Motus Mentis

It appears that the linked video in our recent post Is This A Great Civilization, Or What? wasn’t working for some readers. I’ve since found it on YouTube, and updated the link.

I’ve twice mentioned my mother-in-law, Lily Renée Phillips, in these pages — first here, a few years back, and then again just a few months ago, when an article about her appeared in Newsweek.

Now, fittingly, she has herself appeared in a panel of a syndicated comic strip, which was found and sent our way today by my old friend, noted Sacramento lawyer Jess Kaplan. Here.

Update: I must add that the depiction is rather an unsatisfactory one: it describes Lily as having had a “wealthy” upbringing, which is certainly an exaggeration, and shows her as a rather sour-faced old woman, rather than as the striking beauty she was.

Here’s an amusing distraction: someone has noticed, in a clip from Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 movie The Circus, what appears to be a woman talking on a cell phone.

Less amusing, for those of us of a certain age: that the newswoman relating the story seems not to know who “Charlie Chapman” is.

Here.

We’ve been hearing for quite some time now that the stupendous haymaker awaiting the Democrats next week has nothing to do with amply justified outrage over their policies, tactics, and sneering unconcern for public opinion and the consent of the governed, but is simply the unfortunate result of how difficult it has been for them to get their “message” out to what Katie Couric recently called America’s “great unwashed middle”.

Mr. Obama has patiently explained to us that he and his selfless subordinates have been “more concerned with getting the policy right than getting the politics right”. He has patted us kindly on the head, reassuring us that of course he understands that simple folks like us get really scared when bad things happen, and that when we do, it’s just too hard for us to comprehend all those terribly difficult things — “facts” and “reason” and all that other other grown-up stuff — that He and the rest of the Good Guys have had to carry in their heads while they’ve been implementing enlightened reforms and improvements on our behalf.

James Taranto summed it all up nicely in today’s newsletter:

The Democrats’ message, in short, is that the Democrats are really lousy at delivering a convincing message. Since nobody finds this message convincing, it has a certain surface plausibility. But “We’re really lousy at delivering a message” is a lousy message–so the problem actually is one of substance, not delivery.

I’ve long argued that we ought to legalize marijuana — for several very good reasons, each of which would, I think, be compelling in its own right.

First of all, legalization would be a heavy, if not mortal, blow to the black-market economy that supports the drug gangs that have made Mexico an earthly hell of violent anarchy.

Second, it would in a stroke eliminate an entire criminal class here in America, an enormous population of otherwise upright citizens whose respect for our public institutions is necessarily eroded by these idiotic laws. In doing so it would also greatly ease the burden upon the criminal-justice infrastructure.

Third, it is an overreaching intrusion of the government into personal liberty to prohibit the recreational and medical use of this mildly psychoactive plant (whose ill effects, both socially and physiologically, are surely far less pervasively destructive than alcohol’s).

Fourth, legalization would turn an enormous governmental expenditure — the exorbitant cost of enforcing marijuana laws, and of prosecuting and incarcerating those who are arrested — into a hugely profitable new segment of the nation’s economic base.

With regard to that last, it seems that California’s reefer industry is already making a lot more money than the Golden State’s wineries do. Story here.

Satoshi Kanazawa, writing at Psychology Today, discusses an interesting scientific finding, namely that intelligent people drink more alcohol.

Over at Mangan’s today there is an engaging discussion about his essay. Dennis’s commenter Pat Hannagan takes issue with Kanazawa’s assumption about the correct order of precedence as regards beer-making and agriculture:

Kanazawa says:

The production of beer, which relies on a large amount of grain, and that of wine, which similarly requires a large amount of grapes, could not have taken place before the advent of agriculture around 8,000 BC and the consequent agricultural surplus.

This is a common error in our thinking. The theory goes 1) there was an agricultural revolution 2) things arose out of that revolution, like beer production.

The truth is the opposite as follows: 1) man discovered beer (should be a worldwide national holidays for that great event), 2) in order to produce beer the agricultural revolution was the consequence.

A worldwide holiday hardly seems sufficient, but yes, it would be a start.

Mr. Hannagan continues:

In another context, as Lee Harris notes, “Intellectuals tend to forget that ethical ideals do not pop up out of the human head but first manifest themselves in practice.” Harris’ example is that of the modern notion that Adam Smith “invented” capitalism whereas, what happened was that when Smith discussed the manufacture of pins, in The Wealth of Nations, “he is delineating the essential component of an actual process that had evolved as a way of making more pins in the same amount of time.”

