Now I spent a lot of time reading Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and many scholastic thinkers, and I’ve learned a lot from them, but it’s remarkable to hear someone quote from them as if there were no, um, advances in knowledge about psychology, sexuality, or other matters over the past 800 years or so. (“The only intelligible end of the reproductive organ is reproduction, and insofar as the organ is utilized toward that end, it is a rational human act, a free act, an act of the free will, the rational appetite. Insofar as the sexual organ is utilized for instrumental reasons, it’s not an intelligible act, but rather a purely animalistic act.” Um, right. The part on the extraction of the intelligible species would have gotten an “A” in a history of philosophy class, or at least a “B,” but the study of perception and thought has come a long way since St. Thomas’s wonderful “On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists.”)

Yours truly in today’s Washington Post: “Plaintiff in handgun case is suing D.C. for right carry firearms in public”

It was a good chance to head out to the shooting range in Virginia!

I sometimes counsel people to be sure not to use work email for personal use, as well. Email accounts provided by your employer are the employer’s property and should not be abused; in addition, the contents are the property of your employer, as well, so if you don’t want love notes to be owned by someone else, don’t send them from your work email address.

On my way back from the gym….

Taken with my handy new iPhone…

Chait’s Response to the criticism offered below.

And a Little More: Now We Know What Real Humor Is….Or at Least Real Jokes

An old friend, Veronique de Rugy, has been slimed for her defense of some fundamental moral principles. I’ve known her for at least 19 years, since we organized the first English-language IES-Europe seminars (modeled on the IHS seminars in the US, which I had organized for some years before) in Szirak (Hungary) and Dalarö (Sweden). (I also stayed in her flat when she would leave Paris for weekends during the hottest Paris summer since Charlemagne; that was in 1995, and I was living in a one-room garret at 35 avenue Mac-Mahon near the Etoile. The heat was suffocating, even at night, and there was no running water, other than a tap in the hallway, so I would go to her place on those weekends when she visited her family to immerse myself in cold baths to survive the heat.) But I digress.

Vero recently criticized a proposal by Rep. Barney Frank for a special tax on high compensation and concluded “This anti-capitalist and anti-wealth mentality is scary and very anti-American.” (I suspect that what Vero was searching for was “un-American,” but you’ll understand why that may not have come to her as quickly as it might to some.) That did not sit well with two lefty bloggers. Jonathan Chait thought it clever to respond, “Hey, you know what else is anti-American? Being named ‘Veronique de Rugy.’” How very sophisticated. But, not to be outdone, Matthew Yglesias added some icing to the cake,

Veronique de Rugy is So Anti-American That She’s Not Even an American!

Jon Chait and I both likes it when Barney Frank dismissed concerns that a bank tax would drive talent out of the industry by quipping “I don’t know where people would go for comparable salaries, I guess perhaps they could star in major motion pictures.”

Veronique de Rugy begs to differ, saying “This anti-capitalist and anti-wealth mentality is scary and very anti-American.” Chait retorts “Hey, you know what else is anti-American? Being named ‘Veronique de Rugy.’”

My Googling has, however, revealed something even more disturbing — Veronique de Rugy is literally not an American. She’s French. She holds a PhD from the University of Paris-Sorbonne and is the author of an un-American book with the suspiciously French title Action ou Taxation. It’s true that she agreed to betray her native land by making this France-bashing video, but that doesn’t change the basic facts. Barney Frank is as American as an actual American.

Now, let’s unpack this. On the one hand, Chait and Yglesias just might think that people who are not from America should shut up, in which case they’re idiots. Or maybe they’re trying to be ironic, in which case they’re idiots. Or, if that’s too harsh, either they’re dim, or they’re dim.

Option one:

Yglesias and Chait are idiots (or just dim). They think that mocking people for unusual names is funny, or that only authentic Americans (perhaps native-born, so I don’t qualify, either, or citizens, or whatever) can or should ever make statements about what it is to be an American. That would qualify them as knuckle dragging neanderthals, that is, as idiots.

However, it’s worth considering whether Chait and Yglesias are attempting to be ironic. (I am going to be very careful here, as I recently criticized two dunderheads for their failure to understand the use of irony by a colleague).

So, Option Two:

Chait and Yglesias are trying to turn the tables on those who charge that X or Y is “un-American” (or “anti-American,” in Vero’s phrasing) by returning the favor. Ha ha, some may think. How clever. Yet, upon reflection, it would seem that, if that is their intent, they are too dim to understand the difference between A) calling, say, unequal treatment by the law “un-American” for violating the Constitution and the best core principles of the American tradition, and B) calling the serving of “saucisses et choucroute” “un-American,” in contrast to, say, “hot dogs and sauerkraut” [note the double irony, guys]. Vero criticized special laws punishing people for high incomes as un-American, in the way that one might call censorship “un-American” (Think! Think! The First Amendment is an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America); she did not remark that Hindus, or Catholics, or Scientologists, or sauerkraut are un-American, or use the term in any of the other ways in which the epithet “un-American” is slung around by knuckle-draggers, who confuse “America” with cuisine, or religion, or other inessential matters, rather than with principles of government, of liberty, and of justice.

Or maybe they’ve just put their feet in their big mouths and owe Veronique an apology. I doubt it would erase the embarrassment they should feel, but it would be the decent, French thing to do.

P.S. A note I got from Vero this afternoon: “Thanks also for correction my English. My french brain can’t totally get the difference between Anti and un- american but I can see that it was a mistake. Oh well.” I don’t see them as having any substantive distinction relevant to this smear of her. “UnAmerican” is what she was searching for, but “anti-American” is merely a matter of context; it’s usually used in the context of foreign activities (“anti-American riots,” for example), whereas the domestic context (which is obviously the context for Vero’s remarks about tax policies) would normally require “unAmerican.” In any case, the smear of her for being French and having a French name is disgusting. And the nativist comments from the defenders of Chait and Yglesias support my point. They are disgusting.

UPDATE: It turns out that Mr. Chait is guilty of accusing advocates of tax cuts of being “deeply unpatriotic” after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As usual, he could not wrap his mind around the idea that any actual taxpayers favor cutting their taxes, so he directed all his bile toward “K Street,” apparently unaware that normally “K Street” refers to DC lobbyists, who normally have their hands out for more subsidies. But here’s what Mr. “How Dare You Call Barney Frank’s Policy Positions UnAmerican” Chait wrote about advocates of tax cuts in The New Republic: “There is something deeply unpatriotic about K Street’s rush to turn the tragedy into quick profit.” Now we get it, Mr. Chait. People who want to limit government are “unpatriotic,” but referring to “the mentality” of punitive taxation (and that is the most appropriate term for Barney Frank’s proposal) as “scary and anti-American” is cause for mocking the name of the “Veronique de Rugy.” I suspect there would have been tears if someone had responded to his smear by mocking the name of “Chait.” (Some might say a foreign name like that doesn’t really sound very patriotic to them!) Grow up, little Jonathan.

Updates here and here.

I took off a few hours from my work today for something a little different. I went out to the Blue Ridge Arsenal shooting range today with a reporter from the Washington Post for some practice. He’s writing a story on the “right to carry” case in the District of Columbia (He had written a story earlier on the difficulties of obtaining a firearm legally in the District: “Get a Gun in D.C. — Do You Feel Lucky?: Not Just Strict Rules Test Your Decision“)

I let him shoot two of my firearms: the .38 caliber Smith & Wesson handgun that was the basis for my involvement in the initial lawsuit against the gun ban and then the 9mm Glock 26 that is the foundation of my involvement in the current case. He rented a .38 and was loaned another by a manager. It was good to get back on the range, not to mention to be able to buy some ammunition.

I admit it. I have a problem with killing living, fearing, perceiving, even thinking and loving things. They are delicious, but …. I don’t like killing them for food. (Or for sport or other reasons, for that matter. It’s the killing I’m not keen on.) Fortunately, capitalism is solving my problem. There are reports of “vat-grown meat,” which I heartily endorse. And the other day I went to Chipotle, which serves tasty food, especially — I’m a bit ashamed to admit it — really delicious pork (which was not raised in horrible concrete pens, but “naturally”). Lo and behold, they have a new vegetarian (technically, vegan) meat substitute, called “Garden Blend.” It was good!

I’m cutting down on my meat consumption. It’s not full ethical vegetarianism. I know that. But I figure I can eat well (and a little less expensively) if I cut down on eating the dead bodies of animals that were killed for me to feast on them. And the new “Garden Blend” from Chipotle makes it easier. Thank you, Chipotle! (Er, I already thanked you when I gave you the money for the burrito. So, instead, expect me back!)

I admit that I’m very sympathetic to ethical vegetarianism, but…I found this discussion quite amusing.

Hat Tip: PJ

I am not a big “New Year’s Resolution” person, but the first day of the new year does provide a punctuation in time, so why not?

I will endeavor to renew friendships that had grown cold.

I will endeavor to take actions to learn Russian. (I have tried, but find I never can find the time to sit down for an hour a day, and I have never had the chance to be in a Russian-speaking environment where I had to speak more than the simplest Russian to survive.)

I will endeavor to improve my literary German and my command of German vocabulary and more complex grammatical forms and expressions.

I will try to work harder on behalf of the cause of liberty.

For the first, I have contacted a few people. For the second, I have fired up the Rosetta Stone and resolved to find time every day for that and for grammar and vocabulary drills. For the third, I bought during a recent stopover in Germany a number of novels from Herta Müller and have started Atemschaukel, and have recently read a few more short essays by Robert Musil, whose German is especially rich and challenging and whose ideas I believe to be important. (I need to improve my ready command of German vocabulary and to be challenged to think at the same time.) For the fourth, I am working to sketch out my schedule for the year and to think more carefully about how to work with the resources available to me and to increase both the amount of those resources and the effectiveness with which my colleagues and I can deploy them. (Today I have been working on reports on meetings I had for our libertarian friends in Afghanistan and on some important human rights cases in the Middle East, including Kareem and Ali Hussein Sibat.)

I have experienced it myself….. (Wolly used to be a fierce hunter, who would track down and kill — much to my relief — mosquitos, which she especially hated. Tiggy is more mouse-oriented.)

Hat Tip: Mike

Russia’s new code-breaking game

Not as physically challenging as Parkour, mind you, but mentally challenging in interesting ways:

Wollstonecraft (“Wolly”) Palmer in a Chat Chambre (she speaks French)

for economically illiterate advocates of monarchy: “Turks mourn relative of Ottoman sultan”

Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, from Osman I to Mehmed V

BBC: “Denmark pulls ‘promiscuous’ video”

Critics says the video implied that along with traditional tourism, Denmark was a place to go to have unprotected sex with strangers, with one Danish newspaper, Ekstra Bladet, labelling it “grotesque” and a “waste of tax payers money”.

Um, right.

“No More Marches on DC”

Is it possible to be more transparent?

Note: The Post Magically Disappeared! Here’s the screen shot (click to enlarge to readable size):

So “the purpose” of the organizers of last Saturday’s march (disclosure: I neither organized nor attended it) was “to dissipate energy, and fool people into thinking that their time and money have accomplished something, as the regime laughs up its sleeve.” Ohhh-kaaay….

CNN: “Muslim teen fears for life after changing religion”

Rifqa Bary, 17, ran away from her family in Columbus, Ohio, in July and took refuge …. The teenager claims her father added, “I will kill you!”

….

Although Mohamed Bary said he did not expect his daughter to run away, Rifqa Bary was placed in foster care by an Orlando judge in August while the Florida Department of Children and Family investigated the threat allegations against the parents.

The allegations are certainly serious and one would not want to run the risk that they are true and she would be harmed (note: not all Muslims believe in punishing “apostates”), but why on earth does a 17-year-old need to be placed in foster care? Some reasonable age of emancipation from parental control is appropriate, but…. 18??? Why not let her live where she wants? (I am in Austria at the moment, where the voting age is 16.)

Jason Talley interviewed me recently for his MotorHomeDiaries.com project. It was fun! (I was wearing a bit of Tracht that day.)

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has nnounced “Human Achievement Hour” to coincide with “Earth Hour”

Erich Honecker

Berliner Morgenpost: “Verlassene DDR-Wohnung in Leipzig entdeckt”

BBC: “Untouched East Germany flat found”

Ah, for the DDR, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the German Democratic Republic…I have…such fond memories. Of being followed by secret police when walking through Berlin. Of low quality dreck for sale in dusty stores. Of spending my worthless DDR Marks on the most expensive meal I could find (on Unter den Linden), during which, upon biting into a large stone (not a cherry stone, but a stone) in the mousse, I showed it to the waitress, who noted, “Hmmph.. a stone…how interesting!” and marched off. Of “medicine” for a sore throat that was apparently manufactured for a giraffe and caused me to go so numb I feared I would swallow my tongue. Of cheap shabbiness. Of buildings that had not been painted since the war and still bore the peeling paint and posters from the National Socialists. Good bye, DDR. And good riddance.

(See “Good Bye Lenin!” sometime.)