I remember, years ago, a wisecrack that went: "The good old days were when the prisoner was suspended, not the sentence."

In like manner, we might observe that the good old days were when the only concern about disparate impact in school discipline was whether a schoolmaster used the cane, the strap, or the paddle.

CIA contacts with left-wing intelligentsia types are old news. Beginning in 1953, the CIA funded the British magazine "Encounter," which served substantially as a forum for the Gaitskell faction of the Labour party. No purpose would have been served by subsidizing the right – the idea was always to hive off a faction of the left, thus denying their support to the Russians.

The importance of university education in general generally is exaggerated because employers can't rely on other criteria of ability to qualify candidates for employment. It is given even more than usual significance when choosing people to be groomed for top positions.

As a bank director, I see this in the criteria we use when hiring people. Typically, for example, a person applying for a teller's or clerk's position needs only a high school diploma, while to be considered for a lending officer's position, a bachelor's degree is required. Postgraduate degrees are strongly desired for vice-presidential level posts. Why? There is virtually nothing in the typical BA curriculum that prepares the holder of the degree to be a lending officer, and very little in the typical MBA's content that is realistic preparation for executive responsibility. The degree is not sought by the employer as an evidence of vocational training for the position, but rather as an assurance that the candidate has the native intelligence and drive that make him likely to succeed in it. Such requirements shut out many people who might do just as well or better. I have made this point to my board, but all they can seem to do is shake their heads and say, too bad for them.

It would make much more sense if we could administer an examination designed to sort for the traits and skills we wanted for each position offered, but it is very difficult to do that without running into trouble with anti-discrimination laws. One doesn't run into that trouble by using university degrees as hiring criteria. Because of this, young people who wish to make respectable livings are driven to acquire the needed credentials through a costly, time-consuming, and if truth be told, highly inefficient process – while the universities collect 'economic rents' in consequence of their rôles as gatekeepers to white-collar employment.

As for the rarefied expense of Harvard and a few other universities – it seems to me to be akin to the pricing of some other luxury goods. At the top margin, the marginal improvement in the quality of such products may be very small even though the marginal difference in price is great. Why, for example, is the price of a bottle of Château Lafite so much more than that of respectable and perfectly good second growths like Châteaux Rausan-Segla or Gruaud-Larose? And why is Petrus even more expensive than Lafite? I've drunk Petrus and Lafite, and while they are very good clarets, they are not that much better than those ranked just below them.

The explanation is that the prices are what the market will bear – and the market will bear high prices for goods in such limited supply, as long as there are even a few people willing to pay them. This is true no matter what the luxury article in question be – Harvard degree or Bordeaux grand cru.

I have known several Harvard graduates whose native intelligence seemed no greater to me than my own, and who enjoyed less success in business, less money, and less happiness in life than I have, even though I attended a small private university of distinctly second-tier status.

Blind tastings of wine often demonstrate that we are mistakenly disposed to expect great things of a bottle's contents because of the label pasted on its outside. It's unfortunate that there is nothing like a blind tasting to help us evaluate holders of university degrees.

On the point of what income could be expected from an invested net worth of $10 million – anyone for whom this yields an annual revenue of $100K should not just talk to, but SCREAM at, his broker or trust officer.

$10 million, invested in a properly-laddered portfolio of BAA or better rated municipal bonds, should provide about $300K exempt from both federal and state income taxes. It may be difficult to find taxable investments that will yield an equivalent after-tax income in interest or dividends, but this may be compensated for by occasionally realizing capital gains, which are taxable at lower rates.

$300K in investment income net of tax may not put one on the same plane as a Goldman Sachs partner, but it will provide a modicum of domestic comfort, even in New York City.

On to the subject of education – it probably should be noted that if a parent should give his child $10 million, the current federal gift tax would amount to $3,150,000 (35% of $9 million – the first $1 million of the gift is exempt). There might also be a state gift tax depending upon where the giver lives. This considerably reduces the bang the giver gets for his bucks. On the other hand, if the parent gives his $10 million to Harvard, he gets a charitable deduction from his federal and state taxable income.

Furthermore, if the gift is given in appreciated securities, the giver's deduction is still for the current value even though the basis in it may be much smaller. Even in the present market, it is possible to have acquired any number of stocks 10 years ago at a small fraction of their present prices. If the $10 million in securities cost $2 million when they were bought, the economics of such a gift are much different than they might at first appear. The recipient university, being tax-exempt, invariably will sell the securities at once to realize the gains, so it really nets the whole $10 million for its portfolio managers to reinvest. Neither are they required to spend any percentage of their net worths on their stated charitable purposes – a point that distinguishes universities from some other types of tax exempt foundations. There is good reason why the endowments of institutions like Harvard or Yale are so large.

Finally, tuition and living expenses at university are not considered taxable gifts to one's wee bairns, whereas any gift over $13,000 annually either counts against the giver's $1 million lifetime exemption or is subject to gift tax.

The preference for supposedly 'charitable' gifts to universities, and for parents to pay exorbitant tuition for their children, is as much the product of the tax code's distortion of the economy as the real estate bubble was. I wonder what might be done to prick the education bubble.

Judgment and intelligence are not identical qualities. There are plenty of illustrations of bad political judgment on the parts of Jews. During the period of the Hitler/Stalin pact, almost the entire American and western European left (including most Jewish leftists/communists) toed the party line and advocated 'peace' with the Nazis. How many Jewish lives were lost as a consequence – how many eggs broken for the sake of making the Marxist omelette? This doesn't seem to have been an example of astute judgment on the part of the Jews involved.

Whether the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla is anything more than a momentary "PR disaster" remains to be seen. Simon in the UK reminds us of the attack on the USS Liberty. That ought to have been a worse PR disaster for Israel from the standpoint of relations with the US than the Gaza flotilla attack. From the point of view of most of the American public today it has gone down the memory hole. The same can be said about the treason of Jonathan Pollard. Its consequences for the US/Israel relationship were effectively nil. Calculation can be of many kinds, including about the public tendency toward anterograde amnesia, and its implications about the nature of political opinion.

Anyone who is surprised by the willingness of the Israelis to shed blood, even innocent blood, has not read the Old Testament. One might start with the story of Jephthah (Judges xi – xii), and in particular of the original holocaust (Judges xi:31).

Certainly the claim made by Obama and the Democrats that someone with a household income over $250,000 is rich does not jibe with the commonplace picture of what "the rich" are.

The older stereotype of the rich man living in a stately home with liveried servants at his beck and call, and a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, as portrayed in movies from the 1930s, has, as Steve writes, been supplanted among the more sophisticated by that of the private jet set.

But the household with an income of (say) $300 – 400K does not come close to either. It is likely to be one in which the principal earner is a successful professional or a small-business owner. There are unlikely to be household servants, though perhaps a housecleaning service may be engaged for a few hours a week.

As for private jets, many who use them do not own them; owning one is hugely expensive. More common are fractional ownerships, and for those who cannot afford them, purchases of blocs of time. Twenty-five hours on a Lear 60 might run about $125K, and stepping up to a Gulfstream IV will double that. Even this is well above the means of the typical professional with an income in the mid six figures.

When billionaires like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates say that "the wealthy" should pay more in taxes, it is deeply disingenuous to apply such a description to small businessmen and professionals with much more modest fortunes than theirs. Buffett is laughing all the way to Berkshire Hathaway over that. His insurance companies sell a type of life insurance policy that is used by mere millionaires for estate planning purposes. If the estate tax were to vanish, so would the raison-d'etre for this entire type of insurance, and he'd be out a huge revenue stream that dwarfs what he might pay if his personal marginal income tax rate went up by 5%.

Highly taxing the small entrepreneur is, from the Buffett-Gates point of view, akin to cutting the brush before any saplings have the chance to grow too tall. With much of their own wealth safely ensconced in tax-exempt foundations, they can safely tell government that people with fortunes several orders of magnitude smaller should be punitively taxed. It keeps down the competition.

When the banker Cosimo de' Medici effectively consolidated his family's rule of Florence, one of the things he did was to impose a graduated income tax. One of his biographers has written:

"Cosimo abolished the catasto and used the decima scalata (progressive taxation) to ruin all who stood in the way of his absolute power, while favoring the lower classes and his supporters. His attempts to undermine republican institutions were denounced in vain by the great archbishop of Florence, St. Antonius." [N.B. – the catasto was a sort of register of property titles used for the purpose of assessing ad valorem taxation.]

In other words, Cosimo used progressive taxation to ruin and reduce capitalists of lesser wealth than his own to subjection. I don't know whether billionaires of the Buffett, Gates, and Soros type have read enough history to be emulating old Cosimo's technique consciously, or whether they have conceived the same idea independently.

To the point of anonymous #1, Robert Frank, who blogs about the wealthy at blogs.wsj.com, indicates that new research shows that the top 1% of earners now make more than 2/3 their total income from salaries. This is up, he says, from the 1950s and '60s, when about 45% of their income came from paychecks. Like the house with butlers and maids and the chauffeured Rolls, the notional "idle rich" are a concept from the past.

To the point of anonymous #2, Frank had one blog post several years ago on the subject of how much one had to have to be classified as rich, and the consensus of people he asked was considerably higher than $10MM. I can't find the post with a simple search, but if you're curious and willing to spend the time, you probably can.

The practice of normal persons taking a psychiatric medication to improve their mental performance is very old. Robert Burton, in his "Anatomy of Melancholy," after describing the use of hellebore to relieve what we now call bipolar syndrome, writes:

"They that were sound commonly took it to quicken their wits, (as Ennius of old, Qui non nisi potus ad arma – prosiluit dicenda, and as our poets drink sack to improve their inventions): I finde it so registered by Agellius, lib. 17, cap. 15. Carneades the academick, when he was to write against Zeno the stoick, purged himself with hellebor first; which Petronius puts upon Chrysippus…" (Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sec. 4, mem. 2, subs. 20

FeministX – Again, it depends upon whether by 'classical' one has in mind the narrower definition, meaning music from the period following the Baroque/Rococo and preceding the Romantic, or its broader signification as European art music before (say) the deaths of Puccini or Rachmaninoff. But even within the less inclusive category, there is music in which the performer has a great deal of interpretive and improvisational leeway. Any concerto that has a place for a cadenza is an invitation to the improvisational skills of the performer. It was also standard practice well into the classical period strictly so called for a composer to provide a figured bass, the realization of which was largely up to the instrumentalists responsible for it.

There are even more remarkable examples in the Baroque period, such as the unmeasured preludes of such 17th-c. French composers as Louis Couperin, Champion de Chambonnières, and Jean-Henri d'Anglebert. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmeasured_prelude

An easy example to play is Henry Purcell's imitation of such a piece, with the realization written out, in the prelude to the "Suit of Lessons" (Z. 665).

Here's a rendition of Louis Couperin's unmeasured prelude no. 9, played on a Yamaha YPR9 electronic keyboard (using a vibraphone setting!):

http://www.andrys.com/lcoup9.m3u

Anon. writes that "Bach and Handel compoosed a lot of music for brass, but… [i]t was like a horse trained only to trot along chosen paths."

The reason for this was technological, not artistic. The natural trumpets in use in their day could not play the complete diatonic scale. Valved instruments can, but were not invented until the nineteenth century. Their invention, in turn, required machining capacity of sufficient precision, which was not available in the time of Bach and Handel.

My sister has lived in Portland for about 20 years. When I first visited her there one of the characteristics of the city that I noted was the extent of it well-kept middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods. This was in sharp contrast to the midwestern city near which I live, where the residential areas are typically run-down, and the more affluent people live in suburbs. House prices (at least before 2008) were also high there relative to houses of similar age and square footage in my part of the country.

When I commented on these phenomena to my sister, she attributed them to Oregon's strict zoning laws, which discourage suburban development of the kind so common elsewhere in the U.S. I then pointed out that it didn't seem like Portland had much black population, and that there was no big black slum as there is in many cities of comparable size. If it did have, those zoning laws would quickly be abolished and suburbs based on "white flight" would arise just as they have where I live.

Oregon is a peculiar state. Portland is very socially liberal, while the rest of the state is not. The state's rural conservatives have succeeded in keeping welfare benefits low in Oregon, so a large lumpenprole population has not flocked there. Because of this, white people in Portland can afford to be liberal – they do not have to live with the consequences of their politics.

I have in my book collection a work by Maxime Hélène entitled "La puodre à canon et les nouveaux corps explosifs," dated 1886. It contains a chapter entitled "La pêche au dynamite" (dynamite fishing) in which the effects of high explosives on various species of fish are described in a matter of fact fashion; e.g., pike require heavier charges than trout.

I'm reminded of the old joke about the country bumpkin who invites his city slicker cousin to join him on a fishing trip. They have made their way out to the middle of the lake in the bumpkin's boat, when the bumpkin reaches into a burlap sack, and extracts two sticks of dynamite, capped and fused. He lights both, tosses one overboard, and hands the other to his cousin. The cousin is aghast, and begins to remonstrate about how illegal this is, when the bumpkin interrupts: "Well, are you going to sit there flapping your jaw, or are you going to fish?"

