The Court of Peeves, Crotchets & Irks

Its not often that reading a supreme court verdict has me ROTFL. Observe as Scalia lays the smackdown in the recent gun-rights case, DC v Heller:

The phrase “bear Arms” also had at the time of the founding an idiomatic meaning that was significantly different from its natural meaning: “to serve as a soldier, do military service, fight” or “to wage war”
…
Giving “bear Arms” its idiomatic meaning [as the dissenting justice do] would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war–an absurdity that no commentator has ever endorsed.
…
Worse still, the phrase “keep and bear Arms” would be incoherent. The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once: “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom. It would rather be like saying “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.

… happen to be elected officials? Find out.

(Hat tip: Barticles)

“Super Size Me” never really rose to the level of making sense—of course you will be unhealthy if you eat 10,000 calories per day without exercise. But the film’s smug crypto-paternalism annoyed me nonetheless, so I feel that the cosmos are back in balance after reading this news story of a man that lost 78 pound by eating only at McDonalds.

I was watching a History Channel special on the Hippies this weekend. It was mostly quite boring; good thing I had my reading. I looked up at one point to find the most unlikely “expert” to appear in such a show: NR Editor Richard Brookheiser. On second thought, being a member of the Pythagorean Brotherhood probably does qualify you to talk about hippies…

Back from an overseas trip with my less-pythagorean brotherhood, I finally have time to catch up on all the important things in my life, such as checking the Amtrak YTD financial performance. The results? It is still hemorrhaging money, as expected. But the future is not so bleak. The most noticeable bright spot is that the Northeast Corridor is quite consistently profitable. All told, the trains that run from DC to Boston had an operating profit of $183 million so far this year. When the hodgepodge of “state supported” (read: subsidized off the balance sheet) routes in the rest of the country are taken into account, the net operating profit drops to a respectable $120 million.

The disgrace is the “long distance” (a.k.a. “retarded”) routes, which managed ring up a bill of, get ready, $247 million. Pause. Breathe. Has there ever been a more absurd government subsidy? Okay, there have probably been a lot. But this is pretty bad. Keep in mind too that this is an operating loss, which means that it is simply the ticket sales, minus labor, maintenance, and station upkeep. No interest and no depreciation is included—so its not as though the loss is so huge because the number is saddled with debt from loans used to buy the equipment. In short, the government could afford to pay someone $200 million to take the trains from them, and still come out ahead.

The top offending route is the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles, which, per passenger, per mile, lost 54 cents. That means one person making the entire 1,897 mile journey sends Washington a bill of $1030 (!)

Seriously, y’all. Lets pull the plug. The Northeast Corridor trains arn’t going anywhere, reguardless of whether Amtrak is privatized. States can make up their own mind about how much they want to spend improve their own rails (my guess is that Virginia will spend more than Arizona). And private companies like this one can take over to provide luxury land-cruises without requiring subsidies from Uncle Sam.

A wise man* once said “If Google does something, you can bet that they figured out a way to do it 10,000 times better than anyone else.” Its latest coup: LayOut and SketchUp. My boss asked me yesterday to design and draw a site plan for a potential tenant. Eight hours later, I had produced a series of beautifully rendered, 3D drawings, complete with a professional-looking border with our company logo. I taught myself to use AutoCad over the course of several months and two summers with an architect; I taught myself how to use SketchUp in a few hours. AutoCad costs thousands of dollars; SketchUp Pro costs $49. There is no longer any reason for anyone to pay an architect to do anything besides make construction documents.

I eagerly await the day when I can embrace Google as my master (Google Earth Ruler Edition maybe?).

*Geoff Calkins

The Richmond Free Press is not too happy with Ukrop’s closing its Harrison Street store near downtown. According to a recent editorial on the subject, the Ukrop brothers “moaned and groaned” that the store had not turned a profit in five years. Wow. Those whiny Ukrops, always insisting on running stores that don’t bleed money. But wait! The charges get worse:

The Ukrops, consistent with their political proclivities, cancelled advertising with the Free Press and ramped up advertising spending in the white-oriented, conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch while, at the same time, even reserving in-store newspaper distribution space for white owned newspapers.

Normally, race-baiters go through a little more trouble to be discreet about reaping personal profits from bullying rhetoric. I sure wish a business refusing to buy things from me could, as a matter of course, “raise questions about the level of the company’s civic virute.”

That said, it is a shame that a downtown(-ish) Ukrop’s couldn’t support itself, because the ability to support a grocery store is the sign of a healthy, attractive neighborhood. However, Ukrop’s recognizing that its model wasn’t working might leave room for other, more innovative approaches. At the very least, it will make a valuable parcel of land available for a more appropriate use.

My girlfriend has a copy of After Virtue lying around, and I’ve been re-reading parts of it two years after I finished it for the first time. MacIntyre spends a long time drilling home the point that The Enlightenment Project Had To Fail. He deliberately obscures the reasons why The Enlightenment Project Had To Happen. For the un-initiated, “The Enlightenment Project” is the one of finding a rational basis for morality—a rationally compelling answer to the question “why should I be moral.” According to MacIntyre:

The [pre-enlightenment] moral scheme that forms the background to their [Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, etc.] thought had, as we have seen, a structure which required three elements: untutored human nature, man-as-he-could-be-if he-realized-his-telos, and the moral precepts which enable him to pass from one state to the other.

…

But the joint effect of the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology and the scientific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism was to eliminate any notion of man-as-he-could-be-if he-realized-his-telos.

…

[Enlightenment thinkers] inherited incoherent fragments of a once coherent scheme of thought and action and, since they did not recognize their own peculiar historical and cultural situation, they could not recognize the impossible and quixotic character of their self-appointed task.

The problem is that the concept of a human telos as a grounding for morality—a purpose that simply exists the same way objects do—was never coherent in the first place. Good-for-me is just as obscure and mysterious a concept as good-in-general (which is, in a sentence, the reason I am no longer a Randroid). A telos is my telos because I find it (or, if I understood it correctly, would find it) a compelling reason to act. If the telos just exists out there in the ether, there is no explanation of how this is possible. It must be by virtue of connection to something in my nature. The Enlightenment project is an attempt to solve this problem. MacIntyre’s historicism is an attempt to conceal it.

The Washington Post did an experiment to see what would happen if a world-renowned virtuoso played some of the most beautiful music ever written on one of the finest violins ever made … in the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station at rush hour. Calvin Myint was one of the people who walked by Joshua Bell that day on his way to work. When asked about it hours later, he had no memory that there was even a violinist in the station. He was listening to his iPod.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was “Just Like Heaven,” by the British rock band The Cure. It’s a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It’s about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can’t express the depth of his feeling for her until she’s gone. It’s about failing to see the beauty of what’s plainly in front of your eyes.

Hat tip to my brother for sending this my way.

I think Roy West, a former Mayor of Richmond, would fit in quite well with the Comparative Literature department here at Yale.