Will, our eight year old Samoyed male, Kendara’s Trespassers Will, died this afternoon.

For the last year he had struggled with a health condition which became increasingly severe. It was diagnosed as inflammatory bowel disease and pancreatitis. In theory these are not terminal conditions but he did not respond to treatment. He wasted away. At the time of his death he was quite literally just skin and bones and fur, weighing less than half as much as he had a year ago. Even in his feeble, wasted condition he was a strikingly beautiful dog. He had been a UKC conformation champion.

We did what we could, first seeking help from our regular vet, then a veterinary internal medicine specialist. We took him to the University of Wisconsin’s vet school. We sought assistance in feeding him from the University of Tennessee’s Veterinary Diet Center. For the last couple of weeks we fed him a homemade diet of mostly tilapia and sweet potato and I’m quite sure I will never be able to eat tilapia or sweet potato without thinking of him.

But it was to no avail. Last Wednesday he gave up eating entirely. Then he stopped drinking.

Over the years we have had five therapy dogs but Will was exceptionally gifted. He had a true genius as a therapy dog—he knew who needed him and what they needed. He did an enormous amount of good for many people in his eight too short years. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was remembered long after I am dead and forgotten as “that beautiful white dog who helped my Daddy” or “that beautiful white dog who helped my Mommy”.

He was my own personal therapy dog and I’ll miss him dearly. I am overwhelmed with grief and guilt. The grief is understandable but the guilt is completely irrational. We did everything we possibly could have done and our entire veterinary care team remarked on our tenacity. Sometimes no matter what you do it’s just not enough and it’s important to know when to let go.

You might want to read Asra Q. Nomani’s op-ed in the Washington Post on the organized program to silence critics of the un-Islamic way in which some Muslims practice their faith through shame.

Cultures have different ways of controlling the behavior of their members. Among these methods are through internalized guilt or externalized shame. The cultures from which many Muslims come are not guilt cultures but shame cultures which means, among other things, that attempting to make them feel guilty will not be an effective method of social control while shaming them might.

I also think we need to make it clearer to the Muslims of the Middle East that, if they wish to hold us to a standard of collective guilt, they will need to accept such a standard themselves. And adjust our own ways of thinking accordingly.

In his column in the Washington Post Colbert King writes:

A stipulation: History records that Christendom oppressed and degraded Muslims and Jews by the millions in the name of the Gospel. Christianity was behind the Crusades and the ghettoes of Europe, the persecution and the pogroms. Speaking for myself, our halos are, indeed, badly tilted.

Another stipulation: Not all terrorists are Muslims. Far from it. Terrorism is as abhorrent to most Muslims as it is for most of us.

But that doesn’t mean we can turn a blind eye to Islamist-inspired terrorism.

[…]

Within the Obama administration, “Islamic terrorism” is an offense that dare not speak its name. The administration referred to the Fort Hood massacre, where Nidal Malik Hasan, a self-identified “Soldier of Allah” who shouted “Allahu Akbar” while shooting dozens of people, as “workplace violence.” Why? Whose feelings are being spared?

Certainly not Hasan’s or those of groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which proudly take credit for the mayhem they cause.

A plea to the White House from potential victims and targets of Islamic terrorism here in Washington, Paris and beyond: Call it what it is. Dispense with safe words and focus on the real foe.

There is a strong Jacksonian strain within the African American community, the most reliable of Democratic interest groups. It will be interesting to see whether the tide is turning there.

Should private non-sectarian college in the United States toll the Angelus?

Back in the distant past the attendance at my private non-sectarian elite alma mater was roughly a third Jewish, a third Catholic, and a third anything else. I wonder if it’s about the same now?

Reports of the containment of ISIS have been greatly exaggerated:

ISIS continues to gain substantial ground in Syria, despite nearly 800 airstrikes in the American-led campaign to break its grip there.

