I used to say that when I die and go to hell, I’ll have to make a connecting flight in Atlanta, which would make my destination that much more bearable.
These days it seems that after discarding my belief in hell, all my connecting flights are through George Bush Intergalactic Airport in Houston. And there’s a halfway decent, if feloniously overpriced, bar and restaurant at the entrance of concourse C where I can refuel after missing my connection.
Mastery of the art of quenching red hot iron in water to make steel weapons and tools about 3,000 years ago made possible construction of qanats and aqueducts, which reliably conveyed enough freshwater to sustain the rise of the great cities that anchored every civilization.
– Steven Solomon
Rocket Church
I’ve been in Huntsville, Alabama for most of the past week.
I’ll write about the medical issue that brought me here later; suffice to say that things are significantly better right now, although there are still issues to resolve. If I can separate my emotions from my experiences adequately to offer some perspective, I’ll write more about this in some more detail. Right now I think I’m still too close to the emotional roller coaster to offer something of more than personal interest.
So instead I’ll point out that Huntsville, Alabama, is a… distinctive place. The landscape, and the rural areas, look a lot like rural Tennessee near where I used to live. They love their rockets here. As you drive down the interstate, you’ll have a hard time missing the gigantic Saturn V rocket standing upright on the grounds of Space Camp. Even the churches have steeples that look like rockets.
And I’ll also say that I have been in few places in recent memory that makes me feel skinny. I’m not as thin in real life as my gravatar might make you think. (Yeah, I know, you’re shocked.) But looking at some of the folks around here, particularly at the hospital, I feel like I’ve only got a few pounds to go. Although it seems that the military and engineer types are all in more or less good shape, there is another category of folks who seem to be very, very heavy and I don’t know exactly what they do or how they got that way. There seems to be an abundance of healthy food options here, and I’ve actually eaten as healthy here as I do at home, maybe even a little more so.
Today was a bit of an indulgence, though, as we got over a hurdle with the medical issues, so I can go home without guilt. Rather than fighting the crowds at the restaraunts, I made food tonight — my mother had some pasta sauce, so I made up some pasta, and we got some asparagus. Now, at home, The Wife and I usually sautee the asparagus in some garlic, olive oil, and coarse-ground black pepper. But my father wouldn’t hear of asparagus without hollandaise sauce. He claimed that there was hollandaise sauce available in a jar, but I wouldn’t hear of that. The result was some of the best hollandaise sauce I’ve ever made, and a father astonished at how many pots and pans I used to make spaghetti and asparagus.
Tomorrow I come home and Monday it’s back to my regularly-scheduled life.
The “propensity to truck, barter and exchange” identified by Adam Smith is not a natural instinct that will simply flourish unless quashed by the heavy hand of the state. It requires support from a wide range of social and political institutions–from mores and social trust, to courts and land titling. If all you do is remove the totalitarian state, without building the institutions that support markets, the result can be corruption even more pervasive, and corrosive, than the regime you replaced.
– Megan McArdle
True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.
– Neal Stephenson
I’m away from my regular life right now, attending to a very serious illness within my family. I don’t know if I’m getting a good feel for northern Alabama on this visit, but then again maybe I am. From what I can tell, it’s a lot like Tennessee (which is logical enough; I’m only about 45 minutes from both Tullahoma and Chattanooga). Suffice to say, I’d rather be at the mental and intellectual liberty to work on my next “Great Cases” post or to opine on the Florida primary or to muse about the latest quirk of popular culture I’ve come across — all of which would be much more pleasant than what I’m dealing with now. Also, I do believe I have some arrangements to finalize for Leaguefest, so stay tuned for that.
Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin and crystal in hishand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom.
– H.G. Wells
There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin.
– Benjamin Franklin
Dave Schuler has a couple of posts up, responding to a Charles Murray op-ed. I recommend reading both and the ensuing discussions (In fact, I recommend reading Schuler regularly – a good, independent voice on current events.)
