Gathering Goat Eggs

We went to see Revenge of the Sith last night.

What I liked: The Narnia trailer. Absolutely the best three minutes of the evening. The Fantastic Four trailer is pretty good too, although I am probably unduly affected by the presence of Horatio Hornblower.

What I disliked: pretty much everything else.

I have a friend who actually writes movie reviews for money, so I'm a little intimidated by my own inadequacy here. Isn't This film raises more questions than it answers one of those chin-wag phrases professional reviewers sling about? OK, then, this film raised more questions for me than it answered:

(I suppose I should issue a spoiler alert, but if you're planning on wasting two hours of your finite time on Earth watching this piece of garbage, you're contemplating more spoilage than I'm passing on.)

1. Does Padme tip her hairdresser more if there's elaborate hardware involved, or is it all piecework?



2. Why does a civilization that has perfected faster than light transport have no telephones? Sure, the Jedi have that 3-D videoconferencing thing, but if you're an ordinary human you have to fly a spaceship to another planet and land it next to a lake of fire just to check up on your husband? C'mon.



3. Why does a civilization that has the medical technology to construct Darth Vader know nothing about obstetric anaesthesia?



4. Why are newborn babies in movies always at least three months old?



5. How does Leia get to be a princess? Jimmy Smits didn't seem to be the king of anything. Oh, sure, he's the King of the Sultry Smouldering Latin Eyes, but I don't think that's a hereditary title.

I have many more questions, but they have less to do with the movie itself than with the psychological mechanism by which having more and more money makes you more and more stupid. Psychiatrists should probably name the syndrome Lucasitis.

The most irritating thing about this movie is that it could have been good. The plot contains an important idea: that were are attracted to evil not because we want to do evil, but because we mistakenly see evil acts as paths to things we desire for good, legitimate reasons. But the movie fails utterly to develop this completely sound motivation, and instead throws in a bunch of stuff about Anakin's lust for power and anger management problems that the scriptwriter doesn't bother to develop anywhere and which are consequently unconvincing to the audience. You're supposed to come away thinking, "My Dear God -- in Anakin's shoes I might have done the same thing!" Instead, Anakin seems like a nice kid who turns into a complete creep for no reason at all.

The second most irritating thing about the movie was watching Ewan MacGregor, an actor whom I like and admire, visibly squirming from embarrassment at some of the tripe lines that Lucas forced him to utter.

To all of my daughters' friends, whose parents are ragging them because they want to grow up to be famous musicians:

Just tell them it might lead to a career in counterterrorism.

I don't know about you all, but I'm dialing up Showbiz Kids on iTunes and singing along at the top of my starting my second glass of wine voice.

(Link via Little Green Footballs.)

Unless you've lived in the upper Midwest, you probably won't find this "Newsweek investigative report" on the Iowa lutefisk riots all that funny. I laughed my butt off. The whole making fun of the MSM angle is icing.

The state of Arizona has been mad at the rest of the country for years, ever since the Border Patrol more or less successfully shut down the illegal immigration routes through California and Texas and all the action moved to the Arizona border towns. Arizonans believe, quite reasonably, that they are being forced to bear a high proportion of the costs of Mexican illegal immigration, and they perceive few benefits. (I would argue that the total benefits over time do outweigh the total costs, but will admit that being the locus of initial entry does front-load a disproportion of costs onto you.)

On the other hand, the rest of the country has a legitimate gripe about Arizona, too. They do, after all, insist on sending the biggest ego in the Western Hemisphere to Washington as their senator, where he's free to muck things up for the rest of us while he preens himself for another hopeless Presidental primary season.

I think I have a solution: Let's sell Arizona to Mexico. You don't see Iowans breaking down cattle fences to sneak into Minnesota, do you? And John McCain would fit in much more easily with the Mexican politocracy than he does here. As a bonus, we could use the proceeds of the sale to buy the Yukon Territory from Canada. Then we could drive to Alaska without having to figure out loonies and toonies.

Update: Oops. We'd still have to get through British Columbia somehow, wouldn't we. I guess we'll have to invade their province, kill their leaders, and convert them.

The number two external referrer for Gathering Goat Eggs is a Google search for satanic ex-nuns???

Twelve hits?!?!?

I have been informed, gently and with good humor, that my Anima posts have portrayed Cap'n John in an unflattering light. If they have done so it has been entirely unintentional. I really meant to highlight my own ill temper and inability to deal with adversity, not cast aspersions on the aptitude of any other crew members.

Mind you, even if I had made fun of the Skipper on purpose, I'd have to take back every word now. Because I've never seen such a slick piece of business as the way he backed that tub-beamed vessel into the barn on Saturday afternoon.

The weather's been kind of crummy here in the Mid-Atlantic: cooler than normal, rainy, windy. So when yesterday blossomed warm and sunny and mild, we decided to have dinner after the 7:30 p.m. Mass at Old St. Mary's at one of those little places east of the Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue, the ones that set out sidewalk tables when the weather's nice.

Fifteen years ago I worked just a block up the street, back in the days before Fred Smith had, through his hurricane-force personality, levered the Competitive Enterprise Institute into its respectable digs on Connecticut Ave. We had the second and third floors of a Civil-War era building with a bakery on the ground floor. The neighborhood was edgier then than it seems to be now; I forget what was on the corner but it sure wasn't a Starbucks. We chose a semi-forgettable Thai place, and would have had a decent but unremarkable meal, had we not been a few doors due west of The Poorhouse Bar, and its excitable patrons.

The ringleader seemed to be a big sandy-haired redneck in a cowboy hat and a Nats t-shirt. He and his pals had decreed that it was "National High Five Day" and were loudly demanding that everyone who walked past them on the sidewalk should give the party high-fives. Those who complied were cheered; those who did not were soundly booed. High Five Day? Where have these people been for the last 25 years, locked in a glass case in the Smithsonian American History museum next to Rerun's suspenders?

It's dumb, and a little obnoxious, but what the heck. It was also kind of amusing in a simpleminded way, at least until I noticed that all the louts were white and a lot of the people they were harassing the loudest were black and Asian. But then one of the supporting players, a pale and weedy type resembling a cross between John Denver and Steve Buscemi, followed one uncooperative mark up the sidewalk, yelling obscenities at the top of his lungs.

"Goddam M-----F-----!! Give me a f---ing High Five!!"
This was delivered within two feet of my ten year old daughter. He dropped half a dozen more F-bombs sotto voce on his way back to his table.

Now I'm not a pantywaist prude, and it's certainly not the first time Anne's heard That Word. There was even the time that Mommy, down in the barn, barked one out after she dropped a maul on her foot, and delivered a red-faced apology when she found she'd been overheard. It wasn't That Word in isolation that I found so offensive -- it was That Word used to harass a stranger on an otherwise quiet public street.

The little al fresco restaurant was really just an adjunct to a bar, through which we had to pass to get to the ladies' room. Being a bar, it was full of smoke. The DC City Council would like to change that, though. Citing the need to protect innocent bystanders from the effects of second-hand smoke, there have been attempts over the past couple of years to outright ban smoking in bars and restaurants in the District. No doubt they will be successful soon, and these venues will be Safe For The Children. I suspect if Carol Schwartz proposed a bill to make restaurants Safe for the Children by forbidding drunken yahoos from launching ballistic F-missiles over their tables, Adrian Fenty and Kathy Patterson would be all over Mark Plotkin's radio show on WTOP warning of the Death of Freedom As We Know It at the hands of anti-First Amendment Fascists. And really, I wouldn't support such a law myself, I suppose.

What I would like is for the law to grant me the right to whack foul-mouthed chowderheads with an umbrella or walking stick without fear of prosecution. Even in the city that bans all firearms, an armed society could be a polite society.

In back to back posts, Dale Price treats us to The Reason I Am Not A Traditionalist (Yet) and reports on the encouraging sign that his infant daughter has a holier aesthetic sense than 99.4% of church architects.

I've never been able to figure out exactly what one has to do or believe to be a Traditionalist. Tempermentally and aesthetically I am one, I believe. I get hives at guitar masses and if I could just keep it up for four verses, I could drown out I Am the Bread of Life by grinding my teeth and moaning. Not only that, I was an ATT for years before I was a Catholic. Even though I was an atheist, the beauty of Catholic churches, the solemnity of Her rituals, and above all the trancendent music, nipped at my heels. My knowledge and experience of all these things, though, was largely obtained outside the Catholic Church. While I had accompanied childhood friends to Mass in the mid 1960s, virtually all I thought I knew of the Catholic church came from movies and books. When I married John and we began attending Mass together, two years before I formally joined the Church, I was dumbfounded and bitterly disappointed by the reality of Catholic liturgy ca. 1992. Darn it, I didn't want it to look and sound just like the Methodist church I'd abandoned in 1974. I wanted it to look like Montgomery Clift's church in I Confess.

When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with the smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night there is the sound of a great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasize the stillness. There is another sound too, besides that of the quiet movements of the people from pew to confession to altar rail; there is the sliding of the shutters of the little window between you and the priest in his "box."

Some confessionals are large and roomy — plenty of space for the knees, and breathing space in the thick darkness that seems to pulse with your own heart. In some poor churches, many of the ledges are narrow and worn, so your knees almost slip off the kneeling bench, and your feet protrude outside the curtain which shields you from the others who are waiting. Some churches have netting, or screens, between you and priest and you can see the outline of his face inclined toward you, quiet, impersonal, patient. Some have a piece of material covering the screen, so you can seen nothing. Some priests leave their lights on in their boxes so they can read their breviaries between confessions. The light does not bother you if that piece of material is there so you cannot see or be seen, but if it is only a grating so that he can see your face, it is embarrassing and you do not go back to that priest again.

Those are the first two paragraphs of Dorothy Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness. My response to this bounces between grief and rage. She wrote these words in 1952; in forty years the American church had swept it away and replaced it with Reconciliation Rooms that look like the cubicles of secretaries employed by firms of only middling prosperity, where you are expected to sit in an orange upholstered chair face-to-face with a priest who will try to convince you that most of what you are confessing is not actual sin, and the rest can be atoned of by sitting on a park bench and thinking Happy Thoughts.

So I can see why Tradholes(tm) are bitter and crabbed. It's bad enough to find out you were too late to be surrounded by beauty along with good. To have it dismembered under your nose and watch the corpse carried out back to the dumpster would have been a bit much.

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned," is the way you begin. "I made my last confession a week ago, and since then..."

Properly, one should say the Confiteor, but the priest has no time for that, what with the long lines of penitents on a Saturday night, so you are supposed to say it ouside the confessional as you kneel in a pew, or as you stand in line with others.

"I have sinned. These are my sins." That is all your are supposed to tell; not the sins of others, or your own virtues, but only your ugly, gray, drab, monotonous sins.

Well, at least the crowds are no longer a problem. I'd have time to recite St. Patrick's Breastplate in the confessional were I so inclined.

Dogs can tell it's not bacon. They just don't care.

Yesterday afternoon I replaced the cabin panelling, which the previous owner had taken down and varnished. This sounds easy, but is in fact akin to assembling a 10 foot long three dimensional puzzle in a space with barely enough headroom for Gimli. I think it only reasonable that Cap'n John now promote me to carpenter's mate. I can't stand being tied with Anne at ship's boy. (Rachel gets to be first lieutenant solely on the basis of two weeks spent sailing Club 420s and X Boats on Lake Calhoun.)

What if the captain refuses? There must be Internet resources on how to stage a successful mutiny.

Update:
I think I need to get this essential pirate training tool.

Holy St. Brendan, on this your feast day, pray for me, a poor sailor.

I sensed the Disaster Probablility Meter was edging towards red even before it started pouring rain. Even before I saw that the sailboat was wedged into a backyard the size of a rottweiler's doghouse, accessed only by an ten foot alley lined with automobiles and mulch piles. Even before the trailer lights were diagnosed DOA. But by the time we'd successfully begged the neighbor to move his minivan, backed and edged the entire assemblage onto I-95, I'd vowed to be of good cheer and stow the griping.

Until we discovered we were going the wrong way on 95.

Then we tasted anew the delights of I-95 traffic jams, which are as a rock on shifting sands, even in the middle of Sunday afternoon. And then we missed the turnoff to 301, so we had to go all the way to Fredericksburg before we could head east. We did finally head east, ascended and descended the Nice Bridge (it's not really that nice a bridge, it's named after some Maryland bigwig named Nice) with the assistance of as many Hail Marys as a frazzled housewife can cram into three minutes, and eventually the Jeep, the trailer, the boat, and all of us were sittting in our own driveway.

And then my husband decided that the boat might roll if we left it in the driveway; we should tow it to the bottom of the hill by the barn. In the dark. After two inches of rain. We almost made it, in fact. If the neighbor's hedgerow had just been twenty feet inside his property line, there would have been no problem. I'm sure if we rent a Ford F350 we'll be able to move her to a more plausible dry dock. For now, Anima lies 90 degrees clockwise of her preferred destination, but she's sure not going to roll anywhere. Not with her trailer tongue dug into what was not quite the bottom of the hill, although John thought it was.

Anima is a Mystic 20 catboat, designed by Peter Legnos in 1974. Forty-eight Mystic 20's were built and sold from 1974 to 1981. She is hull number 25 and spent her early life in Connecticut, at one point being rechristened Catspaw II, an error of judgement we intend to put right.

You do not have to have the practised eye of a Wendell Berry groupie to detect that the 1951 IH Farmall C in the left of the picture has not moved in some time. It's been sitting there for two years because I'm too ignorant to rebuild the carburetor, too lazy to learn how, and too stubborn and cheap to pay someone else to do it. Just the person to restore a thirty year old sailboat that's been in dry dock for two years.

It was my intention to vary the agriculture as a path to Christ motifs that are the regular spinoff of my Hoosier hayseed upbringing with plying the waters as a path to Christ imagery, but I think it would be well to first let dissipate the blue clouds of blaspheming that erupted throughout yesterday.

So far so good. I had pound cake and blackberries for breakfast. (Somehow that makes me sound like a Flopsy Bunny.) We probably won't do anything very exciting today, since John's at work and after that he and Rachel have fencing. Tomorrow the girls and I are playing a seisun at the National Colonial Farm, and on Sunday we are driving to Richmond to pick up the sailboat John bought a couple of weeks ago. (No, it's not my birthday present. This is.) Plenty of opportunity for disasters on both days. It's probably good that today will be quiet.

Rereading my earlier post on immigration reform, it strikes me that I sound like a raving utilitarian, justifying an approximation of open borders by describing how useful it would be for Americans. I do believe all that: the studies of net costs of immigration are flawed, and the costs that are correctly identified are almost all a result of the immigrants' illegal status, not the fact that they are immigrants. (I can't imagine my normal readership is interested in reading me fisk George Borjas; the short version is that all the studies I have seen studying immigrants' effect on the labor market are static, and do nothing to take into account the increased economic activity their presence generates.) I think the debunking of the notion that immigration is an economic drain on the American economy is an important component of the immigration debate.

However, a moral approach to immigration reform cannot be based on utilitarian arguments. The moral reason we cannot continue in our current posture towards illegal immigration is that it is just simply wrong to treat people the way we treat illegal immigrants. We look the other way while they enter our country, depend upon them to do work that is hazardous, unpleasant, and dead-end, but we leave them open to exploitation by employers and landlords, make it impossible for them to advance out of menial work, herd them into crowded and dangerous apartments, and dangle the threat of deportation over their heads. We are offending against their human dignity when we do this. It is sinful and unjust and wrong.

There is one aspect of an open borders policy that does trouble me: the effect that it would have on the immigrants' countries of origin. It's clear that the people who do choose to immigrate are, on average, brighter, harder working, and more motivated than those who stay behind. This brain drain will hurt their home countries, and probably make it more difficult for these countries to attain the economic growth rates that would induce people to stay. However, Mexico in particular has had decades to fix its economic house, it hasn't happened, and I don't see any sign it will happen. It's not just that Mexico is poor and financially stagnant. The entire country is riddled with corruption, graft, and favoritism. It's not just that people can't earn a decent living in Mexico — if they do start to get ahead, and they're not lucky enough to be related to someone on the police force, it gets taken away from them through bribery and extortion.

Finally, I want to address the cultural argument. Many people say that a mass influx of Mexican and Central American immigrants would be harmful to American culture. Patrick Buchanan's Death of the West arguments are of this nature: whites will be outnumbered, they won't learn English, their culture is foreign and unAmerican. I try to run a family blog but honestly: what a load of bullshit. If the West is dying, it's because it's committing suicide. Her prosperous inhabitants have rejected life. White Americans women have not reproduced at replacement rates since 1971. The cultures of Mexico and Central America are Catholic, life-affirming, and pro-child. The WASP culture of North America shuns children. It's like the men of Gondor vs. the hobbits. I'm rooting for the hobbits.

Yesterday the USCCB announced a new campaign to encourage immigration reform.

This is one issue where I seem to be at odds with my usual political allies. The right-wing airwaves are full to overflowing these days with outrage and demands that all the illegals be rounded up and dumped back in Mexico. Chris Core has become such a crashing bore on this topic I won't turn on WMAL after 6 pm anymore. National Review is, regrettably, following the John O'Sullivan/Mark Krikorian "close the border crossing" policy. This is both infeasible and immoral.

I have always supported as close an approximation to open borders as could be accomplished. In the wake of the complete collaspe of the demographics of natural increase in this country, it's even more in our own economic interests to greatly increase legal immigration than it was in the past. I believe there should be essentially no obstacles to legal immigration other than criminal background and possibly some very narrow public health requirements.

I think it's now obvious, twenty years after Reagan's attempts at immigration reform, that there is no method consistent with our political will that will prevent people from coming to the United States or enable mass deportations of those already here. Not that I think keeping immigration low is a good policy, but it's time for the people who do think so to admit it won't happen in a society that is jealous of individual privacy and freedom of movement. Our only real choice is to let them in legally or turn a blind eye while they come in illegally. It's far better to know who's here than to have to guess. It's far better to make the incentives favor their cooperation with law enforcement and local authority, rather than creating a climate in fosters fear that every school official, traffic cop and and EMS technician is an unofficial agent of La Migra. (Note to self: Do they still call it La Migra? That phrase dates from my Texas days 25 years ago. The existence of the Michigan International Gay Rodeo Association plants some seeds of doubt.) I say regularize everyone who's already here and open the doors to anyone else who wants to come. Give them proper identification, do background checks, sure. But ditch the artifical quotas and bureaucratic hoop jumping.

It would be far less disruptive for the United States to follow its immigration path of least resistance than it would be for Europe. They may not speak much English, but at least they revere the Lady of Guadalupe. So what is the political obstacle to vastly increased legal immigration? It used to be unionized labor, but I don't think the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters are making this a big priority now. Is it really the conscious policy of some segments of the employer base in this country that they need to control their labor force by keeping them illegal, and thus vulnerable? If that's it, it's a sin and a shame on us all for allowing it to continue.

Update: Amy Welborn also covers. Her comments runneth over.

I have held back on blogging this for a couple of days. I'm a little uncomfortable about writing about people I have only met briefly. And I'm not sure I can say what I want to say without both violating the Fourth Commandment and sounding like a whiny little brat. But I've been thinking about it since the weekend, and I guess I'll go ahead.

This past Saturday it was my joy and honor to be present when a shiny, happy young man made his first Communion. I was invited to his parents' house afterwards, and met some of his extended family, including his grandparents. The wife was physically somewhat frail and confined to a wheelchair, but obviously a vibrant personality. The husband was, so far as I could tell, physically vigorous and energetic. I spent a long time sitting and chatting with them outside, and gradually became aware of the subtle ways in which he was constantly vigilant in his care of her. He didn't make any big fuss about it. He just anticipated what she needed or wanted, or listened as she casually mentioned one thing or another, and quietly got it for her.

I realize this probably sounds like something that is not even notice-worthy, much less blog-worthy. I suppose it wouldn't have meant much to me at all, had I not been raised in a household where a needy person having their needs gently and gracefully met was the last thing your experience would lead you to expect. I think I am finally coming to terms with the extent to which my family's psychopathology has infected the way I view virtually everything that happens, every human relationship, and even my relationship with God and the worldly vehicles of grace God has set down in my path where I cannot but trip over them. At the age of 47, I am still dumbfounded by common human decency when I see it happen.

