From Christian News Wire. (CHT Bruce Majors; be sure to read the whole thing.)

A Cross made from the Cross carried Around the World on foot by Arthur Blessitt (319 nations, island groups and territories almost 40,000 miles) Is ‘Now Orbiting The Earth’! The Cross went up on the SpaceX Falcon 9 Dragon Spacecraft. Celestis was the launch company.

The Celestis canister with the Cross was carried as a secondary payload on the Falcon 9’s second stage & is not on the Dragon. The cross in space is expected to remain in orbit for a year or more.

In other words, it was discarded and left to fall to earth in flames?

The Cross was carried Around the Earth on foot and Now the is Cross Flying Around this Earth over Washington DC, Saudi Arabia, Jerusalem, Asia, Australia etc.

I’m having trouble picturing the shape of this orbit. I think Isaac Newton might be puzzled too.

The cross is passing over you where ever you are.

Okay, that doesn’t help with the orbit thing.

But who’d have guessed that this famous scene of sophistry from Life With Father –

– was prefigured in Poe’s lesser-known essay “Diddling Considered As One of the Exact Sciences”?

The diddler approaches the bar of a tavern, and demands a couple of twists of tobacco. These are handed to him, when, having slightly examined them, he says:

“I don’t much like this tobacco. Here, take it back, and give me a glass of brandy and water in its place.” The brandy and water is furnished and imbibed, and the diddler makes his way to the door. But the voice of the tavern-keeper arrests him.

“I believe, sir, you have forgotten to pay for your brandy and water.”

“Pay for my brandy and water! – didn’t I give you the tobacco for the brandy and water? What more would you have?”

“But, sir, if you please, I don’t remember that you paid me for the tobacco.”

“What do you mean by that, you scoundrel? – Didn’t I give you back your tobacco? Isn’t that your tobacco lying there? Do you expect me to pay for what I did not take?”

“But, sir,” says the publican, now rather at a loss what to say, “but sir –”

“But me no buts, sir,” interrupts the diddler, apparently in very high dudgeon, and slamming the door after him, as he makes his escape. – “But me no buts, sir, and none of your tricks upon travellers.”

(I wouldn’t recommend trying this on an actual bartender, by the way, unless you’re eager to learn wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert.)

Influence or coincidence? I don’t know. The pug dog incident doesn’t appear to be in Clarence Day’s original book Life With Father, so it probably originated in the subsequent play (by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, best known for The Sound of Music, for which they wrote everything but the songs) which in turn was the basis for the movie. Crouse also wrote about the Mary Rogers murder case (the same case that Poe fictionalised as “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”), so that’s some basis, though not much, for speculating that he might have been a Poe aficionado.

The right answer, it turns out, is almost total agreement: “there are very few conclusions or remarks to which we are disposed to object.” And the one point for which Hodgskin does take Spencer to task is Spencer’s rejection of private ownership of land.

It’s almost as though traditional political categories are mistaken somehow ….

Incidentally, although Hodgskin makes some good points in his discussion of land (some of which are reminiscent of Dave Schmidtz’s work), I don’t think he quite sees the force of Spencer’s arguments. Spencer worries that if private land ownership were permissible, the entire earth could theoretically fall into private hands, whereupon the nonowners would be at the mercy of the owners – since while on other people’s property you have to do as they say or leave, and when leaving is impossible all that’s left is doing what they say. (Note, by the way, that Spencer’s worry is not that this would be a likely result. His worry is rather that the principle of land ownership gives the wrong answer to the question of what would be legitimate in the described situation; it says that the owners’ demanding whatever they like of the nonowners would be just, while the Law of Equal Freedom says it would be unjust.)

To this Hodgskin replies that nonowners would not be at the mercy of owners, because there are other ways of making a living besides farming: “what use is possession of the land to seamen, locomotive carriage drivers, and waggoners?” But Spencer’s point is not merely that nonowners would need permission from the owners in order to cultivate the soil; his point is that nonowners would need permission from the owners in order to sit, stand, or move. Hence Hodgskin’s waggoners and locomotive carriage drivers will be at the mercy of those whose land they have to cross, as will seamen if they need trees to make their ships out of. (At any rate, the force of Spencer’s thought experiment should cover hypothetical situations without navigable waters.)

Hodgskin is also unimpressed by Spencer’s insistence that nonowners would be at the mercy of owners, since, as Hodgskin points out, we are all at each other’s mercy anyway. But this likewise misses Spencer’s point, which is not the pragmatic worry that nonowners would in fact be at the mercy of owners, but rather the ethical worry that nonowners would be legitimately at the mercy of owners. My life may depend on other people’s not killing me, but my right to life does not.

