60s Retro Band

 Carroll County sang this in 1972.  We were on the cutting edge of 60s retro.  Got in on the ground floor. 

 

Also "Walk Away Renee"

It's a Marriage Crisis, Not a Fertility Crisis

 Rob Henderson at City Journal writes another summary article about a shift in thinking about what is driving fertility down, Want Higher Birthrates? Promote Marriage.  I've been seeing a run on this idea lately, with what look like good numbers to back it up.

 The real drivers of falling fertility rates in wealthy countries, it turns out, aren’t professional women but younger, poorer women, who are delaying childbirth and ultimately having fewer children. In the U.S., more than half of the fertility drop since 1990 comes from a sharp decline in births among teenagers, partly because more of them are attending college. Even among those not going to college, birthrates are down. In 1994, the average first-time mother without a college degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their twenties still haven’t had a first child.

Yes, I just mentioned urbanism and housing verticality as causes, but I think those are related. It has long been easier for a single person to live in an urban area than a rural or suburban one. 

Imagine A Mystical Limpet

From Miracles, by CS Lewis

Why are many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose a mystical limpet, a sage among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. But then there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet's words is simply and solely the negatives. From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs.

2010 Links That Are Surprisingly Timely

 Make Bureaucrats Justify Their Spending 

Government Budget Discussions. If the people in charge of agencies do not make cuts with a scalpel, someone else will come in and do it with an axe.

The Receiving End of Abuse

 Change Is Difficult means "Things aren't better because some people won't get in line."

Now You Know

Why there was no "French Invasion"


or "Finnish Invasion"


in Rock 'n Roll.

Food for Thought

By replacing your morning coffee with green tea, you can lose...

 

 

up to 89% of what little joy you still have in your life.

Love Is A Fallacy

 For some reason, this story has stuck with me since 8th grade. It shows the limits of logic.

Max Shulman: Love is a Fallacy

Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute—I was all of these.
My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a
scalpel. And—think of it!—I only eighteen.

It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Bellows,
my roommate at the university. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice
enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable.
Impressionable...

Grok 3 and Wokeness

Via Scott Alexander at ACX

If you ask Grok 3 “who is the worst spreader of misinformation”, it will say Elon; if you ask it who deserves the death penalty, it will say Trump (with Elon close behind). I think this helpfully illustrates what the smart people have been saying all along: aside from the topics it explicitly refuses to talk about (like race/IQ), AI’s “woke” opinions aren’t because companies trained it to be “woke”, they’re because liberals are more likely to get their opinions out in long online text, and AI is trained on long online text.

I admit I feel better that Grok doesn't do this because it is nefariously trained to, but as a byproduct of something else.

Or do I? Dangerous statements that have an understandable origin are easier to detect and ferret out, aren't they?

Steven Pinker Resigns from APA

Steven Pinker resigns from the American Psychological Association after 43 years for "virulent Jew hate."

Housing and Fertility

 A study on housing and fertility. I should mention that this is in Brazil.

We find that obtaining housing increases the average probability of having a child by 3.8% and the number of children by 3.2%. For 20-25-year-olds, the corresponding effects are 32% and 33%, with no increase in fertility for people above age 40. The lifetime fertility increase for a 20-year old is twice as large from obtaining housing immediately relative to obtaining it at age 30. The increase in fertility is stronger for households in areas with lower quality housing, greater rental expenses relative to income, and those with lower household income and lower female income share. These results suggest that alleviating housing credit and physical space constraints can significantly increase fertility. 

Housing for family formation has frequently been put forward as a key item, and verticality is supposed to depress birthrates in cities worldwide.  Cities themselves depress birthrates anyway, and have for centuries.

Gondolas in Sugarland

Sugarland TX, in response to rapid growth, is trying ski-lift gondolas for public transport. Roads, tunnels, and elevated trains are expensive.  These are cheaper.

