marriage on a mailing list I follow -- a thread that went on for some time. The list (Triangle InterNetworkers) is an online community whose members live mostly in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina with the highest concentration coming from Chapel Hill. If you know much about Chapel Hill you will not be surprized to hear that when political issues come up on the list most of the posts will come from a liberal perspective. I was reading the Same Sex Marriage thread with some interest but not posting. (I often "lurk" on the political threads on the list, picking my battles because I will be outnumbered.)

Then came this posting where a newcomer to the list complained --

Mostly what I've seen is an endless supply of liberal "Me too, I agree" conversations. As a member of the dread, horrible, so-called "religious right" I am very disappointed to see all of this liberal chatter with not a single "core" member of the list willing to represent the opposing side.

-- and a Libertarian friend of mine responded --

Become that person then. Please, tell me why you think gay marriage should not be allowed. I'd love to hear more about why the government should be in the business of dictating what are essentially religious / moral principles, especially in light of the principle of separation of church and state.

I was unable to resist the dual temptations to -- 1) point out that there were a few of us on the list who were not left-wing ideologs. and 2) answer the rhetorical "I'd love to hear more about why ..." question -- so I jumped into the discussion here.

I'll spare you the details of the arguments that followed. They went on for several days and were great fun. (You can read them yourself if you like, just follow the links.) But, when it was over I am not sure I had done a very good job of satisfying my friend's curiousity about a rationalle for opposing Gay Marriage that would make sense from a Libertarian perspective.

I mention this because I recently read Jennifer Morse's piece in Policy Review that does a brilliant job, I think, of making a libertarian argument for a ban on same sex marriages. She makes many of the same points I did only she says it better. So, Phil, this is a little late but here you go.

I hesitate to quote too much of her piece because it should be read in its entirety. But this snippet, where she is laying out what she proposes to talk about might pique your interest --

This article is not primarily about gay marriage. It isn’t even about why some forms of straight marriage are superior to others. Rather, the purpose of this article is to explain why a society, especially a free society, needs the social institution of marriage in the first place. I want to argue that society can and must discriminate among various arrangements for childbearing and sexual activity.

The contrary idea has a libertarian justification in the background: Marriage is a contract among mutually consenting adults. For instance, libertarian law professor Richard Epstein penned an article last year called “Live and Let Live” in the Wall Street Journal (July 13, 2004). In it, he treated marriage as a combination of a free association of consenting individuals and an institution licensed by the state.

But the influence of the libertarian rationale goes far beyond the membership of the Libertarian Party or the donor list of the Cato Institute. The editors of the Nation, for instance, support gay marriage but do not usually defend the sanctity of contracts. This apparent paradox evaporates when we realize that the dissolution of marriage breaks the family into successively smaller units that are less able to sustain themselves without state assistance.

Marriage deserves the same respect and attention from libertarians that they routinely give the market. Although I believe life-long monogamy can be defended against alternatives such as polygamy, it is beyond the scope of a single article to do so. My central argument is that a society will be able to govern itself with a smaller, less intrusive government if that society supports organic marriage rather than the legalistic understanding of marriage.

There are a few parts where I would have liked her to say more, or where I have seen other people say things better, but it's not really a fair complaint since she was writing a brief article and I was picking a sentence here and there and comparing it to a book-length treatment of something tht was a side issue in her piece. In particular, I was reminded several times of ideas from "Persuit of Happiness" by Charles Murray. This is high praise, actually, since Murray's book is a favorite of mine.

I was also reminded of "Back to Patriarchy" by Daniel Amneus -- a linkage of which I doubt that Morse would approve since Amneus' book is, shall we say, somewhat too plain-spoken for modern sensibilities and, to be fair, Morse avoided saying any of the things that make Amneus' book incandescently radioactive.


If any of this made any sense to you, you might enjoy...

Andre Norton RIP

Andre Norton passed away March 17th of this year. Born Alice Mary Norton she took the name Andre Norton at the suggestion of a publisher who though it would make her young-adult writing sell better to boys. She also wrote occasionally as Andrew North. She was working as a children's librarian at the Cincinatti Public Library when she started writing in the 1940s and for over a half century she was an extremely prolific and influential writer of science fiction and fantasy books and stories.

It is simply impossible to overstate her contribution to women writers in the fantasy / science fiction world, both as an inspiration and as a mentor and facilitator. A list of the women fantasy writers who have collaborated with Andre reads like a Who’s Who of the field -- Marion Zimmer Bradley, A C Crispin, P.M. Griffin and Mercedes Lackey to name a few, chosen at random, in alphabetical order.

If you look back half a century at the SF trade you will find a whole lot of nerdish guys with slide rules and Andre. She pretty much invented the role of female SF writer and she created the sub-genre in which they could excel. Andre has won the Grand Master award for lifetime achievement in Science Fiction and the Gandalf Award for fantasy. Speaking of the body of Andre's work, C. J. Cherrych said

"I've seen a complete collection of Andre Norton's books and it haunts me to this day, sort of like the sight of an unscalable Everest."

I have been a fan her writing since not long after I learned to read. I first met her in person quite some time ago (God, has it really been 35 years?) when a friend and I were invited to her house in Florida where she made us tea, showed us her formidable library and introduced us to her cats. She was very gracious and we had a nice chat about her work. I can't claim to remember the conversation in any great detail but three things do remain to me -- two specifics and one general impression. The specific things I remember her saying are these:

1) When she was writing science fiction she would always structure her stories so that the characters would climb into their spaceship, take off, and immediately land at their destination. She knew that if she provided any details of the actual flight she would get stern notes from Isaac Asimov telling her what she had gotten wrong.

2) before she would start writing she would read widely about the subjects that formed the background of her story but, once the actual writing had started she was careful to read only mysteries for fear that, if she read a science fiction or fantasy story, something would stick in her head wind up in her story without her being aware that she had borrowed it. I believe she mentioned Agatha Christie as a favorite writing-time diversion.

The general impression I received was that she did a remarkable amount of research for a writer of fantasy and soft science fiction. If you mentioned a favorite book she had written she could show you a shelf of books on history, archaeology and religion that had she had read to get the background right.