I think Spencer’s worry can be answered, but the key to answering it lies in challenging the claim that if all the earth were private property, the owners could then demand whatever they wanted of the nonowners. As I’ve argued elsewhere:

Even when A has a right to recover some property in B’s possession, there are limits to the harm A can inflict in exercising this right. If you swallow my diamond ring, I do not have the right to cut you open to get it out, possibly killing you or causing serious injury. If you are trespassing on my property, I do not have the right to shove you off my front lawn and onto the street at the precise moment that a truck is coming that would flatten you. … Hence Spencer is mistaken in thinking that under private ownership his hypothetical “lords of the soil” could legitimately deny nonowners a right to exist ….

Spencer argues against trying to solve the problem by building into property rights an exception clause for extreme situations. I don’t have quite the same horror of exception clauses that he has, but in any case my suggestion is not an exception clause, but rather a proportionality requirement that is always in force.

A point I’m surprised that Hodgskin didn’t raise is the difficulty of reconciling Spencer’s views on land with his “right to ignore the state.” If everyone pays rent to society for their land, who is authorised to collect that rent?

P.S. – I wish Hodgskin had elaborated on his “other points of difference” (he says there are a few, but none as major as the land issue).

Longtime readers of this blog will recognise my latest BHL post, on same-sex marriage, as a shameless mashup of several of my previous AAE posts on the same topic.

My people believe in using every part of the blog.

Thus spake Marvel Studios star-tsar Kevin Feige:

There had been discussion as to where to take … the part [of the Hulk] and Joss [Whedon] had some ideas. He came to us and said, “I’d like to think about another actor,” and we said, “Well, much of what we like about The Avengers is we’re taking all the actors we had before and putting them together again, so we said it depends on who you’re thinking of – if you’re thinking of A, B or C maybe not, if you’re thinking of Mark Ruffalo, we’d be open to a conversation.” And he goes, “Holy shit!” and takes a list out of his pocket, and at the top of his list was Mark Ruffalo.

Okay, so does that mean that Feige was lying his head off two years ago when he said, or at least strongly implied, that the change was made because Ed Norton was too difficult to work with?

But if you look at what the Macks actually say, the accusation won’t fly. Macks have distinguished a variety of different meanings of the term “capitalism” in contemporary use – and our chief preference has been to use “capitalism” not to mean “corporatism,” but rather to mean a social condition which Macks believe is caused by corporatism, but which Socks (and some Caps) believe is caused by free markets. See, for example, Gary here and Charles here. (And of course this is essentially the way that individualist anarchists have been using the term for the past two centuries.)

If you’re going to attack us, at least attack us for what we actually say (and maybe even engage with our arguments for what we say).

What’s striking about that example is that in the (surprisingly good) 1970s-80s tv series – though not in the comics – the experiment that originally turns Banner into the Hulk is part of his research into cases of ordinary people demonstrating extraordinary strength in emergency situations – with the case of a mother lifting a car to free her trapped child being the main case study focused on.

Assuming this isn’t a coincidence, then either Kenneth Johnson (who wrote and directed the first Hulk episode, as well as being responsible for a few other shows you may recognise) got the idea through conversation with Kirby, or else Kirby’s memory is mistaken and inadvertently drawing on the tv show.

Between Lee and Kirby I’m ordinarily more inclined to trust Kirby. But this mother-saving-her-child-by-lifting-a-car idea is so central to the tv show and (as far as I recall) so non-evident in the original comic that I’m left scratching my head.

Robert Rodriguez is finally beginning work on a sequel to Sin City. According to the announcement, the title will be Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, and “details of the film’s story have been kept tightly under wraps.”

Um, no. I don’t think a movie based on a graphic novel that’s been out for nearly twenty years can really claim that its story is “tightly under wraps.”

This reminds of the reporter who claimed that Steven Moffat was being “tight-lipped” about the storylines for Sherlock’s second series because the only clue he would give was the three words “Adler, Hound, Reichenbach”!

Genius. Billionaire. Playboy. Philanthropist.

For some reason I’m on the mailing list of an outfit called “Conservative Action Alerts.” (They seem more libertarian than the conservative mainstream, so that’s probably the connection.) Their latest missive complains that the word “individualism” has been “poisoned by deceptive propaganda that disparaged it as ‘rugged.’”

Well, not exactly. “Rugged individualism” was introduced as a positive term, either coined or popularised by Herbert Hoover (who liked to pose, at least sometimes, as a free-market type even though his actual policies were straight-up big-government dirigism). Admittedly it’s often used pejoratively now, but that’s mainly due to the (ludicrous) perception that Hoover’s ineffective response to the Great Depression was somehow driven by individualism.