The SuperZIPs one is interesting, but not exactly on the forefront of what we need to be talking about. Most Americans don’t need to know what it takes to get into the top 1% (they may be Catholic, but I suspect converting to Catholicism won’t help you or me). Rather, they need to know what to do in order to get into the “continually employed and making a good living wage” percent. As a good handmaiden of the superwealthy, I suppose, I think too much time and effort is spent looking at how well the other One Percent has it. In part, because I am not sure what all we can do about it. More selfishly, because I fear that the ways in which they may be targeted will actually boomarang onto families like mine. It’s not unlike the NCAA football joke, “The NCAA rules committee got so mad at the University of Miami that they gave Miami-Ohio the death penalty.” It might be fair to see what we can extract from the upper echelon, but in order to make real progress we are going to have to redefine wealthy down by a pretty significant degree. Even a lot of people on Wall Street (who caused the economic apocalypse, destroyed the economy, or whatever) aren’t actually in the 1%. But most importantly, I fear that attempts to prevent them from accumulating that wealth will result in laws that they will be able to accountant their way out of while my wife and I take the hit. I don’t see an easy way to do this, and I fear a lot of the simplistic language.
I take issue with, or have questions about, a couple of Schuler’s comments in his second piece. For instance:
“The Pill” gave women more control over their own reproduction. It rendered unwanted pregnancies less likely. The legalizing and subsequent acceptability of abortion was one of the factors that meant that when a man impregnated a woman marriage was not the inevitable outcome.
I could write a post on this, but on what metric should we make this determination? Comparing then and now, the number of children born to unsustainable families does not appear to be dramatically lower. Illegitimacy rates are not down (they may be down in the last twenty years, but we’re going back further than that). People are still having families that they cannot afford. I would argue that the the pill has been something of a mixed bag. People like my wife and I, who can use contraception effectively, afford to use it every time, and are conscientious about it, have benefited tremendously. Meanwhile, people that are error-prone, have difficulty with consistency, or cannot easily afford contraception, the pill has ushered in a sexual revolution that they are ill-equipped to deal protect themselves against the ramifications of.
The second area of disagreement is this:
Our educational system is geographically based. When you combine geographical isolation of people with differing backgrounds (something that has not always been the case), the increasing importance of formal education as agriculture and then manufacturing became less important, assortative mating is at least as good an explanation for what we’ve seen over the last couple of decades as Dr. Murray’s federal government policy social policy is.
Mickey Kaus touched on assortive mating in his book. It used to be that doctors married nurses but now doctors marry doctors (or engineers). I would submit, though, that the nurses that doctors used to marry were not randomly selected. Rather, they were more likely to be nurses from good families. I’m not saying that two incomes (which is more Kaus’s point than Schuler’s) or economic stratification haven’t made a difference, but rather that it’s probably less than meets the eye. My first serious girlfriend was a girl raised in a trailer until she was 14 or so. Things didn’t work out. I’m not saying that I dumped her due to her economic status, but that the different cultures we came from were a part of the overall equation. A reason why her family didn’t “get” me and my family didn’t “get” her family. These dynamics are in play, often subconsciously, regardless of proximity.
More to the point, I spent a lot of time in a social environment from when I was 16 to when I was 19 that was comparatively mixed between working class folks and white collar ones. Almost to a man, we ended up marrying into our own. Even the son of a waste-water worker who made more than his father ever did by his 30th birthday married a girl of a background similar to his. I’m not saying that there aren’t exceptions, but that there are a whole lot more signals in play than we often realize. A nurse is not a nurse is not a nurse. Then, or now.
I wonder if this is indicative of anything.
A while back I used an app that scanned my friends and put them into political categories. I assume that if my friend said “Republican” or “conservative” or “righty” or “right-wing” (some people did put this!) it would put them in the same pot, and the same for the left. The final results were something to the effect of 57% Republican and 43% Democratic (There was another result that included independents and libertarians, but Republicans were the plurality at 40% on that one). This was not a surprise because of where I come from and the politics of that region.
And yet, going through my Facebook feed, of the political post, at least 80% and it seems like more than 90% are from a liberal or Democratic orientation. A good portion of that are coming from the same people, but there are at least 5 or 6 people* batting around liberalish stuff versus only two irregular conservative folks doing the same.
It’s possible that the feed’s selection process considers the liberal people “closer” to me and therefore they are more likely to appear. But a part of me wonders if there isn’t something rather profound here that I cannot quite articulate. Something involving the social acceptability of conservative viewpoints versus liberal ones in my SES social ecosphere. Something that bodes pretty ill for the GOP.
* – I am, compared to many, unloved. Only 110 friends or so.