So if she weighs the same as a duck…

From yesterday’s Boston Globe, here’s an article by economist Peter Leeson arguing that medieval trial by ordeal was really not so bad. The article is notable for its complete lack of anything resembling evidence, but there is a little—very little, but more than none—in Leeson’s academic paper here. I think the most interesting bit of that is the contention that men and women were treated differently: men, typically with lower body fat and hence more likely to sink when tossed in a pond, were more likely than women to be given an ordeal by cold water, in which sinking was interpreted innocence.

The basic theory (tarted up with equations in the paper) is that (i) people who actually believed in the efficacy of ordeals would submit to them only if they were indeed innocent, confessing or settling or running away if they were guilty, and that (ii) the priests who ran the ordeal process would rig the results in favor of the innocent accused. I’m not sure the first point would apply to capital cases, much more common then than now, given that a guilty person, presumably already condemned in God’s eyes, would have little reason not take his chances on the ordeal. And as for the second point, well, I am not convinced that medieval priests were universally known even then for their honesty and incorruptibility.

A couple of years ago Leeson wrote a book about economics and pirate democracy that I keep meaning to read. I hope it’s a bit more convincing than this…

Caprica

[Mild spoilers, but probably nothing you don’t already know if you’re bothering to read this…]

Finally saw the pilot of Caprica today (huzzah for HD TiVo!), and I have to say, it was pretty frakkin’ great. I’m really not sure what I expected, apart from “Battlestar Galactica prequel, with proto-Cylons,” but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t what it turns out to be. (Well, OK, it did have proto-Cylons, which I admit brought a nostalgic tear to my eye. Kind of like the half-finished Death Star at the end of Revenge of the Sith.)

Apparently the story was originally nothing to do with BSG, but the good people of SyFy have done a surprisingly good job shoehorning it in to the pre-existing framework—(ur-)Cylons! Gods! Retro-hip clothing! “Frakkin’!”—and more importantly of continuing the BSG tradition of moral ambiguities and inversions.

The techo-babble doesn’t bear too much thinking about, but you didn’t really expect it to, did you? And it all goes down pretty easily thanks to some excellent production design (I suppose I should be pretentious and refer to mise-en-scène here). As in BSG the design is all “earthlike”; no wild Star Trekky aliens and costumes on Caprica. It reminds me a bit of a great line from Babe: Pig In the City: it’s set “a little to the left of the twentieth century.” The Caprica City backgrounds reminded me a little of old matte paintings from movies set in the not-too-distant future Year 2000, except of course in nice sparkly HD; I’ve always been a sucker for matte paintings. The actors were reasonably good, especially Alessandra Torresani, in what I imagine is the most fun role in the series. That’s her in the picture, being Eve, in case you missed the Gnostic relevance of her character’s name.¹

I’ve no idea how long it will take Caprica to run out of steam, as I’m sure it will. It took BSG about a season and a half before it started becoming obvious that the writers were starting to flounder. I’ll take a season and a half of this.

1.  See also Genesis 3:20 in the Septuagint.

Corporations are Persons, Money is Speech, Ignorance is Strength

I haven’t actually tried to read the decision in Citizens United v. FEC—it’s long (looong) and written by the odious Anthony Kennedy, whose pompous arrogance, untempered by Scalia’s savage and entertaining wit or by Thomas’s clarity and brevity, pisses me off—and if I did it’s not like I’d really be a reliable interpreter, not being a lawyer and all. But, well, jeez.

I’m trying to buck up by telling myself that

1. This will merely make advertising more honest; corporation already contribute pretty much whatever they want to political campaigns, they just have to weasel through loopholes;
2. Political advertising makes less difference than people think, and we’re pretty much saturated as is; and
3. Let’s face it, existing restrictions on campaign finance do suppress speech.

But no, I’m not buying any of that either.

From what I’ve read about the decision (from which I may admittedly have drawn wildly inaccurate conclusions, see above) I think the real problem with it is that it doesn’t acknowledge the principal-agent problem. Owners of large corporations—that’s all of us who own stock—do not have any input into those corporations’ political advertising. It’s our agents—the officers and boards—who decide that, and their incentives are wildly different from ours. I certainly don’t want corporations I own stock in to be spending anything at all on political ads, but my wish makes not one whit of difference.

