"Indeed, the rage of theorists to make constitutions a vehicle for the conveyance of their own crude, and visionary aphorisms of government, requires to be guarded against with the most unceasing vigilance."
     -- Joseph Story
     Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
     Book III, § 1857.

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Hugh Hewitt on why the CBS forgery controversy is hurting Kerry, even though there's no reason to suppose his campaign had anything to do with the forgeries. There's too much psychologizing in there for my taste.

Here's a much simpler explanation. John Kerry has always been a poor candidate; on an even playing field he wouldn't have a chance. This playing field, though, has been anything but even: The "unbiased" mainstream media have been doing everything possible to push Kerry into the White House, and even with all the stops pulled out the best Kerry could manage was to break even every now and again. Without this substantial tilt to the field, Kerry is doomed; he needs the artificial high ground the media have been providing him. The last thing he wanted, of course, was an enormous sinkhole suddenly collapsing underneath him; for that, he (and we) can thank Dan Ra^ther.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 8:38 PM | comments (0)

Friday, September 17, 2004

This is something that has worried me for a very long time, now. This needs a much longer post, which I do not have the time to write just now, especially as I would need to be very careful about what I can and cannot say. For now, I will note, market pressures are producing new business practices that will increasingly sap the accuracy and reliability of the public records, and it will go on until enough buyers-in-good-faith get burned that they move the State legislatures to "do something about it." It's that last part that has me really worried: It's been a long time since legislatures were known for thinking out the consequences of the laws they passed.

About this specific fraud: Let's say you're a lender, and you're looking to cut costs. Well, those drive-by appraisals cost something, don't they? After all, the person doing the driving wants to get paid for it, and he spends a lot more time unproductively driving between properties, than productively appraising the properties as he drives by them. So instead you derive a "probable value" from the transfer tax on the most recent deed, and you call it good. Well, here's some news for you: County recorders are happy to accept more transfer tax than is actually owed. Here in California, each additional $1.10 of transfer tax stands for an additional $1000 of supposed property worth, so every extra dollar you "invest" in transfer tax can bring a return of over 90,800%; all it takes is a lazy lender, and as long as you're not too greedy, no one will ever notice. Then, of course, if your neighbors are doing it too, there are artificially-inflated comps all over the place, making the fraud even more undetectable.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 1:45 PM | comments (0)

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

A couple of things.

First, re-reading that last post, something in the back of my mind said, "The model number on that Linotron was 202, not 200." Hey, this was twenty years ago; for all I know, it may be right. In any case, it's not important enough to go looking it up.

Second, I've decided to experiment with the comment facility here. I have decided its tenure, like that of Federal judges, shall be dum bene se gesserit, so behave. I do not hold with the promulgation of rules for such things, as there are too many persons nowadays for which a rules list means only, permission to push the boundaries to the limit. I will, however, delete anything I choose, without warning and without appeal. Comments are currently open to everyone, since I find registration just as annoying and intrusive as the next guy. If I see spam, though, or anonymous abuse, I will start locking things down.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 10:51 PM | comments (4)

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

My input, for what it's worth, on the Dan Rather forgery flap.

In the early and mid-Eighties, I worked Summers and Christmases as a computer programmer in the ADP department at Sigonella, Sicily. For those that don't know, Sigonella is a Naval Air Station. The office considered itself more or less high-tech, but, being a military base overseas, this must be taken with a grain of salt. Fully ten years after the supposed date of composition of Rather's forged memos, what did the military have available to it in its data processing center? Our office had two IBM DisplayWriters, sharing a single daisy-wheel printer. The DisplayWriter, and the printer, were barely capable of primitive proportional-font printing; the wheel for this stayed locked up in the department secretary's desk drawer, partly because it was more expensive, but mostly because it was so much trouble to use that no one (including the secretary) wanted to haul it out. The problem had nothing to do with printing; instead, it was, that the monospaced DisplayWriter screen made it more difficult to judge the result one would get once it were sent to the printer. The proportional wheel, after the secretary's few experiments in trying it out, wound up not getting used at all: It just wasn't worth the bother. And the quality of print, using that proportional wheel, wasn't anything wonderful; any laser printer these days can produce much better output.

Keep in mind, this is what was available to the Navy. The National Guard would not have been as well equipped. I find the idea that a National Guard unit, ten years earlier, would have had even better equipment, very difficult to believe.

In the same time period, I was also production editor for a college newspaper, which meant, I created the layout, and then typeset all the stories to fit the layout. So I'm also familiar with what it took, ten years after the supposed time of composition, to produce output such as we see in these "memos." In our case, it took a Linotron 200 H&J; typesetter sitting in the basement of the university Admin building, which produced its copy by rolling photosensitive paper past a high-quality cathode-ray tube, which paper must then be run through developing fluid, allowed to dry, then cut, waxed, and pasted onto the flats for the day's paper.

Since I could make that Linotron sing for its supper, I also wound up typesetting resumés for graduating Journalism majors. Here's what it involved: I would typeset the text; the production department would then run it through the Linotron, develop the paper, and dry it; the result would be cut, waxed, and pasted on an ordinary 8˝-by-11 sheet of paper, and the whole finally Xeroxed onto good stock. This is what it took to get high-quality print in the mid-Eighties. Even assuming such things were possible in the early Seventies (and that a National Guard installation would have all the necessary equipment), the idea that anyone would go to such bother for a simple file memorandum is ludicrous. Also, I can assert with full confidence: Any military personnel that did go to all that bother (and expense!) for a simple memorandum would be risking court-martial for fraud, waste, and abuse.

It is obvious that these documents are forgeries. It is also obvious, the forger is either young enough, or self-centered enough, that the idea that the cheap-and-easy desktop publishing capabilities we have today are of recent vintage didn't even register. It is impossible to defend these documents from a position of knowledge; they can only be defended by the deliberate cultivation of a studied ignorance.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 2:01 AM | comments (0)

Friday, July 23, 2004

Here's a rarity: A post that's not a response to anything, except perhaps a deadline, which in this case is the opening of the DNC next week.

The sense I've had for a long while now of the tenor of public debate is, the lunatic fringe on the left has deliberately and thoroughly talked itself out of what last few remaining scruples it had. So here's my -- well, "prediction" is the wrong word -- for what it's worth. It's not that I expect there to be violence at the Conventions, nor that I will be surprised if there isn't; it's just, there's no way in hell I'd bet against it happening.

I don't have any specific convincing evidence I can point at for this -- well, "conclusion" is the wrong word, too. All I have to go on is a general distillation from my browsing around the Internet, observing the news, and the reaction to the news, and the discussion of the news, and the reaction to the discussion, and so on. And what I see is a lynch mob straight out of The Mysterious Stranger, its members cheering each other over the brink; each vying with all the others in the measure of his exertion, though it carry him to his destruction; each person on guard against all the others, poised to trample anyone who shows the slightest sign of changing course; each hoping against all knowledge that the cliff they're rapidly approaching isn't really all that high.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 8:45 PM | comments (0)

Sunday, July 18, 2004

Steven Den Beste critiques Andrew Sullivan and Rich Lowry on the gay marriage flap.

The Fourteenth Amendment does not go as far as Den Beste thinks; it does not, as he says, forbid the result in Plessy v. Ferguson ("separate but equal"). What produced the result in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas -- if we ignore the Court's psychologizing, which is constitutionally irrelevant -- was more prudential than constitutional, along the lines of: "In all the litigation over this issue, we have never seen a 'separation' statute the point of which was anything other than inequality, so the States have confronted us with a clear choice between upholding Plessy v. Ferguson and upholding the Fourteenth Amendment itself, and we choose the Fourteenth Amendment." The Constitution does not require this result, but it does permit it. Fine so far, but the Court then proceeded to twist the Fourteenth Amendment into something those who enacted it would not have recognized, broadening this bit out of all proportion, ignoring that bit outright, and transforming the other bit over there into, as Monty Python would say, something completely different.

As to "broadened out of all proportion": The Fourteenth Amendment speaks of "privileges and immunities," of "due process," and of "equal protection of the law." It does not speak in terms of "no discrimination whatsoever." The line of thought that says it does is a comparatively recent creation of the various law reviews, as part of a "rewriting" binge launched by Brown, which rewrite has been partially, but not completely, endorsed by the Supreme Court. That the Fourteenth Amendment does not actually mean that, is easily demonstrated: If it did, then the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments were a waste of time, and the failed Equal Rights Amendment was already a done deal a century before it was proposed. And, as to the specific area of "gay rights," we also have it that the proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment (who, let us remember, thought they were proposing something new, and necessary) emphatically denied, in the face of their opponents' contrary claims, that it would produce any such result (in passing, it is amusing to note, the recent modification to the Massachusetts Constitution, as a result of which its Supreme Court foisted gay marriage upon us, is, in its terms, almost exactly the same as the failed ERA, which, we were assured ad nauseum, had no such consequence). The Fourteenth Amendment does not say what specific classifications it prohibits, though the Fifteenth at least gives us a clue ("race, color, or previous condition of servitude"); it is absurd, though, to claim that it prohibits all such classification.

As to "ignored completely": No matter how broadly we read the Fourteenth Amendment on the subject of discrimination, it acts only upon the States ("No State shall..."); it imposes no limitation whatsoever upon the Federal government. Yet the Supreme Court decided Bolling v. Sharpe (challenging "separate but equal" schools in the District of Columbia, a matter of Federal, not State, law) with nothing more than a wave of the hand in the general direction of Brown v. Board of Education, and not a word about how they accomplished that trick.

As to "something completely different": Again, no matter how broadly we read the prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment, it requires only that, whatever burdens or privileges the law provides, it must spread them equally. It does not specify what those burdens or privileges must be. But the Supreme Court has transformed "due process" (and, later, "equal protection") into specific guarantees of what both the State and Federal governments must do, and what they cannot do, whether the laws in question apply equally or not.

The controversy between "the letter of the law" and "the spirit of the law" is well known. What is not well known is, these two do not cover all the parts of the controversy any more. Now we have:

• The letter of the law: The law reaches only what it proclaims on its face. This is still the rule -- at least for the most part -- in the criminal law, and properly so: No prosecution can be brought, except upon the terms explicitly authorized by the legislature.
• The spirit of the law: The law also reaches similar circumstances, even though by its terms they are excluded, so long it might fairly be said, if the legislature had been confronted with this variant, it would have included it also within the law's terms. An example of this is, the extension of the Fourth Amendment to government interception of electronic communications: It is absurd to imagine that the Framers should have foreseen the possibility of such things, but eminently reasonable to suppose, if they had, they would have included them.
• The aspiration of the law: The law also reaches those circumstances the legislature ought to have included, even though by its terms they are excluded. An example of this is, the extension of the Sixth Amendment's right to employ counsel into a right to demand counsel regardless of ability to pay. By the bare terms of the text, there is little to distinguish, here, between the "spirit" and the "aspiration": the Sixth Amendment can be read either way. Unlike electronic communications, though, indigent defendants are not a modern phenomenon, and the uniform practice under the Sixth Amendment for the best part of two centuries bespeaks a right to employ counsel, not a right to demand, so Gideon v. Wainwright is an "aspiration," not a "spirit," decision. Another example is, the Supreme Court of Nevada using its own Constitution to strike down other provisions of that same Constitution, so as to redesign the funding of education according to its own preferences.
• The underlying principle of the law: The law also reaches all circumstances whatsoever which are contained within the underlying principle that justifies the law, even though by its terms they are excluded. An example of this is, the combination of speech, press, and religion under the First Amendment into a general underlying "freedom of expression," which then decides such matters as burning the flag.
• The justice of the law: The law reaches just results, whatever they are, without regard to its terms, whatever they are. There are very few clear examples of this, because the Supreme Court prefers to dress up its decisions, wherever possible, in some sort of justification under the Constitution or laws, rather than baldly proclaim, we decide this upon whatever grounds seem good to us, without regard to any provision of law (the law reviews, though, have no such compunction). There are overtones of this in Lawrence v. Texas, to the extent that the Supreme Court's wholly illegitimate invocation of foreign law contributed to the result. The distinction between this and the previous category is, here, neither the Constitution nor its Framing is a starting point; to the extent they make an appearance at all, they are a mere fig leaf for some wholly external ideology.

As one progresses down this list, one is further and further removed from legitimacy. Between "letter" and "spirit," there is still due deference to the power of the legislature to make what laws it pleases, upon such reasons as seem good to it, and that a court's refusal to comply must itself be founded upon the law; we have also, that whatever errors the courts make can be corrected by the legislature clarifying its meaning. Once we get to "aspiration," though, the legislature is no longer a power in its own right; no matter how clearly it drafts its laws, they are subject to equitable revision by the courts. Proceeding to "underlying principle," this illegitimate revisionary power is no longer confined only to the subjects of the laws actually passed: The dots can be connected to form whatever grand picture the courts wish to draw. When we arrive at "justice," the dots themselves are no longer a concern, and representative self-government is obliterated.

Andrew Sullivan's position, if truth were told, is founded upon "the justice of the law": He knows what he wants, and he doesn't care how he gets it. His dressing the matter up in general "anti-discrimination" terms (an "underlying principle" approach to the Fourteenth Amendment) is only a subterfuge, and a recent one at that: Right up until just before Lawrence v. Texas was handed down, he would regularly disclaim that same argument. His position at the time, many times stated, was, "Give us the right to sodomy, and we'll be satisfied; we promise that we won't immediately launch a new effort over gay marriage, which we couldn't justify under the law in any case." So far from being merely misguided upon this point, he is explicitly dishonest about it, and any argument with him about it is thus a waste of time.

UPDATE: Reading this through again later in the evening, I was reminded of one of the points I originally had in mind before I started writing it. In mitigation, let me say, this post was not composed with full attention over the course of a serenely peaceful afternoon; it was composed in whatever little bits and pieces of time I could snag whilst on continuous duty to break up all the fights between my three children in the pool. They're asleep, now, finally, so...

As I alluded above, discrimination on the basis of sex is controlled by the Nineteenth Amendment, not the Fourteenth. All that the Nineteenth Amendment says is, the suffrage cannot be conditioned upon sex. Voting aside, the legislatures are free to make distinction between the sexes for whatever purpose they wish; those who deplore this state of affairs took their best shot with the ERA, and failed. So even if we gather "discrimination against homosexuals" within "discrimination on the basis of sex," the only consequence is, the right to vote cannot be conditioned upon homosexuality.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 7:45 PM | comments (0)

Sunday, June 27, 2004

From Andrew Sullivan, upon whom the irony is lost:

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "But there is an added technique for weakening a nation at its very roots ... The method is simple. It is first, a dissemination of discord. A group - not too large - a group that may be sectional or racial or political - is encouraged to exploit its prejudices through false slogans and emotional appeals. The aim of those who deliberately egg on these groups is to create confusion of counsel, public indecision, political paralysis and, eventually, a state of panic. Sound national policies come to be viewed with a new and unreasoning skepticism ... As a result of these techniques, armament programs may be dangerously delayed. Singleness of national purpose may be undermined. . . . The unity of the state can be so sapped that its strength is destroyed. All this is no idle dream. It has happened time after time, in nation after nation, during the last two years." - FDR, May 26, 1940. I wonder what Roosevelt would have made of Michael Moore, don't you?

-- posted by Clayton Jones 5:06 PM | comments (0)

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Various persons are hashing over Andrew Sullivan's state of mind.

You're approaching this from the wrong angle, people. All Andrew needs is a pirin tablet -- that, and a supporting cast to worry over whether he takes it or not.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 8:16 AM | comments (0)

Saturday, June 19, 2004

Al-Qaeda has beheaded another one. Sure makes me want to rush to the bargaining table, that one does.

A curiosity: When Al-Qaeda first threatened Johnson's beheading, I saw their demands reported as, Saudi Arabia to release all these prisoners (see list), and that all United States personnel leave the Middle East, all within 72 hours. The second demand disappeared in all subsequent reports. Does anyone else recall it?

Of course, it's perfectly understandable why it would disappear. After all, it's not like Al-Qaeda, or Johnson's beheading, has anything to do with the war, y'know, and any journalist would be irresponsible, who would leave anything lying around that might send the lumpen proletariat jumping to conclusions.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 12:41 AM | comments (0)

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Nick Berg, it appears, has been insufficiently dissected.

When I watched the video, my general sense was, "Something is wrong, here." And I don't mean the obvious. It was a really clumsy patch job. We see shots of Berg alone against a wall, and of Berg with the five terrorists behind him; in the shots with the terrorists, he is in different postures, but we never see him moving. The sound, though it has no synchrony at all with the video, runs pretty much continuously over these discontinuous stills, right up until just before "God is great!" and the scream, but is patched together from fragments, together with the odd silence, from that point on. I say odd, because, before the murder, there is a constant background hum from the videocamera's motors, but during and after the murder it, shall we say, cuts in and out. Also, I would not suspect the director of this fetid production of any delicacy or restraint, and yet there are too many gory bits edited out of the murder itself, details said director would have been desperate to salvage from the, errr, cutting room floor, if he had any choice in the matter. The body finally shown getting its cervical vertebrae sawn has been dead for a while; the death itself is nowhere. Why?

Thus much for what the terrorists put on the tape. What about Berg himself? He did not look at all frightened, or even concerned, to me. He did not react at all to what was going on around him; he had no reaction, either considered or reflexive, even when he was shoved to the floor; he sat unmoving -- though in several postures -- through the whole inept prelude, with a single expression stuck to his face throughout. And that expression did not ring true. My first impression was, he was trying desperately not to burst into tears, which is perfectly understandable. Five minutes of same ol' same ol', though, distributed over all the takes that obviously went into this production, along with the complete absence of any nervousness, tension, or fear, all took their toll on that impression, and it began to look more and more like some sappy amateur-theatrical attempt at a "penitent" appearance.

Then we have the wholly disgraceful curtain-chewing performance of his family since his murder, which speaks volumes about the Berg moral atmosphere. We also have the remarkable coincidence of his prior linkage with Zacarias Moussaoui, and some strange behavior in Iraq when he was running around free.

I don't want to read much into Berg's behavior on the video. It's too far removed from my experience -- and, we may continue to hope, from everyone else's -- for the general "phoniness" feel of it to be anything more than a first impression, and I have no confidence in it. We have all these other things, though, and, while they do nothing to confirm that impression, they dish up a lot of collateral support, and there is nothing, really, to urge against it, other than the general disposition to put the best possible face upon the acts of one who cannot defend himself. Along those lines, though, we can also explain Berg's behavior -- well, lack thereof -- on that video, with more credit to himself, by the not-at-all-outlandish supposition that his captors had drugged him to just this side of insensibility. It doesn't explain his other strange behavior while roaming around Iraq, but it sure as hell answers what his eyes looked like on that video. And we can note the unbelievable assholes he had by way of family without that fact impeaching him.

So here are the possibilities. Either Nick Berg was an innocent who got shoved onstage, intoxicated and against his will, for a bit part in a script he didn't understand, or he was a willing participant in all but the final Hitchcock twist. I regret to say, all the circumstances incline me toward the latter view: that Berg was, as Rachel Corrie was, a useful idiot, and he said or did something during his murder that revealed the betrayals -- his captors' of him, and his of us -- which is why most of it didn't make the cut.

But I would be happy to be wrong.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 7:22 PM | comments (0)

Friday, May 21, 2004

An angst roundup from Instapundit, a continuing series. And there's plenty more out there that he's missed, especially lately.

If you focus on "Anti-Bush slant" or "undermining the war effort," or whatnot, you're missing what's really going on, here. Considerations like upcoming elections and treason are secondary. Air time and column inches are secondary, as well. The primary consideration is, these are journalists -- mind you, I did not say "reporters" -- and they live and breathe to make a difference. What kind of difference doesn't matter; it can make things better, or worse; it can be an unmixed blessing, or a catastrophe; it can be the final triumphant outbreak of worldwide prosperity and happiness, or "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when"; whatever. Don't bother them with details. But they absolutely insist upon making that difference, and -- here's the kicker -- knowing that they made it, themselves. It's an important profession, damn you, important, and those doing it are important, too, the most important of all, don't you dare say different, and the proof of it is all the difference they make. So nothing is more to be expected than that they will set themselves crosswise to everyone and everything around them, agitating for the achievement of that which anyone in his right mind would prevent at all costs, so that, once it is achieved, whatever it is, no one can say, it was not their achievement.

It is a mistake to say these persons have no regard for consequences. Consequences are all they think about. They're just not the same consequences the rest of us have in mind.

There's a lot of this in the legal profession, as well. Which, for example, do you think is actually the most important consideration to Michael Newdow: the future ease, comfort, and well-being of his daughter? that she not "suffer" the "violation" of being "forced" to say "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? or that it's his name on the briefs, the arguments, and the case title that just might make a difference, and be damned to anyone else, including his daughter?

-- posted by Clayton Jones 6:28 PM | comments (0)

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Thanks to something Steven Den Beste posted, I spent a long time this evening wandering around Amritas' blog, reading his critiques of Chomsky. I had not previously come across any details of what it is Chomsky has been up to; all I had was the general impression, he is held in contempt by all right-thinking persons, who are identified as right-thinking by the fact that they hold Chomsky in contempt. So now I have a general impression of what the fighting is about, and a basic understanding of the particular brand of snake-oil Chomsky has been selling.

I found myself reminded of something out of atomic logic. And here we hit a digression: since I only suppose this blog has readers, I can just as easily suppose they need that term explained. Atomic logic is the name (well, one of the names, and the name that was fashionable when I went to college) for that part of formal logic that deals with "atoms" -- what a programmer would call boolean variables -- and the operators that work upon them in expressions. Atoms are either true or false; the operators that work upon them likewise give a result of either true or false. These operators are:

• AND -- the value of the expression "A AND B" is true only when both A and B are true
• OR -- the value of the expression "A OR B" is true when either A or B (or both) is true
• NOT -- the value of the expression "NOT A" is true only when A is false
• XOR -- the value of the expression "A XOR B" is true when either A or B (but not both) is true
• IMP -- the value of the expression "A IMP B" is true when either A is false or B is true (or both)
• EQV -- the value of the expression "A EQV B" is true when A and B are either both true or both false
• NAND -- the value of the expression "A NAND B" is true when either A or B (or both) is false
• NOR -- the value of the expression "A NOR B" is true only when both A and B are false.

Now, out of the list above, which would you say are "basic" operators, and which "derived"? A layman would object to the formal definition of OR, since the word as used in ordinary speech means XOR instead; he would choose AND, XOR, and NOT as the basic operations, and derive the rest:

• A OR B :== (A XOR B) XOR (A AND B)
• A EQV B :== (A AND B) XOR ((NOT A) AND (NOT B))
• A IMP B :== ((NOT A) XOR B) XOR (A AND B)
• A NAND B :== NOT (A AND B)
• A NOR B :== (NOT A) AND (NOT B)

• A XOR B :== (A OR B) AND (NOT (A AND B))
• A EQV B :== (A AND B) OR ((NOT A) AND (NOT B))
• A IMP B :== (NOT A) OR B
• A NAND B :== NOT (A AND B)
• A NOR B :== NOT (A OR B)

• NOT A :== A NAND A
• A AND B :== NOT (A NAND B) :== (A NAND B) NAND (A NAND B)
• A OR B :== (NOT A) NAND (NOT B) :== (A NAND A) NAND (B NAND B)

• NOT A :== A NOR A
• A OR B :== NOT (A NOR B) :== (A NOR B) NOR (A NOR B)
• A AND B :== (NOT A) NOR (NOT B) :== (A NOR A) NOR (B NOR B)

As far as I know, this trick has only one real-world application, which is in the construction of integrated circuits. The actual nitty-gritty of putting together NAND and NOR gates is a lot simpler (and the gates work a lot faster) than any of the others, so this trick is used all over the place in microprocessors. Other than that, NAND and NOR are pretty much useless; there is no expression in which they can be used that cannot be made clearer by not using them.

This didn't stop one of my professors in college from jumping all over this trick. It showed that NAND and NOR were more "basic," you see. He even assigned an ugly problem on the final: Write an equivalent to this ordinary expression using only the NAND operator. And we did it, too. Something that started out as an easily understood half-of-a-line became an impassable four-line thicket of up-arrows (the glyph for NAND) and parentheses. We had our revenge by the same act, though, since the idiot no doubt went blind trying to grade them.

Now from what I saw on Amritas' board, the prototypical Chomskyite would go right along with said idiot professor, concluding, either NAND or NOR (take your pick) is the actual internal mechanism (the "deep structure") of all thought, and all the other operators are merely derivative ("surface structure"). Whereas the truth is self-evidently the opposite: AND, XOR, and NOT are the workhorses of everyday thought, and all the others are derivative; the OR and IMP operators, as defined, actually contradict the equivalent everyday usage, and NAND and NOR contribute nothing to understanding, but instead obstruct it.

On another tack, I was reminded of an argument I had once on the internet with a woman who absolutely insisted that brown was not a color. She had the artist's "insider" perspective, you see: One finds brown on a color wheel by starting out with red, or orange, or yellow, and decreasing the luminance, so there is no such thing as brown; there is only dark red, or dark orange, or dark yellow. It made no difference to her that that perception doesn't work that way, that it requires an effort of will to see the underlying similarity of what ordinary perception insists on treating as qualitatively different, and more than a little self-deception to say that the qualitative difference doesn't matter.

Back to the immediate subject. Chomsky is full of shit. I say this with all the confidence of long introspection on the underlying problem (and with no other authority), and, if Amritas' depiction of the field is anything to go by, it probably helps that I have no training in it. The actual structure of thought, if we must have it in those terms, is an amorphous digraph interconnected to a fare-thee-well, where both the vertices and the edges have any number of qualities, but nothing is in any particular order. Grammar is not a necessary component of thought itself; it arises from the requirement of representing this graph somehow in a linear form (since words must be uttered one after another), and there is no one "right" or "best" or "fundamental" way to do this. The syntactical system, whichever one it is, picks out enough of the highlights to communicate, not the entirety of the graph, but enough (the "meaning") so that it can be reconstructed in the listener's mind (again, in no particular order); the wholly internal art of resupplying the bits and pieces that didn't get sent, thus pulling reasonable certainty out of uncertain materials, is what goes by the name of "understanding."

(I've played around with the idea of constructing a computer model along these lines, but actually doing it would require a lot more time than I have to spend on it. Mostly it would have to do with deciding what ought to be a vertex, and what an edge, and what all the possible attributes (qualities) of each would be, and growing the whole thing in much the same order that a child learns to speak. The end result, I suspect, would be a picture of language, and of the basic knowledge required to understand language, that would show only slight echoes of what grammarians have been maintaining for centuries; in particular, I suspect that the "parts of speech" actually required to describe and run a working language would bear very little resemblance to the old categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on.)

Also: If Chomsky's universal "deep structure" idea is right, and if, as he has it, it mirrors the syntactical patterns of English, then English ought to be one of the easiest languages for foreigners to learn. Whereas we know, it's one of the hardest.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 1:23 AM | comments (0)

Friday, May 07, 2004

Well, if this blog ever had readers, they've surely drifted off by now, but I'll struggle to keep up the fiction. Apologies for dropping off the map. All I can plead in mitigation is the unremitting gall of employers who actually want projects finished on schedule. It's been heads-down time here for a good month and a half. It's not just this blog that has suffered; I've basically been out of touch the whole time, and there's a lot of news to get caught up on before I would have anything to say about it that anyone else would think were worth reading.

I notice, however, that Steven Den Beste is still in a funk over the quality of feedback he receives. And what I have to say in just a bit will no doubt qualify, in his mind, as just the sort of sideline trees-instead-of-the-forest nitpicking he complains about.

I wind up agreeing with Steven most of the time. Every once in a while, one of the overtones of what he has said will make me uneasy, but there is very little of his output with which I would disagree, and, most times, very little (if anything) that I would add to it, and anyway he says it a whole hell of a lot better than I would. (I like to flatter myself that this has something to do with the relative amounts of free time each of us has, to say nothing of the fact that writing, like any other art, improves with exercise. If I should ever find myself with sufficient leisure, though, Steven, I'll be gunning for you. Just letting you know, is all.) If I don't have anything of my own to say, I'm not going to waste space here posting that nothing, nor will I waste anyone else's time (again, keeping up the fiction) grinding through "I agree," "me too," and "read this." Steven runs one of the only two blogs, so far as I know, that have ever linked here (the other being Emperor Misha); I assume anyone who winds up here will already be an avid reader of USS Clueless, and will already have seen whatever I might otherwise link. The same applies to any email I might send.

Still, there's that funk to worry about. What worries me about it is that it has much the same feel to it as was present and growing in Steven's posts on his discussion groups just before he pulled the plug on them. And the overall sense I get from his recent posts on the topic is, he'd like, every once in a while, to have the sense that there are at least decent odds of finding something in his inbox that makes it worth the effort of firing up the damn program and slogging through everything else.

I hope you realize, Steven, that's a very tall order. Even if we overlook the torrent of spam, and the residual drip, drip, drip of pointless "gotcha!"s, both of which already have the scales heavily tilted the other way, it's an intimidating assignment. "Attaboy!" only goes so far, and it doesn't work more than a couple of times, even assuming you have any reason to think my approbation is worth something. The alternative is, actually coming up with something just as interesting to say back, but that takes a lot more work.

OK, that said, here's the potshot I alluded to above, again addressing those troubling overtones. Actually, I have two of them. First, it's "rights," Steven, not "natural rights." The important part is that there be things government cannot do. Where those rights arise, whether from the nature of government, or from the nature of man, or from philosophy, or from law, or what have you, is unimportant, and the term "natural rights" has some legal baggage you might not want to tote along.

Second, the idea of "perpetual revolution" is troubling. Human nature is what it is; it effortlessly defeats any attempt to change it, and clobbers any scheme predicated upon its being somehow different. And it is human nature itself, in the last analysis, that drives the determination of the proper forms and powers of government. So there is no intrinsic value in "change" apart from the merits (or lack thereof) of a particular proposal; it is far more important that the law be known -- which includes that it be stable -- than that it be just; and we've been at it for a few centuries, now, refining this, that, and the other, and pretty much have most things right already. And I must say, I find it difficult to reconcile your admiration for the idea of "perpetual revolution" with what, to paraphrase Aristotle, anyone must have before he comes to the study of engineering: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The remarkable thing about our government is its long-running stability. The world has seen tyrannies, whether stable or fragile, one after another, with dreary monotony, for millennia; it has also seen, here and there, the occasional short-lived outbreak of freedom, and usually they shake themselves apart. Ours is the only one that has lasted.

(I should perhaps clarify what I mean when I say, "Human nature is what it is." The trouble is, it would take much more time than I have right now. Let's see if this does the trick, though: "Law" is to "justice" is to "human nature," what "statement" is to "truth" is to "fact." What I want to avoid, here, is any confusion arising from the failure to distinguish between human nature itself, on the one hand, and all the -- mutually contradictory -- systems that have attempted to describe and/or control it, on the other. My statement about the knowability of the law being more important than its justice, though, is in a different category; it depends upon a specific view of human nature, and thus invites all those mutually contradictory systems to take their whacks at it.)

Moving on to a different post, here's a final observation. One of the indications -- I was going to say "stigmata" -- of "p-idealist" thought is the attempting to explain the behavior of multitudes in terms of specific personal motives.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 9:44 PM

Monday, April 12, 2004

From Bastard Sword (who just got blogrolled by Den Beste, and I am so jealous), a dissection of the usual boilerplate global-warming copy. Some of the commenters on the thread lit upon an error in this paragraph of the original:

But Jonathan Gregory, of the Hadley Centre for climate prediction at the University of Reading, and colleagues from Brussels and Bremerhaven, report in the journal Nature that an average annual warming in the region of 2.7C (37F) would mean that the rate of melting would outpace the annual snowfall.

The aphorism, "Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by simple stupidity," has a corollary for the modern age: "Never ascribe to simple stupidity what can be explained by computers." And the parenthetical "37°F," simply because it is such a stupid and obvious error, shows all the hallmarks of having been inserted into the text after the fact by a computer program that scans posted copy, inserting English-to-metric and metric-to-English conversions whenever something trips its wires. I've seen the same sort of thing happen on news web sites, where the author's unfortunate choice of phrase just happens to look like a Fortune 500 company, and the scanning software, without any regard to the contextual error, inserts a parenthetical containing links to the NYSE listing.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 9:20 PM

Friday, March 26, 2004

From Crescat Sententia, an interview with Eugene Volokh. Here's question #8, and its response:

8: Most (hopefully all) scholars of Constitutional Law can name some laws that they think are constitutional but undesirable-- things that the government legally can do, but shouldn't anyway. What about the reverse? Are there any laws or policies that you think would be on-the-whole good policies to have, if only the Constitution permitted them?
 
I'm not an expert on this, but my sense is that the privilege against self-incrimination is a bad idea. I don't see why the prosecutors shouldn't be able to subpoena the defendant and ask him to explain just where he was the night of this-and-such. Sure, the privilege is a check on government power -- but it's not clear to me that it's the right sort of check on government power, and that its benefits outweigh its tendency to foster injustice (both acquittal of the guilty and, in some cases, conviction of the innocent). Still, it's right in there in the constitution, and it has to be enforced.

It's a deliberate concession to religion, and it's written into the Constitution itself, so it doesn't quite square with this fragment from Volokh's answer to question 15:

I think the Court's [] Establishment Clause doctrine is mostly right, at least at the level of the big picture; ...

-- posted by Clayton Jones 6:51 PM

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Steven Den Beste on heaving things out to the Lagrange points. The difficulties he points out can be solved by lobbing more than one mass.

Say I fire off a mass today on a Simon orbit (Steven's terminology) with a period of twenty-two months. A year from now, I fire off another mass on an Alvin orbit with a period of ten months. At the beginning of 2006, both these masses wind up at L4, and Alvin's energy deficit can be balanced by Simon's energy excess by choosing how much to send each time.

It's still easier to hit L4. One can hit L5 by the same means, but Alvin will need to make several orbits, and we must take care to miss L4. For example, today we fire off Alvin on a nine-and-a-half-month orbit, and two years from now, we fire off Simon on a fourteen-month orbit. The great chipmunk reunion takes place at L5 at the beginning of May, 2007.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 1:45 AM

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Everyone's taking whacks at the proposed FMA, so here's mine. The proposed amendment goes too far, and not far enough. Given my druthers, this is what I would enact:

Section 1.
No existing provision of this Constitution, nor of any State Constitution, nor of any Federal or State law, shall be construed to define marriage as anything other than a union of one man and one woman. Any change to the institution of marriage shall enter the law through the acts of the people of the various States, speaking clearly through their elected representatives.
 
Section 2.
The Supreme Court of the United States is hereby reminded, the power set forth in the second sentence of Article IV, Section 1, of this Constitution, is given to Congress.
 
Section 3.
The people declare that, were it not for the unlawful actions of dishonest judges, this amendment would not have been enacted, and they deplore the judicial contempt for this Country's laws and institutions that made this amendment necessary. That the lesson not be lost, they further enact that Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall and Justices John M. Greaney, Roderick L. Ireland, and Judith A. Cowin, all of the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachussets, are hereby deprived of their offices, and are forever unable to hold any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States or any of them, and that no act or order of the said Court, in any dispute pending on or after the First day of February, 2004, shall have any effect until their successors shall have been seated and rehear the matter.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 12:43 AM

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Hmmm. My invitation was unaccountably lost in the mail, so here's my entry.

Top Ten Ways the Loony Moonbat Left Will Make Themselves Look Even MORE Hopelessly Ridiculous in 2004

10. Former Vice President Al Gore, attempting to speak at Democratic rallies across the country, is continually attacked by rabid minks earlier "liberated" by ELF. Retired General Wesley Clark is subsequently charged with cruelty to animals.
9. In a bid to revive flagging media interest in covering its protest marches, International A.N.S.W.E.R. starts buying its own bulldozers. It claims "vindication" when its "Drivers Wanted" web page is soon receiving more hits than Google.
8. Fresh from receiving an honorary LL.D. from Harvard University, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco announces that the City will register all voters that apply, without regard to constitutionally-suspect categories like nationality, citizenship, and species. Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago sends him a telegram congratulating him for "thinking outside the box."
7. Self-described "comedian" Al Franken challenges former President Ronald Reagan to a debate -- and loses.
6. Invited to give a few brief comments at the Democratic Convention, Bill Clinton finally winds up his speech only after the DNC, in a last desperate attempt to reclaim the podium, sends Angela Lansbury onto the floor dressed as the Queen of Diamonds. In her speech the next day, Hillary Clinton chides the Party for its "lack of follow-through."
5. After failing to win the nomination, the ketchup-spattered John Edwards, one of the few survivors of the Convention debacle, files a class-action suit on behalf of trial lawyers, and all others similarly situated, against the Democratic National Committee. The ATLA enthusiastically joins the suit, looking forward to a profitable decade spent individually deposing all registered voters.
4. In a bold move to forestall a recurrence of the voting irregularities that marred the previous Presidential election, the Florida Supreme Court decrees that, in order to allow enough time for court challenges, tallies shall be due from each county five days before the election. The Canvassing Boards of Broward and Dade Counties easily meet this obligation, and Al Gore is certified the winner of Florida's electoral votes.
3. A congressional investigation into the mayhem at the Democratic Convention discovers that the voting was rigged, and that the trigger for the massive carnage was a bucket of tomato ketchup suspended over the stage. The death of former candidate Howard Dean in a freak auto accident that same night is dismissed as a "mere coincidence."
2. The United States Supreme Court, in Edwards v. Democratic National Committee, rules that whatever public purpose a legislature may wish to advance in preserving ballot secrecy (which, it notes, is not mentioned in the Constitution) cannot outweigh the rights of a plaintiff in a civil suit. Responding to cries of "un-American!" from the right-wing fringe, Justices Souter and Ginsburg flash metallic stars attached to their right breasts; the last remaining manufacturer of syrup of ipecac goes out of business.
1. After losing the National election in a landslide, John Kerry swears himself into office as the "real President" in San Francisco, and begins assembling a Cabinet. The entire city is then flattened during an A.N.S.W.E.R. protest.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 1:03 AM

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Eugene Volokh on a proposed approach to a Federal Marriage Amendment.