Not sure how you do that in Boston in winter, but hey, skiers are used to it and may adapt quickly.

ABBA Reposting

I've been putting up music that I posted fifteen years ago, but nothing from ABBA, which was a staple then. Notice a Swedish group, singing on German television, is choosing to not only sing in translation, but compsing entirely in English in 1975.

 

The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld

We Confess Our Small Faults Only To Convince People We Have No Greater Ones

Rob Henderson extracts some of his favorite maxims from the collection.

And you thought I was cynical about human motivations?

Adoption Series

 The 2010 memories of the adoption from Romania in 2001.

5 More Short Links from 2010

 She Ain't Heavy, She's My Dachshund

 As The Backs Go Tearing By. My mother sang this at Central in the 40s, I sang it in the 60s & 70s. 

Bureaucratese of the Day

Tourist Site - Budapest.  click to enlarge

Tourist Site - Zurich   click

Remember to comment here and not at the 2010 link.

Fairfield Four

 

Vaccine Efficacy

 Neil Stone on X  

Sometimes vaccine efficacy is subtle.

Sometimes it isn't.

(Post 2500 -) The Free Market

Reposted From 2010

Conservatives, not just progressives, often fail to remember that free market principles are not something one applies to a society. They are like gravity, always present. Adam Smith's invisible hand was a description of how things work, not advocacy for how things should work. Market principles continued within communist regimes. Governments may ignore them or try to counteract them, but they remain. Ignore or fight against them too much, as in communism, and gravity eventually brings you to earth.

The free market is not the only operating force, of course. As with gravity, other forces can be brought to bear to harness it or hold it at bay for some purpose, such as throwing a stone or building an airplane. Affection, vengeance, drive for power, moral principles - all these can work to channel or oppose the self-interest mechanisms of the market. These are in fact necessary countervailing forces, as they are often the basis of long term "self-interest" in a broader sense. We like to have family and friends, we like to believe our lives have meaning, we give up resources to build systems of law and fairness to inhabit. Corruption - a type of self-interest that does not have regard for these other forces - can harness the free market to benefit the few, leaving only scraps of value outside the centers of power. The free market will continue to work in both places, whether on the scraps or among the cronies, but these circles will then operate independently.

Surprise After Surprise

Another podcast from someone smarter than me, being interviewed by someone who is also smarter than me.  My sidebar is full of such folks. (Not all.  Some just have topic specialties I enjoy.)

Steve Hsu has a Manifold episode which records his being interviewed by...someone. An anonymous tech person on the  Informtion Theory podcast: Adventures in Physics, Trump, and More. Steve is or was a liberal and was dean of research at Michigan State but has surprisingly good things to say about Trump and surprisingly negative ones to say about gov't research, especially NIH.  I didn't see either of those coming. 

Also AI, Miltech, and Balance of Power. Deepseek is a game-changer because it uses so much less energy; 6th generation Chinese fighter planes; America's chip advantage via Taiwan and Netherlands is not only narrowing, but the Chinese just smuggle in those chips if they really need to.  Not in quantity, but still very useful.

From the book club that David Foster and I are in one of the Silicon Valley guys passes along an article about AI coding, The 70% problem. Recommended. By him, I mean. Most of it is beyond me, but some of you like that stuff.  Have at it. 

Evangelicals and Ukraine...And AVI's Three Year Rule

There is widespread support for Trump's "rudeness and arrogance" to Zelenskiy, including some liberals who would rather not admit it.  But I think this will be less popular with evangelicals than his other moves. You will find some fringe fundies who approve of Putin because he is against gay marriage, but as a whole, evangelicals have had far more success evangelising in other places in Eastern Europe. Russia had a strong tradition of underground Baptists during the Soviet era (see One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), but when the Iron Curtain fell, a lot of the religious revival went straight to the Orthodox Church. Evangelical missionaries had great success in Romania, Ukraine, Slovak Republic, and Hungary.  Rather less in former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the Baltic nations, and not well at all in Belarus and points east.

