Tasty Tidbits 10/4/11

1. “Inchoate thoughts.”
2. iPhone good news, bad news.
3. A new “humanitarian theory” of punishment.
4. Rick Perry’s hunting camp again.
5. God, The Invisible Hand?
6. Rare photo.
7. Dept. of Yum

1

NPR’s All Things Considered Monday included an interview of two spokesmen for Occupy Wall Street.

They’re angry. After occupying Wall Street for a while and chatting, they think they see a common theme: they’re all angry – angry that 1% controls 50% of the money and has too much political influence.

But before that, and still, they have a list of several dozen “facts” (not demands) that they think were “beautifully written,” including poison food and mistreatment of “non-human animals.” NPR asked if maybe they needed something more than “inchoate thoughts.” I’m not sure they understood the question.

James Howard Kunstler, who’s right about a lot of things, would understand the question but has no patience with those who think the OWS soup lacks a theme. He thinks that’s a pretty dumb thing for a boomer, of all people, to say:

It is cosmically ironic, of course, that the same generation of Boomer-hippies that ran in the streets and marched through the maze of service roads around the Pentagon has become a new “establishment” more obtuse, feckless, greedy and mendacious than the one they battled with over 40 years ago.

By the end of his rant, you realize that he doesn’t really disagree at all, but maybe is ticked that the boomers aren’t out there with OWS.

The long-awaited “Progressive Tea Party” this ain’t. Darned shame.

2

Good news: Apple apparently is going to unveil the iPhone 5 today. My iPhone 3 is really laboring any more and the battery life is almost nill. I have trouble remembering life without a smart phone, and since I’ve got many gigiabytes of (legal) mp3s in iTunes, iPhone is awfully handy.

Bad new: It may be a Sprint exclusive for a while, as Apple squeezed beaucoups bucks out of Spring for something. I’m kind of married to AT&T now, for various reasons nor worth going into.

Here, here, & here.

3

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, now argues in a recent article in The Atlantic, “The Brain on Trial,” for a “more biologically informed jurisprudence.” Specifically, Eagleman argues that a “forward-thinking legal system” will respond to neuroscience’s increasing capacity to demonstrate the illusory nature of free will by developing “customized rehabilitation” for criminal behavior.

I’m glad someone wrote a response to the Eagleman article in the Atlantic. I, too, almost immediately thought of C.S. Lewis’ essay on The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment:

Lewis rightly pointed out that as humane as “mending” a criminal may sound, such “sentences,” when issued by “the expert ‘penologist’ (let barbarous things have barbarous names)” and enforced by the power of the state, tend ultimately to dehumanize. Lewis explains, “[t]o be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” More ominously, Lewis observed that the threat intensifies when the state is corrupt. “For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing,” writes Lewis, “it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as crime; and compulsorily cured.”

I guess every generation must have it scientistic proponents of “we understand crime now, and can treat it rather than punishing it.”

4

I commented yesterday on some gotcha politics played up by the press. I saw in the the New York Times. Rod Dreher saw it in the Washington Post, and reacted about as I did, but at greater length and with the eloquence befitting a professional writer.

Think about that: the top story on the web site of the daily newspaper in the capital city of the most powerful nation on earth is about the attempts of a fading Republican presidential candidate to deal with a story about the use of the word “nigger” in the name of a hunting camp Perry and his father leased years ago. To be sure, it is offensive, and I am no how, no way a supporter of Rick Perry. I would not be sad to see his campaign peter out.

But it’s more than a little mind-boggling to contemplate that this kind of penny-ante stupidity and racial insensitivity is deemed newsworthy enough by the Post to put on the front page. A couple of days ago, Perry called for the U.S. military to invade, in effect, Mexico to take on drug cartels. Hello! That’s huge … It is far, far more significant that a man who still has a decent chance at being the GOP nominee thinks it would be a good idea to send American troops into Mexico to conduct crimefighting operations than that this man used to hunt at a deer camp with a racially insensitive name (a middle-aged white Republican from small-town West Texas as lacking the racial sensitivities of the Washington Post newsroom — wow, who could have imagined that?).

5

Here’s a strange twist: according to new social science research from Baylor University, the more working-class, less educated, and and religious you are (that is to say, the more you fit into the natural populist class), the less likely you are to want the government to get involved in the economic system to level the playing field. Clearly, American populism circa 2011 doesn’t look like American populism in the era of the robber barons … Today, Baylor researchers find that many of the most devout Christians come down on the opposite side of the economic argument [from William Jennings Bryant], not in spite of their faith, but because of it. Why? Because they tend to believe that God is in direct control of economic events, and will reward them financially for being faithful. In other words, Adam Smith’s invisible hand belongs to the Lord.

Rod Dreher again. (Boy, am I glad he’s back!)

6

This may not be as rare as the north pole sunset I posted a few days ago, but a friend is camping up at Sleeping Bear Dunes and got this shot of an albino red squirrel:

7

Fig, carmelized onion and bacon jam.  I haven’t made it, but boy, I get hungry just imagining it. (HT, of all things, Volokh Conspiracy)

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Bon appetit!

(To save time on preparing this blog, which some days consumes way too much time, I’ve asked some guy named @RogerWmBennett to Tweet a lot of links about which I have little or nothing to add. Check the “Latest Tweets” in the upper right pane or follow him on Twitter.)