The etymology of adultery

Posted on May 27, 2015 by lawofmarkets

An interesting bit of explanation on the etymological origins of the word, adultery: Adultery, adulteration, and the historical ‘married woman’ limitation.

“Adultery” apparently comes from the same root as “adulterate.” A married woman who has sex with someone other than her husband risks getting pregnant and giving birth to a child who is not her husband’s but might be raised as her husband’s — thus adulterating the husband’s blood line. In the words of Bacon’s Abridgment (1736),

Fornication and all other Lusts are unlawful, because Children are begotten without any Care or Preparation for their Education; and the Crime of Adultery receives this further Aggravation, that it not only intails a spurious Race [here, meaning offspring and their descendants -EV] on the Party, for whom he is under no Obligation to provide, but likewise destroys that Peace and mutual Endearment which ought always to subsist in the Marriage State.

Likewise, State v. Lash (N.J. 1838) cited Bacon’s Abridgment, and elaborated on it thus (paragraph breaks added):

This is the circumstance on which adultery depends at the common law; its tendency to adulterate the issue of an innocent husband, and to turn the inheritance away from his own blood, to that of a stranger. If the woman be single, her incontinence produces none of this evil; her issue takes away no man’s inheritance; it can be heir to nobody, and the burthen of its support, is cast by law upon herself and the partner of her guilt. Even if her paramour be a married man, it is not adultery, for the same reason; the bastard cannot succeed to his inheritance, neither does it adulterate the issue of his wife; it can never succeed to her inheritance in case she leaves any to descend. She may adulterate her husband’s issue; the law cannot defend him against her; his only reliance is on her virtue; but he can never adulterate hers.

This is the reason why a married woman, if her husband become unfaithful, cannot maintain an action of adultery against him or his paramour, in any of the common law Courts; such infidelity does not adulterate her issue, nor his own; it brings no ones inheritance into jeopardy, nor can it possibly produce a spurious heir to disturb the descent of real estates. If she wishes it to be treated as adultery in her husband, she must sue him by a short petition to the Court of Chancery, which, governed by the Ecclesiastical law, allows adultery to consist in the breach of marriage vows; and there she may have a decree of divorce and allowance of alimony.

Now of course the careful reader will have noticed that Bacon’s Abridgment is not limited to the “adulteration of the blood line” argument, but also notes the destruction of marital peace stemming from the breach of the marriage compact — a destruction that can stem from the husband’s affair with an unmarried woman as much as from a wife’s affair.

The law will forbid either party to stray, but the adultery part relates only to bloodlines. Who would have known?

Why the left loves our enemies

Posted on May 20, 2015 by lawofmarkets

The article discusses the left’s hatred for its own culture by examining the question, Why Does the Left Kowtow to Islam?. Here’s the answer after quite a bit of text, but while I agree to a point, I don’t think it is fundamentally right:

The point is that the left doesn’t kowtow to Islam because they actually love Islam, but rather because they hate our own culture. They have been steeped in a narrative about how American and Western culture is racist and “imperialist,” and they’ve been trained to see anyone with a dark complexion and a non-Western origin as the victim of our crimes. When they see criticism of Islam, or deliberate attempts to defy Islam, they filter it through that narrative. They see it as: there go those bigoted right-wing Christians, demeaning dark-skinned foreigners again. So they reflexively oppose it. . . .

The left is fundamentally reactionary. It is a reaction against capitalism and against America. The left are defined by what they are against, or more accurately who they hate. So they are drawn to sympathy toward Islam because it is not-us: non-Western, non-American, neither Christian nor a product of the Enlightenment. And I guess that’s what the two ideologies have in common: they are both reactions against the supposed evils of the West. Which explains why leftists tend to find themselves uncomfortable and look for excuses to retreat when they are called upon to defend the West against this rival group of reactionaries.

For myself, I can only think of the causes as psychological. It is not hatred of us, but of themselves. It is self-disgust that has arisen for some reason. We are not a hierarchy, in which everyone is allotted a place so that whether one might have objectively chosen that particular niche, that is who we are. Most societies tell you who you are and insist you live in that way. Free societies are not based on classes, castes, status, but only on what one can achieve for oneself. The pressure is tremendous. The likelihood of failure to find some satisfying position is ever-present. There are therefore those who achieve status by leading the disgruntled and the rest, who really are dissatisfied with life, and care almost not at all about the overall success of their own culture since they do not share in any of it.

Conspicuous consumption in the twenty-first century

Posted on May 19, 2015 by lawofmarkets

From The New York Times, what wealth really allows you to do today:

WHEN our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign.