At least one-third of the country’s territory is now under ISIS influence, with recent gains in rural areas that can serve as a conduit to major cities that the so-called Islamic State hopes to eventually claim as part of its caliphate. Meanwhile, the Islamic extremist group does not appear to have suffered any major ground losses since the strikes began. The result is a net ground gain for ISIS, according to information compiled by two groups with on-the-ground sources.

The “half full” way of thinking about this is provided by Rear Adm. John Kirby:

During a Jan. 6 press briefing, for example, when a reporter asked “where ISIS’s relative strength is right now,” Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby replied by talking exclusively about the U.S. effort in Iraq, naming cities were the military believed ISIS’s momentum has been “halted.”

When the reporter pressed for an answer on what was happening in Syria, Kirby struggled, saying, “I couldn’t give you a—a specific point at which, you know, we believe, well geez, we’ve halted their momentum. It—it’s come slowly, in various stages. But I think it’s safe to say that over the last three to four weeks, we—we’ve been confident that that momentum has largely been blunted.”

IIRC our air campaign against ISIS is costing something in the neighborhood of a half billion a month and, presumably, we can continue to “blunt” ISIS’s momentum as long as we’re willing to keep it up.

Social Security Trustee Charles Blahous warns:

The problem in a nutshell is that Social Security’s disability trust fund is running out of money. The latest trustees’ report projects a reserve depletion date in late 2016. By law Social Security can only pay benefits if there is a positive balance in the appropriate trust fund (there are two: one for old-age and survivors’ benefits (OASI), the other for disability benefits). Absent such reserves, incoming taxes provide the only funds that can be spent. Under current projections, by late 2016 there will only be enough tax income to fund 81 percent of scheduled disability benefits. In other words, without legislation benefits will be cut 19 percent.

Some are proposing that the difference be re-allocated from the Social Security retirement trust fund:

Some have suggested that DI’s funding problem be addressed merely by giving DI some of the taxes now going to OASI (currently DI receives 1.8 points of the 12.4 percent payroll tax, OASI 10.6 points). As I have explained before, this suggests a misdiagnosis of the problem. The problem is not that DI commands too small a share of the tax relative to its obligations; to the contrary, OASI actually faces the larger actuarial imbalance. DI is hitting the wall first largely because the baby boomers hit their peak disability years before their retirement years; it is the first crisis triggered by the unsustainable financing arrangements threatening DI and OASI alike.

I’m not sure his diagnosis is right, either. I think that the real problem is the lack of grown in jobs that pay good wages. When you’re laid off your unemployment insurance eventually runs out. If you still can’t find a job, applying for disability is worth a try. It’s the unemployment insurance of last resort. A lot of the jobless qualify for disability, especially the older ones.

I think that people are going to need to resign ourselves to one of just a handful of solutions. Either

1. We need to figure out how to produce more jobs that pay decent wages
2. We need to abandon the fund accounting approach to disability and Social Security retirement and pay the benefits from general funds or
3. We need to raise FICA max or eliminate it altogether (which has problems of its own)

Absent one of those a lot of people will very soon be in really desperate circumstances.

And what happens when DI and OASI “hit the wall” at the same time?

Fareed Zakaria, skeptical that more determined intervention in Muslim countries will end terrorist attacks, writes:

Let’s review the record. The United States’ non-intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s is said to have spawned Islamic radicalism, as did the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s, as did the partnership with Pakistan’s military, as did drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, as did the surge in Afghanistan, as did the withdrawal of troops from that country. When the United States intervenes, it is said to provoke terrorists; when it doesn’t, it is said to show that Washington is weak. No matter what the United States has done over the past two decades, Islamic radicalism has been on the rise, often directed against the United States and its Western allies, and it always finds a few alienated young men who act on its perverse ideology.

If both intervention and non-intervention increases terrorism, then our actions if not irrelevant are not dispositive. There are other factors at work.

