Amalia Rodriguez Sings Povo Que Lavas No Rio.

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Hitler bombs Guernica and invades Poland. In Portugal, Salazar comes to power; in Spain, Franco. Salazar demands that all fado singers carry identity cards. Everywhere there are allied and nazi spies, looking for supporters and traitors.

It was at this time, in 1939 that the legendary fadista Amália Rodriguez made her debut at the fado house Retiro da Severa.

By then, fado had left the streets and taverns where it had begun and had entered the bourgeois venues. Amalia quickly became the most original and celebrated artist in the genre, an international star who performed everywhere, from opera houses to Broadway and Hollywood. But the government in Portugal had nothing good to say and Salazar always derided her as ‘the little creature.’

Here, Amalia sings Povo que lavas no rio (“The people who wash in the river”).
The washer women are poor and the song, like many of hers, becomes political by the very fact of her singing it, for she sang many anti-fascist poets, besides Portuguese classics, like Camoens.

“Povo que lavas no rio
Que talhas com o teu machado
As tábuas do meu caixão.
Pode haver quem te defenda
Quem compre o teu chão sagrado
Mas a tua vida não………”

— Excerpt from Povo Que Lavas No Rio,
Lyrics by Pedro Homem de Mello
Music by Alain Oulmain (a Franco-Portuguese anti-fascist poet whom she helped set free after the Portuguese secret police arrested him)

“People who wash in the river/ Who with their axes hew/ The boards of my coffin/ There are those who value you…….”

Yet, of the poverty in which she grew up, she was always dismissive:

“We never complained about life. Sure, we knew there were people who were different from us, otherwise there would be no revolutions. But I never heard anybody talk about that. It’s the privileged classes who discuss that type of thing, not the poor. And, after all is said and done, there’s also class discrimination among the poor. We were like social outcasts.”

Of God she said, “Even if he doesn’t exist, I believe in Him,”

Do Wise Latina Women Judge Differently from White Males?

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There’s a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about likely Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s remarks in 2001 when she was an appeals court judge.

““I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor.”

(Published by the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal)

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler finds the implication of her remarks troubling. He suggests that they go beyond simply stating that each individual’s perspective matters to negating the existence of an objective stance altogether.

Ho hum. This is such a tired battle. No one ever seems to say anything new or insightful. It all seems to boil down to a power struggle. Those upholding objective standards claim they do so because indeed standards are “out there” – i.e. objective.

Those arguing for identity as the trump card claim that the objective standard merely disguises power relations and the (white, male) identity of the powerful.

Can I say anything new? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try if only to spare myself future boredom reading the reasoning on both sides of these kinds of debate.

Back later with more.
******
OK. Here’s how I see it.
Experience always alters perception, so, to that extent, Sotomayor is not saying anything inaccurate.

I think the part that bothered Adler is this one (and I can see why): He says she “quotes approvingly” law professors who have said that “to judge is an exercise of power.”
Again, note the problem with reasoning in the social sciences here. There is an elision, a gap, in which changes in meaning are lost.

To say something is an act of power is not the same thing as saying it’s only an act of power. Moreover, power has a connotation in today’s political lingo that’s inherently negative.

Supposing then you were to substitute the word “will,” for the word “power,” what then?
Sotomayor would then be saying that people’s experiences influence the way they think, which informs their judgment. Their judgment is as much an act of will as it’s the logical conclusion of reasoning independent of the actor who performs it.

Instead of discussing power relations (politics), we’d end up in a much more fruitful arena, exploring the relationship between our will and our perceptions and reasoning. We’d be in the territory of cognitive science and philosophy. And we’d be much more likely to come up with something useful.

And all from looking at our language a bit more critically.

Of course, I have no idea whether that’s what Sotomayor meant. I’m just saying that a nuanced reading of words might be a place where both sides of the debate could start.

Instead, the debate ends locked in what I think I’ll label a Catholic (God is all-knowing*) versus Protestant (God is all-powerful) polarity, with judge substituting for God.

* I originally wrote all-rational, which seems to have led to a misunderstanding. I meant “reason” (as in ‘right reason’ rather than Reason, as in Enlightenment rationality)

Award Winning Research Proves that Fed Fiddled Us Into Disaster

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A Distinguished Academic Research Award went to researchers who showed that Bernanke’s tinkering with the interest rate converted a minor recession in 2004 into a full-fledged implosion of the credit markets in 2008:

“In a correlative movement with the rise in the price of oil, the Federal Reserve moved from a low accommodative interest rate policy to one of a steady and consistent increase in interest rates between 2004 and 2007. The switch in policy, to higher interest rates, combined with the financially corrosive effects of low initial variable interest rates, between 2001 to 2004, converting to much higher indexed variable interest rates, between 2005-2008, became a prime cause of the financial services mortgage crisis of 2008. The study suggests that the Federal Reserve’s sustained manipulation of interest rates between 2000-2008 had a deleterious effect on financial lenders and individual borrowers.”

— “Federal Reserve Interest Rate Manipulation between 2000-2007 and the Housing Mortgage Crisis of 2008,” by Dr, Fred M. Carr and Dr. Jane A. Beese, August 8, 2008, of the University of Akron’s .K. Barker Center for Economic Education.

My Comment

(later)

Judge Orders Chemotherapy for 13 Yr Old over Parents’ No

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In the news: a Minnesota judge has ruled that 13 year old Daniel Hauser, a cancer patient, has to undergo chemotherapy that he’s stopped in favor of American Indian medicinal therapies used by the Nemenhah Band, in which Daniel is said to be an elder. His father claims he (the father) was cured of cancer by the same methods. The teen-ager’s cancer is reported to have resumed growing after the chemotherapy was stopped.