Then I met the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous stay-at-home-moms, of my new habitat. My culture shock was immediate and comprehensive. In a country where women now outpace men in college completion, continue to increase their participation in the labor force and make gains toward equal pay, it was a shock to discover that the most elite stratum of all is a glittering, moneyed backwater.

A social researcher works where she lands and resists the notion that any group is inherently more or less worthy of study than another. I stuck to the facts. The women I met, mainly at playgrounds, play groups and the nursery schools where I took my sons, were mostly 30-somethings with advanced degrees from prestigious universities and business schools. They were married to rich, powerful men, many of whom ran hedge or private equity funds; they often had three or four children under the age of 10; they lived west of Lexington Avenue, north of 63rd Street and south of 94th Street; and they did not work outside the home.

Instead they toiled in what the sociologist Sharon Hays calls “intensive mothering,” exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure, then advocating for them anxiously and sometimes ruthlessly in the linked high-stakes games of social jockeying and school admissions.

If a woman wants to show she’s made it, quit work and raise your children! No one else can afford it, certainly not amongst the educated classes. But if you can, you will be in a zone of your own.

Economic sinners

Posted on May 5, 2015 by lawofmarkets

I am in the middle of so many projects in which the modern version of economic theory is at the centre, that I find my thoughts overflowing into these blogs. A blog is not, however, supposed to be anything other than an overview shared among like-minded people. Comments on my post on the sins of economics are reasonable and temperate, but still fill me with some dismay which has me led me to go over some of that ground again. The sense of inevitability for the Industrial Revolution in the midst of the pastoral settings of eighteenth century England is not one I share. What did happen is not necessarily what had to happen. As Tel, no doubt intending to be ironic, points out:

I dunno, it’s probably more important that Isaac Newton invented gravity… I mean, without gravity you could slip easily, lose your footing and fly off into space. Sorry, but Newton is much more important in the scheme of human progress.

As it happens, Newton’s three laws did not change all that much about anything, but it did change the climate of thought. Certain ideas matter. It was not Adam Smith by himself and on his own, although he did have a fair share to do with it. The period 1770 through to about 1830 was the only period in history when being anti-establishment meant being pro-market. It was in that relatively brief span of time that the market economy was allowed to come into the foreground in the teeth of opposition from the landed aristocracy to the Luddite opponents of new technologies. Economic theory has been trying to backtrack ever since, whether the Marxist variety or the Keynesian variety and now even the mainstream. With Green policies so insidious, where to from here is not all that obvious, although I think that with the market genie out of the bottle, it remains almost impossible to stop. But Schumpeter in 1942 was already predicting that capitalism’s success would be its downfall.

Ray has then added:

I trust we are not ascribing the growth experienced during the Industrial Revolution to Adam Smith. It was not until after the repeal of the Corn Laws and Navigation Acts in 1846 and 1849 respectively, more than seventy years after The Wealth of Nations was first published, that the teachings of Smith and Ricardo, began to dominate policy matters. Until then, the Mercantilists ran public policy, very much the antithesis of everything Smith taught us.

A climate of opinion is essential for any system to take hold. If opinion didn’t matter, if the structure of beliefs made no difference, then elect socialists and get on with spreading equity instead of wealth. These things matter now and they certainly mattered 1770-1830.

And this was brought up from the Zero Hedge list, which is supposedly an example of seeking greater market regulation:

The benefits of free trade outweigh the costs of a country losing its manufacturing sector as a result; the fact that domestic companies have to comply with much stricter and costlier regulations than their foreign competitors is of no consequence.

If you don’t think domestic regulation affects an economy’s ability to produce, just have a look at the mining industry before and after Labor. Try adding in a measure of carbon pricing and see how the aluminium industry prospers. The phrase “internationally competitive” has a meaning. This may not be phrased to your liking, but it makes a point worth thinking about.

So let me finish with this quote from Rich:

A seed takes time to grow to a tree that bares fruit, and in that time it needs its protectors and proselytisers.

If economics in 1776 was like economics today, how likely would the Industrial Revolution have been then?

Lies, damned lies and temperature records

Posted on April 27, 2015 by lawofmarkets

Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures is the story, reported here as well, but how can they know the records were fiddled before they check?

Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “its hottest March since records began in 1880”. This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).

But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as “the hottest year ever”.

It ought to be a mystery, but it’s not really. If you hide the decline the number must go up.

Churchill and the Gallipoli Campaign

Posted on April 26, 2015 by lawofmarkets

This is Steve Hayward discussing the military and political issues that surrounded the lead-up to the attack at Gallipoli. Everyone may know this already, or may just be wrong, but it seems the wasted lives were in the execution and not the concept. This is how it ends, but read it through.

