Eugene Volokh's Blog, page 2642
December 30, 2011
Challenging a False Dichotomy: Socialized Medicine is not the Only Alternative to the Individual Mandate
Some defenders of the Obama health insurance mandate try to scare off opponents by claiming that if the mandate were repealed, the result will be a system of socialized medicine. Presumably, conservatives and libertarians oppose the latter even more than former. Such claims may have led conservative commentator Paul Rahe to argue recently that the individual mandate is even worse than socialized medicine, or at least worse than government-provided health insurance. I think Rahe is wrong. But the more important point is that this is actually a false dichotomy: there are many alternative health care reforms that are more market-friendly than either the mandate or socialized medicine, whether the latter takes the form of government-provided health care (as in Britain) or "single payer" health insurance (as in Canada).
Even before Obama, health care was the most heavily regulated and subsidized industry in the United States, and there is plenty of room for free market reforms that can drive down costs by increasing competition. Some of the possible options are described in an important book by Cato Institute health care scholars Michael Tanner and Michael Cannon. They include breaking the connection between health insurance and employment created by government favoritism for employer-linked plans, and allowing individuals to purchase insurance across state lines, which would make insurance more portable and increase competition between insurance providers. As University of Chicago economist John Cochrane points out, there are also free market reforms that could alleviate the problem of coverage for preexisting conditions — the issue that is often cited as a justification for the mandate. And that's just a small sample of the many available options. Many additional proposals are covered at John Goodman's blog, among other places (Goodman is one of the best-known free market-oriented health care economists).
Obviously, the range of policies that are politically feasible in the near future is a lot narrower than the range of theoretically possible options. Even so, at least some pro-market reforms are likely to be as much or more politically viable as socialized medicine. If liberals could not push the latter through when the left was riding high in 2009 and Democrats had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, it is highly unlikely that they will enact it at any time in the foreseeable future.
To the extent that socialized medicine is politically feasible, it may well become more rather than less so as a result of the individual mandate. Under the mandate, government must define the level of coverage that everyone is required to buy, including defining which medical conditions and treatments are included. This opens the door for constant lobbying by health care providers and other interest groups to ensure that their particular treatments are covered by the mandate. As more and more is mandated, the price of insurance goes up, and so too will political pressure for increasing government subsidies and government-provided insurance. Insurance costs have in fact gone up as a result of the Massachusetts "Romneycare" mandate that is the model for the federal reform.
Predicting the political future is a difficult business, so it's possible that my expectations are wrong. At this point, however, it seems at least as likely that the continuation of the mandate will make socialized medicine more probable than that the opposite will happen.
Finally, if getting rid of the individual mandate really will bring on the advent of socialized medicine, why don't any liberal activists and health care experts support it? There are plenty of left-wingers who would prefer socialized medicine to the Obama plan. If they think that the repeal of the latter would lead to the former, then they should form a coalition with Obamacare opponents on the right and work to get it repealed. A small number of liberals are in fact willing to get rid of the mandate, most notably Howard Dean. But even Dean doesn't claim that abolition of the mandate would lead to socialized medicine. He merely thinks that the mandate is a political liability for Democrats and that the Obama plan can work just as well without it. The extreme rarity of left-wing support for repeal of the mandate suggests that few liberals genuinely believe that getting rid of it is likely to lead to socialized medicine.
Obviously, none of this is directly relevant to the constitutional arguments against the mandate. It is logically possible that the mandate is both unconstitutional and the only politically feasible alternative to socialized medicine. But that scenario seems highly unlikely. The spectre of socialized medicine should not deter free market advocates from either pursuing the constitutional case against the mandate or trying to repeal it politically.
Court of Appeals Approves Prosecution of Man for Reading Estranged Wife's E-Mail Without Her Authorization
I blogged about the case a year ago, and now there's an appellate court decision in it, People v. Walker (Mich. Ct. App. Dec. 27, 2011). An excerpt:
[T]he charge against defendant arises from his alleged unauthorized access to the password-protected email account of his estranged wife, Clara Elizabeth Walker, from July 2009 through August 2009. At the preliminary exam, Clara testified that she filed for divorce from defendant on June 5, 2009, and that defendant had been served with the divorce papers by July 2009. Clara and defendant continued to live in the same home through August 2009. During this time period, Clara had a personal email account through Gmail and another email account through Yahoo. Clara never shared her passwords for these email accounts with defendant, nor did she ever give defendant permission to access those accounts....