And maybe that's not such a bad thing. I'm still thinking about the ordinary kindness that man showed his wife, and wondering how many times I've perplexed my own beloved husband by assuming, with no justification at all, that I could count on no such kindness from him. He is not naturally equipped to penetrate the clouds of self-doubt and insecurity that shade the heads of people like me, since his formative years were spent in the care of adults who were capable of giving their own offspring what they needed, rather than sucking all the energy out of everyone around them with their own sick compulsions. It is fortunate that his personality is equal parts patience, stoicism, and affability, or don't think he'd have made it this far, dragging me by the heels towards the sunlight every foot of the way.

So perhaps it's good that I still see ordinary goodness as a species of minor miracle. At least it makes me notice it.

Someone who thinks an economic analysis of the misequilibrium of carnal knowledge is the funniest thing she's read all week. Heads up, all you grumbling members of the dissentariat: you think it's grim when celibate old men in dresses lecture you about sex? Try an economist. When a commenter reduced the analysis to two exchange agents who are both simultaneously monopsonists and monopolists, and then admitted he could no longer follow his own argument, I was blowing diet Pepsi out my nose.

I would prefer that no one use my comments box to point me to information about celibate old male economists in dresses. And yes, I know the story about Deirdre McCloskey.

I do my share of griping about physicians, but this time the MD in my crosshairs is the state of Maryland.

Gasoline prices in Maryland are not currently at an all time high; that milestone seems to have been passed on April 9, when the statewide average price of a gallon of regular unleaded hit $2.26. It's currently $2.19. Still, the gasoline prices here are very high by recent historical standards, and it's bound to be hurting the agriculture and marine industries in rural Southern Maryland particularly hard. So what does the state of Maryland do about it? It orders gas stations in St. Mary's County selling regular for $1.999/gallon to raise their prices.

These "dumping" laws are always justified as protection for "Mom and Pop." I'm sorry, this is just stupid. Gasoline is a commodity. If Mom and Pop can't pump it for the same price as Sheetz and Wawa they should find some other way to draw customers in — like the quaint little station close to me that decided to offer to pump the gas for their customers! What a novel concept! Failing that, they need to get out of the gasoline business. For that matter, Sheetz, Wawa, and BJs are consistently lower than the big boys (BP, Shell and Texaco around here) by at least a nickel, but I don't see Shell hurting.

This sort of regulation is particularly stupid when it forces sellers to set prices based on what they paid for the product. The price the seller paid at wholesale for the product is meaningless in setting what price he should charge for it. Repeat after me, everyone who fell asleep in Microeconomics 101 (which apparently includes the entire regulatory apparatus of the State of Maryland): sunk costs are not costs at all. A cost is not a cost — it cannot affect economic decisionmaking — unless you have a choice about whether to incur it. The only thing that matters in setting price is what the customer is willing to pay.

This is particularly stupid in a market like petroleum, where exquisitely functioning global futures markets gather and transmit information in real time about future expectations for input prices. And in fact, retailers can look at futures right now and see that hundreds of thousands of knowledgeable people are valuing the future price of crude oil $4-5 a barrel lower today than they were a week ago. If a gas station owner has the information to make a reasonable bet that in two months he'll be spending less to fill his tanks, why is the state of Maryland prohibiting him from acting on that knowledge, pleasing his customers, building goodwill, and incidentally, helping the local economy by making it cheaper to plant soybeans, deliver hay, move livestock, and set crab pots?

Apparently the state of Maryland is doing it to placate Burch Oil, a local conglomerate which makes most of its money not from gasoline but from home heating oil. I don't know anything bad about Burch Oil, I don't buy my heating oil from them, and for all I know they're an upstanding corporation that gives back to the community and orders their delivery trucks to stop for squirrels crossing Point Lookout Road. But son-of-a-gun, guys — didn't you make enough last winter when you were filling up 400 gallon tanks at two-bleedin'-thirty a gallon? Do you really need every beat up GMC pickup and rusted out Farmall Super C in St. Mary's County to be ponying up an extra buck a tank to keep your heads above water?

But for some reason great goat stuff just keeps falling into my inbox. Like fainting goats.

And all nations shall be gathered together before him: and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left.

I never pictured the Lord waving an umbrella and all the goats fall down. Not until now anyway.