I have met her several times since on those few occasions when she could be convinced to attend a science fiction convention but those meetings were always brief and formal. She was a very private person and was never comfortable surrounded by large groups of people, even her fans.

As to her writing, I must confess to a difficulty in describing it. If you have read much of her work, and are thus a fan as I am, there is no need to describe it. If you have not read her work it is maddeningly hard to describe it without making it sound like the sort of fiction that slightly precocious thirteen-year-olds post on fan websites. Many of the subjects she touched on would appear a few years later as pretentious fads. As an example, she had an interest in some of the non-Christian and pre-Christian legends and belief systems of the British Isles and many of them inspired and informed her work. While her work may have inspired many of the people who describe themselves as Wiccans it is not altogether fair to blame Andre for the undeniable fact that, not satisfied with admiring Andre's work as storytelling, many of her fans decided to simply move in and live there. The same difficulty presents itself with other themes in her writing -- American Indian lore, Animals and UFOs, to name a few that stand out. Andre may, for instance, be the only modern writer to write genuinely interesting stories where the main characters are cats.

From a certain point of view Andre never wandered very far from her beginnings as a children's librarian. She had no literary pretensions. She wanted to be remembered as a storyteller, not a literary figure, and for the most part the world has granted her wish. Her books continue to sell -- novels she wrote 50 years ago are still bought and read by readers of all ages. Many of her tales are romances but none of them contain the least bit of sex. Characters in her books do manage to reproduce but tend to do so in the gaps between the books in the series. Not, mind you, that she avoided the subject, just that it was never what her books were about.

You can read more extensive (and better) pieces about Andre at the SFWA Web Site and at CNN.

I will close with a bit from Mooncalled -- one of her most explicitly Wiccan novels. The gender is wrong and, given the fact that Andre never married, the bits about procreation are odd -- but given Andre's ladylike androgyny it seems to fit.

Blessed be, Oh, Mother, for this one was
Thy child-
Blessed his eyes that he saw Thy path and
walked therein.
Blessed his mouth that he praised Thee in
the day and the night.
Blessed his heart that it beat with the life
which Thou gavest him.
Blessed his loins which were fashioned to
bring forth life in Thy honour and to Thy service.
Blessed his feet which walked in Thy pathways.
Reach forth Thy loving hand to draw him
into Thy own fair
place where he may rejoice in Thy beauty
and wait until it is
Thy wish that his essence embody again.
Blessed be - in Thy name.

G K Chesterton

I went looking for a Chesterton quote for something -- I don't remember exactly what -- and I found a quote for everything. It's an excerpt from his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse.

"By this sign you shall know them,
The breaking of the sword,
And man no more a free knight,
That loves or hates his lord.

"Yea, this shall be the sign of them,
The sign of the dying fire;
And Man made like a half-wit,
That knows not of his sire.

"What though they come with scroll and pen,
And grave as a shaven clerk,
By this sign you shall know them,
That they ruin and make dark;

"By all men bond to Nothing,
Being slaves without a lord,
By one blind idiot world obeyed,
Too blind to be abhorred;

"By terror and the cruel tales
Of curse in bone and kin,
By weird and weakness winning,
Accursed from the beginning,
By detail of the sinning,
And denial of the sin;

"By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire;

"By God and man dishonoured,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old barbarian,
The barbarian come again--

Damn! that guy could write.

Free Speech -- or at least free text...

My good friend Calvin posted a comment on my posting on slippery slopes. He makes some good points about free speech and provides some free text that I can cut and paste, putting valuable words on my blog without having to type them. As a matter of fact, I think I will paste it now so I can demolish his argument. He said --

I agree that the root problem, to change metaphors, is the idea that money ought to be removed from the notion of free speech and political discourse. It pains me to think that billionaires can spawn multiple front organizations and pump millions of dollars into influencing elections and issues of the day. Why should a billionaire have any more influence than me? I can see the temptation to prevent such people from doing these things and I can see the temptation to at least require financial transparency in their activities. But I believe that it is a temptation that must be resisted. Free speech without the freedom to spend money, and spend it privately, is no free speech at all.

Having said that, I'm also in favor of a free and aggressive press to find the people who are spending the money to support various initiatives and candidates.

So, on with the demolition. I will start with my most devastating argument: I agree with him one hundred percent. Take that! Ha Ha! In a perfect world -- or even a half-way sensible world -- freedom of speech would be limited only by other people's rights to life, liberty and property. As long as everything was mutually voluntary, and as long as the "speech" in questions stayed away from libel, slander and deliberate fraud -- anything would go.


But, sadly, we find ourselves quite a way down a slippery slope and my sympathy for financial transparency in political speech stems from the fact that it addresses most of the more sensible concerns that prompted campaign finance reform and is considerably upslope from our current position. It offers a handy outcropping where I can tie off my rope while I trudge up the hill.

[At this point the writer senses that he has exceeded his readers' patience with his metaphor, and resolves to knock it off...] There are two ideas here; both are wrong but one, I contend, is wronger than the other. The ideas are that the first ammendment was not intended to protect certain types of speech: -- a) political speech, or b) anonymous speech. Version "b" -- anonymous speech -- is clearly wrong; the founders did quite a bit of anonymous writing, especially before the revolution when they had an understandable nervousness about being hung. But version "a" is exactly wrong -- 108 degrees wrong -- laser-guided precision wrong. Political speech is exactly what the founders were seeking to protect. One can imagine that they hoped the protections of the first ammendment would be a better solution to the hanging problem and eliminate some of the need for anonymity.

The other appealing thing about requiring finiancial transparency in political speech (not that I advocate it, mind you, but for the record) is that it offers a much less radical absolutist position. You can do the whole thing and be done with it without setting up some sort of bizarre, Orwellian police state. This isn't true for the current, already-intrusive campaign finance laws which come with an attic-full of "other shoes" waiting to drop. A few of them came clattering down in the last election but there are still piles of them up there.