Clara testified that she used a computer that defendant bought her for her use. Defendant set up the computer for her, but Clara set up the Gmail and Yahoo accounts herself. Although Clara had previously written passwords in an address book, she has not used the address book for passwords in many years and never provided defendant with those passwords. Clara testified that she had never written a pass code for defendant on a sticky note, and that she allowed defendant to use her computer only when it needed a repair. Defendant had two computers of his own at home, and Clara did not know the passwords for defendant's computers....
[D]efendant argues that the circuit court erred in denying his motion to quash the charge alleging unauthorized access of a computer, MCL 752.795....
[T]here was evidence that defendant acted without authorization when he accessed his estranged wife's Gmail account. Defendant's wife testified that her Gmail account was a personal account and that she never shared her passwords for the account with defendant or granted him permission to access the account. Further, she allowed defendant to use her computer only when it needed a repair. Defendant admitted to the police that he accessed his wife's Gmail account by guessing her password. These facts support a reasonable inference that defendant lacked authorization for his access of his wife's Gmail account....
[Moreover,] the prosecutor presented evidence that defendant acquired, altered, damaged, deleted, or destroyed property or otherwise used the service of a computer program, computer, computer system, or computer network. Defendant used the services of Gmail when he gained access to his estranged wife's account, viewed her emails, and printed them to distribute to a third party. Further, by viewing, printing, and distributing the emails, defendant acquired his wife's property, i.e., her password-protected emails containing restricted personal information or other tangible or intangible items of value....
Contrary to defendant's argument, nothing in the statutory text suggests that spouses, estranged spouses, or parties to a divorce proceeding are immune from prosecution under the act.
The case can therefore proceed to trial. Thanks to Michael Smith for the pointer.
Student Law Review Note Ideas Related to Class Actions?
Andrew Trask (Class Action Countermeasures) lists what he sees as the ten most interesting 2011 articles on class actions, plus ten articles that he thinks ought to be written but haven't been. If you're looking for a student Note topic, check those out. Thanks to Brian Lehman for the pointer.
"It Ain't Pretty and We Should Not Pretend That It Is"
The broader context, from the dissent in In re Michels (N.Y. Comm. on Jud. Conduct Nov. 17, 2011):
As a Commission, our duty is to respect both the First Amendment and the quandary this system imposes upon judicial candidates. It ain't pretty and we should not pretend that it is. Therefore, we should give every judicial candidate the benefit of the doubt when there is any margin to do so. That's the least the First Amendment demands and the least we can do to be fair to the judges who face this unenviable process which is necessary to ply their idealistic, supremely difficult trade.
The decision involves an interesting and difficult question of the permissible scope of restrictions on misleading candidate speech in judicial campaigns; those interested in the subject should check it out.
December 29, 2011
Fourth Circuit Overturns Conviction Because Officer Used A Knife to Remove the Crack Tied Around An Arrestee's Private Parts
Kevin Walsh flags a very unusual Fourth Amendment case out of the Fourth Circuit that reaches a rather surprising holding: The police violate the Fourth Amendment, justifying suppression of the evidence, when the police use a knife to remove drugs tied around a suspect's private parts during a search incident to arrest. The case is United States v. Edwards.
First, the facts. For fans of The Wire – cue the music – the case occurred in Baltimore in the Northern District. The police obtained a search warrant for a known drug dealer, Joseph Edwards, who was quite familiar to the officers. Edwards had earlier illegally brandished a weapon in front of two women. The police knew the neighborhoods where Edwards hung out, so they went there at night and saw him and placed him under arrest based on the authority of the warrant. Before putting Edwards in the police van to be transported to the station, the officers decided to check his crotch for guns or drugs. One of the officers testified that this was a common practice: " You know, it's unpleasant for everybody involved. But if you have reason to believe that there might be something, then it's a good idea to check, because often they do hide things down there."
Four male officers surrounded Edwards. One officer loosened Edwards's belt and stretched his pants and underwear out about six inches away from his body, and the officers directed a flashlight to see if anything unusual was there. As it turned out, there was indeed something unusual: Edwards had a clear plastic sandwich bag containing 43 smaller baggies of crack all wrapped around his penis. One of the officers put on gloves, took a knife he had with him, and cut the sandwich bag off. Edwards was unharmed, and the discovery of the crack led to crack possession charges.