Many evangelical congregations have Romanians or Ukranians in them, have people who have gone on short term missions there, and support charities there. They have become very tied to the people of these nations, essentially ignoring their corrupt governments as a work in progress that will sort itself into western values...Someday. 

It has been 35 years since the Romanian revolution, and early on, Americans rooted for all the formerly communist nations to not fall prey to Russian expansionism.  If Iliescu was actually no better than Ceausescu, that was ignored because the danger was that it would go back.  That is still not outside the realm of possibility, and Moldova and the Baltic nations are on edge with what has happened in Ukraine. Yet it is progressively less likely that the Russians could do any such thing for the next decade or so. 

I have some parallels.  We resettled Laotian refugees in the 80s, and I boned up on that country's politics and people left behind, because I knew that the Syha's still cared about it. I haven't got a clue what is happening in Laos now, and frankly, I don't care. We worked with (South) Sudanese refugees not so many years ago and still have some connection. We were excited that South Sudan became independent in 2011 after horrifying persecution and oppression.

But of course, the South Sudanese were still capable of getting into wars between Dinka and Nuer over cattle.  What is up now?  I don't know. Maybe I should care, but I don't. As with Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Kosovo, etc, I don't even know who to pretend are the good guys. There have been Americans since the beginning who have insisted that the various factions in Ukraine are all so corrupt that we should have nothing to do with any of them, and they have receipts. Some liberals and libertarians, but a fair number of conservatives of paleo stripe have been beating out that rhythm on the drum for a few years, Putin or no.

For evangelicals who have to mix with liberals every day it has been something of a respite as well. They finally have something they can hold in common, rooting for Ukraine. Trump and Vance have seemed obnoxious, and most modern Christians of all sorts have a lot of the Gospel of Nice under the hood. Jeez, can't you guys take a hard line more quietly, without having to be rude about it?  

But now the full question is on the table, whether we like it or not: regardless of what happened before, What are we willing to do now? Russia invaded almost exactly three years ago, and I have long noted that Americans don't even like their own wars to go longer than three years, never mind anyone else's with our money. We will tolerate endless low-intensity warfare it seems, but not sharp hostilities. Billions, not millions of dollars have gone unaccounted for. My feelings are quite mixed at this point. As far as any war can be said to have started at a particular point, this one started in 2014. Two mostly-Russian provinces of Ukraine attempted to break away, and the Russians poured resources into them. The Ukrainians tried to prevent them. That still looks like Russian aggression, but you could stretch a point...

Feb 2022 invasion is unarguably Russian.

So what are my possible bad reasons for this uncertainty of position?  Am I being a typical American who just gets tired of hearing about a war and wants it to go away, whether we are winning, losing, or treading water? Am I seeing Ukraine as a Romanian equivalent and wanting them to prevail against Russians because I just always will?  Have I become increasingly isolationist because president after president has punched tar babies of countries? Do I just not want to hurt my wife's very pro-Ukraine feelings?  Am I becoming a MAGAhead, or reflexively disliking something because liberals like it?  Does Zelenskiy being an obvious arrogant prick about this sway me more than it should? I harp on all of us having buried and unattractive motives for our mostly-performative politics. Shouldn't I be especially alert to that here?

Accuse me of anything.  I might cop to it.

FYI

 Facebook has a whole new crop of American experts on diplomacy tonight.  Check it out.

There Shall Be No Poor Among You

 Reposted from 2010.  Good comments

There is a new book by this title - I know nothing about it - and several interesting commentaries online concerning subtleties that might be missed at first reading. If you're interested in that sort of thing. But I think this is the sort of Bible passage you can have a go at even without a lot of background.

Discuss.

Deuteronomy 15 (New International Version)

The Year for Canceling Debts
1 At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. 2 This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel the loan he has made to his fellow Israelite. He shall not require payment from his fellow Israelite or brother, because the LORD's time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. 3 You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your brother owes you. 4 However, there should be no poor among you, for in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, 5 if only you fully obey the LORD your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. 6 For the LORD your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.