What hasn't been discussed here is how third-party payments tend to inflate health care costs. The effect is comparable to that of governmental or quasi-governmental efforts to bring about "affordable housing," which merely served to inflate the bubble faster and to a larger size before it finally burst.

Anyone who, in the days of rag paper and quill pen, suggested that a doctor should employ a bookkeeper for every eight patients he treated, would have been thought daft. Doctors used to see patients in one-man offices or in consulting rooms in their homes. Today they have to pool their resources in huge clinical practices in order to afford the clerical support they need.

The physician I see works at such a clinic, and it has more clerks in its employ than it does doctors, nurses, and lab technicians combined. What gives rise to the need for all those clerks? The third-party payers, both public and private, whose bureaucratic procedures require them. One bureaucracy has created another in its mirror image. The cost is passed on to the consumer indirectly, through higher premiums or taxes.

Politicians have been complaining about the high cost of medical care ever since office calls were $3 and house calls were $6. See how much good they have done!

License the name. There is precedent.

In 1982, when Apple Computer attempted to trademark the name Macintosh, its application was denied on the grounds that the proposed trade name phonetically infringed upon the rights of McIntosh Labs, a maker of high-fidelity audio equipment. Steve Jobs was forced to enter into a licensing agreement with McIntosh Labs.

There is some protection even when a trademark conflicts with a long-established copyright or with the common-law right of a person to his own name. I heard on good authority some years ago that the Scottish operation of the McDonald's restaurant chain once sent a cease-and-desist letter to the owner of a rural inn called Macdonald's. Unfortunately for the fast-food giant, the inn was owned by a member of clan Macdonald, and had been in his family for centuries. The irate Scot responded by threatening to hale the company into Lyon Court, an venerable institution having jurisdiction over all questions of name and arms in Scotland. Apparently the chain's executives were inonplussed upon receipt of such a recondite message, but quickly decided to drop the matter when their Scottish solicitors advised them of the unlikelihood that they would prevail, and of the Court's powers to levy the ancient penalty of "horning" – a fine that doubles for every day of continued violation.

Very interesting, but still there is a bigger difference between Bahrain and Libya – Libya has been an overt sponsor of terrorism against the West (Lockerbie) while Bahrain has not.

Economists like to believe that economics is a science, but as an intellectual discipline it is at about the same point that astronomy was before it became completely disentangled from astrology, or where chemistry was before it abandoned the notions of transmutatory alchemy.

The analytical part of economics, which explains how markets work, how supply and demand set prices, the function of money and banking, and other such matters, contains nothing which is beyond the ken of any reasonably perceptive small businessman or community banker – nor does a command of this knowledge suffice to make one a celebrity economist like Paul Krugman.

But the predictive part of economics is quite another proposition. Everyone hangs on the word of its practitioners. Unfortunately, it has often demonstrated itself to be as wildly inaccurate as astrology. Economic advisers relying on the theories of macroeconomics have proven as ill-equipped to replenish modern public treasuries as seventeenth-century alchemists were to fill up the coffers of their princely patrons.

Most high-profile economists today occupy a role in society comparable to that of astrologers and alchemists, rather than astronomers and chemists. When we think of the prominent astrologers and alchemists of four or five centuries ago – Nostradamus, John Dee, Paracelsus, and their ilk – what strikes us is that they were very odd people indeed. Why should it be any less so today with people who purport to be able to foretell the future and to bring about prosperity by means of their hieratic knowledge?

That immigration is lowering the average IQ in public schools is no reason to exonerate the teachers' unions, which well deserve censure for their role in destroying what was one a well-functioning public educational system.

It is a constant trope of the teachers' unions that criticizing them is "bashing teachers." This is a clever piece of misdirection. There are bad teachers and good teachers, just as there are bad and good people in any trade or profession. It's the union that prevents the bad ones from being fired, and the good ones from being compensated according to their merits. That is one of many failings of the public educational system, and would be so even if there was no immigration.

The claimed fear that land burial of Osama might lead to the site becoming a 'shrine' appeals to a basic lack of understanding of Wahhabism – the sect of Islam to which Osama was adherent. Wahhabis are always buried in unmarked graves. They believe even tombstones to be idolatrous.

The Wahhabist movement in Saudi Arabia has, on such grounds, pulled down shrines and monuments left by the pre-Saudi Hashemite and Turkish rulers, who were Sunni but not Wahhabi. The Taliban used the same grounds for destroying the ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan. It strains credulity to suppose that militant Wahhabis like those in charge of al Qaeda would erect a shrine to anyone, even Osama.

Are we to suppose no one in the U.S. government knows these facts about Wahhabism, which anyone can find in an encyclopedia article about it?

This shrine business is a non-explanatory excuse for a hasty and opaque action that we can be reasonably sure had different motivations and objectives.

It has always seemed to me that many of the traits commonly attributed to Jews are just as prevalent amongst Lebanese and Armenian Christians.

@Georgia Resident, I think what you say about the crusader component in the ancestry of Levantine Christians is correct. I am acquainted with a number of Lebanese and Palestinian Christians whose names and physical appearances (fair-skinned, black-haired, hazel-eyed) suggest at least some Frankish descent.

One recalls the luxury yacht tax imposed under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990. It did little to keep the rich from owning yachts, which many of them already had. On the other hand, it severely affected the building of new yachts, shutting down boat-building companies and putting their employees out of work.

Advocates of luxury taxes ought to read Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees." The private vice of luxury leads to public benefit in the form of employment for those engaged in providing the luxuries. Because the demand for luxury is highly elastic, taxing luxuries will serve principally to bring about economic distress for those people.

Stable tax revenues can be expected only from taxes on economic activity that is relatively insensitive to their effect. Trying to tax "the rich" (however we define them) without taxing those who are not rich never works very well, because the taxed activity – whether it be buying a yacht or expensive car, or realizing a capital gain – is so easily avoided.

I think I may have posted this anecdote as a comment in another one of your comment sections, but it is so good that I will risk repeating myself.

I'm a director and principal stockholder of a community bank. We're in a Midwestern state with perhaps 5-6% black population, and this concentrated almost entirely in its two largest cities. The bank is in a relatively affluent suburban area outside one of those cities, and the population here is lily-white. There is, however, a state penitentiary that falls within the limits of one of the villages in the area.

In addition to traditional bank examinations for financial safety & soundness, the FDIC conducts "compliance" exams under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) to determine if red-lining or lending discrimination is going on. Under these acts, a bank must file detailed reports about the racial demographics of its borrowing customers.

Several years ago, the bank underwent such an exam. The examiners came equipped with plat maps and census reports of the community. After some time, a young FDIC bureaucrat strode into the office of the bank's chief operating officer with a portentous look on his face, and announced that it appeared to him the bank was engaging in redlining and racial discrimination. He pointed out that the census data showed a high black population in this particular village within our area of operations, yet the bank's HMDA reports did not show a single black borrower.

The FDIC man shoved some papers in front of the COO, who looked at them carefully, and replied "Well, we don't make many loans to prison inmates." I didn't witness it, but heard that the crestfallen look on the bureaucrat's face was almost worth all the grief of undergoing the exam.

Motivation is indeed important in criminal law – it is what makes the difference between (for example) murder in the first degree, involuntary manslaughter, and justifiable homicide. The distinction is based on the presence or absence of mens rea (wrongful intent). The law does not and should not attempt to go farther and try to assign greater seriousness to one kind of wrongful intent and less to another.

Murder of witnesses is more serious than ordinary murder, not because of its motivation, but because of its effect – for
it is not only murder, but interference with the process of
law. It is two offenses in one.

Any so-called hate crime deserving of the name of crime is
a crime independent of the hate – premeditated murder or
attempted murder, bodily assault, or the like. If it is not, it is
an attempt to criminalize thought or sentiment. In other words, it is a secular equivalent of heresy or apostasy.
There is no place for this in the common law.

I knew it was Wolfe, without looking; but I agree, with some reservations, to the point about the difference between American and British attitudes (leaving Continental Europe, which differs in its turn).

A British public-school education was for a long time quite a sufficient academic achievement to qualify one for any position of leadership in British society, such as a military or naval commission, membership in Parliament, service in the diplomatic corps or as a colonial administrator. To become a solicitor, one apprenticed in a law office; to become a barrister, one dined in term at the Inns of Court. A university education was necessary only if one intended to take holy orders, to become a physician, or to be an academic. Achievement was recognized by honours granted in the name of the monarch, ranging from the humble MBE, through various higher decorations, knighthoods, or peerages. In the world of scholarship and science, it meant much more to be a Fellow of the Royal Society than to have a mere DPhil.

Because the United States is constitutionally debarred from conferring titles of nobility, and has refrained (though not literally prohibited by the Constitution) from appointing its citizens to orders of chivalry (as republican France does with its Legion d'Honneur), the academy has become by default the American fons honorum.

Americans like titles just as well as any other people. It was once socially acceptable here for retired military officers ranking as captain or above to use their titles. Thus, Theodore Roosevelt was widely known as "Colonel" before, during, and after his presidency; and I can remember as a child hearing people refer to Dwight Eisenhower during and after his presidency as "General." This custom seems to me to have been abandoned around the time of the Vietnam war, when the military became unpopular. The academy's reputation, though, emerged unstained from that period, though it probably should not have done.

As post-graduate degrees have multiplied, the distinction of holding one has predictably declined. Now we begin to note that the institution by which the degree was granted receives more attention. It is no longer enough in some circles that one holds a PhD – one must have attended the right undergraduate and postgraduate schools.

To a great extent, this is an extension of education-as-racket, and serves little purpose in distinguishing real ability. I believe the percentage of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies holding Ivy League degrees has decreased in recent years. A degree may get one in the door, but is no more an automatic ticket to fame, fortune, or power than it ever was.

Similar phenomena have been observed with cats. The domestic cat has been shown to derive entirely from Felis sylvestris libyca, a subspecies of old-world wildcat found in the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean. Yet continental European and British wildcats sometimes cross with farm or feral cats. The ancient Scottish wildcat (F. sylvestris grampia) is known to cross with domestic cats, and the melanistic Kellas cat is thought to be such a cross. The large, domestic long-haired breed called the Maine coon cat is suspected by some to have bobcat (Lynx rufus) ancestry. Domestic cats have produced fertile offspring with the serval (Leptilaurus serval), which is not even of the genus Felis; they are known as Savannah cats and are fairly widely kept as pets. A domestic cat cross with the caracal (Caracal caracal) has been done at the Moscow zoo.

The old standard belief that different species of the same genus may interbreed, but only to produce infertile offspring (as in the case of the mule) may well be the exception and not the rule.

Crime is a young man's game. The aging of the population probably has as much to do with the reported decline in crime as does the tendency to lock criminals up for longer terms. We'll see what kind of increase in violent crime the early release mandated by the Court's ruling brings.

California has the highest number of criminals on death row of any state: 702 as of April 1, 2010 (probably more now – this is the most recent information I could find quickly). If only the Court could quit being such an obstacle, it would be very helpful to empty the prisons of those convicts – in pine boxes. Every time the courts delay an execution, I hope the state of California's attorneys remind them of the Supreme Court's mandate to reduce the numbers of inmates.

Another possible help might be to combine flogging with a shorter term in a county jail for a longer term served in state prison. It works in Singapore – and, again, when judges quibble, remind them of the scarcity of prison beds. Delaware for many years had, in addition to its gallows, both the pillory and the whipping post – and got by with nothing but county jails. Its hard-core criminals all high-tailed it to Pennsylvania.

White non-Jewish peoples living in what used to be called Christendom would have trouble with the Muslim world regardless of the existence of the state of Israel. We have had such trouble since the time of Charles Martel. Hilaire Belloc, who was hardly a friend of the Jews, predicted in the fourth chapter of his book "The Great Heresies" that the West would have to contend with Islam long after Bolshevism was but a memory – and he has been proved correct by events.

Anon. of 5/25 at 9:21AM has his facts basically right. They just need some more detailed exposition. The establishment of Israel peeled away some of the Jewish diaspora's support for communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. As a consequence, the politics of at least some American Jews has begun to follow a familiar pattern of ethnic voting. Because since 1948 they have had an ethnic identification with a foreign nation, they behave less like the "rootless cosmopolitans" of yore, and more like voters of Irish, Polish, or Greek extraction. Slezkine's "The Jewish Century" discusses these changes perceptively.

On the other hand, the prime identification of other American Jews is more with the international left than with Israel. They had no difficulty with the Israeli Labor party, or with the avowed socialism of the earliest Israeli governments.

But now that Likud is in charge, and the population of Israel is no longer dominated by western Ashkenazic Jews in the way it was in the days of Ben Gurion, the bloom is off the rose. Israeli politics has been shaped more recently by Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, who have experienced socialism at first hand and are disillusioned with it, and by Sephardic and Oriental Jews who fled thence from Muslim countries. Netanyahu represents the thinking of these people, and not of American Jewish leftists.

If Likudniks running Israel can fracture the near-monolithic support of American Jews for the left and the Democratic party, that is all to the good.