Update:

I have been told that I have once again posted an entry that cannot be decyphered. I was going to say something snippy about the quality of education these days and post a link to a good online dictionary, but then I couldn't find a good Gibberish/English dictionary online. [The Reuters news service has some excellent examples of Gibberish, but dialectical differences and the lack of a lexical index make it unsuitable as a reference for translation.]

So, I have decided to add this brief translation of this posting.

As a matter of principle I oppose any restriction, regulation, monitoring or regulation of political speech. I strongly oppose the current "campaign finance reform" laws that impose financial limits on political speech. I also oppose a requirement to state the sources of funding for political messages but I consider such a requirement less damaging to first ammendment rights than the spending limit.

However: I do not believe it is politically possible to repeal all campaign finance regulations. The resentments and irritations that prompted their adoption are still present and I don't see the political will needed to make the laws go away completely. I am rather more hopeful that the public can be convinced that the less-damaging idea of financial transparency addresses the same issues as the spending limits, especially given the obvious failure of campaign finance regulation in the past election cycle.

More on The KGB and the Pope

Arnaud de Borchgrave offers more information about the evidence that the KGB was involved in the attempt to assasinate the pope a quarter century ago. As I said before the Pope outlived the regime that ordered the attempt on his life -- neither the Soviet Union nor the KGB is around any more.

The story of the Pope and the KGB doesn't have any legs right now, possibly because people feel that it is old news. But it's worth remembering that Putin is an old KGB guy and he's still here. Don't get me wrong -- I rather admire Putin; he is a prince among Russian leaders, no doubt, and usually makes the best of a bad situation. I also like polar bears. They are easily the most appealing, likable man-eaters at the zoo. Tigers may be pretty but polar bears are more fun. I like polar bears, but there are certain realities about them that one must keep in mind.

Slip-Slidin' Away

<Prolog>

It was the summer of 1978 and my new wife and I were driving through Rocky Mountain National Park on our honeymoon. We had started in Tallahassee, Florida, and our destination, if that concept makes any sense on a trip like that, was the 36th Annual World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. We still had several days before we needed to be in Phoenix and we were taking the scenic route. The scenic route, in this case, was Old Fall River Road -- a rocky, bumpy winding road that offered breathtaking vistas, terrifying dropoffs and lots of dents and scrapes on the undercarriage of my low-slung car. It was a lovely day and half a mile away, across a steep ravine, we could see people skiing on the snow that still covered one of the peaks. It was not a very smart place to ski because the slope got steeper near the bottom with a 30 foot ice cliff at the end. As we were watching, one of the skiers, a young lady, fell, sliding down the slope and off the terminal cliff. She landed in a rocky, melt-water creek below.

The mountain she was skiing on had a bigger road than ours with a parking area near the skiers, but the place where the girl had landed was difficult to reach from that side because it required a transit across a considerable area of unstable ice. It was about eight hours before the main rescue team was able to reach her, strap her down and drag her back up the hill with ropes. The person who reached her first -- and possibly saved her life -- was an atheletic young man from one of the cars parked on our side of the ravine. He collected warm clothing from the rest of us stopped along the road, scrambled down the ravine and and up the other side to reach the fallen girl from below. It took him about two hours to make it across. My wife and I contributed a jacket and a blanket -- which gave us an excuse to stay and watch the the rescue so we could get our stuff back.

Years later I spoke to someone who remembered the story from the news. He told me that the girl had broken an arm, both legs and her pelvis as well as hurting her back, but that, after an extended hospital stay, she had fully recovered.

</Prolog>

Slip Slidin' Away

A number of things I have seen today have me thinking about slippery slopes. The first was a post by my friend Calvin. He was writing about the new law proposed by the San Francisco City Council that would require bloggers who engage in political speech to tell where the money comes from if they spend more than $1000 on their blog and have more than 500 individual readers in a 90 day period.

One view of this story is that it represents a considerable slide down the slippery slope that we stepped out on when we decided that campaign finance reform could somehow be reconciled with the first ammendment. A cynical take on campaign finance reform is that the politicians voting to "get the money out of politics" are like oil men who want to "get the money out of a hole in the ground." Sadly, however, I don't look at it that way. I think they are more or less sincere -- the more's the pity. I wish I thought they were merely greedy. Greedy politicians have limits. They are limited by the need for stealth, occasionally by guilt, and more often by the limits of self-delusion. It is their sincere but misguided colleagues who do the real damage. The problem is that once you decide that it is a good idea to limit political speech its hard to know where to stop.

While it is tempting to think that this latest law shows, once again, the totalitarian tendencies of the SF government since they are even trying to regulate blogs, the real problem is not the application of campaign finance rules to blogs, it is the flaws that have been in the thinking about campaign finance reform from the beginning. And there is something a bit odd about the word "even" in the phrase "even trying to regulate blogs." If we take the major bloggers' opinions on blogging on face value blogs are a new and influencial medium of which the mainstream should take notice. Well, ok, they seem to be noticing. If you take the proposed law and replace the word "blog" with, say, "privately owned newspaper" then most bloggers could read it without feeling the need to comment. Only a few of us out here on the right-libertarian fringe would still cry foul. I'm not sure I see the compelling reason for the radar to be adjusted upwards so that bloggers can still fly under it.

In a number of issues where I, for one, worry about a slippery slope the San Francisco City Council sees the same issues and says "Whoa! A slippery slope! Dude! Where's my snowboard?" That said, I am not sure that the proposed legislation about blogs is a good example. While I am adamantly against keeping people from spending their money to express their opinions, I am sympathetic to a requirement to say where the money came from. I found another posting that suggests that the SF law may be more the latter than the former. It's still slippery out there on that part of the slope -- but I may be ok with it because I have these:


Social conservative footwear:
for making small concessions
on slippery slope issues.

The second reminder of the slipperiness of slopes was a brilliant posting by Jane Galt on the subject of gay marriage. She is showing all the warning signs of the inevitable slide into Fusionism that happens to libertarians who think too long or too carefully about their positions. Fusionism was the idea of Frank S Meyer who, about 50 years ago, posited that libertarianism and traditionalist conservatism, properly understood, will wind up at the same place. His insight: good acts are not particularly virtuous if they are coerced, and absent a tolerable degree of civic virtue it is difficult to make a convincing case that freedom is a good idea. It is almost impossible to find anyone who buys all of Meyer's notions but it is also impossible to deny the gravitational pull that drags libertarians and conservatives to the empty spot in space that Meyer identified as the center of the universe.