Consider the Article V process. Consider the enormous investment of time and effort required to get anything through it. Consider how much greater that investment must be, when the subject matter is as contentious as this one. Now picture the man who undertakes all this, when the goal of all his striving is, "We agree to disagree." Does this look just the slightest bit unrealistic, maybe?

Constitutional amendments are nuclear missiles, not spitwads. The courts have been able to get away with as much as they have, because the country isn't willing to reach for the nukes every time the courts go on a toot. And when the country is finally driven to push the button, it's not going to confine itself to half-measures; it will make sure the job gets done.

I find it interesting, though, that Volokh, a professor of law, is saying "I agree entirely" of a measure that openly proclaims, "We don't trust the courts."

And why do I have this suspicion that what Professor Bainbridge means by "reach[ing] consensus" is what Andrew Sullivan means in the same context? which is, "You've got one chance to see things our way, before we shove it down your throat."

-- posted by Clayton Jones 11:06 PM

Monday, February 09, 2004

Steven Den Beste on treason and dissent.

First, elaborating further on "enemies": The term, as used in Article III, has a specific meaning; it does not mean "who- or whatever the Federal government chooses to call an 'enemy.' " For a thing to qualify as an "enemy" under Article III, there must be an actual war on between us and it. The U.S. citizen giving aid and comfort to Jacques Chirac, say, is no traitor, no matter how hostile Chirac may be to our National purposes.

Second, elaborating upon the common-law idea of "treason": There were other reasons to define treason explicitly in the Constitution, besides its use throughout English history as a particularly gruesome weapon between rival factions. The common law of England defined many other things to be treason. Some of them were simply inapplicable to our republic, as, for example, "if a man do imagine or compass the death of our lord the King": murder still being murder, and the President, as the Framers emphasized, merely one among all us other civilians, requiring no special legal eminence in the matter of his death. Some were repugnant: An attempt on the chastity of the Queen, or of the King's eldest daughter, or of his eldest son's wife, was treason; such concerns, whatever their merits in an hereditary monarchy, do not apply when an office is elective. Some were and are crimes, though the Constitution forbids that they be treason: Counterfeiting, for example, was treason under English law; it is, at least for those familiar with 25 Edw. III c. 2, conspicuously excluded from the definition in Article III, but placed squarely within the authority of Congress in Article I, Section 8. A large part, also, of what motivated the Article III definition was the impulse that later expressed itself more clearly in the Eighth Amendment: No one with his head on straight would say that filing coins ought to be punished like that. This is not to ignore the more inventive constructive treasons as part of the Framers' motivation, but they do not tell the whole story.

Third, a reservation as to "dissent." As anyone who has raised small children knows, there is no value to be had in dissent per se. The value of any thought, or of any expression of thought, is in its content, and not in its accord with, conflict with, or indifference to any prevailing orthodoxy. Certainly dissent is nothing to tout for its own sake; if we set aside any consideration of the actual content of thought, we ought rather to prefer harmony to discord. We have, for example, the "prevailing orthodoxy," if you will, that the Earth is round; the man who insists on its flatness is a fool with nothing of value to contribute, his "dissent" earns nothing but contempt from me. We've seen a lot of this, especially, in the last two years: Utter ass-aches screaming at everyone they can force to listen: "Pay attention, I'm dissenting!": the subject under dispute, whatever it is, a mere detail to them; the magic word "dissent," on the other hand, all-important. The rejoinder comes, it is the freedom to dissent that is of such tremendous importance: to which I answer, that doesn't improve my opinion of the man who makes nothing more of his life than a chronic, dreary, obnoxious proof that, hey, it's still there.

Finally, as to wholly repugnant ideas: We forbid our government to interfere, not because all thoughts are deserving of protection, but because no one has ever found a way to empower the government drawing a line here without its eventually growing into the power to draw lines everywhere. If a clear principle were possible, such that decent society stood on the one side and NAMBLA (to use Steven's pet example) on the other, I would not at all mind watching every last squidgy bit of NAMBLA being crushed out of existence. Note, however, that phrase, "drawing a line." It is only recently under the Supreme Court's "expression" jurisprudence (insisting on the explicit drawing of all lines) that NAMBLA's advocacy has been protected; for most of this country's history such advocacy would have been criminal, not because anyone could point to a definite line crossed, but from the general common-sense view that the line, wherever it was, would have been crossed long since. And freedom, somehow, was not imperilled thereby.

Here's something for you to mull over, Steven: The fact that common sense is subject to the occasional pitfall does not invalidate it; it is still, in many contexts, far more valuable than any substitute rationalism can hope to provide. And if this is not the case, then there is no special value to be had in government by the people, and no reason to prefer it to, say, the new Byzantium erecting itself in Brussels.

-- posted by Clayton Jones 10:43 PM