In today's opinion, a divided Fourth Circuit rules that the crack must be suppressed. Using the knife to remove the baggie was constitutionally unreasonable because Edwards could have gotten hurt, the court rules, even thought he wasn't:
We conclude that Bailey's use of a knife in cutting the sandwich baggie off Edwards' penis posed a significant and an unnecessary risk of injury to Edwards, transgressing well-settled standards of reasonableness. The fortuity that Edwards was not injured in the course of this action does not substantiate its safety. The district court found that the entire search took place at "approximately 11:30 [at night], in a dark area." While the officers used a flashlight when searching inside Edwards' underwear, they did not continue to use the flash– light when Bailey removed the baggie containing the susected drugs with his knife.
The government contends that because Bailey knew that Edwards was being arrested for a handgun violation, the search inside Edwards' underwear was reasonable to ensure that the police had not missed finding a weapon during the earlier pat-down search. . . . .[A]ssuming, without deciding, that the government's rationale supports the reasonableness of the decision to search inside Edwards' underwear, this rationale does not justify the dangerous manner in which the contraband was retrieved from his genital area once the contraband was discovered. In fact, the government provides no reason whatsoever why the concealed contraband, once the police had determined that it clearly was not a handgun, could not have been removed under circumstances less dangerous to Edwards.
We do not suggest that after discovering contraband concealed under a suspect's clothing, officers are required to permit the suspect to remove the contraband. . . . [I]n the present case, there were several alternatives available to the officers for removing the baggie from Edwards' penis, which neither would have compromised the officers' safety nor the safety of Edwards. These alternatives included untying the baggie, removing it by hand, tearing the baggie, requesting that blunt scissors be brought to the scene to remove the baggie, or removing the baggie by other non-dangerous means in any private, well-lit area. Thus, we conclude that, in the absence of exigent circumstances, the right of the police to seize contraband from inside Edwards' underwear did not give the officers license to employ a method creating a significant and unnecessary risk of injury.
I'm not persuaded. The officers had arrested Edwards pursuant to a valid warrant, and they were conducting a search incident to arrest. Under United States v. Robinson, that allows a full search of the person, which I would think would include checking out whether a suspect has hidden drugs or a gun on their body. The court uses the Bell v. Wolfish framework to determine whether the search of Edwards was reasonable, but that seems like the wrong doctrinal box: While Bell is the framework for searches for drugs and guns on the person once arrestees arrive at the jail, here the controversial step was using the knife to remove the drugs. Using the knife wasn't a search at all: It was a means used to seize drugs that had been found in plain view during a search incident to arrest. It could be litigated as an excessive force civil claim, but I don't think it implicates the constitutionality of the search that preceded it or triggers Bell.
Even if you accept that Bell's framework applies, I'm not aware of a precedent that supports such micromanaging of the details of a search. The court's opinion announces that the police can use "blunt scissors" to remove a baggie of crack from around an arrestee's penis, but the United States Constitution prohibits using a "knife" to do it — apparently because the latter poses unnecessary risks while the former does not. While most of us can recognize and appreciate the Court's concerns, I don't think that a suspect's decision to tie a bag of crack around his johnson triggers such heightened scrutiny of the means of removal when the cops arrest him on a warrant and search him incident to arrest. That's all the more true because Edwards wasn't actually injured when the officers removed the bag.
California Supreme Court Upholds Law Abolishing Redevelopment Agencies
The California Supreme Court recently issued a ruling upholding the constitutionality of a law abolishing the state's numerous redevelopment agencies:
The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday against redevelopment agencies, including San Diego's, and said they cannot remain in business by paying the state a portion of their property tax receipts....
The court was dealing with two laws passed by the Legislature in June to help close the state budget deficit by tapping the redevelopment funds held by redevelopment agencies.
One, AB1X26, abolished the redevelopment agencies and set up a mechanism to shift the redevelopment taxes back to the cities, counties, schools and others.
The second, AB1x27, allowed the agencies to continue but required them to opt in but only by paying pay the state $1.7 billion from their tax revenues this year and about $400 million annually in the future or about 10 percent of their tax receipts....
The second law is unconstitutional, the court said, because the agencies do have a right under Proposition 22, passed last year, to retain local revenues.
"We largely uphold Assembly Bill 1X26 and invalidate Assembly BillX127," the court said.
And so in an ironic twist of fate, the agencies won their argument that they can keep their money but lost their argument that they can continue to exist.
Although the bill abolishing the redevelopment agencies was adopted primarily for the purpose of alleviating the state's dire fiscal problems, it also has the beneficial side effect of curtailing eminent domain abuse. As I explained in this post defending the new legislation before it passed, the redevelopment agencies routinely engaged in dubious takings that transferred property to favored interest groups and destroyed more value than they created.
The Institute for Justice — a leading libertarian public interest law firm specializing in eminent domain issues — addressed the property rights benefits of the ruling in this statement:
In a landmark victory for private property owners in the Golden State, the California Supreme Court today upheld a statute abolishing the nearly 400 redevelopment agencies across the state. The court also struck down a law that would have allowed these agencies to buy their way back into existence. The final outcome of the case is that, in 2012, California's decades-long redevelopment nightmare will finally come to an end.
California redevelopment agencies have been some of the worst abusers of eminent domain for decades, violating the private property rights of tens of thousands of home, business, church and farm owners. The Institute for Justice has catalogued more than 200 abuses of eminent domain across California during the past ten years alone....
While the decision focused on specific provisions of the California Constitution, its practical effect represents a significant victory for California property owners. "Redevelopment in California has been a billion-dollar, state-subsidized boondoggle that has completely eroded private property rights through the abuse of eminent domain for private gain," said Christina Walsh, the Institute's director of activism and coalitions. "With the court's decision, redevelopment has finally met its long-overdue end, and property owners who have been living in terror across the state can finally rest safe in what they've worked so hard to own."
The ruling won't necessarily end all eminent domain abuse in California. Other government bodies also sometimes engage in abusive takings, and it's possible that the state legislature will give more condemnation authority to some of those agencies now that the redevelopment agencies are gone. Nevertheless, the abolition of those agencies is a major step forward for property rights in California, as well as for the state's beleaguered taxpayers.
Proposed by a liberal Democratic governor and supported by a wide range of libertarian and conservative property rights advocates, the law upheld in this case is a good example of the kind of cross-ideological cooperation on property rights issues that we need to see more of.
Pauline Maier's Marvelous Book, "Ratification"
I recently finished reading Pauline Maier's marvelous book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788. Maier, a historian at MIT, has written the first comprehensive narrative of the ratification of the U.S Constitution, from the Philadelphia convention, through each of the states (in order of deliberation) and the drafting and adoption of the first 10 amendments. It was made possible by the still incomplete Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution that now runs to 24 volumes, on which Maier based much of her research. The records of the ratification debates are notoriously incomplete but Maier is able to fill in many of the gaps with other sources.
Having read much of the surviving records of the ratification convention debates, I probably know more about these conventions than most people. Yet there was far more in Maeir's book that I did not know than I did. Studying the conventions in chronological order makes far clearer the evolution of the arguments against and for the Constitution as well as the shifting tactics of both sides. You also learn about the differing political and economic situations of each state, as well as the biographical backgrounds of the major players, and many of the minor players as well. It is a riveting story, engagingly told. And the new paperback is just $12.91 on Amazon.com!
The story is also told in an extraordinarily fair and balanced way. Having previously read Maier's views on the Second Amendment expressed in a New York Times op-ed, I was on my guard for the sorts of biases one typically finds in historical treatments of subjects with potential contemporary relevance. In addition to leaning one way or the other on the meaning of the text, there are always those scholars who perennially love or hate Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, or Madison, etc. or those who root for or against the Federalists or the Antifederalists. So far as I could tell, Maier's treatment is as "neutral" or "objective" as is possible for a scholar to be, unfashionable as those terms may be among academics. It just seems like she is telling the story as it unfolded, letting each character speak for him or herself, while dispassionately presenting the various strengths and weaknesses of each. I got little or no sense of whose side she may or may not be on, or who she liked or disliked.
In any historical work of this breadth, you are forced to judge the accuracy of the information with which you were previously unaware with the accuracy of the information you already knew. Through all this 480 page book, I found nothing at odds with what I thought I knew, giving me confidence in the rest. One reason for this, perhaps, is that Maier offers little information that is comprehensive enough to draw conclusions on original meaning — and she only rarely even suggests any interpretive claims. So in contrast to her op-ed on the Second Amendment, there is little or nothing with which to disagree on originalist grounds.
Which is not to say there is nothing of substance to learn from this story. Perhaps the most pervasive theme of the book is how widespread the pressure for amendments was by opponents, and even most supporters conceded that some amendments were necessary. Although I already knew this in general terms, it was most powerful to read accounts of the role that amendments played at each convention after the earliest ones. Reading this account makes it very clear why it was that the Constitution was so quickly amended — although (as I have written) Madison had to overcome much resistance among a Federalist dominate Congress to get it to take up the matter — and why the amendments proposed by Congress were so disappointing to so many of the Antifederalists. Indeed, the debate over possible amendments and whether their adoption should precede the adoption of the Constitution or come afterwards is probably the dominant theme of the book.
Given my views on originalism, some may wonder what implications Maier's book has for original meaning interpretation. I can think of one: this work undercuts claims by some originalists that, where the general public meaning of the text is vague, the ratification debates clarify that meaning by rendering it more specific. For example, some cite the Virginia ratification debates in which the Federalist defenders of the Constitution denied that states could be sued by citizens of another state in federal court as Article III appears clearly to authorize. The claim is that vague original meaning was "fixed" by the views that supporters of the Constitution offered to clarify meaning. For example,the claim is made that that debates in Virginia support the conclusion that Chisholm v. Georgia, which rejected Georgia's claim of sovereign immunity from citizen suits, was wrongly decided and that the Eleventh Amendment reversing that holding restored the original meaning. The alternative view is that the Constitution's text did authorize such suits (though this may or may not have been an oversight), and once the Supreme Court correctly so held, Congress and the states revised the Constitution's text to eliminate this federal jurisdiction over states. (I have written about Chisholm here.)
Maier's narrative makes it abundantly clear that few outside the walls of any convention would have been aware of any statements by the Constitution's supporters, and convention delegates in one state knew very little about what transpired in the others. Although convention statements both for and against the Constitution are evidence of original public meaning, public statements by Federalist supporters cannot provide a definitive gloss on that meaning. To the contrary, the very fact that the Antifederalists read the provisions in Article III this way, which then required an extra-textual admission of sovereign immunity by the Constitution's supporters, is some evidence that the Supreme Court in Chisholm was right about the public meaning of the text. (Of course, one can see why a historian like Maeir who, in her NYT op-ed, makes claims about "original intent" might think otherwise, but she makes no such "originalist" claims in this book.)
No one should read Pauline Maier's wonderful book looking for insights about interpretive methodology or the original meaning of various clauses. One should read this book if you are at all interested in how the Constitution came to be, and what American political discourse was like during this crucially important and formative period of American history. And one should also read this book if one simply wants an engaging and entertaining story that you may have thought you already knew, but didn't really.
Should Conservatives Favor Government-Run Health Care to the Individual Mandate?
Over at Ricochet, via Instapundit, Paul Rahe argues that conservatives should prefer a government-run health care system paid for by higher taxes over an individual-mandate approach:
Government exists first and foremost for the sake of our protection. Without it, our lives and our property would not effectively be our own. Government exists also to promote our well-being. For its support, however, taxation is necessary, and we have tacitly agreed that, to be legitimate, these taxes must be passed by our elected representatives. By our own consent, we give up a certain proportion of our earnings for these purposes.
The money left in our possession, however, is our own — to do with as we please. It is in this that our liberty largely lies. Romneycare and Obamacare, with the individual mandate, changes radically our relationship vis-a-vis the government. The former presupposes that state governments have the right to tell us how we are to spend our own money, and the latter presupposes that the federal government has that right as well. Both measures are tyrannical. They blur the distinction between public and private and extend the authority of the public over the disposition of that which is primordially private. Once this principle is accepted as legitimate, there is no limit to the authority of the government over us, and mandates of this sort will multiply — as do-gooders interested in improving our lives by directing them encroach further and further into the one sphere in which we have been left free hitherto.
I'm curious: Did any conservatives express this view before President Obama embraced the individual mandate? Or at these sorts of arguments something that conservatives didn't assert until long after the legislation was passed?
UPDATE: On April 3, 2010, a week or so after the individual mandate was passed, Rahe appeared to strongly endorse the following statement of Mark Steyn that was part of a broad criticism of the new law:
Whatever is in the [health care] bill is an intermediate stage: . . . the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be "insurers" in any meaningful sense of that term (i.e., evaluators of risk), and once that's clear we'll be on the fast track to Obama's desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.
That's the kind of criticism I remember at the time: Obamacare was really bad on its own, the argument ran, and even worse it was likely to lead to a government-run system in the future. As I recall, the thinking was that Obama really wanted a government-run system but didn't get enough support for it outside the left, so he had to compromise with moderates and that resulted in the mandate.
Former Confidant Eric Dondero on Ron Paul
Here's an interesting blog post by Dondero, that takes Paul to task over his "simply outrageously horrendous views on foreign policy, Israel, and national security for the United States."
I thought the most interesting revelation was Paul's argument that the U.S. shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II because "saving the Jews" was none of our business. The issue of whether and to what extent the U.S. should use its military resources for humanitarian causes is certainly a legitimate one. But the idea that the U.S. got involved in World War II to "save the Jews" bespeaks such a gross misunderstanding of history that one is left to conclude that Paul is either an ignoramus who has formed very strong views on foreign policy with very little knowledge to back them up, or that he is unusually susceptible to conspiracy theories, especially ones that involve Jews. The evidence suggests that the answer is "both."
UPDATE: A commenter points out, correctly, that it's not clear from Dondero's statement whether Paul actually believed that the the U.S. got involved in WWII to "save the Jews," or whether, instead, Paul expressed opposition to U.S. involvement in WWII, and then when challenged rejected the notion that such involvement was justified to save the Jews. Such involvement certainly wouldn't have been justified on the latter basis, given that saving the Jews was, to say the least, not exactly a priority of the Allies' leadership during the War, regardless of whether it was in fact "our business" or not.
So, I think I was too hasty to criticize Paul on the basis of Dondero's statement. But Dondero's statement is still very interesting.
Belated Christmas and Holiday Greetings and Happy New Year
To all of the readers and Co-Conspirators of the Volokh Conspiracy. The Anderson family had a lovely Christmas, with our daughter home from her first semester at Rice University, which she loves despite spending the semester with mono and strep and returning home early for an urgent tonsillectomy. Santa delivered Ipads to Beloved Wife and me, which I am finding harder to set up than I would have expected, mostly due to having to change a whole raft of Apple, Itunes, and MobileMe passwords and settings, and upgrade to the Lion operating system. Not quite as seamless as I had hoped, but I'm powerfully eager not to haul my laptop around as much.
I gave everyone in the family Volokh Conspiracy tote bags. Enough said, and that's not all I gave Beloved Family. (Inside Beloved Wife's bag were a couple of Agnes B shirts I tracked down cheap on Ebay; I don't know much about clothing, men's or women's, but I knew from long experience these would be good choices.)
Beloved Daughter gave me two books. The first is Football for Dummies because, well, that's my level of knowledge. But I'm expected to cheer for my alma mater, UCLA, and now for Rice, although I'm told I should not expect many victories. The second is one of the coolest books I've received in a long time, which Beloved Daughter found at a Rice library used book sale. How Things Work is a 1961 book by a mechanical engineer and editor with a trade magazine in the late 1950s (I've got the title slightly wrong — I'll find it and the author and amend this). It explains in simple language and great drawings how the mechanical and electrical devices of ordinary life work. Refrigerators and sewing machines, air conditioning and electric motors, fuses and light bulbs, zippers and car engines. The reason it is so great is that these are still (as Tyler Cowen and others have pointed out) the machines of daily life, minus the semi-conductor revolution.
One of the strange things is that a lot of popular mechanics and pop sci stuff somehow skipped a generation with me — I learned a lot more about abstract theories and things like relativity and genetics as taught in the 1960s than mechanical things. Somehow those were taken as obvious — but let me be the first to admit I could not truly explain how a zipper works. And though I knew about atomic theory, I was hazy on the practicalities like AC and DC. Or for that matter, why a toilet has the shape it has. The emerging technologies were computers and such; mechanical objects were assumed. So this book is a pleasure to read and I'm filling in some crucial gaps about ordinary things. I'd always been an "assume the can opener" kind of guy — without much clue exactly how a can opener works. Interestingly, these basic principles of machines and power transfer are at the heart of another book that Santa brought — Mark Ripptoe's Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, which has many drawings showing how levers and fulcrums drive a lot of strength training such as the dead lift.
Our family also watched the entire Lord of the Rings this week. Apparently this is not that uncommon; I saw that Michael Totten said the same on his FB page and promptly got a bunch of responses saying, yeah, we do that too. I suppose it's because the three parts each came out at Christmas. And when else will you have the time? But — I defer to Ilya on this — it seems to me there is a spiritual message there that is not precisely religious but part of that which religion and spirituality have always stood to combat — the temptation to despair. That seems to me the biggest reason why we found the movie appropriate for Christmas. Resisting despair at the individual level, and using bonds of affection — trust, loyalty, fidelity — to combine together for the greater good and to resist the greater evil.
(I've left comments open.)
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