In her posting Jane Galt demonstrates a masterful grasp of several concepts that a libertarian cannot completely understand and remain a libertarian and remain sane. One of these is the suspicion that, in some cases, when social conservatives worry about a "slippery slope" they may be onto something. She looks at other other slopes that conservatives have been ridiculed for asserting were slippery -- welfare, sexual liberation and divorce. In her survey she finds society lying broken and bleeding at the bottom of each of these slopes.

At he beginning and end of her posting she denies supporting one side or the other -- but her arguments all run one way. Her denial that she has drawn a conclusion shows her her sense of the approach of the Fusionist event horizon, and her helpless flailing as she is being drawn in.

Random notes: Those shoe spikes are Liberty Mountain Crampons -- no kidding, "Liberty Mountain" -- you can buy them here. You can read a bit more about Frank Meyer here and here.


Update: My wife instructs me to describe the "atheletic young man" in my story as a "semi-professional climber" and urges me to include the detail that when the girl fell she landed a few feet away from a crevase that would have added another 70 feet to her fall.

The April Fish and the Holy See

Earlier today the Pope had died, according to the Italian press, but the Vatican denied it and the Italian news services now report that he is barely hanging on. Since none of the headlines backing away from the reports of his death mention a Pesce d'Aprile I assume that, despite today being April 1st, he is very ill.

It has been suggested that the Vatican can sometimes detect signs of life for a brief period after medical doctors have lost them -- a bit of extra time that is used to prepare statements to the faithful. But John-Paul II has been very ill for weeks and I expect that, at least from a logistics point of view, the Vatican is ready and we will know fairly quickly if he passes.

From a rational point of view it makes little sense to grieve for his death. He has had a good run as Pope, by anyone's accounting. He is vastly admired, both within the Catholic Church and in the world at large. One of the most influencial figures of the end of the 20th century, he has seen, and been a part of, monumental changes in the world. Recent evidence suggests that the KGB paid him the great compliment of trying to assasinate him in 1981 and he has had the satisfaction of outliving the regime that attacked him. Finally, if these are his last days the timing of his dying, only days after Terry Shiavo, gives him an opportunity to put lie to the false dichotomy of suffering and dignity.

World's Most Rambling Post -- Contact Guinness

The last time I was in traffic court [No, I don't drive particularly fast. My vice is always driving about the same speed and tending to ignore speed limit signs that occasionally are below the setting on my absent-minded auto-pilot. But, where was I? Oh yes...] The last time I was in traffic court there was a young couple there. It seems they had gotten into an argument about which vehicle was faster, her Volvo or his Jeep, and had decided to find out.

I was reminded of this story by an issue of Ben Stein's Diary -- yes, that Ben Stein; you can no longer win his money but you can read his diary at The American Spectator. (TAS requires a subscription for the full text of most of their articles but they appear to be dangling Stein's Diary as full-text bait, trolling for readership.) Ben Stein is always an interesting read and in this installment he relates how he and his son, Tommy, got into an argument (on Stein's 60th birthday) about which car was faster, Stein's Caddy or Tommy's Subaru...

I used to be a regular reader of Stein's diary but I let my subscription to TAS go and I haven't kept up with it. I Googled for it because I remembered an entry in his diary from a long time ago and I was curious whether he was still writing it. In that long-ago diary entry, Stein had some potentially inflamatory ideas about race relations -- things that many people secretly believe but nobody can say. The politically incorrect observations were part of a story in which an unspecified friend came to visit Stein in his house and expressed the unfashionable opinions. The exposition was punctuated by protestations from Stein such as "I can't believe you're saying that!" and "Get OUT of my HOUSE!"

Ben Stein is a very smart man. Ben Franklin was also a very smart man. Lawrence Summers at Harvard is a third very smart man. Summers was recently invited to speak, off the record, at a conference on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce.” He was asked to "stimulate debate" and he did -- big time. Summers, like Stein, wanted to encourage people to think about a contentious issue where the "official" view does not entirely entirely explain the observed data. But, unlike Stein, Summers neglected to isolate himself from the controversial parts of the inquiry. Instead, he got out his kite and launched it into the thunderstorm. And he has called down the lighning.

Like I said, Ben Stein is a very smart man. I admire him greatly. I also admire Ben Franklin and I am glad he avoided electrocution, because the kite and thunderstorm thing was brilliant and stupid, both at the same time. I might be tempted to admire Dr. Summers if it weren't for the terribly wicked things he has said and done. For more insight into the Summers fiasco at Harvard I offer this link to a stern scolding of Summers by a justifiably irate feminist member of the Harvard faculty. [OOPS! wrong link!! Sorry, can't seem to find the one I intended.]

Wire Photo Coincidence -- The Prequel

I was deleting some old files and I found two images that had struck me a while back. One is the Anheuser-Busch logo and one is a guy setting up the stage for one of the presidential debates.



What an interesting coincidence -- that the red stepladder, when photographed from this angle, looks like a big letter "A". Surely, it couldn't be that the AP wire was using the Bush/Busch thing to remind us that there was a time when W liked adult beverages perhaps a bit too much...

Fake Indian, No Pony

There was time, quite a while ago, when the world was black and white (as documented in most of the photographic evidence that remains to us) and the defining property, and chief virtue, of the academe was tweediness. Universities were populated by eccentrics who, by some accident or peculiarity of temperament had become so deeply interested in some subject that they needed to be put in professorships so they could be taken care of. In exchange for this modest support and being allowed to pursue their chosen obsession, they were encouraged to discuss their topic with students passing through the institution. The idea was that most of the students would have their intellectual horizons harmlessly broadened and those susceptible few, for whom the obsession proved contagious, would stay on to replace their mentors.