In the mean time, other Americans should not delude themselves that friendly relations with Arab and other Muslim nations are obstructed only by the irritancy of Israel. The West will always have to deal guardedly with Islam. As Pat Buchanan observed long ago, all they have that is of interest to us is oil, and they have to sell it to us, because they can't supply their people with the necessities of life if they do not. Apart from the limited contacts necessary for the furtherance of this commerce, we should have as little to do with the Muslim world as possible. A policy based on this matter-of-fact understanding, free from cant about human rights or 'demaaahcracy', is what will serve Americans best.

I suspect that spectator sports have little to do with it. What has more to do with it is that, today, being identified as "racist" is the political kiss of death that exposure in some sort of financial or sexual irregularity used to be. What Republicans want above all is to be elected. Just as Paris was "worth a mass" for the formerly Protestant Henri IV, so being electable is worth genuflecting at the altar of Martin Luther King's secular sainthood and racial equality is for "movement conservatives."

Republicans' willful blindness to race vis-à-vis IQ, crime, and related phenomena did not start at the grass roots. It began with the leadership of the conservative movement. I can recall when, for example, "National Review" published articles by Southern conservatives. It was possible to find sympathetic discussion on the right of such historic figures as Randolph and Calhoun. William F. Buckley even defended segregation and the poll tax.

But, just as Buckley did with Revilo P. Oliver, the John Birch Society, and the followers of Ayn Rand, he later "excommunicated" those who spoke realistically about race from the ranks of respectable conservatism. Why? I suppose because a man of Buckley's social standing came to regard all these people in the same light as he would an embarrassing relation. One doesn't talk about one's dotty aunt or dipsomaniac uncle, much less invite them amongst polite company.

There is even a "conservative" ideological position, West Coast Straussianism, that is made to order for the modish Republican blindness to race. It idolizes Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, stresses egalitarianism, and has as its central tenet the notion of the United States as a "propositional" nation. How sincerely movement conservatives and Republicans believe this, I don't know. Strauss was noted for his concept of the "noble lie," and perhaps dissimulation about race and IQ is viewed as such by these people.

I'm not much of a football fan, but in my experience, rather few of them harbor any illusions about the intellectual acumen of the players. I recall being invited a few years ago to a friend's Superbowl party. While it was mainly an excuse for eating, drinking, and conversation, we did actually watch the game. At some point during the pre-game programming there was an interview with a black player. He was a hulking, tongue-tied brute whose every sentence was broken by the interjection "you know?" several times. It was almost painful to watch. At the end, my friend turned to me and said, "They [i.e., blacks] are just dumb as a post, aren't they?"

@ hbd chick – the objection that thoughtful religious people have to the theory of evolution as popularly presented is not its claim that living creatures developed over millions of years rather than in six days – it is rather its claim that their existence is a random phenomenon without purpose or meaning. There is no more scientific evidence to support this than there is to support its converse, and anyone who says so (e.g., Dawkins) has trespassed outside the bounds of science.

American Protestantism is, like the muddy Mississippi, broad but shallow. Most of it descends from what was, four hundred years ago, the 'far left' of Christianity, viz., the 'independent' faction of Calvinism. Egalitarianism was a part of this in the seventeenth century, as was biblical literalism. It rejected the sensible approach of St. Augustine, who held that those parts of the Old Testament that were incompatible with the evidence of our senses should be interpreted metaphorically. This is what religious non-endorsers of human evolution are doing, instinctually, when they support claims derived from evolutionary psychology.

We need to encourage their instinctive Augustinianism in such matters, perhaps by reviving the censored stanza of Cecil Alexander's hymn:

"The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate."

Hierarchy is inherent in nature, as our experience makes amply evident, whether this be attributed to a Creator or not. But for those who have faith in Him, they should be reassured that

"He gave us eyes to see it,
And lips that we might tell
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well."

@David – certainly Dawkins, Gould, Lewontin, Sagan, and other modern evolutionists DO claim that the theory of evolution implies the random and purposeless development of life-forms. To suppose otherwise gives an opening to the "argument by design," anciently proposed by Plato in the Timaeus, and concisely expressed in the fifth tract of the Corpus Hermeticum:

"No one claims that a statue or a picture has been produced unless there is a sculptor or a painter. Has this craftwork [i.e., the universe] been produced without a craftsman, then?"

My point was that the theory of evolution is NOT incompatible with the argument for intelligent design, despite what Dawkins et al. may say. In denying the possibility they abandon science and enter the realm of philosophy. They are just asserting the arguments of Epicureanism as expounded by Lucretius.

Re: "team sports… mimic the old warrior ethic" – the fashion for team sports such as baseball and football in the United States dates only to the late nineteenth century, by which time "the old warrior ethic" was pretty well forgotten. It is much more a phenomenon of urbanization and industrialization.

The traditional American national sport was shooting, just as it still is in Switzerland. Long-range rifle matches at Creedmoor once received as much or more press coverage as baseball or football do today. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"A strong body makes a strong mind. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks."

Surely, shooting has much more to do with "the old warrior ethic" than do "games played with the ball." And if playing such games "stamp no character on the mind," how much less valuable to the character must it be just to suck down beer after beer as you watch others play them on television?

The modern confusion of games with sports is something that has happened in my lifetime. When I was a youngster, "sporting goods stores" were places that carried guns and ammunition, dog training gear, fishing tackle, camping and boating gear, traps and trapline supplies, outdoor clothes and boots. Hunting, fishing, trapping, boating, and camping were the "sports" in which local people participated, and were distinguished from "games" that were largely played by schoolboys. Schoolboys' games, played by adult men, for the entertainment of spectators, are "sports" only by courtesy.

@Truth – "He's smart enough to market his strongest asset for millions of dollars; what about you and Buddy Boy?" – The question is, how capable will such a person be of managing the money he makes during his fleeting career? Accounts of such people crashing and burning, their fortunes squandered on riotous living and a parasitic entourage, are commonplace. It may take only the right physical talents to make a fortune in professional football, but it takes brains to hold onto the money after the few years of lucrative earnings are past.

As for myself, at the age of 57 years, I have a very comfortable net worth, am CEO of my family business, and hold outside directorships in three other companies. In addition, I am probably a better shot today than I was forty years ago; frequent exercise of the mind and body according to Jefferson's suggestion is a pleasure, especially when I can choose between my pair of guns by Woodward and my pair by Holland & Holland.

Where will the hulking inarticulate brute be, and what will he be doing, when he is 57?

To liken Prince Philip's candid and frequently tactless remarks to Tourette's syndrome (with its motor tics and gibberish or obscene vocalizations) seems off the mark. The use of the word "gaffe" to describe them is more appropriate, if meant in the Kinsley sense, i.e., a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. Yet even this is not quite right, for Prince Philip is not a politician. The powerlessness of modern royalty is what frees him to voice honest opinions. He is not embarrassed by them; they serve only to embarrass the politicians that actually run Britain in his wife's name.

There is something admirable about a man in public life who has enough confidence in his position that he is unafraid to express his true beliefs. Britain lost many such public men when it eliminated the rights of all but a few hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords. I suspect that much support for the retention of monarchy arises from fear of a future in which flannelmouthed politicians and bureaucrats not only rule but reign. The United States supplies a cautionary example of this to the rest of the world.

Anon. of 5/31/ at 10:07 – did I write that science implied anything about the presence or absence of purpose or meaning? Science is about how events take place – theology about why. It is you who misunderstand. What I wrote was that any so-called scientist such as Dawkins who uses evolutionary theory as a justification for his proselytizing atheism is claiming more than the scientific method can show.

Science necessarily expresses no opinion about either the existence or non-existence of an architect of the universe. Atheism is as much a faith-based position as is intelligent design. Dawkins, Lewontin, et al., are Epicureans masquerading as scientists. Their reasons for so doing lie outside the bounds of science.

@Truth – holding onto a fortune and augmenting it is as great or greater a skill than making one. Look at the statistics to see how many privately held businesses make it to the third generation. The numbers are very small. It takes much more than just being a "custodian" to keep and grow a business. How many professional athletes even manage to leave an estate to their children?

As for shooting not being a "sport," all I can say is that many, many people would disagree with you, including the IOC, which includes several shooting disciplines in the Olympics. And that's just shooting at inert targets, not at game. Try a few days of walked-up pheasant or grouse shooting over dogs, or stalking big game, before making any judgments about the physical strength or stamina involved.

Shooting (including archery), hunting (i.e., riding to hounds), and fencing are much more ancient sports than any game played with a ball. All were recognized as such in classical antiquity – see Xenophon and Arrian – and admired as preparation for military service. They much more embody "the old warrior ethic" than does sitting on the couch watching grown men play a schoolboy game.

@Truth – Don't you think equipment has something to do with success in all kinds of sports? Why, for example, won't major league baseball allow the use of aluminum bats, which are widely used by high school and college players? How do you suppose modern college and professional football might be affected if the leather helmets and minimal body padding of the 1890s were still in use? An old friend of mine from South Africa, now dead, played rugby in his youth and coached it until fairly late in life. He used to scoff at the voluminous padding worn by American football players.

What about going back to Grandpa's wooden-shafted golf clubs, or the heavy old gut-strung wooden tennis racquets that my mother used when she was a girl? How would today's boxers stand up if required to fight with bare knuckles and without mouth or head guards according to the rules of John L. Sullivan's day?

The advantage given to the participant by the use of equipment in any competitive sport is equalized by requiring it to be uniform. This is as true in any of the competitive shooting disciplines as in other sports requiring the use of equipment – something you would know if you had any familiarity with them.

Whatever advantage can be gained by equipment in the shotgun sports is not, in any event, seen in game shooting, where the pinnacle of development – the hammerless sidelock ejector gun – was reached by the London makers in the 1880s and has not been surpassed. Can you name an organized team sport that has not seen significant changes in the equipment used or the rules of play between 1880 and the present?

further @Truth – Derrick Jeter may be a better shortstop with a milk carton than you are with a $300 Converse. But I'll bet you don't use steroids. Does he, or doesn't he? Try Googling "Jeter steroids" and you'll get a very mixed bag of claims and opinions.

To claim that "the athlete has more to do with success than the equipment" doesn't hold true if you include the hypodermic syringe under the heading of equipment.

Trap is a very specialised game. While I'm primarily an upland game shot, and shoot clays informally just to keep in practice, I do know that old guns made for trap by high-grade makers like Parker or Ithaca as long ago as the 'teens and 'twenties are in demand by high-level competitors and bring very high prices.

Live-pigeon shooting is a more demanding discipline than trap. The late Russell B. Aitken (1910-2002) was many times a champion live-pigeon shot. He won the 1956 Pan-American championship in Havana and the 1958 Grand Prix de Vichy, among others, with a Purdey sidelock ejector gun. You may see a picture of it, with his medals inlet into the stock, in the catalogue of the sale of his gun collection (lot 7, Christie's New York sale of 4 April 2003). It was built on Frederick Beesley's British patent no. 31 of 1880 (as Purdey guns still are today). Aitken also shot Holland and Woodward guns. Both the Holland and Woodward hammerless s.l.e. designs are of similar vintage.

A good friend of mine, who has won many sporting clays competitions in his state, habitually shoots with a Lang hammer gun made in the late 19th century. There is no advantage to a repeating action in any of these competitions. I have always found repeating shotguns cumbersome and ill- balanced, and Europeans regard them as unsporting for game shooting in any event. There are many new good makers of sporting guns in Italy, and what are they making? Copies of nineteenth-century British designs, for the most part. Indeed, Abbiatico & Salvinelli have revived the hammer gun.

Gunmakers have not improved much on the design or workmanship of a century or more ago. The standard bolt-action sporting rifle used for domestic big game hunting is pre-WWI technology, largely derivative of the Mauser 1898 action. Perhaps the most popular calibre in the U.S. is the .30-'06, so called because it was introduced in 1906. Close to it is the .30-30, which was introduced to fit the Winchester Model 1894 lever-action rifle. The Colt 1911 semi-automatic pistol is a century old this year and still in active military use. Many combat soldiers prefer it for its superior stopping power to the newer Beretta M9, which is current issue, but is chambered for the 9x19mm Parabellum, first adopted by the Imperial German navy in 1904. Still older shotgun designs, as noted, are still in production. It is true that such innovations as plastic stocks and investment-cast parts have been introduced, but their purpose has not been to improve the quality of firearms – it has been to cheapen their production.

I don't know how you could possibly demonstrate one way or another what the outcome of a boxing match between John L. Sullivan and a boxer of the present day would be under 1880s rules. My point was not to suggest anything of the sort, it was simply to observe that equipment has changed in boxing as well as many other sports, and that while we have a good basis of comparison between current contestants (because they use uniform equipment), we can't compare their statistics meaningfully with those of the past, because they were achieved under different conditions (equipment included).

You claimed that shooting is not a sport because of the advantages of modern equipment. I believe I've shown that the equipment used in the 'blood sports' has undergone notably less change over more than a century than has that used in many popular games played with a ball. And you have advanced no persuasive argument to the contrary.

I never wrote that country sports were better preparations for "modern life." Like the protagonist in Evelyn Waugh's "Scott-King's Modern Europe," I believe that preparing a boy for life in the modern world is a very cruel thing. What I wrote was that shooting, hunting to hounds, and fencing more embody the old warrior ethic than do modern games played with a ball by a handful of grown men for the entertainment of a passive audience of grown men.