In my view jihadism is just the successor to Pan-Arabism, clothed in a religious pretext. Behind it is a complicated stew of nationalism, post-colonialism, religion, and societal dysfunction, most of which is beyond our ability to change. It is not really about us and there’s not much we can do to stop it so our efforts would be better focused on protecting ourselves from it.

Those who favor strong intervention at least have clarity of vision on their side in the sense that if you have eight suspects for a crime and you execute all eight of them you’re bound to execute one criminal. I just don’t want us to be the kind of people who would intentionally engage in such a program.

Apparently, there’s a bit of a furor over the lack of Academy Award nominations being received by African Americans:

The Oscar acting nominations are typically a reflection, in some part, of the best roles of the year available to actors and actresses, which makes 2015’s lineup troubling. Though the Academy doesn’t reveal a breakdown of its membership, a 2012 report by the Los Angeles Times found that of the nearly 6,000 members, 94% are white, 77% are male and 86% are age 50 or older.

Last year, actress Lupita Nyong’o took home the best supporting actress Oscar for the film 12 Years a Slave, which featured a mostly black cast and also won the best picture statuette. But this year’s Oscar nominees, including the best picture heat, has a decidedly racially homogenous feel, with the exception of Selma, which was nominated for the top prize.

I was outraged when Out of Africa won Best Picture over The Color Purple so it’s nothing new. I guess the same people are voting as voted in 1985.

I can’t help but wonder if the large proportion of British, Canadian, and Australian movie stars in American movies isn’t trying to tell us something?

In an editorial opposing an increase in the gasoline tax the editors of the Wall Street Journal make a number of good points. The federal excise tax on gasoline funds a lot more than interstates these days:

But since the 1990s, the Highway Trust Fund has come to fund much more than new roads and bridges and highway maintenance, abandoning the original “user pays” principle behind a gas tax. Drivers now see about a quarter of their gas taxes diverted to subsidize mass transit in merely six metro areas and sundry other programs for street cars, ferries, sidewalks, bike lanes, hiking trails, urban planning and even landscaping nationwide. Trolley riders, et al., contribute nothing to the HTF.

Federal spending on such side projects has increased 38% since 2008, while highway spending is flat. Here’s what the politicians won’t say: Simply using the taxes that are supposed to pay for highways to, well, pay for highways makes the HTF 98% solvent for the next decade, no tax increase necessary.

Our infrastructure (defined as roads and bridges) isn’t in as bad a shape as the advance publicity might lead you to believe:

Another myth is that U.S. roads and bridges are “crumbling,” to use the invariable media description. Federal Highway Administration data show that the condition, quality and safety of U.S. surface transportation are steadily improving. The Chicago Federal Reserve Bank noted in a 2009 paper that roads have “indisputably” improved over the last two decades and that “the surface of the median interstate highway mile is suitable for superhighway speeds not typically permitted in the United States.”

And states are actually able to build roads and bridges more efficiently than the federal government is:

Almost three-quarters of highway spending is already supplied by state and local governments, and if the federal role is reduced, they can decide either to increase their own gas taxes; fund roads some other way, such as tolls or public-private partnerships; or use tax dollars for other priorities like schools. States can build cheaper in any case, since the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rules and Buy America procurement provisions that accompany federal funding don’t apply.

The points I wish they had made is that if the income that lower gas prices brings is used as a windfall for federal revenues (by increasing the gas tax) it will affect the economy adversely and the gas tax is very regressive.

I know that someone will quote the civil engineers’ report to me. Their annual report says nothing about what roads and bridges are worth repairing but only addresses the raw numbers of roads and bridges and their condition. A bridge over a creek in rural Wyoming that hasn’t been used by anybody in a decade has the same weight in the engineers’ report as a brand spanking new bridge in Chicago that 10,000 people use every day. We have a lot of old, dilapidated useless roads and bridges.

One modest proposal for those who believe we should be using less gas: rather than building more roads start removing some. Interstates allow areas to be developed that otherwise would not be. They encourage gasoline consumption.