Their position outside of the hubbub of everyday life gave academics a certain degree of immunity to the ordinary requirements of logic. Their interest in their fields of study could, for instance, be “passionate” and “dispassionate” at the same time – passionate in the sense that their interest was all-consuming, but dispassionate in that they examined the subject from all points of view without preconception. As with a vain man who uses a second mirror to see how he looks from behind, this desire for alternate viewpoints was part and parcel of their obsession, but it nonetheless gave them added perspective that people outside the academy would often lack. This omni-directional viewpoint would sometimes put them at odds with the particular passions of the day (thus the "dispassionate" part) but, since very little attention was paid to professors, very little damage was done.

Then, early in the second half of the last century people did start to pay attention and, somewhat gradually, everything went to Hell. Journalists, especially television reporters, looking for alternate points of view for balance started to seek out academics. Professors started to see themselves on television – many were dismayed but others rather enjoyed the attention. Academics, who could examine their subject area from a number of points of view, found that the more controversial angles got them the most attention. Other academics, covetous of the attention their colleagues were receiving, started to accentuate their own out-of-the-mainstream notions. A facility with controversial ideas, which started off as a side effect of broad scholarly inquiry, became more and more a substitute for it.

One might be tempted to think that these learned men and women, who ought to be the wisest of their generation, could handle a bit of public attention better than, say, a farmer who unearths Jimmy Hoffa while digging a ditch to irrigate his cauliflower. This supposition is especially tempting for those with little actual experience with academics. The fact of the matter is that all professors are flattered by attention from people who don’t need their classes to get the degrees needed on their resumes to obtain jobs with corner offices and high salaries. And if this flattering attention is accompanied by a hint that the world is starting to take an interest in the professor’s field of study – well, the sense of confirmation is a drug that few professors can turn away from once they have tried it.

Other faculty members and administrators got hooked on the reflected glow of their glib, controversial colleagues. With institutions as with individuals, controversiality, once a side effect of scholarship, became a good in itself. No longer a problem with one’s curriculum vitae to be offset by other factors, notoriety became a positive credential. Research became increasingly tendentious as researchers whose research suggested a concern dug a little harder to see if the concern couldn’t be widened into a crisis. Scholars whose fields did not lend themselves to alarm traded on their accomplishments to branch out into over areas of controversy. As an example, consider Noam Chomsky; his early work in formal language theory is as brilliant as his later writings on politics are appalling, and that is high praise indeed.

Given the confusion about the relation between controversy and scholarship it is inevitable that poseurs such as Ward Churchill should arrive on the scene. In a way the unpalatable nature of his ideas gave him a sort of cover. The administrators and other faculty of the university, in reviewing his work, judged it by its general shape and familiar odor. Understandably, no one was particularly interested in really digging into it. Until they were reminded that there is still such a thing as too much controversy they were content to give him the benefit of the doubt. Like the optimistic little boy in Ronald Reagan's joke, they assumed there must be a pony in there somewhere.

Note: I am not an academic. This posting consists of a laying out impressions I have gathered -- impressions waiting for others, closer to the issue, to correct. I do have a certain amount of experience with the world of academics. As a student at a major university I earned two degrees – a BS in Mass Communications and a Master’s in Computer Science. I also worked for the university. I was employed by various university departments and had occasion to help a number of professors with computer analysis and simulations for their research. My overlapping careers as student and employee lasted for seventeen years.

Yet Another Blessing

I have many things for which I am grateful – loyal friends; interesting work; a decent degree of prosperity; a happy marriage; and children who appear to be turning out better than expected and (if the concept makes any sense) much better than I deserve.

To this list of blessings I can add a new one: It is not up to me to decide whether Terri Schiavo lives or dies. In a certain narrow sense of the phrase, I don’t really care one way or the other. This is not to say that I don’t sympathize and empathize with Terri, her family, her husband, her doctors and nurses, the judges who have reviewed her case, the politicians who (perhaps ill-advisedly) decided to become involved and poor Kathryn Lopez at National Review Online who does care very, very much. It’s just that the merits on both sides are so perfectly balanced that I can see little reason to prefer one over the other. This fine balance is the reason that the Schiavo thing has been so contentious for so long.

NR Online currently has a article by Pia de Solenni, the director of life and women’s issues at the Family Research Council, in which she argues that Terri Shiavo’s condition should be re-examined, in part because –

It’s not even clear that she’s in a persistent vegetative state, since she’s never had the benefit of diagnostic exams such as an MRI or PET.

Also on the NR website (on their blog, The Corner) is a link to a the CodeBlue blog in which a doctor (a radiologist in south Florida) posts a CT scan of Terri’s brain and remarks that it is not that bad…

I HAVE SEEN MANY WALKING, TALKING, FAIRLY COHERENT PEOPLE WITH WORSE CEREBRAL/CORTICAL ATROPHY. THEREFORE, THIS IS IN NO WAY PRIMA FACIE EVIDENCE THAT TERRI SCHIAVO'S MENTAL ABILITIES OR/OR CAPABILITIES ARE COMPLETELY ERADICATED. I CANNOT BELIEVE SUCH TESTIMONY HAS BEEN GIVEN ON THE BASIS OF THIS SCAN.

Both of these writers support further evaluation of Terri Schiavo’s condition before she is allowed to die and, yes, they do contradict each other in the details. On the one hand the CT scan exists, on the other hand it is nine years old and de Solenni could have qualified her statement to indicate that there were no “recent” diagnostic scans. As the case drags on the facts get tattered and frayed. They lose their sharp outlines and everything becomes true and everything becomes false, as it suits you to see things. I didn’t pick this inconsistency to take sides; it’s just the example that caught my eye and supports my notion that the facts of the case are complicated and inconsistent. I could easily find similar inconsistencies in the arguments on the other side. Which is why I am so, so glad it isn’t up to me.

Even if it were up to me my decision would be determined by my relation to the case. If I were a Florida judge, given the rough equivalence of merit on both sides I would probably see no compelling reason to override the decision of Terri’s husband. If I were a judge in a federal court I would see no compelling reason to override the decision of the Florida courts. If I were a member of the US House or Senate I would, for Federalist reasons, defer to the laws of the State of Florida. And, if I were a Florida legislator I would be largely without guidance -- I might want to put the feeding tube back in to give me more time to make up my mind.

And, if I was just me? If all of the principals of the case came to me, saying “BigLee, we have heard of your vast wisdom and have come for advice,” what would I do? After first making sure they hadn’t mistaken me for some other wise guy with the same name, I would advise them to put the feeding tube back in and let Terri’s parents and other family take care of her. For justification, I would use the flip side of something the Marcus Aurius said in his Meditations about the fear of death.

He who fears death either fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if thou shalt have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm; and if thou shalt acquire another kind of sensation, thou wilt be a different kind of living being and thou wilt not cease to live.

It seems to me to apply equally well to Terri’s current state. Either Terri is still there and her parents should be allowed to take care of her, or she is gone and it does her no harm to allow her parents to take care of her. After 15 years, and with no hope left, her husband is understandably eager to get on with his life. I’d give Terri to her parents – for their sake, not for hers – and set her poor husband free.

Open Letter to ExpressAutoParts.com

You can order auto parts online for about 40% below the retail price. But are the savings worth the hassle? I don't know yet but maybe not.

Here's the deal. My daughter's car needed a brake job and I decided to have it done while she was away on spring break. The cost of the repair is pushing the value oif the car but she is attached to it so I was looking for ways to get if back on the road on the cheap. ExpressAutoParts.com seems to have consistantly the best prices on the needed parts and their site is well organized and easy to use. But...

Sirs,

I am writing to report a problem with an order. My specific requests are in the paragraphs labeled Option A and B below. I also have a few questions about your standards for customer service that I thought I would share with the readers of my online journal -- teleoscope.blogspot.com.

On the morning of Monday, March 14th, 2005 I placed an order for some parts to repair the brakes on my daughter's 1985 BMW 318i. The order number is #132512 and the parts ordered are listed below.

1 N1030-19797 PEX ; Brake Pad Sensor
1 N2020-19726 GIR ; Wheel Cylinder
1 N3000-19760 FAG ; Brake Master Cylinder
1 N1040-34162 GIR ; Brake Caliper New
1 N1040-34163 GIR ; Brake Caliper New
2 N1000-19695 ATE ; Brake Disc

I did not receive a confirmation email with a tracking number but I could see the order in the "My Garage" area of your site. I had availed myself of your offer of free UPS ground shipping and, since you advertise same day shipping, I expected the parts would arrive late in the week. When they had not arrived by Friday noon my worry about the lack of a confirmation email became a real concern and I posted an inquiry on your customer service page asking whether my order had, in fact, been shipped. Receiving no response I posted a second inquiry a few hours later. Slightly after 6 pm on Friday I received an email saying that the warehouse was waiting for my order to "come into stock" and that it would be shipped within ten days. It does not tell me which of the parts I ordered are out of stock.

At the time I placed the order, and as I write this note, and at each of the several times I checked in between, you website has listed all parts in my order as "In Stock". What is your standard for having your ordering application accurately reflect your inventory?

Your website promises "same day shipping." Do your customer service standards allow for waiting five days to notify a customer that his order was unexpectedly out of stock and has not been shipped, and then only after he asks about it twice? Do you notify customers of out-of-stock merchandise at all, or should customers who need timely service assume that the parts are out of stock if they do not receive a confirmation email within 24 hours and cancel their order?

I can understand why an organization that expects to do high-volume Internet sales might not want to list telephone numbers but a telephone number would make a welcome addition to your note that an order is delayed.

Spring break is over, my daughter is back and being down a car is becoming inconvenient. It makes no sense for me to wait ten days for parts I can get locally today if am willing to pay retail. As I see it we can do one of two things:

Option A: You can 1) ship me the parts that are in stock, 2) drop the out-of-stock parts from the order, 3) tell me what you shipped so I can get the rest locally, and 4) comp me expedited shipping because you have wasted my time. This is my preferred solution because I wouldn't have to admit to my wife, my daughter, my mechanic, and the readers of my web log that I am an idiot for thinking I could save money by ordering auto-parts online.

Option B: Alternately, you can cancel my order and tell me you have canceled my order. I will then buy the parts at retail prices and conclude that online auto parts dealers are only suitable for weekend project cars. I will worry, briefly, that this is unfair to your competitors, but I will get over it.

I will leave the choice of option to you. I authorize you to do either. If you see a third option, my phone number is (000)555-1234. Your web site promises excellent customer service and guarantees my satisfaction. I am waiting to be impressed.

Lee Haslup
biglee (at)haslups.com
Cary, NC

So, am I an idiot? Probably. I'll let you know.

Update: 19 March 2005

D'oh!! Things aren't looking so good on the "Am I an idiot?" front. I received this from ExpressAutoParts:

Dear Customer;

We currently have the Brake Pad Sensor in stock. The rest of the parts
are expected to be back in stock in the next 6-14 days. We will ship
these parts to you as soon as they are back in stock and we will send
you an email with the tracking number. Please accept our apologies
for the delay and we thank you for your patience.

Regards,

ExpressAutoParts.com

So, of the seven items I ordered, all of which they advertise as "in stock," the only one that they actually have is the five dollar brake pad sensor.

On the positive side, they responded promptly to my email (on Sunday, no less) and, since they listed the parts that were in stock (actually the one part that was in stock), clearly somebody had read my email and made some effort to do what I had asked. My previous response also came during non-business hours as well.

My current theory is that somewhere, deep in the dungeons of the ExpressAutoParts "warehouse" is a parts guy, chained to his station with a huge bin of brake pad sensors and a computer. He spends all day shipping brake pad sensors and in the evenings he drags himself to his computer and sends out a few pathetic emails to irate customers who have ordered any of the thousands of other parts listed on the web site.

I feel for him and to lighten his workload I sent him this helpful message:

Please cancel my order. I will obtain parts from another supplier.
Order number is 132512.

Thanks

Lee Haslup
Cary, NC

I have told my mechanic to go ahead and order the parts from a "real" auto parts provider. This involves kissing another hundred and eighty bucks goodbye (a tearfull parting, I assure you.)

So, am I an idiot? Yes. Can one order auto parts on the internet? The answer to that is still "maybe." I have done a bit of Googling since my parts did not arrive and it turns out that I am not the only person to have had a problem with ExpressAutoParts.com. The reason I am an idiot is that I didn't do my Googling first.

Several of the people who complain about ExpressAutoParts go on to suggest AutoPartsWorld.com as a better source of online parts. One can get a pretty good feel for an online store by typing their URL and the words "customer-service" into a search engine. Typing "autopartsworld customer-service" into Google returns 428 pages. This is a decent number -- a few pages for the store itself to talk about their customer service, a few more for their business partners, a few pages where the store and the words customer-service are unrelated, and maybe one or two complaints (because nobody's perfect.) I glanced through the list for AutoPartsWorld and I didn't notice many complaints. Compare this to the results for "expressautoparts customer-service" -- 55,000 pages. A fair percentage of these pages contain complaints. A running theme is people who order parts (often brake parts) that never arrive. Several people report that they were put off so long waiting for back ordered parts that their 60 day window for contesting credit card charges expired. Complaints seem to have spiked starting late last year. ExpressAutoParts appears to have dug themselves quite a hole. And I jumped into it.

*sigh*

So, the results aren't really in about ordering auto parts online. I am still hopeful about it and I apologize to the competitors of ExpressAutoParts for casting doubt on the industry based on one data point. Sadly, I gotta get my daughters car back on the road and don't have time to personally collect any more data.

Wire Photos Coincidences.

From time to time I will see a wire photo that looks somehow familiar. Consider this photo of a woman holding vigil outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo may have her feeding tube removed. (Link is to a Yahoo Photos AP image -- not sure how long the link is good.) It occurred to me that I had seen something like it before.



Is it just me, or did the idea that the sacredness of life is somehow a Catholic issue give this image a bit more resonance with the photographer or the photo editor? No particular point here. Just wondering.

Copyright Laws

The other day I found myself in a discussion with my college-age daughter and a friend. We were discussing music file sharing and I found myself outnumbered. Their position is that online music file sharing is simply theft – end of story. My position is that there is a continuum with theft at one end, perfectly legal and ethical participation in online communities at the other end, and some room to look at what we hope to achieve with laws to protect intellectual property in the middle.

As markers for the ends of the continuum, let me offer these two images…


The image on the left is fairly self-explanatory. It represents what most people think of when they equate online file sharing with theft -- and it cannot be denied that many – perhaps a majority of – file sharing users are simply looters in cyberspace, smashing windows and running away with anything they can get their hands on. If they think about the ethics of it at all – and most don’t – they will offer some idiotic pseudo-Marxian drivel about the rich record companies that oppress the little guy.

The image on the right may need a bit more explanation. Ada Jones was arguably the first female star in the record industry. She made her first recording, for Edison, in 1893 or 1894 and her career peaked around 1910. If you click on the image of her you should be able to download an MP3 file of her singing “If I Knock the ‘L’ Out of Kelly” which she recorded on an Edison Blue Ambersol cylinder in 1917. [If you click on the other image you won’t hear Jack. The helicopters are already circling for my snarfing the album cover from their web site.]

I downloaded the Ada Jones MP3 from the old Napster some time back. I was looking for songs I remembered my dad humming when I was a kid. Most of them are WWII vintage stuff and not that hard to find. A few took some tracking down and the Ada Jones thing was a real find. [It’s likely that dad heard a different (later) recording, but finding any version of that song is difficult.] The recording is 88 years old and my understanding of copyright laws suggests it is probably in the public domain. As far as I know no copyrights were broken or ethical rules bent in the process of my acquiring that file.

Most of the other songs I downloaded for my “Songs Dad Used to Hum” collection fall into the middle of the continuum. They are probably still under copyright but, in many cases, out of print and/or hard to find. I try to buy a legit copy of them whenever the opportunity presents itself – admittedly, often used disks on eBay – but some of them are pretty obscure. [In some cases, oddly obscure – why don’t we ever hear the Ames Brother’s “Rag Mop” on the oldies stations? It’s a hot song.]

There are two primary ways I look at intellectual property issues. The first is the notion that the creator (author, composer, performer, etc.) should own the work because, absent the creator, the work wouldn’t exist. Let me first state that I buy this argument for the simple cases, for recent works where the creator, or the creators agent, is generally known and is actively involved in managing its use. Most real world intellectual property has a number of “creators” and there is a bit of lawyer work to be done to decide the relative value of the contributions – but that doesn’t change the argument.

What does change the argument somewhat is work that is less commercially viable, older or relatively obscure, where the creator or his agent is more-or-less absent from the scene. The current owner of the work – often a third-party holding company – is not actively encouraging the use of the work so they can generate revenue because the expense of doing so would exceed the revenue generated. In theory, someone wanting to use the work could approach them and negotiate a fee but the expense of the negotiation is once again a barrier. The only time the rights to such works are exercised is when the owner believes someone has violated them and litigates for compensation.

An analogy would be buildings that might at one time have commanded high rents that have fallen into disrepair. The owners of the buildings make no attempt to rent the buildings but have installed man-traps at the entrances to collect an occasional dollar freeing people who have blundered into them. I suppose that some of the money paid to the architects that designed the buildings might have come from the expectation that some future owner could roll drunks in the lobby or let out the second floor to hookers – but not very much. Similarly, by the time a song has been sold three or four times and has lost most, if not all, of its commercial value, the argument that, without its long-dead composer, the song wouldn’t exist gets harder to apply.

Note that it is commercial viability, not age, that positions things on the continuum. I wouldn’t have minded seeing the copyright on Peter Pan extended again. As far as I am concerned it meets all the criteria for protection. But some of the last few recording of Ada Jones are still under copyright and I don’t think they should be. Poor Ada has almost disappeared, it would be a pity if Metallica finished her off. Nobody will ever make big money selling her music but it’s kind of fun to listen to her sing.