“Daniel was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and stopped chemotherapy in February after a single treatment. He and his parents opted instead for “alternative medicines” based on their religious beliefs.

Child protection workers accused Daniel’s parents of medical neglect; but in court, his mother insisted the boy wouldn’t submit to chemotherapy for religious reasons and she said she wouldn’t comply if the court orders it.

Doctors have said Daniel’s cancer had up to a 90 percent chance of being cured with chemotherapy and radiation. Without those treatments, doctors said his chances of survival are 5 percent.”

On the Need for Wisdom in Politics

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A useful description of the importance of prudence or wisdom (sophia) rather than theory or formal education in statesmanship:

Following a discussion of virtue as a mean between extremes, Aristotle attributes to concrete action a higher degree of truth than to general principles of ethics.

The mark “of a man with high moral standards is his ability to see the truth in each particular moral question, since he is … the standard and measure for such questions.” (20) Ethics in politics, then, is not merely announcing moral postulates or retreating before the complexities of the world.

What matters, said Voegelin, are

not correct principles about what is right by nature in an immutable generality, nor the acute consciousness of the tension between the immutable truth and its mutable application (possibly even with tragic overtones), but the changeability, the kineton itself, and the methods to lift it to the reality of truth. The truth of existence is attained when it becomes concrete, i.e., in action. (21)

In classical and Christian ethics, the first of the moral virtues is sophia or prudentia because without adequate understanding of the structure of reality, including the conditio humana, moral action with rational coordination of means and ends is impossible. (22)

Voegelin’s characterization of the spoudaios (who sees the “truth in concrete things”) carries an important moral message for the democratic statesman. No amount of single tangible facts imparted through education can substitute for the type of experience that pushes great men to the limits of their human possibilities. The knowledge of the statesman grows out of the eternal laws by which man moves in the social world. The validity of those laws, the Aristotelian truth that man is a political animal, does not derive from “objective” facts in conformity with the mathematizing models of the natural sciences. The key to those laws of man lies in the practical wisdom through which the statesman elevates his experiences into universal laws of human nature. (23)”

— “Eric Voegelin and Reinhold Niebuhr on the Moral Resources of Democracy,” Greg Russell in Modern Age, Sep 22, 2006

Bail-Out for Insurers

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In the news:

“The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. was the first to disclose Thursday that it had been notified by the Treasury Department that it was eligible for $3.4 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Lincoln National Corp., which commonly goes by the name Lincoln Financial Group, said it has been initially approved for a $2.5 billion injection from TARP’s Capital Purchase Program.

Allstate Corp., Ameriprise Financial Inc., Principal Financial Group Inc. and Prudential Financial Inc. also are among insurers receiving preliminary investment approval, Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams confirmed. He declined to disclose the amount of investment each company will receive.

The total capital injection into the six companies will be less than $22 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the situation…”

My Comment

22 billion might not seem like a lot, but insurers’ holdings have taken a big hit in recent months, it seems, and a cut in their ratings would have been likely once their assets fell below a certain level.

So you have government ownership of large parts of the housing market (which itself covers, in all its aspects some 30% of the economy), extensive government intervention in banking and insurance, government run trade, government run schools and colleges, government run social security and medicaid and medicare, and what does the left think the problem is? The free market!

Hayek on the Inadequacy of Mathematical Economics

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“There is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man’s knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people’s knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it [equilibrium analysis] does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem.”

— Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” VII, 31

Allied Irish Chairman Pelted with Eggs

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In the news, BBC reports on another kind of Blackrock – Blackrock, South Dublin, where Gary Keogh was hastily removed from a building after chucking eggs at Dermot Gleeson, chairman of Keogh’s bank, Allied Irish. The outburst came at a shareholder’s meeting of Allied Irish to approve a 3.5 billion euro government recapitalization for the bank, which has lost 91% of its value over the past 12 months.

Said Keogh,

“I have no pension. My pension now is wiped out because of AIB. I cannot sell the shares because they are useless.

If we didn’t live in a tolerant society, the chairman and the rest of the board would be hanging by their necks with piano wire out on the road.

Meanwhile, inside, an unsettled Mr Gleeson stood in front of a blue AIB logo spattered with egg and continued to take questions from shareholders….”

My Comment

Hooray for Mr. Keogh.

Any society can only take so much ‘tolerance’ and ‘non-judgmentalism’ without bankrupting itself financially and spiritually.

The moral problem underlying all this is that we deny that actions have consequences. And we also refuse to judge our actions by their consequences.

We want to make every action free of consequence, although consequences are precisely what guide us in ordinary life.

We’re accountable when we drive on the roads, aren’t we?

So why do bankers get to abdicate that responsibility when it comes to larger social and economic issues?

Record Prices for Rarities at Auction Sales

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High prices at auctions are an indication that investors are avidly interested in high quality tangible assets which will hold onto their value and are ready to pay extraordinary prices for them even in this market. Two illustrations from the auctions houses:

In Namure in southern Belgium, on Sunday, demand for Tintin, the cartoon reporter, broke national and world sales records, AFP reports. Five hand-drawn pages by Herge raised 1, 172,000 euros (1.57 million dollars) a world record for Herge as well as a national record for cartoon strips books. Buyers came from all over Europe, the United States, Lebanon and China.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that at Sotheby’s semi-annual sale at Geneva, a virgin blue diamond straight from South Africa, weighing 7.03 carats, sold to any anonymous buyer on May 12, Tuesday, for a record 10.5 million Swiss francs ($9.49 million), including commission, the highest price paid per carat for any gemstone at auction and a new world record price for blue diamonds. The sale price without commission, a record, was $1,349,752, Sotheby’s said.