How, exactly, is a person prepared for war, or anything else but a good night's sleep, by sitting on a couch, watching television and swilling beer? How many people are "football fans" as opposed to players? Wouldn't some of those fans be better citizens if they got off their fat duffs and went hunting, fishing, riding, camping, boating, or did something else outdoors that exercised their own minds and bodies? This is the pernicious aspect of "spectator sports" – they substitute vicarious participation for genuine activity.

As noted before, I am not so much interested in the comparison of previous athletes with those of the present. Any comparison of the two is bound to reflect a disparity between the pre- and post-steroidal periods. This, more than all the training you speak about, has skewed results to the point that comparisons are no longer reasonable. Your remarks about the effects of improved equipment need to encompass as a part of that "improvement" these pharmaceutical "enhancements."

The emphasis on "teamwork" is a product of the factory age and the development of an industrial proletariat. Soccer, especially, exemplifies this. It's why that game is popular in socialist Europe and not so much here.

What we need in this country is more, not less, independence of mind and individual achievement. "To ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth/That was the ancient law of youth." And still should be – at least for those being prepared for leadership, rather than being part of the common herd.

The claim that "social networking technology may be contributing to the decline in crime by making it easier to build a case" is not really borne out by the details given later in this post. There it is revealed that the victim's father "lost hope that the police would find a suspect." So this man built the case himself, with the aid of private detectives.

Only after gathering the evidence on his own was he able to get the LAPD to take an interest in the suspect. Then when the latter was found at a Puerto Rican resort and arrested, "a local judge let him out on bail and he vanished again."

If law enforcement isn't willing to put the effort into solving a murder, and the only way a suspect is identified is by the private efforts of the victim's relatives, how many murders are going to be solved? If judges aren't willing to hold suspects in capital cases, and let them out on bail despite their high flight risk, how many of them are going to come to trial?

Social networking technology did help find a suspect in this case, but how does it contribute to the decline in crime if police are too lackadaisical to investigate until evidence is dropped in their laps, and courts are then too complaisant to detain the accused? The main message conveyed by this account is not about the value of technology, but rather the utter indifference and incompetence of the legal authorities. If crime is falling, it must be doing so in spite of, rather than because of anything they accomplish.

I find the claim that "the Catholic Church discouraged even fourth-cousin marriages" to be far-fetched, and I would like to know on what authority Fukuyama says this. Fukuyama appears to be confusing the fourth degree of kinship with that of a fourth cousin.

Your first cousin is related to you in the fourth degree, as is your great aunt or uncle. The degree of kinship you have with a collateral relative is determined by counting back from yourself to your common ancestor, and forward through his ancestors to him.

Accordingly, in the case of a first cousin, you share a grandparent. Starting with yourself, count 1 back to your parent, 2 back to your common grandparent, 3 forward to your parent's sibling (your aunt or uncle), and 4 to your first cousin – the fourth degree of kinship.

A table of degrees of kinship may be found at:

http://www.mystatewill.com/degrees_of_kinship.htm

Your fourth cousin is one who shares with you a common great-great-great-grandparent. This is so distant a relationship as not to be listed on the linked table, but if it were, fourth cousins would be in the tenth degree.

First-cousin marriages are prohibited by canon law and, in some jurisdictions, by civil law. Canonical dispensations for the marriage of first cousins were and perhaps still are routinely granted, and in many jurisdictions there is no civil prohibition.

The contention that marriages to fourth cousins – i.e., to persons in the tenth degree of kinship – were forbidden by the mediæval Catholic church can easily be refuted by reference to birth brieves recorded at the Court of the Lord Lyon in Edinburgh and the College of Arms in London, or to works documenting genealogies of ancient families, e.g., Debrett or Burke's.

@hbd chick – The period between the 11th century and the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 was relatively brief. Further, it must always be borne in mind that before the First Vatican Council of 1870, papal bulls and decretals often had no force outside of the Papal States, because under various concordats and constitutions outside the Pope's temporal authority, they might or might not be published at the discretion of the temporal ruler. If not published, they were not enforceable either civilly or canonically.

Indeed, marriage customs often differed widely in those realms from the forms canonically prescribed. Handfasting, for example, had legal status in mediaeval Scotland, and noble feus might descend through ecclesiastically unrecognised liaisons, e.g., as the lordship of the Garioch did through an ecclesiastically illegitimate daughter of William the Lion. In England, the legal commentator Bracton (fl. 13th c.) recognised the status of 'concubina legitima'. On the other hand, even though a marriage of a noble and an ignoble person were solemnised by the church, it might not confer rights of inheritance upon the children under temporal law or the private law of a great noble or princely house. Morganatic marriages between royal and non-royal personages were contracted on such a basis as recently the last century.

I have done a great deal of my own family's genealogy through the middle ages back to the time of Charlemagne. There were not enough people in Europe during those centuries for all marriages to have been exogamous to the standard indicated – especially in the British isles. Charlemagne shows up in my ahnentafel repeatedly. His descendants at the tenth degree (and lesser degrees) of kinship intermarried with great frequency and fecundity. History shows that this had very little effect on the vigor and intelligence of the line, as Pinfold and Socko have pointed out. Claims to the contrary are indeed agitprop.

Almost everyone of northwestern European descent is descended from Charlemagne in one line or another, and just about everyone having Anglo-Norman ancestry is a descendant of Edward III. The table of kindred and affinity provided in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, as still used in the Church of England, reflects what was actual English practice going back to a time long before the Reformation.

@hbd chick – no, NOT like cheating on taxes. The Pope was not considered infallible, even when speaking ex cathedra, prior to Vatican I; what was lawful both canonically and civilly in realms outside the papal states depended upon the applicable ecclesiastical constitutions (e.g., Henry I's Constitutions of Clarendon) and concordats. These typically placed the right of appointment to bishoprics in the hands of the temporal monarch (just as the right of presentation of a cleric to the local church was typically in the hands of the lord of the manor) and reserved the right of publication or promulgation of papal
bulls to him. If not promulgated by the temporal sovereign,
a Papal bull or decretal had no legal force within his land's
boundaries. Essentially the church in most mediaeval
kingdoms was subject to the state. Indeed, in some cases,
they might be united in an hereditary prince-bishopric,
passing not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.

The mediaeval church was much less centralized than it became after the Council of Trent. Indeed, the conflict of
Guelph and Ghibelline can be summarized as one between
the Pope's claimed authority and that of the Holy Roman Emperor. The long list of antipopes from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries shows how effectively papal authority was disputed during the very period Fukuyama asserts that the church prohibited fourth cousins from marrying. Its writ in fact ran no further than the temporal demesnes of the papacy. Customary secular law governed outside them with respect to property, marriage, and inheritance, as demonstrated by extensive genealogical records.

The case of Charles II of Spain is not an illustration of "too much Habsburg." The bad genes were from the highly inbred house of Trastámara, coming from his ancestress Joan the Mad. There was mental unsoundness in the Spanish line, seen also in the eldest son of Philip II, Prince Charles of the Asturias. Joan the Mad was the latter's great-grandmother both on the paternal and maternal sides.

Joan the Mad shows up fourteen times in the ahnentafel of Charles II. By my calculation, 13/32 of his genes came from her – over 40%.

Gould, like Lewontin, Kamin, and several other anti-hereditarians, is on record as an avowed Marxist. His positions are ideologically, not scientifically based. No one should be surprised.

@Kyle – it was not that the Church lacked legal authority, but rather that papal bulls and decretals on such matters as marriages to fourth cousins had little force outside the temporal demesnes of the pope. The centralization of papal authority began at the time of the Counterreformation and did not reach its present extent until Vatican I in 1870.

In the middle ages, there was very little direct communication between the papacy and the laity outside the pope's temporal demesnes. Bishops were in practice appointees of secular monarchs, and parish priests were appointees of their barons and squires. What was taught in the pulpits and enforced in the dioceses was not exact conformity with the rulings of Rome, but varied from kingdom to kingdom. The farther one got from Rome, the less conformance there was with its dictates, and the more likely local custom was to be observed. For example, Jon Arason, the last Catholic bishop of Holar, Iceland (decapitated 1550) had two acknowledged sons, despite the requirement of priestly celibacy in the Latin rite.

The practical indifference of the church to its theoretical prohibitions must also be considered. As an example, Catherine of Aragon was initially betrothed to Prince Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII, and married him in 1501. Arthur died in April of 1502; a papal dispensation was obtained in 1503 so that she might be betrothed to Prince Henry (later Henry VIII) despite having been his brother's wife and hence within a canonically prohibited degree of kinship. When, years later, Henry wished to divorce her, he based his argument on the canonical prohibition, which he claimed had been improperly waived. He brought great scholarly weight to bear on his side. In 1529, at Henry's behest, archbishop Cranmer sent Richard Croke as an emissary to Venice to solicit the support of the very learned Franciscan, Francesco Zorzi (author of "De harmonia mundi" [1525]) on this question, which he obtained; but it was of no use in persuading the pope. This episode illustrates how relatively insignificant the rules regarding consanguinity were with respect to the diplomatic considerations of the day.

At a less exalted level, apart from royalty and the great nobility, few people would even have known who might be their fourth cousins. The mechanism for enforcing any prohibition against consanguineous unions would have been solely by the publication of the marriage banns, a custom which was intended to allow objections to be brought to a marriage. The vestige of this practice is still found in the part of the marriage ceremony in which the officiant asks if anyone has cause to show why a couple should not be joined in wedlock, let him speak now or forever hold his peace. The publication of banns was not required until the Lateran Council of 1215, the same that your Fukuyama quotation indicates relaxed the rules on consanguinity.

Thus the means of enforcing the older, strict rules – even in territories under direct ecclesiastical rule – were almost non-existent before 1215, and after it were still fairly haphazard. The Reformation, of course, took place only a little more than 300 years after that, and this led to the adoption of the present Table of Kindred and Affinity, which prohibits only first cousins from marrying. So, the notion that church law actively required distantly exogamous marriages for most of European history is not easily sustained by these facts – even if we do not consider the extensive genealogical records, quarterings of arms, and other indications that, at least among the nobility and gentry, marriages routinely took place amongst persons closer in consanguinity than fourth cousins.

Further apropos of the claim that lay patronage of ecclesiastical benefices made no difference because "they are still being selected from a pool basically controlled by the church" – again, you are basing your ideas of the pre-Reformation church on the post-Reformation phenomenon of Ultramontanism in the Roman Catholic church.

The nobility and gentry sent their younger sons into the church, and the rights of lay presentation were intended to allow them to select their kinsmen as parish clergy in their territories, or just to find them sinecures. Talleyrand is a late example of the type – he was given an abbacy while still in minor orders. The aristocracy, not the church, controlled who the clergy were.

When a king wished to appoint a bishop, he sent the cathedral chapter, who nominally elected their bishop, the name of his candidate, with "congé d'elire" (leave to elect him). The candidate need not even have been a priest. If he were not, he would be ordained one before being consecrated a bishop.

It is true that St. Thomas à Becket disappointed his royal patron, but he was exceptional. That is why he was canonized. Most mediæval bishops did not disappoint their patrons, and very few of them were saints.

I'm not sure where the Habsburg jaw or lip came from, whether it was in the Habsburg line before the Trastámara alliance, in the Trastámara line, or whether it was simply a consequence of excessive inbreeding in the 16th and 17th centuries. The physical condition of Charles II of Spain, as well as of several of his ancestors, sounds a great deal like acromegaly (look at a profile of Rondo Hatton – he had a "Habsburg jaw," although any genealogical connection is quite unlikely).

But the mental condition of Charles II is not attributable to acromegaly, which isn't normally accompanied by imbecility. Several of Charles's relatives also had acromegalic features, but were not mentally impaired – e.g., his father-in-law the emperor Leopold I, who was a competent statesman, a patron of the arts, and skilled at musical composition. The emperor Rudolph II had a milder case of Habsburg jaw, and suffered from bouts of melancholia, but despite this managed to keep peace in his fractious empire by following a then-unusual policy of religious tolerance. His intellectual curiosity led him to support numerous artists – most famously, Arcimboldo – and scientists, including Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Cornelis Drebbel.

The Habsburg jaw became much less noticeable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (probably due to the influx of Lotharingian blood via Francis I), and it is not evident at all in the features of the current family, e.g., the archduke Otto. They also appear to be a reasonably intelligent lot.

We have perfectly good existing words to describe someone skilled in argument without having to coin another. "Casuist" or "sophist" appear to fit the bill.

Mr. Berman,

Usage has given the terms casuist and sophist a pejorative connotation, but they didn't originally have it. Originally they just described persons skilled in argumentation, and they could still be used that way.

As a parallel, consider how in a generation or two the meaning of "to discriminate" has changed. We used to consider it praise to describe someone as discriminating in his tastes, and to think it proper to discriminate between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, harmony and cacophony, etc. Now, in popular usage, "discrimination" is almost always used in a negative sense; it is wrong to discriminate.