The second way I think about intellectual property rights... [Yes, I know, you were hoping I had forgotten that I promised two ways, but no such luck.] The second way to look at them is from a utilitarian point of view. By this line of thinking we protect intellectual property rights to encourage people to create and distribute usefule and/or enjoyable works by offering them the assurance that they will be garanteed a piece of the action. This argument works if you don't give a rat's ass who "owns" things, or why they should. A true Utilitarian is just in it for the stuff and the best way to get the stuff is to make sure the people who make the stuff get paid for it.

Libertarians (and I am one, most of the time) tend to be rather suspicious of utilitarian reasoning. When Nathaniel Brandon came down from the mountain there was nothing on his stone tablets that talked about "the greatest good for the greatest number." The second way to look at intellectual property is clearly inferior to the first when both can be applied. While the ink is still wet I am 100 percent with the rights of the creator to do whatever he wants with his work. But after a few years, when the creator has passed away and nobody is quite sure if he sold the rights to the work, or to whom, and nobody much cares -- when "He made it so he owns it" has turned into "Somebody must have made it so maybe somebody still owns it" -- then the utilitarian argument starts to make sense.

So, what do I think would be better? I think that we should change the way copyrights work to try to get some of the commercially non-viable stuff out into the public domain faster and to reduce the barrier to use of work of marginal commercial value. On the one hand, I still think that the creator should own the material and should call the shots. On the other hand, when someone secures a copyright on a piece of work he is, in effect, asking society to recognize the concept of ownership of abstractions – of an image on paper or a series of bits in a computer stream – and it seems fair to ask something in return.

Specifically, I think the initial period of protection under a copyright should be much shorter and that after that period the copyright should need to be renewed every year to remain in effect. A small fee, say ten dollars, should be required to renew the copyright. To compensate copyright holders for this additional effort and expense I think the amount of time a copyright can remain in effect (when renewed annually) should be increased.

This is intended to engage the copyright owner in the decision about commercial viability – as long as the owner thinks the work has potential for revenue the copyright can remain in place. When the owner writes it off it enters the public domain. The periodic renewal also puts the owner on record as an active, current holder of the rights.

The intention here is not to deny holders of intellectual property rights their revenue. It is to make as much material available to the public as possible, both by encouraging owners to release unprofitable property into the public domain and giving them incentive to embrace new lower unit-royalty, lower cost methods for marketing their marginal holdings. By simplifying the process of determining who currently owns the rights to a work it will reduce the chilling effect that causes worthy but obscure older works to be passed over by publishers because of fear of litigation.

Back when I was a Napster user (I haven’t signed up for the new service yet) some people thought the cool thing about it was you could get music for free. I liked it because I could get the music. I liked the oddball stuff that nobody would sell because nobody would buy it. I miss that. I want it back.

Most of what I know about Ada Jones I got from an online sample chapter from Tim Gracyk’s book “POPULAR AMERICAN RECORDING PIONEERS” which he has posted at www.garlic.com/~tgracyk/ada.htm

How could I resist?

I went to the grocery store for hamburger buns and was unable to resist



Energy Beer!

Before you comment, note this: I am famously behind the times and I don't doubt that cafeinated beer is old hat. But it's new to me and I don't want to know.

My Friend Nick

I met Nick under what one would expect to be not the best of circumstances. I was working at the time for a huge telecom company and was working on a project that was in deep trouble. I was an architect and development team leader for a key component of a major re-engineering project. This was before the telecom bust and the company had the resources back then to do big things. Our project was a big thing – as it turned out, a big mistake. It involved hundreds of very talented people from multiple regions of the company, spanning at least five countries and three continents. Early in the project, things had seemed to be going well; lots of brilliant tools had been developed and it was only in the latter stages of the project – when we went to hook them all together, that things started to fall apart. We discovered that there was no workable agreement about the underlying business process. There were disagreements about the definitions of such fundamental concepts as “Order” or “Product” or “Customer.” We were doomed… and management began the process of looking for magic solutions to their insoluble problem. One of those “solutions” was to bring in a largely European company that did business process consulting and project management, and with that company came Nick.

I expect that Nick was in some of the initial interviews that the consulting company did with me when they were first brought in, but to tell the truth I don’t remember him there. My earliest clear memory of Nick was later, when he had been assigned to my part of the project and was reviewing our code. We were working in Smalltalk and Smalltalkers like to use high resolutions and small fonts to get as much code on the screen as they can. My first memory of Nick is of a tall, lanky man hunched over in front of a computer monitor. He had taken off his rather thick glasses and was holding them up to the screen to use as a magnifying glass to read the tiny characters a few at a time, all the while laughing and complaining, in a loud, Dutch-accented voice, about the size of the font.

During the time I worked with Nick on that project he was always cheerful and hardworking. He displayed that European bluntness that I sometimes find off-putting with other continental expatriates, but I never did with Nick. His good nature, easy humor and lack of pretence made the directness of his speech charming. He worked alongside my team on our hopeless project for slightly less than a year and during that time we became friends. He constantly reaffirmed that first impression I got from his peering at the tiny type to see our Smalltalk code. He was a big, gangly man of great curiosity and enthusiasm who worried very little about the impression he made.

In the decade since that time we have kept in touch. My wife and I made it a point to try to see Nick and Ingrid whenever we were in the same town. Their stories about their renovation of an old house in Atlanta are some of my wife’s favorites; sooner or later she tells everybody about our friends Nick and Ingrid and what they found under the tablecloth and what was in the drawer that had been taped shut and painted over. We’ve followed their travels though Christmas cards and emails, and always look forward to the next time we could get together, even if that was only for a few hours every other year.

By now, a perceptive reader, having noticed the persistent past tense in this description, will have figured out that Nick has passed away. I heard from Ingrid a week ago that he had died, apparently taken ill with a cerebral hemorrhage while visiting the town of Potosi in Bolivia. Potosi is famous for its colonial-era silver mine and also famous as the highest city in the world at better than 13,000 feet. The altitude there bothers many visitors and may have contributed to Nick’s problems, but I am not an expert and I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that I will miss Nick.



Nick and Ingrid atop a Mexican Pyramid