So, just as Smith did not invent capitalism, but rather he noticed it about him and wrote about it (rather well of course), the agricultural revolution did not invent beer production, but was as a result of beer production.

From beer comes all Western civilisation. Mock it, deride it at your detriment, for it is the root of all we have achieved. Beer makes, and made, us human!

As Oz Clarke describes it, in his and James May’s excellent series which I highly recommend Oz & James Drink To Britain (you can watch it here on YouTube):

That, means, that people actually started living in places, in communities, not because they wanted to do things like having houses and things but because they wanted…to brew…beer. And once they were in communities they then wrote poetry, and symphonies, and invented the steam engine and started going on caravan holidays. That! …is civilisation, and the reason for civilisation is because we wanted…to drink…beer!

True or false, it’s as good a creation myth as you could ask for.

It’s been a busy couple of days, and I haven’t had much of the solitary time that brooding and writing requires. Today, for example, we spent gallivanting around the city, and at one point we found ourselves harborside in the out-of-the way Brooklyn neighborhood known as Red Hook.

The weather was splendid, and we took a little stroll along the waterfront. There appeared in the harbor a truly colossal cruise-ship, the biggest I’ve ever seen. I snapped a photo of it. I have no idea what ship it is, or where it was going. Here it is:

Not much of a post, but it’s the best I can do for today.

Poking around in the news this evening, I saw that UFOlogist Robert Hastings had held a news conference today with a number of retired Air Force servicemen. The panel claimed, in no uncertain terms, that they had had first-hand close encounters with strange flying machines at various nuclear-weapons sites, that they had been ordered to keep mum about it, and that in their minds there was simply no question that these vessels were of otherworldly origin.

I’m generally very skeptical indeed about the entire spectrum of paranormal claims, from spoon-bending to reincarnation to Supreme Beings, but I have always felt that out of the whole lot, the possibility that there are indeed ETs buzzing around seems easily the least far-fetched. That there is other life “out there” somewhere is, I’d say, almost a statistical certainty, and the only solid argument I know of for thinking that UFO claims are all balderdash is the technical challenge of navigating astronomical distances in a commuter-friendly fashion.

I realize, of course, that there are very substantial Einsteinian objections to the idea of faster-than-light travel, and I understand them well enough to admit that I haven’t the slightest notion of what a possible usable loophole might be — but given that much that was once “obviously impossible” is mundane today, I’m reluctant to declare extraterrestrial visitation an obvious impossibility solely on the basis of this technical limitation, however insurmountable it may seem at our current level of scientific and technological advancement. (After all, the Droid smartphone I just bought works on principles that were utterly undreamt-of until very recently, and not so long ago it would have seemed like sorcerer’s magic.)

Moreover, although I’ve never had any convincing experiences of my own along these lines, I do know people who have — and they are people I know well, whose veracity I have no reason to doubt; they were ordinary visual experiences, made extraordinary only by their content. And recently, though I won’t go into any details about this, I’ve also been introduced to certain parties who had what one might call a “special connection” to some of the hush-hush government research that took place in the years after WWII.

So all in all, I really don’t know quite what to say about all this; it’s nagged at me all my life. I’m well aware that this is a topic that is catnip to kooks and oddballs (indeed, as Woody Allen has pointed out, some UFO “witnesses”, when pressed, will admit to being members of both groups). I realize also that there never was more fertile soil for attention-grabbing hoaxes and paranoid (or wishful) self-delusion. And maybe I’ve just been reading too much Charles Fort. But at this point I have to say that if I had to place a bet, I’d wager that at least some of these sightings are genuine. (There, I said it.)

Anyway, here’s a CNN clip of today’s press conference. We report, you decide.

I’m curious, though: there are a lot of smart, thoughtful people who visit this blog. What do you think?

We’ve been off the air for a couple of days, due to workplace emergencies and, last night, a concert by the British prog-rock band Porcupine Tree at Radio City Music Hall.

The concert was fabulous: the band were in mid-season form, and Gavin Harrison’s mind-boggling performance was worth the price of admission all by itself.

The workplace emergencies I could have done without.