7 If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother. 8 Rather be openhanded and freely lend him whatever he needs. 9 Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: "The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near," so that you do not show ill will toward your needy brother and give him nothing. He may then appeal to the LORD against you, and you will be found guilty of sin. 10 Give generously to him and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. 11 There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.

Freeing Servants
12 If a fellow Hebrew, a man or a woman, sells himself to you and serves you six years, in the seventh year you must let him go free. 13 And when you release him, do not send him away empty-handed. 14 Supply him liberally from your flock, your threshing floor and your winepress. Give to him as the LORD your God has blessed you. 15 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you. That is why I give you this command today.

16 But if your servant says to you, "I do not want to leave you," because he loves you and your family and is well off with you, 17 then take an awl and push it through his ear lobe into the door, and he will become your servant for life. Do the same for your maidservant.

18 Do not consider it a hardship to set your servant free, because his service to you these six years has been worth twice as much as that of a hired hand. And the LORD your God will bless you in everything you do.

Fiskebackskil, Sweden

The town my great grandfather left in 1881 at the age of 14 to go to sea, eventually coming to America after seeing Hong Kong and Rio

Kid Sports

Reposted from 2010

Neo had a post, touched off by yet another story of a town that wanted to switch entirely to cooperative games, about the lessons learned through competitive sports. I commented there, but thoughts do rattle around in my head whenever the subject comes up. There has certainly been a change over the decades in American culture, but I don’t know if it is as thorough as claimed. In our common mythology, boys used to play pick-up games without much adult supervision and would play for hours, especially in summer. Presently, they play sports highly-supervised by adults, who ruin things somehow. Girls were unwelcome and rare in the old days, while co-ed games until puberty are more encouraged now.

As we can always find data to support a theory already believed, this view has become the common wisdom. I’d like to revisit it and would appreciate your collective knowledge. And - if you have any friends form other sites who might be interested, then - Red Rover, Red Rover, send Tommy right over. All conclusions are tentative, so theories are welcome even if the initial evidence for your idea is scant.

The first great exception to the myth is playground basketball, especially in cities. It is unsupervised, self-organising, and goes on for hours, just as we imagine happened in the old days.

OTOH, game equipment is certainly more standardised now, so even pickup games have more regularity than the games I recall playing in the 60’s and hearing about prior to that. An official size and weight ball in any sport was not a given in my youth, and was regarded as a treasure. Rich kids had sewn, intact footballs, basketballs, and baseballs. We often made due with worn tennis balls or cheap plastic items. (Tug of War with a cheap garden hose is a really bad idea, BTW.) These often required rule adjustments. Fields of play were oddly shaped and required adaptation as well: slopes, streets, bushes. These lend themselves more to informal games of catch and individual tricks.

My sons played both school sports and town sports, more than I did. But in my era we had church leagues, boy scouts, and day camps; the first two of those were even more common in earlier eras than mine.

Girls didn’t play in the defined sports much, but certainly played often in the competitive games of Eggs (Spud), Kick the Can, Red Rover, a dozen versions of Tag, Hide and Go Seek, Giant Steps, Red Light – I’m sure there were others. They rode bikes with us, though any boy and girl who rode out of sight together were subject to immediate teasing. It was these games, more than the sports, which were spontaneous and self-organising. Sports with any group larger than the usual half-dozen from your immediate area were spent in endless arguments about rules and infractions. Not a lot of actual running and throwing got done. The rules of games were more generally agreed upon. Or perhaps the whole dynamic of arguing about it was different with girls present. I seem to recall the girls being the arbiters and setting the rules more authoritatively, though age was an even more powerful vehicle of authority. I suppose there are important adult lessons to be learned from that as well.