The essential strategic soundness of the Dardanelles offensive has come to be more deeply appreciated as the decades have passed. Basil Liddell-Hart described the Dardanelles as “a sound and far-sighted conception, marred by a chain of errors in execution almost unrivaled even in British history.” It presents one of the great “what ifs” of history. Had Turkey been knocked out early, and the war ended sooner, perhaps the Bolshevik revolution would never have taken place. Perhaps Hitler would never have risen to power. These kinds of questions can never be answered, and it is perhaps frivolous even to indulge them. But it is a tribute to Churchill’s insight that nearly 50 years after the episode, Clement Attlee, who was Churchill’s great opponent in the Labour Party (it was Attlee who defeated Churchill in the election of 1945), remarked to Churchill that the Dardanelles operation was “the only imaginative strategic idea of the war. I only wish that you had had full power to carry it to success.”

I might also mention The Sunday Age ANZAC Day quote from Bill Shorten. Did they even pick it because they agreed with the sentiment. Here are the words. Read ’em and weep.

When we landed here on this beach, it was someone else’s country.

Who is his constituency for this, because if there actually is one, they are moronic to the core.

What does science have to do with real world facts?

Posted on April 25, 2015 by lawofmarkets

In the mail, so to speak, I was sent this from the Mail on Sunday last month: Why my own Royal Society is wrong on climate change: A devastating critique of world’s leading scientific organisation by one of its Fellows. Here is the gist of it in the first few paras:

Five years ago, I was one of 43 Fellows of the Royal Society – the first and arguably still the most prestigious scientific organisation in the world – who wrote to our then-president about its approach to climate change. We warned that the Society was in danger of violating its founding principle, summed up in its famous motto ‘Nullius in verba’ – or ‘Don’t take another’s word for it; check it out for yourself’.

The reason for our warning was a Society document which stated breezily: ‘If you don’t believe in climate change you are using one of the following [eight] misleading arguments.’

The implication was clear: the Society seemed to be saying there was no longer room for meaningful debate about the claim that the world is warming dangerously because of human activity, because the science behind this was ‘settled’. . . .

Yet the Society continues to produce a stream of reports which reveal little sign of this. The latest example is the pre-Christmas booklet A Short Guide To Climate Science. Last year also saw the joint publication with the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Climate Change: Evidence And Causes, and a report called Resilience. Through these documents, the Society has lent its name to claims – such as trends towards increasing extreme weather and climate casualties – that simply do not match real-world facts.

Oh those real world facts. Why should that get in the way of anything? These people are doing a bang up job of demonstrating that science is where the truth is. Because this is from The Daily Mail today: Our climate models are WRONG: Global warming has slowed – and recent changes are down to ‘natural variability’, says study. If the facts don’t allow you to use your models to reach the conclusions you want to reach, just get another model. Watch how it’s done:

To test these, [the research team] created a new statistical model based on reconstructed empirical records of surface temperatures over the last 1,000 years.

‘By comparing our model against theirs, we found that climate models largely get the ‘big picture’ right but seem to underestimate the magnitude of natural decade-to-decade climate wiggles,’ Brown said.

‘Our model shows these wiggles can be big enough that they could have accounted for a reasonable portion of the accelerated warming we experienced from 1975 to 2000, as well as the reduced rate in warming that occurred from 2002 to 2013.’

‘Statistically, it’s pretty unlikely that an 11-year hiatus in warming, like the one we saw at the start of this century, would occur if the underlying human-caused warming was progressing at a rate as fast as the most severe IPCC projections,’ Brown said.

In other words, it doesn’t actually matter what happens in the real world, climate change is happening. And it’s not an 11-year hiatus, it’s now up to 17, but that too, I’m sure, fits into the data. There is, in fact, the way this has gone on, no observation that we can apparently make that is inconsistent with a prior belief in global warming.

Of course, the interesting part is why they so desperately want the planet to be warming, and why they want this warming to be man-made. Methinks there may be other agendas running, not least amongst which is a desire for more grant money to look into this problem further. But the anti-free-market agenda no doubt remains the top priority, as my own model conclusively shows.

[Thanks to Des for sending the Royal Society story along.]

The Kluka Klan

Posted on April 23, 2015 by lawofmarkets

This is Rush Limbaugh going after those who perpetrated the home invasions in the name of the law in Wisconsin in 2013. He wishes to ensure their names are known to one and all, and I am happy to assist. At the centre of it was “the judge, without whom this case could not have happened, Barbara Kluka, K-l-u-k-a“.

She came along in the second John Doe investigation, and she approved every petition, every subpoena, every search warrant in the whole case in less than one day’s work. She enabled law enforcement to raid these innocent citizens’ homes. She’s since recused herself from this, but not before she enabled all of this to happen in the second phase of the John Doe 2 case here.