Words may even acquire meanings opposite to those they originally had. In Latin, "egregius" (meaning outstanding) is a term of praise; its English cognate means something or someone outstanding only in its repulsive or foolish qualities.

eh – The Super 8 home-movie format was introduced in 1965, before the Super 8 motel chain started in business in 1972. Although I do not know the details, there was most likely some negotiation between Eastman Kodak and the motel people over rights to use the name for their respective purposes. I remember that the selling feature of Super 8 motels when the chain began in business was that the rooms cost $8.88 a night. It's a testimony to the effects of inflation over the past 39 years.

Before Super 8mm movie film, which came in a cartridge format, there was "double 8." This was a 25-foot strip of double-perforated 16mm film that you put into the camera and shot on one side, then you turned it over and shot the other side. The processing lab slit the strip down the center and spliced the two halves to give you a 50-foot home movie reel that ran for about 3 minutes. Super 8 was an improvement over this because the frame size was a little larger, and also the cartridge format obviated the need to stop in the middle of filming and turn the film over.

Either one was much inferior to 16mm, which was the standard home-movie format before the 1950s. However, both 8mm formats economized considerably on film and processing, and brought home movies within reach of a much larger number of consumers.

Aristotle held that the appropriate age for marriage was 18 for women and 37 for men. Amanda Marcotte probably doesn't know who Aristotle is. It is too bad that we know who Amanda Marcotte is. She is well deserving of obscurity. She should be told to go to Hell, which is, after all, "quivi le brutte Arpie lor nidi fanno… con trist' annunzio di futuro danno."

Denying The Gap, as manifested in "No Child Left Behind," is the Lysenkoism of America's soft democratic despotism. It is just as surely coming a-cropper as did Soviet agronomy under Stalin, and for the same reason.

Maybe instead of edited videotapes, it might be better to reduce the procedural complications that have entangled criminal trials in recent times. It was, after all, not until the mid-nineteenth century that most trials for offenses other than treason took longer than a day.

Appellate procedure could also be streamlined fairly easily. As late as 1957, Lord Chief Justice Goddard dismissed six appeals in one hour. American courts could profitably follow his example of "justice-in-a-jiffy."

Is it "pedigree collapse" or simply the fact that royals (as Filmer pointed out in his "Patriarcha") are the most senior kinsmen of their countrymen, and therefore have a generational lag compared to them?

I recently found that the duke of Cambridge (Prince William) is my twenty-seventh cousin twice removed. Our common ancestor was Henry II. His line descends through Henry II's youngest son, John "Lackland" (the bad king John of the Robin Hood legends), whereas mine descends through Henry II's acknowledged but illegitimate son William Longespee, earl of Salisbury. Since the twelfth century, my line through Longespee has picked up two more generations than William's line through John. Prince William is thus of the same generation as my grandparents, although I am thirty years older than he. To the best of my genealogical knowledge, this is not at all untypical. The system of primogeniture assures that royalty always passes to the most senior heir male. Most people of Anglo-Norman descent have one or more British royal ancestors, but they are always through junior lines. Debrett or Burke's will furnish many examples. Furthermore, male royals have historically married and begotten children at older ages than their subjects.

Give Otto's grandchildren time and they will produce a good crop of great grandchildren. With a lineage as ancient as the Habsburgs', there is probably a cumulative lag between three and five generations separating them from their fellow south Gemans.

Reg Caesar – of course everyone in northwestern Europe probably has a royal line somewhere or other. That's the point of my comment, as it was of Filmer's "Patriarcha" in the seventeenth century. Kings stand in relation to their peoples as the senior representatives of a great family. We may reject Filmer's political theory that they therefore have a right to rule – but his genealogy and anthropology are sound. It is a necessary product of royalty's senior status that there are fewer generations between the royal personage of the day and the royal propositus than there are between him and his contemporary descendants through cadet branches.

The line to Mahomet that you mention comes through one of the medieval Spanish royal houses into which a Moorish princess married, converting to Christianity. Descendants of this princess in turn married into other European royal houses, with the result (inter alia) that all descendants of John of Gaunt (including the present British royal family) are thus descendants of Mahomet. There are many people of European descent who share this line, though (unless they are Muslim) they may not claim the title "seyyid," accorded in the Muslim world to Mahomet's descendants. Seyyids are rather common in Arabia, Turkey, and Persia.

There simply weren't enough people in the world in the middle ages for today's population to be the descendants of completely exogamous unions. There is considerable common ancestry within a regional population. That is what makes such a population a race. A race consists, essentially, of people descended from common ancestors, who accordingly share a family resemblance.

Your comment about the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne rather misses the point. It is indeed the case that just about all people of western European descent have Charlemagne as an ancestor – but how many of them can document their lines? The nominal qualification for membership is descent from Charlemagne, but the real qualification is genealogical skill.

@Anon. of 8:06PM re "prole things like… hunting" – did the Labour party in Britain outlaw hunting with hounds because it was a "prole thing"? Do you suppose that quail shooting on the plantations of south Georgia, or hunting for elk or mountain sheep in Wyoming or Idaho are lower-class activities? How about African safaris?

The notion that guns and hunting are solely the interests of "rednecks" is one of the greatest canards of the past fifty years. NRA members have been shown to have considerably higher-than-average levels of education and income. I'd guess that those of Boone & Crockett associates and Safari Club members are even higher.

Anglophilia amongst the rich long antedates this report. The American WASP plutocracy of the 1890s aped the British aristocracy with their stately homes, liveried servants, and debutante balls. The British "public" schools were imitated on this side of the Atlantic – with somewhat less flogging and fagging – by college-prep schools like Andover, Groton, or Choate. London clubs like White's or Boodle's had their equivalents in the Union Club in New York or St. Botolph's in Boston, and the Social Register answered roughly the same purpose here as Debrett or Burke's did over there. Numbers of American heiresses, indeed, married into British aristocratic families, the best known such match being between Consuelo Vanderbilt and the duke of Marlborough.

Of course, in those days most of the American upper class were WASPs, and had a greater sense of ethnic identity with the British than is the case today. Even so,
Anglophilia has been a continuing note amongst the upper crust, varying only in its intensity. The reason is simply that for centuries, no one has known better how to live both well and stylishly than the British upper class. Ralph Lauren has made a fortune because of this perception, and his success has been a far greater indicator of its strength than any book, movie, or Masterpiece Theatre series.

Anon. of 7:49PM: you are right to this extent – the old WASP upper crust used to embody at least some of the substance as well as the style of an aristocracy. The same is not so of today's nouveau riche, and the world is the worse for it.

The provisions that allow Puerto Rico to be used as a corporate tax haven were intended as an indirect subsidy to Puerto Rico. That corporations may benefit thereby is incidental. This is true of almost all the other "tax loopholes" that exist. For example, the exemption of municipal bond interest income from personal or corporate income taxation is a device to subsidize municipalities at the expense of the Federal treasury by enabling them to borrow at lower rates. It is only incidentally a benefit to certain investors.

The U.S. policy of taxing personal income globally is an exception to the usual practice of most other countries. For example, by the simple expedient of domiciling himself in a low-tax jurisdiction, someone from a high tax jurisdiction (e.g., Sweden) may escape his country's high tax rates, while retaining his citizenship. This is not true of U.S. expatriates. An American citizen who lives and works in Ireland pays Irish taxes, but that is not the end of his tax liability. He must file a U.S. income tax return, then (to make a long story short) calculate his U.S. income taxes based on his global income, and then take a tax credit for his foreign tax payments. If there is any difference, he must pay it to the I.R.S.

A U.S. citizen cannot escape U.S. taxation even by renouncing his citizenship. If a person has a net worth exceeding a certaim amount (I believe $2 million), on renouncing his citizenship he must pay taxes on the portion of his net worth above that amount. See:

http://www.expattaxandlaw.com/expatriation.html

I do not believe any other country in history has exacted anything resembling this tax, except for Nazi Germany, which confiscated a large portion of the property of emigrating Jews during the 1930s.

Corporate taxation works differently, more like the way personal income taxation does in Europe. The reason for this is that to treat global corporate income as subject to domestic taxation – which no other country in the world does – would put U.S. corporations at a significant competitive disadvantage with those based overseas. The fact is that they are already at such a disadvantage due to other U.S. regulations, which have no parallel in other countries relative to their own corporations.

George Soros became an American citizen in 1961, according to published accounts. Does anyone know if he holds dual citizenship?

The current IRS code imposes a rather complicated exit tax on high net-worth U.S. nationals who renounce their citizenship. Essentially it amounts to a pre-payment of the estate tax plus a forward estimate of tax on their global personal incomes for ten years. The intent is to provide an extreme disincentive to persons who might think of expatriating themselves to avoid U.S. taxation. However, how this might apply to a person holding dual citizenship is unclear. It occurs to me that such a person, especially were his assets already largely overseas, could simply decide to leave one day, and thumb his nose at the I.R.S.

It is obvious from his conduct that Soros has no loyalty to any nation, and is perfectly happy to subvert the economy of any country that suits him – then to flee its jurisdiction, as he did that of France.

"They ask: Wasn't voting for Obama supposed to stop this kind of thing?

The answer should be, no, electing Obama was at least part of what started it. Were there violent "flash mobs" before Obama? I don't remember any. The phenomenon certainly has something to do with the technological means by which they are summoned, which didn't exist until recently – but mightn't it also have a connection with the empowerment that young underclass blacks must feel at having a black man in the White House? Obama's attorney-general, Eric Holder, dismissed the voter-intimidation case against the self-styled Black Panthers in Philadelphia, giving a clear signal that the administration would turn a blind eye toward black thuggery against racial and class enemies.

Political violence against whites has been widely tolerated, and in some cases overtly encouraged, by black rulers in Africa, e.g., in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Isn't it curious that Obama has taken no public notice of the flash mob phenomenon? Could it be that he tacitly approves? His silence and inaction are in striking contrast to David Cameron's prompt response to similar violence in England.

Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan) wrote in his autobiographical "Memory Hold-the-Door" (1940) of the once-powerful Liberal party that:

"Its dogmas were so completely taken for granted that their presentation partook less of argument than of a tribal incantation. Mr. Gladstone had given it an aura of earnest morality, so that its platforms were its pulpits and its harangues had the weight of sermons. Its members seemed to assume that their opponents must be lacking either in morals or in mind. The Tories were the 'stupid' party; Liberals alone understood and sympathised with the poor; a working man who was not a Liberal was inaccessible to reason, or morally corrupt, or intimidated by laird or employer. I remember a lady summing up the attitude thus: Tories may think they are better born, but Liberals know they are born better."

The aristocratic pretensions of the right have pretty well disappeared, but the moral and intellectual vanity of the left is alive and well, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The photo reminds me of an old story dating from John J. Pershing's service as an intelligence officer during the Moro rebellion in the Philippines. A captured Moro was brought to then-Capt. Pershing for interrogation. The Moro said he wanted to ask a question, and Pershing granted permission. The Moro pointed to rear sight of the Krag rifle carried by one of his guards, and asked "what's that for?"

Not surprisingly, the Moros' marksmanship was notably poor. Perhaps the tendency to "spray and pray" is widespread in Muslim cultures.

I was recently at Lake Tahoe, surface elevation 6,225 feet. Although both are on the shore and share a common elevation, an obvious economic difference exists between King's Beach, California, on one side of the state line at the north end of the lake, and just across it, at Incline Village, Nevada. King's Beach is a town of small cabins and trailer courts; Incline Village is one of mansions.

According to Wikipedia, the median household income in King's Beach as of the 2000 census was $35,507. The median household income in Incline Village was $69,447. Famous residents of Incline Village include Warren Buffett, Michael Milken, and Larry Ellison; the median price of a single family house in Incline Village is $845,000.

Clearly, elevation can have nothing to do with this difference. What does is the absence of a Nevada state income tax. Persons who are wealthy enough to own two or more residences can rather easily choose to buy or build one in a place that minimizes their tax burden for purposes of legal domicile. The Tax Foundation reports that Nevada residents on average work until April 2 every year to pay their total tax bill, ten days before national Tax Freedom Day (April 12).

Tax Foundation information on Colorado, where Mr. Sailer's examples Aspen and Telluride are located, indicates that Colorado, although it levies every major tax, does so at very low levels. Spending discipline through the state's Taxpayer Bill of Rights has helped restrain taxation. The state's tax burden is below the national average, and Coloradans work until April 8 to pay their total tax bills, four days before national Tax Freedom Day. The Tax Foundation reports that New Mexico, where Mr. Sailer's other example, Santa Fe, is located, is also a low-tax jurisdiction; like Colorado, its tax burden has fallen in recent years, and New Mexico residents work until March 31 to pay their total tax bills, twelve days before national Tax Freedom Day.

Lowering the legal age of sexual consent will be one of the future issues of this sort. It's already happened in Britain, where I believe it has been reduced to 16. Polygamy and "polyamory" are also likely. If state constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage are thrown out by the Supreme Court, there is ultimately no restriction on marriage, or on any form of consensual sexual activity, that will withstand attack.

Anon.'s comment of 11:07 today is to the point. Many breeds have been selectively bred for conformance to some physical ideal, without regard to working abilities. The Irish setter is an example. Once a popular breed for upland hunting, it has almost disappeared from the field. One fellow hunter opined to me that the sleek head shape desired by the show-dog breeders leaves too little room for the brain. I am not a sufficient authority on dog physiology to say whether this is true, but there is plenty of testimony to the difficulty of training the present-day Irish setter as a bird dog. At some point, most have given up and switched to other breeds.