If the world were otherwise ordered, then maybe shareholders would control in some meaningful sense how corporations behave. The fact that such is not the case, and really can’t be, is exactly the sort of real-world inconvenience that Anthony Kennedy can’t be bothered with. How I miss Sandra Day O’Connor.

On the Bright Side

Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson are completely irrelevant now, right? The Democrats can get just as much nothing done with 57 votes as with 59.

And maybe, just maybe, Harry Reid will grow a pair. Or, since that’s not going to happen, step down in favor of Schumer, who already has one.

I hope the Democratic “leadership” is watching Jon Stewart; watch the whole thing, or start at about 6:30.

Martha Oh Dear

I’m trying not to get depressed about today’s election until it actually happens, but it’s difficult. The hope I’m clinging to is that the polls are basically worthless because of wild self-selection bias. Those of you not in MA have no idea how annoying this last week has been, with constant calls from both sides. Any reasonable person’s first response to any poll at this point would be a string of obscenities. I don’t know how I’ve managed not to rip the phone out of the wall yet. God knows what that does to the responses.

My pre-post-mortem is pretty conventional. After a reasonably good campaign in the primary, Coakley (and her handlers, who deserve a lot of blame here) assumed she’d coast in the general, and effectively shut down her campaign. That allowed Brown to get out his base—MA may be the Bluest of Blue states, but all states are really Purple, and we do have a big Republican base here, ready to have its blood angried up (see also this). When a couple of polls showed the race getting close, the Republicans smelled blood and the Democrats panicked. Panicked Democrats are even less competent than calm Democrats, and Coakley’s ads over the last week are starting to turn even me against her. She can’t seem to decide whether to campaign against Bush and Cheney or against Operation Rescue, and neither makes a particularly good target. Yeah, we all hate W and Dick, but we’ve all noticed that they’ve been out of office for a year now; and the abortion thing is based on obvious exaggeration to the point of, well, lies. So, feh.

UPDATE: Apparently turnout is heavy, which (i) is likely good for the Coakley, since she’s a Democrat in a Democratic state, and (ii) means the polls are probably crap, since they assumed the low turnout appropriate for an off-election in January. Say what you (and I) will about all those vile robocalls, at least every last person in the state knows there’s an election today.

Goodbye, Naughts

I’ve enjoyed the little spate of articles about what to call the decade that’s just ended now that it has, well, ended. I’m also impressed that apparently we mostly haven’t needed to call it much of anything at all (although a reliable expat friend assures me that in England they really do call it “the noughties.”)

Insofar as I called it anything myself, it was “the aughts.” I think that’s mostly because of fond but dim memories of Jethro Bodine as a double-aught spy. Very dim, as it turns out. Jethro was actually a double-naught spy.

For higher culture, here’s a Language Log piece on how we might pronounce the coming year. I think I had planned to alternate between “twenty-ten” and “two thousand ten.” It would not have occurred to me that anyone would have thought there was and Official Way. So thank you for setting us straight, National Association of Good Grammar!

My New Year’s Resolution

Which I’m making public in hopes of shaming myself into keeping it: Get some exercise, you great walrus.

One of the few things I learned in Elementary School that really stuck was that Exercise Is Evil. Turns out that’s not true.

Lazing Into The New Year

Happy New Year! I broke with tradition by staying up ’til 10 on New Year’s Eve, rather than sacking out at the usual 9.

As a family Christmas present—well, mostly for me—I second TiVo. It being an HD DVR, I could no longer live with the ancient non-HD TV, so I got a new one of those too (an LCD/LED, selected in part for the high contrast and brightness the LED backlights get relative to CCFD, but really more for the techno-coolness). That being in place, I am finding it difficult to live with the old DVD player and its pathetic low resolution and sorry black level, so Blu-Ray is next.

How long ’til all these things are obsolete?

A disadvantage of getting a super-thin closer-to-the-bleeding-edge-than-usual-for-me television is that it makes few concessions to old technology. The thing has only one component/composite video input; it expects you to use HDMI. So I had to run out and overpay hideously for an HDMI cable, not wanting to wait a week for a reasonably-priced one through the mail. Why are cables such a racket, anyway? Is it not obvious that they’re just pieces of wire and plastic, and are usually overpriced by a factor of 10?