My Dad talked about playing for hours when young. But he also talked about having lots of work to do and being isolated from other boys except the Greenwoods on the next farm. I suspect there were Saturday games occasionally allowed to go on for hours, rather than sports every afternoon, and these were well-remembered, taking up increasing memory space as he aged. Kids went swimming – I doubt think that racing was more than an occasional part of that anywhere. Wrestling, breath-holding, and swinging were more likely. In Manchester there was The Ledge, where boys jumped off cliffs into the water of an old granite quarry. The only competition was how high you dared jump from. Oh, and macho posturing and bragging, but that’s a given.

In our town, by the way, the intensity of competition increases with age. In T-ball, everyone bats every inning and runs to first base - no further. It doesn't matter what the rule is about throwing kids out on the basepaths, because it never happens. By minor leagues (up to age 12) however, the game is fully competitive.

Budget Cuts

A new worry occurred to me today.  I an confident that a thousand or a million other people have also had it in the last few weeks, but I like this new theory because (ahem! ahem!) it is mine. The totals of b illions saved have been amazing.  Thrilling to those supporting them, ghastly to those opposint them, but certainly bigger than anything we have seen.

What if we reach a really big number and pat ourselves on the backs and say job well done and move on to some new focus, but it's still just a drop in the bucket.  What if ten years from now, if the Sweet Meteor of Death doesn't take us out in 2032, there are graphs all over the internet showing that there was a slight downturn in growth of government starting in 2025, but the overall trend is not much changed.  Barely dented. While we are still toasting each other about how wise we are.

I know we don't really believe in the deficit. We have been told for years that it is going to consume us - any day now, just you wait - but it hasn't. We know from so many other things that things change slowly, slowly, then all at once.  You and your girlfriend argue for months and grind your teeth over more and more little things and nothing changes, until one day you have no girlfriend.  It is the reasoning that those worrying about climate change or species extinction use.  Slowly, slowly, then overnight, and somewhere in that slowly was a point of no return that we missed on the way by.

Yet the numbers really have grown over the last few years. We resist the cuts: the children need shoes, honey! And they do need shoes, but now even shoes are on the table. Er, family budget cut menu. Shoes on the table, shoes on the menu, this metaphor isn't holding up well, but you take my point.

 

Conflict Theory Vs. Mistake Theory

From the continuing series of People Smarter Than Me.

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten (ACX): Why I Am Not a Conflict Theorist .

I had not heard the phrases conflict theory and mistake theory before, but we have been over similar territory many times here.

Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people...I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.

As usual, I do find myself wishing there were someone smart enough to serve as an editor for Dr. Alexander, but he is thorough. He goes issue by issue that our beliefs cannot stem only from self-interest - not on either side, whatever we accuse our opponents of - nor can they be solely attributed to being uniformed or untrained. SALT taxes, vaccinations, climate, immigration, Ukraine, lockdowns, Gaza, the deficit - the self interest is there for a few, and for many of us to a small degree. But in general, no.  He does identify a few issues that might be more a product of self-interest.

It is related to CS Lewis's Bulverism, focusing on some status of the speaker rather than the reasonableness of the argument. Alexander finds that where we stand on issues is more related to psychological factors. I said in the 80s that 50% of all political positions are performative.  By the 90s I had upped that to 75%, and by the 00s I said more than half seriously that I now believed that 90% of our political beliefs are performative, to fit in, or show off, or belittle others. Human beings are not that unreasonable.  In pure situations where they are motivated for real results they can strategise.  But we take shortcuts, because our real purpose is not to arrive at the right answer.  

At this point I just hope that some residue of my beliefs, when subjected to consuming fire, turn out to have their origin in desire to find the truth.

Planned Parenthood

PJ Media has a response to a NYT article about Planned Parenthood clinics being less able to provide services other than abortion because of tight budgets - but abortion services are thriving. PJM frames this as the NYT inadvertently admitting what pro-lifers have said all along: that PP is primarily about abortions, while the other services are for cover.