A revealing sentence in the quoted article: "Updike makes it sound as though the controversy was that he referred to gay sex at all, not that he spoke about it in a bigoted manner."

Well, yes! Most people who are not homosexual would not regard descriptions (quoted in the linked article) of the hairs surrounding a man's anus, or his "rectal scent," as erotic – they would be disgusted. Is registering this disgust "speak[ing] about it in a bigoted manner"?

The propaganda of homosexual activists for the past several decades has been carefully designed to describe homosexuality as a state of being, rather than a propensity to engage in certain kinds of sex acts. It is hard to feel sympathy for people who face social disapprobation because they habitually behave in ways most people find grossly disgusting. It is easier to feel sympathy for them if they are described as suffering persecution for an innate condition for which they can no more be held responsible than someone could for having green eyes or being left-handed.

A similar sort of calculated propaganda is seen in the public presentation of that other hot-button social issue, abortion. Abortion advocates are careful to couch their arguments in terms of a woman's choice. They object like hell to graphic descriptions of the process, which may involve sticking a cannula into the head of the unborn child and sucking out its brains, or chopping up the child's body inside its mother's womb and removing it in pieces.

Such revolting anatomical detail makes it graphically clear what "pro-choice" activists are defending – just as Updike's drawing unsympathetic attention in his review to Hollinghurst's graphic description of hairy anuses and rectal scents does in the case of "gay liberation." Both the apologists for abortion and the apologists for buggery really dislike it when someone turns over their smooth, clean-looking rock and exposes the verminous decay beneath it.

Are the Marines still using atabrine as an antimalarial prophylactic? My late father served in the Marine Corps in the Pacific in WWII and told me that because of the quinine shortage (the Japanese had taken the Dutch East Indies, where most of the cinchona was harvested), Marines were issued the synthetic antimalarial atabrine. It had the side effect of creating a jaundice-like condition that turned the skin yellow. This caused many to "forget" to take it, with predictable results. It sounds like history is repeating itself.

Your point is very well taken. The Catholic author E. Michael Jones has written extensively on the WASP fear of Catholic ethnic political strength, and the actions taken by the Protestant elite in response to it, in his book "The Slaughter of the Cities."

Edgar Allen Poe was for a long time more esteemed in France than in the United States, where the New England literati of the nineteenth century tended to regard him as a writer of light and vulgar entertainments. Similarly, the pulp-horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was taken more seriously there than in the U.S., where he was dismissed as a hack by the likes of Edmund Wilson, and is still not well regarded by some – witness the harrumphing reviews published here when a volume of Lovecraft's stories was released as part of the Library of America series.

I wonder if the quality of the French translations might have something to do with both cases. I've never read either in French, so can't say. Some writers seem to translate naturally and well into other languages. There are those who claim that the English translations of Borges read better than the original Spanish. Again, never having read them in Spanish, I am in no position to say.

The great intellectual controversy of the seventeenth century was over who wrote the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of philosophical and magical works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, an Egyptian sage who supposedly lived before the time of Moses. So important were these works supposed to be that when Cosimo de Medici acquired a Greek manuscript of them, he ordered his house scholar, Marsilio Ficino, to drop his translation of Plato and begin translating the Hermetica.

The great antiquity of these documents had been assumed since the time of Saint Augustine, and they were significant because they seemed to foreshadow some of the teachings of Christianity. They played a central role in Renaissance Neoplatonism, the major philosophical current of the sixteenth century. A depiction of Hermes is even worked into the pavement of the cathedral of Siena. But In the early seventeenth century, the Calvinist scholar Isaac Casaubon demonstrated that on a textual basis, the date of the Hermetica was no earlier than the first or second centuries A.D.

Casaubon's argument was not immediately accepted. Indeed, such notable figures as Sir Isaac Newton and the Hon. Robert Boyle continued to believe in the veracity and antiquity of the alchemical Hermetica, which were not among the texts examined by Casaubon. The Danish historian and chemist Olaus Borrichius defended the Hermetica in a long controversy against his rival Conringius that went on for much of the late seventeenth century. Finally, the Hermetica were abandoned to occultists, with the lapse of widespread belief in transmutatory alchemy.

The controversy was largely forgotten until the great British scholar Dame Frances Yates brought up its history in her book "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition." This spawned a great deal of new investigation, which continues to this day, and has shown what a significant role Hermeticism (mistaken though it was) played in the development of early science.

Indeed, there's a tie to Shakespeare and the controversy over the authorship of the plays attributed to him. The subject of Dame Frances's book, Giordano Bruno, spent some time in London, where he was introduced to the court of Elizabeth I and to the circle of Sir Philip Sidney. Instrumental in this was the Italian-born Protestant and naturalized English subject John Florio, who wrote the first Italian-English dictionary and was the source of knowledge of all things Italian for the educated Englishman of the time. Florio's influence on Shakespeare (or whomever wrote the plays) is well documented, and there is even a recent book claiming that Florio was their author:

http://www.amazon.com/John-Florio-Man-Who-Shakespeare/dp/2981035819/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1320442549&sr=8-5

Hermetic and Brunonian allusions can be found in Shakespeare's plays, which show that the plays' author was steeped in Renaissance Neoplatonism – and, whether through Florio, or directly from Bruno (assuming Florio was "Shakespeare"), its intellectual content entered into the popular frame of reference. Prospero in "The Tempest" is an archetypal Renaissance Hermetic and Neoplatonic magus.

Whiskey wrote:"Really, the Earl of Oxford would sit down and write plays instead of the usual aristocratic pursuits of gambling, whoring, drinking, fighting, dueling, and general debauchery? Really?"

Where did you get your concept of "the usual aristocratic pursuits"? Certainly not from Castiglione, whose much-reprinted and much-translated manual "The Courtier" set forth the skills an aristocrat of the sixteenth century was expected to have.

For males, these included reasonable competence in the skills any junior military officer was expected to possess (riding, fencing, shooting), but also those of a diplomat and of a pleasing companion to one's peers and superiors. The latter were expected of ladies as well. Court etiquette was complicated, and failure to master it was punished by ostracism.

Being a gracious conversationalist was taken for granted. Musical skill – typically on the lute, one of the viols, or the virginalls, which were aristocratic instruments – was prized. At least one was expected to be able to read music well enough to take a part in a madrigal, and the ability to dance well distinguished ladies and gentlemen from bumpkins. A knowledge of the intricacies of genealogy and heraldry was an essential to success. The ability to read and write both in the vulgar tongues and in Latin, the language of the church, the law, and international correspondence, was also an expectation. Elizabeth I knew six languages, including Latin and classical Greek. Being a dab hand at turning out a sonnet was useful, especially for a gentleman in appealing to the ladies. All these skills had to be demonstrated with a seeming carelessness and effortlessness known as "sprezzatura." Not everyone succeeded equally well at this, but all tried.

Whoring, drinking, gambling, and fighting were certainly popular, but anyone with pretensions to noble or chivalric status who had no other interests or pursuits would not have stood a chance at one of the magnificent courts of the late sixteenth century.

@ W. Baker – re "Similarly, lots of Southern whites claim to be descended from Princess Pocohontas."

Such "claims" are in many cases well documented. Descent from Pocahontas is largely a Virginian phenomenon, and not so general across the South. The Virginia statesman John Randolph of Roanoke was a descendant of Pocahontas, and the Randolphs were very prominent, on the same social level as the Custis and Lee families.

The "Red" Bollings are so called because of their descent from Pocahontas. Mary Jefferson, sister of Thomas, married John Bolling (III), a great-great-great-grandson of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. Edith Bolling, great-great-granddaughter of this John Bolling, married Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States. A Bolling is currently lieutenant governor of Virginia, but I am not sure whether he is of this line. Not all Bollings are.

What the British call a double-barreled name originates with the marriage of a gentleman to an heraldic heiress – i.e., a woman who is the heiress to the lands, name, and arms of a noble or gentle family because there is no male heir. The husband attaches the name to his own by deed-poll, and displays the heiress's arms in an escutcheon of pretense upon his own; the children quarter their mother's arms with their father's, and the names descend thence to their progeny This essentially aristocratic practice is the result of a desire – often mandated in the marriage contract or in the will of the heiress's father – to perpetuate the name and arms of his family. This consideration would be absent in the usual non-aristocratic marriage, where –
whether an only child or not – the bride would normally take her husband's name.

It is a source of some amusement that feminists in the U.S., who are typically of left-wing egalitarian sentiments, have adopted what is, on the other side of the Atlantic, considered a practice of "toffs" and an identifier not perhaps of aristocracy, but at the very least or aristocratic pretensions.

There is a story about the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (ennobled toward the end of his life as Lord Dacre) that during a conversation with a member of a noble family he became increasingly annoyed by the latter's continual reference to him as "Roper". Finally he could stand it no longer, and corrected him: "It's Trevor-Roper." The aristocrat supposedly replied, "My dear fellow, I hardly know you that well."

@Anon. of 11/26 at 1:36PM – the story about Lord Dacre is widespread, but without a reliable source – probably apocryphal. Nonetheless, Trevor-Roper was noted for his snobbery and desire to be associated with his social betters; the anecdote is a reference to that.

@Hereward, Lugash, Reg Cæsar – I write with the left hand, and shoot right-handed – mostly shotgun, but also rifle and pistol. Shotgun shooting is particularly dependent on eye-hand coordination, and I attribute my preference for right-handed shooting to my strong right-eye dominance. It seems quite unnatural and difficult for me to shoot from the left shoulder for this reason.

Right-handed tools – scissors, saws, etc. – have never posed any problem for me. Dining is an interesting issue. The standard American table manners call for one to hold the fork with the left hand, use the knife with the right, then to set the knife down and transfer the fork to the right hand. Europeans don't do this. I could never manage the fork-transfering business, and my mother never insisted that I do. No one has ever asked me if my table manners are the result of left-handedness, but a number of people have remarked to me that I dine in the European fashion.

@Kevin Joyce, I have always preferred a fountain pen and have never smeared the ink. I note that many left-handers have a very peculiar way of holding a pen, and it is simply a question of learning not to do this. Part of it is how you orient the paper; if a left-hander orients the paper as a right-hander would, he is writing "uphill," which is difficult to do. The answer is to turn the paper. Also, an oblique nib is very helpful in producing pleasing handwriting with the left hand. Pelikan makes suitable nibs. Most stationers do not carry them, but can order them on request.

I do not think that the advent of credit cards was the reason for the decline in men's standard of dress. Rumors of the death of the suit and necktie are much exaggerated. I had lunch at my club today, and I did not see any man in the dining room that was without a necktie and either a suit or a sports coat and odd trousers. In the part of the country where I live, they are still standard business attire, at least above a certain level of rank and compensation.

What you may be observing is that the level of rank and compensation at which this becomes the case has risen. The middle-management types who used to dress in coat and tie don't so often imitate their superiors in this way today. To begin with, there are fewer of them. Business consolidation has eliminated many such positions, and the ones that remain are no longer way-stations en route to the executive suite. Perhaps those that occupy them therefore see less reason to "dress for success" to impress their superiors, as the 1980s-era self-help book advised.

I sometimes hear people expressing the opinion that suit and tie are uncomfortable – indeed, this is almost implicit in your description of yourself as "comfortably dressed in jeans, some kind of vaguely Hawaiian shirt, sneakers, and three days’ beard growth." For my part, I couldn't be physically or socially comfortable in such get-up. It is possible to be perfectly comfortable in a suit and tie. There is a reason, after all, that it is called a "lounge suit."

The key is good tailoring. Of course, if you go to a department store and trust your wife to select your clothing, you will not get that. Far too many men buy shirts with collars that are too tight when buttoned, and expect to wear the waist of the suit's trousers not at the natural waistline, but below the overhang of a beer belly. This may be a consequence of having grown up wearing jeans. It is wrong, and looks it. Of course such clothing won't be comfortable. The wearer will feel the urge to get out of it as soon as he possibly can.

If one wants to buy a comfortable suit, at least he should go to a good men's store (Brooks Brothers is reliable), or better, to a bespoke tailor, and let the staff there help him. Such people understand how the clothing should fit, and will steer the customer away from mistakes. This costs some money, but it will be well spent not only on superior comfort and fit, but also on appearance and durability.

Primogeniture was the predominant system of inheritance in England for freehold land and the incorporeal hereditaments attached thereto, while gavelkind prevailed for personal property not connected with the land. Some peasant populations had a custom whereby the youngest son inherited the copyhold of his parents' tenant farm while the elder sons went out to seek their fortunes. This was probably a result of the early disappearance of villeinage (unfree tenancy) in England. The "patriarchal" or "community family" system prevailing in Russia is, on the other hand, a reflection of its long persistence there. Under villeinage, the elder sons would not have been permitted to leave.

Bear in mind that Scots law is a system of modified Roman law, quite distinct from English common law. There are noteworthy differences between the Roman law of inheritance and the common law, and this probably accounts for some of the difference shown between England and Scotland.