The neatest thing about the TiVo (at least until I get a cable guy to come and install the card(s?) for the digital channels) is the streaming Netflix. I’ve been watching Netflix streaming stuff for a while on the laptop, which was just good enough to keep me from overcoming my natural laziness and cheapness and getting a TiVo/Roku/whatever. Which was of course stupid of me. The Netflix/TiVo thing turns out to mostly work pretty well, and the picture quality is much better than I had expected. The only glitch I’ve run across is that there is no way to control the aspect ratio—it is whatever it is (mostly 16:9 in what I’ve seen, but some 4:3), and the TiVo box makes no effort to convert it, as it will for plain old cable. That means you can’t really use it with an old TV that doesn’t have a settable aspect ratio. Unless you don’t mind stretched or squashed pictures.¹

The TV/TiVo are in probably the worst wireless reception area in the house, so I ran an ethernet cable under the house, through the basement and the scary crawlspace (seriously; that part was like being in a horror movie). I also learned to crimp my own RJ45 cables, so I’m feeling pretty manly. In the nerdliest possible way.

 

¹ Which apparently many people don’t. Widescreen televisions in public places are invariably set to 16:9, even though they’re often getting 4:3 signals. Does that not make anyone else crazy?

I, Blogger

Hey, am I back to blogging, after a whole year? I’m kind of curious about that myself. Probably this is just a holiday aberration, but we’ll see…

And a Happy Boxing Day to you, Garrison Keillor!

I must have been doing a spectacularly poor job wasting time over the last week, because only today did I see Garrison Keillor’s Christmas rant:

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

Golly. For the record, he also says bad things about Lawrence Summers and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and unaccountably refers to the good people of Cambridge, MA, as “Cambridgeans.”

One has to wonder exactly how serious this is intended to be. On the one hand, Keillor is a professional humorist and satirist. He’s also an inveterate rewriter of lyrics, Christmas lyrics not excepted. On the other, well… it isn’t very funny, now is it?

I’m leaning towards thinking it’s satire, or at least thinking that he thinks it’s satire. I am hardly Garrison Keillor’s biggest fan¹—I find A Prairie Home Companion both precious and grating, not to mention endlessly, mindlessly, numbingly repetitive—but I don’t think he’s stupid. I can easily imagine him being sufficiently egotistical to blast the UU’s for rewriting lyrics even as he does it himself (possibly by distinguishing “serious” and “humorous” rewrites). I can’t imagine him being so ignorant of musical tradition as to think that lyrics haven’t been rewritten continually since there were lyrics to rewrite. Or that Christmas music was universally wonderful and timeless until those Unitarians and Jews had to go and spoil it all.

I think he’s adopted a sort of vaguely anti-Semitic (and anti-Unitarian (and heck, while we’re at it, homophobic)) curmudgeonly Andy Rooney persona, full of misty nostalgia for those good old days that never existed. Perhaps he’s also kidding on the square.

And this wouldn’t be the first time Keillor’s attempted satire was taken more seriously than he claims to have intended. Here’s his apology, in the context of Dan Savage’s response to same, for the above-linked column.

FWIW, I looked up the offending Godless Silent Night. I’m not sure which of the two versions in the UU hymnal so offended Garrison. The first is just like the one he’s used to, except that it replaces “son of God” with “child of God” and ends each stanza with “Sleep in heavenly peace”—no Sons or Lords here. The second is a much more literal translation of two of the original German verses, very mildly Unitarianized so as to avoid the word “savior.”

Lots of responses to this on the internets, of course. Here’s one from folk-singer-(pretty good folk singer, in fact)-turned-Unitarian-minister Fred Small, whose church it was that Keillor was talking about. This piece includes links to other Unitarian-Universalist responses (some of which seem angry and wounded—UUs, like “Cambridgeans,” are natural Keillor fans). Here’s something pretty icky from Powerline, the gist of which is that Keillor must be sublimating his anger at the Jews (isn’t it really the atheists, and those who like the First Amendment?) who have so rudely driven Christmas from the Public Square.

 

1. Garrison Keillor’s biggest fan is Garrison Keillor.