In the second John Doe case, the DA, John Chisholm, had no real evidence of wrongdoing by anybody. It didn’t stop him. Conservative groups were active in issue advocacy, which is protected by the First Amendment. It didn’t violate any campaign finance laws. Issue advocacy is politics 101. These people were targeted because they’re conservatives and liberals. As I say, what happened here in not only the treatment Scott Walker got, but everybody else, this is liberalism run amok without any checks, without any opposition, without anybody pushing back, and in its own way California is the same example.

Despite the fact that there were no violations of the law in any away, the DA, Chisholm, convinced “prosecutors in four other counties to launch their own John Does, with Judge Kluka overseeing all of them. Empowered by a rubber-stamp judge, partisan investigators ran amok. They subpoenaed and obtained (without the conservative targets’ knowledge) massive amounts of electronic data, including virtually all the targets’ personal e-mails and other electronic messages from outside e-mail vendors and communications companies. The investigations exploded into the open with a coordinated series of raids on October 3, 2013. These were home invasions,” including the ones that I have detailed previously in this half hour.

They are true fascists and totalitarians, in the exact mould of people who think of themselves as good and decent. Instead they are vicious cowards who use force to terrorise those whom they cannot convince by their words and argument. The totalitarian temptation is ever-present and is almost invariably associated with the left.

The GYPSY life

Posted on April 21, 2015 by lawofmarkets

An interesting article sent to me by my son: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy. And it starts with an equation of sorts:

Happiness = Reality – Expectations

Ah, as explained, Gen Y is in deficit compared with us baby boomers who are in a major net surplus, as shown in the chart above. And it begins the assessment of us with this: “after graduating from being insufferable hippies . . .”. Having been literally one of those insufferable long-haired hippy dropouts – life in the communal settings of Vancouver, a year and a half as a gardener in London after finishing my Masters, living in a garret in Paris, dishwasher at Honest Ed’s Ice Cream Parlour, before I finally snapped out of it.

And there were two parts to it that may seem contradictory but are not. The first was that I felt I was on a conveyor belt towards a future that was pre-determined and not my own. The job I didn’t get in Ottawa – the one my Mother always thought back on wistfully before I went off to Australia – I missed out on because the mailman came that day after 5:00 pm. So I took off instead, and aside from the pain it caused my parents, which is not a small consideration, I lived a very different life from the one they had thought I should.

The second half is that I felt a kind of fear that I would not measure up to the requirements of the adult world. It is not obvious when you are twenty-odd that you will be able to move up and along the career path towards higher levels of responsibility. Maybe you have it and maybe you don’t but failure is unpleasant, and the fear of failure stops many taking even those first few steps. Anyway, it was only after I had been promoted to Assistant Charge Hand for the gardening crew I was part of for the London Borough of Hammersmith that I began to feel a kind of confidence in myself that getting an A on an essay never could quite provide.

But the difference for me is that I was taught by and lived amongst members of that Greatest Generation. You have lived amongst and been educated by those despised hippies. They were your teachers, or your teachers’ teachers. And what a difference that has made, and you do have my sympathies. The worst generation and you have not even begun to see just how destructive we have been.

So let us see the first part of the false narrative of my generation that is supposedly believed by this GYPSY generation:

The GYPSY needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of prosperity and security. The fact is, a green lawn isn’t quite exceptional or unique enough for a GYPSY. Where the Baby Boomers wanted to live The American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own Personal Dream.

If you don’t think this is a hippy ethos, you were not paying attention. We were dropouts of a society that was a good deal more together than this one, and we were bored by it. But only a comparative few of us did the dropping out, and what we found was how unsatisfying it was. We tried it, and there is nothing there, which is why there are hardly any of us left leading such empty lives.

Everybody wants to fashion their own life to suit their own personal ambitions. No one even knows what these personal ambitions are until life begins to tempt us into our different directions. Until the moment comes, it is all just sampling and grazing. We are wealthy enough as a civilisation to indulge our young in an ability to mess around like this. The disdained hippy generation was perhaps the first ever to be part of a civilisation wealthy enough to allow large-scale indecision before most of us settled into a life-time pattern, although it is possible that the 1920s was also something like that as well, cut short by the Depression, then war and then the restoration of a hardened centre.

The apparent disdain for “secure” careers shown in the article is merely an artefact that there is no sense of insecurity felt by the young. And that is because, if you ask me, they have not yet felt the possibility that their entire lives may end up wasted in purposeless frivolity, an aimless path of no consequence in which nothing was achieved and life just petered out.

We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth