Zeta Woof

Seth Lipsky talks with Edwin Vieira Jr., author of the long out of print Pieces of Eight, about the prospects for real money.

"What are you going to do when the currency doesn't function any more?" is one of the ways Mr. Vieira puts the issue to me as we tour his study, a trig garret crammed with such books as a multivolume set of the Colonial Records of Rhode Island, where Mr. Vieira, the son of a U.S. Navy physician, was brought up. "If you look at the hyperinflations of the 20th century—Weimar Germany, Hungary, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia—in every one of those systems, there was, somewhere in the world, a first-class currency that they could use, directly or indirectly [when their own currency collapsed]. What happens now, when the Federal Reserve Note goes down, what are we going to use?" He pauses and then asks, with a chuckle, "Are we going to stabilize the euro?"

In this morning's Wall Street Journal. Premium content, unfortunately. Email me and I'll send you a copy.

Or carry a handful of quarters down to the corner drugstore.

I love full manual mode. This is not the aperture or shutter speed the camera, with all its vast artificial intelligence, would have chosen for me.

A while back I mentioned Charles Fleming's book Secret Stairs, and wondered if he knew of the stairs Philip Marlowe had climbed. Mr. Fleming wrote to say that he had forgotten that particular passage, and which book was it in? Farewell, My Lovely, I replied, and after a bit of sleuthing he wrote back with a fascinating footnote to that novel:

I am about 99% certain Chandler based this segment on the Castellammare section of Pacific Palisades, where it borders on Malibu. The description of the beach and the coast highway, and the pedestrian path over the highway, and the long staircase up from the highway, are about right. There is no 280-step staircase, but there is a series of staircases that could certainly add up to that. Many of them have been destroyed by earthquakes and landslides, to which that area is subject. Some of them are still open. I believe Chandler could have walked up two or three connecting ones to get up to "Cabrillo Street." Which in reality is probably Revello or Posteano Street. The "sidewalk cafe" that Marlowe is told about is no doubt Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Cafe, which was a hot spot and mob hangout unti Ms. Todd's sudden and unexplained death. She lived in a house three streets above the cafe, up three flights of stairs, in about the location Chandler uses for the Marriott house. The cafe building is now the home of Paulist Productions, a religious filmmaking organization.

Thank you, Mr. Fleming.

Two centuries after Marbury v. Madison, there remains a deep confusion about quite what a court is reviewing when it engages in judicial review. Conventional wisdom has it that judicial review is the review of certain legal objects: statutes, regulations. But strictly speaking, this is not quite right. The Constitution prohibits not objects but actions. Judicial review is the review of such actions. And actions require actors: verbs require subjects. So before judicial review focuses on verbs, let alone objects, it should begin at the beginning, with subjects. Every constitutional inquiry should begin with a basic question that has been almost universally overlooked. The fundamental question, from which all else follows, is the who question: who has violated the Constitution?

Via Instapundit, a must-read.

So now, if you'll excuse me, I must go read it.

Yeah, I know just how he feels.

On Saturday we had a big garage sale to get rid of some of Keith's junk. Two of my brothers, two sisters, Mom, Dad, Auntie Joy, and a dozen or so customers were wandering in and out of the old farm house when a lady in a small car drove up and got out carrying a clipboard. She walked up to the front door, looking a little bewildered.

"I'm here," she said, "From the Census?"

We looked at her.

"How many, um, people live here?

My brother took the question.

Holding up a finger, he said, "One used to. But he's..."

He made a gesture with his hands.

"Laid out flat."

Alan Pell Crawford reviews two new books about the American Revolution, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, by T. H. Breen, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America, by Jack Rakove.

As with all good reviews, this one is worth reading in full even if you don't have time to read the books.

Especially if you don't have time to read the books.

Keith left behind a few guns. It's pretty much up to me and my brothers to decide who gets what. There's a vz24 in 22-250, a varmint rifle. Randy wants that. There's an 8x57 Mauser with a hand-made stock, and quite a story behind it. I wouldn't mind having that.

But one of the most intriguing is the Winchester Model 06, a little pump action .22, described elsewhere on the web as "about the best behind the kitchen door farm gun ever invented." Yep. That's where Grandma kept it. Varmints in the garden? Bang! Dinner.

The Senate has been exorcised.

And Rand Paul had a nice little sound bite:

I have a message, a message from the tea party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We have come to take our government back.

I quit smoking.

I have a cigarette on the desk in front of me right now.

Left there by my brother Jim.

It sure is tempting.

Greg called on Wednesday and said let's go so I grabbed my present and my cake and we went. We spent my birthday digging the Buick out of Keith's garage, out from under a pile of debris which included twelve chain saws, dozens of power tools in various states of repair, and thousands of hand tools of every kind, and all of it covered with a thick layer of dust, garbage, and bat droppings. It took us until Friday noon to clear enough away to open the door and the trunk. No treasures, but the interior is in remarkably good condition with 80,000 original miles.

My present? The Canon Rebel XS Digital SLR. I haven't learned to use it yet.

Some old photos my sister scanned. My mother and Uncle Keith as children, in Six Corners, Oregon, in the mid-1930s. Grandpa owned a service station.

Apologies to my regular readers (all five of you) for the light blogging, but I've been a bit distracted.

On Sunday my Uncle Keith, a recluse, was found dead in his driveway. He was 76. No one has seen the inside of that big old farm house since Grandma died 23 years ago. Unfortunately for me it's at the other end of Oregon, so I've been following the story through email, phone calls, and the family blog — sorry, restricted viewing, but here's something my brother wrote today:

Mom and Dad puttered around on various things. Dad worked on the cabinets next to the front door (and had a mouse jump out of one drawer at him), and also began collecting ammunition into a box. Mom and Barb worked mostly on the kitchen. I finished cleaning Grandma's room that Sue and I had started yesterday. It is now cleaned. Its closets and drawers were mostly empty anyway. I spent the afternoon on the bathroom.

A curious note: . . The glass door bookcase in the living room and the curio cabinets and built-ins in the dining room appear to be completely unchanged and untouched since Grandmas passing. In fact, many of the objects are in the same positions they've been in since I was a child. The ceramic, red velvet covered dog. The dolls with crochet dresses. The glass vases filled with marbles. I'll try to remember to take some photos tomorrow and post them.

I'm itching to get up there and have a look for myself.

Failure in the Falklands would have been the end of Thatcher, Thatcherism, and the rollback of socialism in Britain. Her confidence under these inauspicious circumstances was, surely, a miracle of Providence. Leaders who become legend almost always display this strain of preternatural confidence. In all of history, the number of women who have both possessed it and achieved the power to exercise it may be counted on one hand.

— Claire Berlinski, There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, p. 169.

In this morning's Wall Street Journal.

For their analysis, Dr. Pääbo and his colleagues extracted DNA mostly from the fossil remains of three Neanderthal women who lived and died in Croatia between 38,000 and 45,000 years ago. From thimblefuls of powdered bone, the researchers pieced together about three billion base pairs of DNA, covering about two-thirds of the Neanderthal genome....

...the researchers compared the Neanderthal DNA to the genomes drawn from five people from around the world: a San tribesman from South Africa; a Yoruba from West Africa; a Han Chinese; a West European; and a Pacific islander from Papua, New Guinea.... Traces of Neanderthal heredity turned up in all but the two African representatives.

Update: Turns out we noted this research four years ago.

I've often thought that we would do well enough just to buy the surplus eggs from our friends, but now Leslie and Marielle are lobbying for their very own coop. Looks like I've got another spring project.

Thanks to John Derbyshire I have a name for my condition.

I am an iatropohobe; I avoid doctors as much as I can. It takes several months' relentless nagging by Mrs. Straggler to get me to the "annual" check-up. This is a family trait, though whether nature or nurture I would not venture to speculate. My father's attitude was fixed firmly in the 19th-century conception of hospitals as places where poor people go to die, and of physicians as being at least as likely to harm as to heal you. In forty years' close acquaintance with Dad, I don't recall ever seeing him take prescription medicine, though he suffered from the average number of minor ailments — colds, cramps, colics. He died aged 85 from pneumonia, "the old man's friend."

My brother Randy wrote a wonderful screed about the health care system a few days ago. Unfortunately it was in an email to my wife. I wish he would post it on his blog.

Claire Berlinski was discussing with Sir Bernard Ingram the hatred that Margaret Thatcher inspired. "What was it about her," she asked, "that so rubbed people the wrong way?" It was a class thing, she discovered. Ingram described it this way.

BI: The British establishment was in the grip of a sort of pale-pink socialism. There are still a lot of them around now who believe, who have this sort of naive, ths romantic view of the working classes...

CB: Where does this romantic notion come from? What are the origins of that?

BI: Oh, I would have thought the origins are in the Fabians, you know, that we must do good. We know how to do good, and we have the money to do good, and we have the security and we will do good. And that inevitably became, and you will be done good to!

And then Thatcher came along, and she was from the working classes, and she spoke for the working classes, and she said in effect that they were tired of being done good to, and that enraged the establishment, the upper classes, her betters. How dare she.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady in The Wall Street Journal.

The late Milton Friedman once quipped that "if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand."

Friedman was using hyperbole to make a point about central planning. Or so I thought until Hugo Chávez put himself in charge of Venezuela's coffee sector. Last year, for the first extended period of time in the country's history, Venezuela did not produce enough of the little red berry to satisfy domestic demand. It has now become a coffee importer and is facing serious shortages.

I just closed the cover on Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

A fascinating slice of twentieth century history. Ayn Rand connected with everyone from Cecil B. DeMille to Rose Wilder Lane to Alan Greenspan. Worth reading twice, but I have other books waiting....

If I grab the wrong one going out the door this morning the DHS is going to be very upset.