Primogeniture applied in Scotland, as well, but so did the rules of clanship, so properties and titles as a rule descend in Scotland to heirs general and not just to heirs male in the direct line. Special rules apply to name and arms. A good example of the effect is seen in the inheritance of the children of Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk and Diana Hay, 23rd Countess of Erroll (a peeress in her own right). Their first-born son, Martin Sereld Victor Gilbert, Lord Hay, inherited the Earldom of Hay and the chiefship of Clan Hay. Their second-born son, Perergine David Euan Malcolm Moncreiffe of that Ilk, inherited the barony of Easter Moncreiffe and the chiefship of Clan Moncreiffe.

Rainer is right in saying "It would indeed be useful to define the intelligentsia as a social class in itself, with a particular power base (the ability to manufacture public consent) and particular economical interests (living directly or indirectly from state subsidies), and to regard the conservative intellectual not as a heretic but as a class traitor."

The top 5 to 10% of the American population as ranked by income and wealth is a mixture of entrepreneurs, rentiers, and the intelligentsia. There is no agreement on common principles amongst these people, though they may share common tastes and habits.

One faction constitutes what might be called a "courtier" party, in which a social-engineering intelligenstia-elite collaborates with a rent-seeking economic elite drawn primarily from the financial industry; each, for its own reasons, seeks control of people through goverment compulsion. Their view is typified by the editorial page of the New York Times.

The other faction, a "country" party made up of entrepreneurs and investors, sees laissez-faire economics and prefers a smaller government. This faction's view is represented by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

It is worth noting that more of the actual powers-that-be on Wall Street (e.g., Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Diamond, and their respective institutions) concur with the New York Times world view than not. They are both suitably positioned and unscrupulous enough to game the system of government to create rent-seeking opportunities for themselves. The Wall Street Journal is more likely to represent that of the country banker and businessman, who are neither .

Angelo Codevilla's book "The Ruling Class" further explores the division between our modern court and country parties. It might usefully be read in conjunction with Murray's writings.

The struggle between the two elite factions follows the pattern Vilfredo Pareto outlined in "The Rise and Fall of Elites." Clearly, in these terms, the intelligentsia is the ascendant elite, whereas the independent entrepreneur and investor reflect the manners and mores of the old bourgeoisie, and constitute parts of an elite faction that has been declining for the past eighty years.

The attacks of the intelligentsia on the "top 1%", cast in class-warfare terms, its apologia for the constant misbehavior of the black underclass, and its promotion of race replacement through unlimited immigration, are all habits acquired in the course of its struggle against the declining bourgeois elite. As Sam Francis reminded us, egalitarianism almost never reflects an actual wish for everyone to be equal in condition. It is a tool used by a rising, would-be elite to cast down an established elite that it despises and seeks to supplant.

The "conservative intellectual" may be viewed by the intelligentsia as a class traitor, but really doesn't belong to the intelligentsia at all. It is worthwhile to remember that "intelligentsia" was originally a Russian word that denoted a particular category of educated persons. Perhaps we might borrow another term from the Russians to describe the conservative intellectual – "superfluous man." Albert Jay Nock, the proto-libertarian philosopher, friend of William F. Buckley, Sr., and moral exemplar to William F. Buckley, Jr., entitled his autobiography "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man." Most conservative/reactionary thinkers worth reading are "superfluous men" in the sense Nock was. Even WFB, Jr. fit this description, until his craven sell-out, late in life, to the neocon branch of the intelligentsia.

@ David – It has often seemed to me that the insistence that modern society is a meritocracy, unlike the societies of the past, contains a large element of moral vanity and unwarranted self-congratulation.

High intelligence and strong motivation have always been necessary to climb to the commanding heights of economic and social status. A mediocrity or a fool might inherit a title or a fortune, but without applied intelligence could not maintain high position. History is replete with stories of high-born failures (e.g., Philip, first duke of Wharton, "Mad Jack" Mytton), and of the successes of smart and diligent persons of obscure origins (Cardinal Wolsey, Jean-Baptiste Colbert).

I suspect that many of the top figures in Washington or on Wall Street today would not have been able to hold their own at the courts of Lorenzo the Magnificent or Guidobaldo da Montefeltro. They'd have been thought ignorant boors.

Success even in middle-class trades might elude them. The great Christopher Plantin (1520-1589), the first man to make a fortune as a printer and publisher, required his typesetters to know Latin, Greek, and one vulgar tongue in addition to their own – all that on top of knowing how to set type. How many of today's Ivy League professors could meet those language qualifications, to say nothing of the typographic one?

After looking at the previous works of "Sam Bourne" as described on Amazon.com, I'd have to say that "amusingly shopworn and stereotypically Jewish" is a description that could equally well be applied to all of them. Even so, such stuff must sell, or publishers wouldn't put it on the market.

It has always struck me how many of the sort of paperback novels one finds in airport news stands have themes either about Nazis, Nazi survivals, neo- and quasi-Nazis, or something to do with the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Cold War produced a few good spy thrillers, but even at its height, the commies – who were the clear and present danger – never were the favored villains of airport news stand literature. There, the marketing tactic seemed to be to put a swastika on it, and it would sell – even though the Nazis were an enemy safely buried, and quite unlikely to come back from the dead.

There are not enough Jews in the world to generate the demand for all the books serving up these amusingly shopworn and stereotypical preoccupations. So, the question is – who constitutes the market for them?

Boadicea? Really? Will she paint herself with woad? Blue might go well with her silver tongue stud.

Will she sing Beaumont and Fletcher's lyrics?

"O lead me to some peaceful gloom,
Where none but sighing lovers come,
Where the shrill trumpets never sound,
But one eternal hush goes round.

"There let me soothe my pleasing pain,
And never think of war again.
What glory can a lover have,
To conquer, yet be still a slave?"

Her husband, however, would be better suited for a role in a different Beaumont & Fletcher play – that of the grocer in "The Knight of the Burning Pestle."

@ Beecher Asbury – You wrote: "White post Puritan elite. OK, I give up. Explain why Puritans are bad. I am getting tired of all this hate directed at the Puritans. I thought the Puritans were good… Please explain why I should dislike these quiet, industrious and most capable people."

Let us recall the verse of Butler's "Hudibras" describing his Puritan protagonist:

"For his Religion, it was fit
To match his learning and his wit;
'Twas Presbyterian true blue;
For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints, whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant;
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery;
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and desolation,
A godly thorough reformation,
Which always must be carried on,
And still be doing, never done;
As if religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
A sect, whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies;
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss;
More peevish, cross, and splenetick,
Than dog distract, or monkey sick."

Here's the origin of what W. Baker, in the first post to this comment section, describes as "A perfect amen corner for our evolving Trotskyite/NeoCon/Likud philosophy of perpetual but creative destruction."

Do not the neo-cons and the Likudniks "build their faith upon/The holy text of pike and gun;/Decide all controversies by/Infallible artillery;/And prove their doctrine orthodox/By apostolic blows and knocks;/Call fire and sword and desolation,/A godly thorough reformation"? The people of Iraq and Afghanistan have had a massive dose of such "reforms" over the past decade.

Are not the Trotskyites, with their doctrine of perpetual revolution, prefigured by the Puritans in the belief that their "godly thorough reformation" is one "Which always must be carried on,/And still be doing, never done", as if not just religion, but all of human society, "were intended/ For nothing else but to be mended"?

Eric Voegelin detected in the Puritans of the English Civil War the first manifestations in the early modern world of that utopian totalitarianism which he somewhat confusingly called "gnosticism."

The Puritans were not just quaint people who adhered to a strict personal morality, wore black clothing with buckled shoes, and shot turkeys with blunderbusses in the primeval forests of seventeenth-century New England, as American children were once taught in elementary school. In Old England they were lthe vanguard of the religious left.

There, they brought about the judicial murder of the earl of Strafford, the archbishop of Canterbury, and finally of King Charles I. The mechanism used was the parliamentary bill of attainder, and their historic example is the reason why such bills of attainder are specifically forbidden under the U.S. Constitution. They afterwards instituted a dictatorship under Cromwell that was perhaps the first example in history of what the late Sam Francis called "anarcho-tyranny."

They may have been industrious and capable in their private lives, but they were certainly not "quiet," and they were disastrous at the task of governing.

This aspect of polygamy was the subject of a popular English song in 1873, when the Shah of what was then called Persia visited Great Britain:

"Have you seen the Shah,
Smoking his cigar?
Twenty wives and two black eyes,
Have you seen the Shah?"

I'm reminded of the Q&A joke: "Q. Why don't Mormons believe in purgatory? A. With several mothers-in-law and no booze, they don't need it." The same could be said for Muslims.

@ Anonymous, you wrote in response to my remark that the Puritans were disastrous at the task of governing:

"That couldn't be more blatantly and self-evidently untrue. They created two of the most successful countries in world history."

How so? The Puritan Commonwealth of England, which lasted only from 1649 – 1660, was held together for most of its brief existence by the strength of Oliver Cromwell's personality, and even he was sorely tried in dealing with a fractious Parliament. After his death, his son proved a feckless ruler, and the leading Parliamentary general, George Monck, recognizing Richard Cromwell's incapacity, ended up negotiating with Charles II, forcing the dissolution of the Long Parliament, restoring the king, and with him, the Church of England, its Book of Common Prayer, and its bishops.

The historic political and economic success of England was certainly not due to the Puritan commonwealth, but arose from England's much more ancient heritage as a maritime nation, to which was added the prosperity brought by the much later industrial revolution. That took place under the restored monarchy and the ascendancy of the broad Anglican church of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much of the nineteenth-century British empire was conquered by Scots, who though they may have been Calvinists, were not Puritans.

Neither was the political and economic success of the United States of America due mainly to New England's Puritans. The commercial acumen of the Middle Atlantic states, such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, along with the agricultural wealth of the tidewater and deep South, had just as much or more to do with it.

Finally, expansion into the old Northwest Territory, the Louisiana Purchase, and later the intermountain West, drew few people from the settled precincts of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The frontiersmen came mostly from earlier frontiers such as western New York and Pennsylvania, and the southern uplands.

These people were not New England Puritans (Congregationalists) in their religious adherence. They were a mixture of Methodists, Baptists, Scottish-derived Presbyterians, and smaller numbers of Episcopalians, German-speaking Lutherans, etc. New Englanders from Maine were prominent in the lumbering industry, but they hailed mostly from Maine a part of New England that had first been settled by Sir Ferdinando Gorges's expedition, which was a commercial venture, and not an effort to build the "shining city upon a hill" envisioned by the Puritan John Winthrop's sermon to his shipmates aboard the Arbella.

@ Anonymous – you wrote: "The agricultural and industrial revolutions acame out of those East Anglian Puritan and equivalent non-conformist / dissenting religious groups with as you say a heavy contribution in the industrial revolution from the Scottish version of Puritans."

Those events did not reflect the the Puritans' success at the task of governing, at which, as I originally noted, they proved disastrous Rather they showed their capacity for success in private life. Different skills are at issue in the one instance than in the other.

@Anon. – I have New England ancestry, too, but not all of it could be called Puritan in the strict sense of the term. One of my ancestors on my mother's side was a Church of England clergyman who co-founded Barnstable, Mass. He eventually got in trouble with the local religious authorities for "prelacy" and fled to Maine, where he joined the settlers of the Gorges expedition. His fellow co-founder, whose descendants became cousins of mine through marriage with his daughter, similarly got in trouble with the powers-that-were because they sympathized with the Baptists. You may recall that Baptists were systematically hounded by the Puritans. Roger Williams was exiled to Rhode Island, which Cotton Mather called "the fag end of civilisation," for his Baptist beliefs.

The influence of New England in the history of the colonial period, the Revolution, and the subsequent western expansion has been overstated by schoolbook history. Considering the origins of American public education in the common school movement of New England under the aegis of Horace Mann and his followers, this emphasis is more easily understood. The important point to remember is that it is lopsided. The "Pilgrim fathers" have been transformed from just one of many early groups of settlers in British North America to the central participants in a myth of civic origins. A more mature and balanced reading of history will remedy this.

And even though there were New England Congregationalists who migrated westward, the success of that expansion had nothing to do with their skills in government. None of the new territories or states had state Puritan churches, as Connecticut did until 1818 and Massachusetts did until 1833. All of their development took place under secular governments not dominated by Puritans, and to the extent that Puritans participated in that development, they did so in the capacity of private citizens and not as theocrats along the lines of Cromwell or the Mathers.

I recall reading somewhere that the survival of ballet after the Russian revolution was the result of pure happenstance – an influential Bolshevik had a ballerina as his mistress. The attempts in 1919 of the revolutionary regime to close the Bolshoi and Mariinksy ballets as relics of the tsarist past were accordingly thwarted. If this claim is true, I'd be curious to know further details. At any rate, the old Soviet Union at least preserved the fine arts, and produced some fine classically-trained musicians.

Far worse from a cultural standpoint has been the American new left and its intellectual heirs. To quote Susan Sontag (who strongly approved), these people "have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent.” Elsewhere she wrote, "Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."

Sontag and other figures of that ilk cultivated a nostalgie de la boue, presumably finding it more authentically proletarian and therefore more satisfying than the bourgeois "Matthew Arnold notion." Such intellectual leadership has brought about the progressive demotization and vulgarization of popular culture we have witnessed over the past forty years.

@Paul – It is not only the "Appalachian Scots-Irish and the Amish" that mined the Bible for given names. This was also widespread amongst the Puritans of both old and New England, and they not only used the "begats" in the Gospel of Matthew, but also other names from the Old Testament. In fact, British low-church Protestantism had a philo-semitic strain dating back to the Puritans' conviction that the Jews could be converted to Christianity if only it could be stripped of its "Romish" residues.

"Down, down, for ever down with the mitre and the crown,
With the Belial of the court, and the Mammon of the Pope!
There is woe in Oxford halls, there is wail in Durham’s stalls;
The Jesuit smites his bosom, the bishop rends his cope.

"And she of the seven hills shall mourn her children’s ills,
And tremble when she thinks on the edge of England’s sword;
And the kings of earth in fear shall shudder when they hear
What the hand of God hath wrought for the Houses and the Word!"

Another Puritan naming habit, which seems now to have died out, was that of using words denoting moral or theological characteristics as Christian names, e.g., "Preserved Smith" (who was – quite fittingly – an historian of the Protestant Reformation).

"Many great scientists and mathematicians have likely had relatively low levels of genetic noise combined with some fairly deleterious de novo mutations; with the net effect of a powerful mental engine strangely focused on some particular topic not directly related to fitness.  Low noise, high weirdness.   Math, not sheilas. One might look for advanced paternal age in such cases."

A couple of observations in connection with this:

1) Melancholia (what we would now call bipolar syndrome) was anciently associated with creative genius. See F. Saxl, et al., "Saturn and Melancholy."

2) Aristotle held – and his opinion was apparently shared by many in classical antiquity – that the ideal ages for marriage were 18 in the case of the female, and 35 in that of the male.

'Anonymous said…
"Who? Whom?"

Can someone explain what this phrase means. I see it repeated often on this website.'

"Who? Whom?" is a translation of the words of V.I. Lenin (in Russian, "Kto? Kogo?"). It was his response to a comrade who braced him about the inconsistency of his New Economic Plan of the early '20s with conventional Marxist ideology.

The sense of it was, consistency in principles don't matter – it's all a question of who benefits at the expense of whom.

In Lenin's view, and that of his followers, anything that advances the goals of the revolution is commendable, anything that doesn't is not. Thus they need not apply a common principle to two similar situations if in one case the "vanguard of the proletariat" would benefit thereby and if in the other the "class enemy" would benefit.

ATBOTL said…
"If our ancestors were so primitive, why did this guy's ancestors leave the paradise that is the Middle East to live with them?"

The Roman emperor Titus had something to do with it – see the "Jewish Wars" of Flavius Josephus. The later emperor Hadrian finished the job Titus began – see Dio Cassius.

Judah Benjamin was a Sephardic Jew, as was Disraeli. The Sephardim in Holland and Britain were rather different in their politics from the German and eastern European Ashkenzic Jews. In Britain, the Sephardim tended to be Jacobites and Tories, a consequence of the declarations of indulgence given them by Charles II and James II. James II's daughter the princess Anne (queen from 1702-14) was the first English royal to visit a synagogue.

The largest Jewish settlements in colonial America were at Charleston, S.C., a bastion of tolerant Anglicanism, and Newport, R.I., where the Baptist Roger Williams had fled from the Puritans of the Bay Colony to establish a colony without a religious establishment. Puritan Massachusetts did not welcome Jews, and while Nieuw Amsterdam under the rule of Peter Stuyvesant had a small Jewish contingent, Stuyvesant tried to discourage Jewish settlement and described the Jews as "the deceitful race, – such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ," desiring that they "be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony."

On the subject of Confederate Jews, it's interesting to note that the famous Jewish financier of the 1920s and '30s, Bernard Baruch, was one of the sons of Robert E. Lee's personal physician. Simon Baruch, of Camden, S.C. Baruch's mother, a Sephardic Jewess of old colonial stock, was an early member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In 1925, Bernard Baruch endowed the UDC's Mrs. Simon Baruch University Award for scholarly writing on Confederate history.

Steve Sailer wrote: "All right, try hard to picture the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank in Paris, where students have congregated for a millennium. Okay, got that? Well, it's not like that."

The Left Bank was a pretty violent place in the mid-fifteenth century. One need only examine the criminal record, still extant at the Châtelet, of one François de Montcorbier, alias des Loges, alias Villon, alias Michel Mouton – Master of Arts of the University of Paris, also burglar, robber of church poor-boxes, murderer, and quite incidentally the greatest French poet of his day, or perhaps ever.

Riots and street affrays were commonplace. In 1452,
the lieutenant of criminal police, Jehan Bezon, deposed that "a large number of students have created great disturbances, for example by stealing and breaking up at nights with great noise the signs hanging outside houses of this town, at the same time crying, 'kill, kill!' in order that citizens should open their windows to see what was happening. They have also stolen hooks from the butchers of St.-Geneviève and abstracted fowls from St. Germain-des-Prés, and have taken away by force a young woman at Vanves… Also, they proceeded to the Halles to take the sign of the 'Spinning Sow,' but as the ladder, they say, was too short the student who climbed it to take the aforesaid 'Sow' fell to the ground and was killed…"

On the feast of St. Nicholas that year, the Paris police department had its revenge upon the students. The sergeants of the guard began by roughing upo some students, then broke into a house at the sign of St. Estienne, belonging to a priest named Andry Bresquier, then away saying mass – wrecking and looting it under their lieutenant's orders. Having sacked this house, they broke into another at the sign of St. Nicholas, smashing windows and drinking all the wine they could find; next entering the Collège du Coquerel, they found a barred door, behind which was a professor Maistre Darian, lecturing to an audience of forty students. They battered down the door, threatened the master, and carried off his pupils, marching them roughly through the streets.

All this and more may be found in D.B. Wyndham-Lewis's biography of Villon, from which the above accounts are extracted.

In fifteenth-century Paris, the Chinamen would have been no more safe than in today's Los Angeles – but might at least have had the consolation of being murdered by a more literate mob of criminals than ply their trades today in southern California. Those criminals, in their turn, stood at least a good chance of being hoicked up on the gallows of Montfaucon by that admirable public servant, the hangman of Paris – for whom, unfortunately, Los Angeles has no modern equivalent.

How many supposed "hate crimes" actually are hoaxes? Let's see – we have this one, Sharpton's Tawana Brawley hoax, the Duke lacrosse team rape hoax, the Jena 6 hoax, and the Trayvon Martin case in which it's already been shown that the national new media deliberately altered or suppressed information. There must be many other such instances.

Indeed, there's something basically fraudulent about the entire concept of "hate crime." Any crime of violence against person or property is still a crime whatever may be the racial or ethnic antipathies of its perpetrator. The objective of agitation to outlaw "hate crimes" is to extend the definition of crime to encompass the mere adherence to, or expression of, politically incorrect sentiments. It is, in other words, designed to proscribe heresies against the reigning secular orthodoxy. The baleful potential of such a new type of inquisition has already been demonstrated in several European countries, Britain, and Canada.

"…it was notoriously most common among hillbillies."

Like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt?

See also Waugh's "Black Mischief," set in Azania (clearly patterned on Abyssinia). It is my favorite of Waugh's novels, and in a better world would have been dramatized for "Masterpiece Theater" as was "Brideshead Revisited."

Keynes did not publish his "General Theory" proposing what are now called Keynesian analyses and advocating what are now called Keynesian policies until 1936, three years after the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the implementation of the New Deal's tax-and-spend policies. Some Labour Party leaders wished to implement similar policies in Britain, but were constrained by the contemporary balance of parliamentary politics from going to the lengths that FDR did here.

In other words, Keynesianism was an effort to provide an after-the-fact theoretical justification for steps that politicians already were pursuing or sought to pursue. It smacks of rationalization rather than genuine insight. The New Deal actually retarded rather than promoted economic recovery in the U.S. Unemployment was 18% in 1939, ten years after the great crash of 1929, and down only 7 percentage points from its 1934 peak of
25%.

Britain, without such policies, recovered more quickly than did the United States. Unemployment dropped significantly only after the U.S. began preparing to enter WWII, and this was achieved only at the cost of removing a sizable number of the nation's young men from the available workforce through military conscription. A large number, of course, did not return. Perhaps Sen. Wheeler's comment that FDR was going to "plough every fourth boy under" as the New Deal's last resort was true. Real recovery did not come until after the end of the war, when further New Deal enactments were halted, and some of the more dirigiste policies of FDR's programs were rolled back.

The anemic recovery we have experienced so far, and the remaining high levels of non-employment (understated in official unemployment statistics) suggest that Obama's policies are repeating the mistakes FDR made in 1936-7, when he complained of a "strike of capital." The administration's fiscal policies of huge Keynesian "stimulus" have done little perceptible good,
and the threat of huge tax rate increases in 2013 has brought about an anxious sit-tight attitude amongst the managers of cash-rich businesses. Monetary policies of the sort advocates by Keynes to deprive rentiers of income from capital have not encouraged business investment. It is not so much the case that banks are not lending as it is that qualified borrowers are not interested in borrowing.

It is hard to see the current circumstances as an empirical confirmation of Keynesian policies.

What an irony that the very person who observed that most practical men of affairs are slaves of some dead economist is now the dead economist by whom they are enslaved.

Anonymous writes: "And counter to Crawfurdmuir's claim (and claims of many businessmen and non-Keynesian economists in 1945) that this was due to reductions in the labor supply rather than government spending increasing aggregate demand, full employment remained after the nation demobilized and conscripted soldiers returned to the labor force."

WWII permanently reduced the labor supply. FDR did not quite, as Sen. Burton K. Wheeler predicted, "plough every fourth boy under," but enough were ploughed under that it made a difference.

Whether this alone accounts for the postwar recovery is debatable. There were no additional New Deal policies, the OPA was allowed to expire, and capital had more breathing room under Truman than it would have done under Roosevelt or – thank God he didn't succeed -Henry A. Wallace, the true progenitor of today's self-styled "progressives," who took over the Democrat party in 1972 under the banner of George McGovern, a Wallace backer in 1948.

If the right should ever gain power, it ought not just to use left-wing arguments, but also left-wing tactics, against the left. Indeed, let's restore Hetch Hetchy, and let San Francisco be damned. The left seeks to tax things of which it disapproves, such as carbon emissions. Let's tax some activities the left likes. How about an abortion tax? Of course, it could be graduated, so as to exempt poor black women who should be discouraged from reproducing anyway from having to pay it, whilst making college-educated white feminists who don't want their career paths interrupted by the unintended consequences of a sex-in-the-city lifestyle pay through the nose. The left approves of "alternative energy." Why not, then, situate a large, unsightly wind farm on Martha's Vineyard, or in prominent view of the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport? The left prates endlessly about "affordable housing." Let's build a
project right in the middle of Barney Frank's affluent liberal district, and fill it with the most degraded bunch of lower-class negro thugs, whores, and drug addicts we can scrape from the Boston slums.

The leftist intelligentsia always wants to inflict its social experiments on others. We should make sure they get repeated doses of their own medicine, and get them good and hard.

People have said that Obama is the most intelligent person in the room long enough and often enough that Obama believes it himself. He has said so.

In my observation, most people who achieve leadership positions are reasonably intelligent, but a really intelligent leader would never succumb to the belief that he was the most intelligent person in the room. He'd realize that was the way to exclude any advice that did not coincide with his own preconceived opinions, and to surround himself with yes-men.

The list of Obama's advisers who have quit (or who have quietly been forced out) is lengthy, and suggests that this is what he habitually does. Obama seems to me to be a good example of what comes from the notion that what young black males need most is for sympathetic white teachers and other adults to bolster their "self-esteem." Now he has so much that he can brook no challenge to it, and the country is paying the price.

Comparisons to the "Sun King" are unfair to Louis XIV, who learnt at a very early age to conceal his own opinions and listen impassively to his courtiers before deciding on his course of action. He knew that he was surrounded by flatterers and that most of them were insincere. Charles I would be a better comparison – Obama might profit by his example.

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) composed 39 operas before retiring in 1829, aged 37. According to his Wikipedia entry, "by the age of 21, Rossini had established himself as the idol of the Italian opera public." In terms of sheer numbers of operas composed, his is certainly an example of vigor in youth, as was Mozart.

Verdi was a much later bloomer, as was Puccini. I suspect some allowance has to be made for the development of the form between the time of Mozart and Rossini until that of Verdi and Puccini – orchestras became larger, productions longer and more elaborate. The same is seen with symphonies; Haydn wrote more than 100, Mozart 41, Beethoven only 9. Since Beethoven only Mahler (with 10) and Shostakovich (with 15) have exceeded that number.

It's somewhat surprising to see no Wagner operas on the list. It makes me wonder whether the frequency of performances is entirely a gauge of their popularity with audiences. Mounting productions of the most popular Wagner operas is considerably more demanding and expensive than it is for those of Verdi and Mozart. I suspect that Verdi and Mozart may be performed more frequently not just because audiences predictably like them, but also because they are easier for opera companies.