I don't go to PJ Media that much.  Not because I find it inaccurate, but because it tends to tell you only one side of the story, and it is unnecessarily inflammatory.  Sometimes it exaggerates and leaves out important details.  But on this one, I think they hit the mark about right. The NYT, in an effort to show how beleaguered Planned Parenthood's other services have become, has let the cat out of the bag that providing abortions is still the main priority.

Blues Traveler

I don't think I've ever posted anything by them before

 

Kaplan Quote

Reposted from 2010

 

Robert D. Kaplan Eastward to Tartary  Chapter 17, Crossing The Jordan:

In the 1970's, when I was in my twenties, I traveled throughout Islamic North Africa and the Middle East, settling in Israel, where I served in the military. In Israel, finding life among people of my own faith claustrophobic, I rediscovered my Americanness. What I took away from Israel was not Zionism so much as realism: While Israel's security phobia might at times seem extreme, life in Israel taught me that the liberal-humanist tendency to see politics predominantly in moral terms could not be less so. In Israel, I often met foreign journalists who demanded absolute justice for the Palestinians and talked constantly about morality in politics, which in practice meant that anyone who disagreed with them was "immoral." You couldn't argue with these people. Meanwhile, my right-wing neighbors in a poor, Oriental part of Jewish Jerusalem sought absolute security. You couldn't argue with them, either, but at least their arguments were grounded in concrete self-interest and not in absolute moral terms. (A confidant of King Hussein and Prince Hassan told me the reason the two men had trusted Yitzhak Rabin so much was that he always framed his arguments for peace in terms of Israel's military self-interest rather than morality.) Self-interest at its healthiest implicitly recognizes the self-interest of others, and therein lies the possibility of compromise. A rigid moral position admits few compromises. This is some of what I took away from Israel.

Statistical Genetics Update

Just a few things from Razib's interview with Tade Souaiaia.

We have long known that empirically the distribution tails of many traits are fatter than they are "supposed" to be.  Adding to the puzzle is that some traits are fat only at one end. The very approximate new rule of thumb is that the regular distribution for traits might apply for 98-100% of the population in the huge "middle," but there is a nontrivial chance that things have gone a bit screwy at one or both ends.

For a polygenic trait such as height, there are people who fall into the extreme 1% on each end in the usual way, that they have a larger number of tallness traits and fewer average or shortness traits. In addition to that group, there are tall people that got there via one gene, usually a mutation affecting the pituitary, like Andre the Giant. At the shorter end, there are those who got there with a polygenic score for shortness, and also some who inherited a single gene for dwarfism or related condition. With a single deleterious mutation - and many are de novo in that generation or a parent's - it is 50-50 whether a child inherits it. Thus you might get two children in the normal distribution, and two others very short, rather than four generally-shorter children if it were all polygenic.

Tangent: I heard for the first time that sitting height is less affected by these single-gene exceptions, while leg length is more affected. I knew of individual examples where this was true - namely, myself - but didn't know it was a recognised statistical phenomenon.  I am 5'8".  My best friend in highschool was 6'7".  We sat at nearly the same height, so the difference was in the legs.  He bought 37" inseam pants which his mother hemmed at the cuff with great difficulty, while mine were nearly 10" shorter.  If you see me in shorts you immediately wonder what is wrong with that man's tibias? Senior year I had a girlfriend who was 4'11", which was comic when the three of use were walking or standing, but she also sat much taller. Sitting in the bleachers, you could tell from the back she was shorter than us, but not that you'd necessarily notice more than the usual girl-slightly-shorter expectation.

Intelligence is only slightly fattened at the upper end.  There is no single "genius" gene. But there are any number of conditions that are intelligence destructive, fattening the lower tail. You will find families with generally depressed scores, just as you find families where all the kids are smart. But a child at the extreme lower end is more likely to have siblings who are average, while children just a bit better off in the IQ department are likely to have other siblings who also lag. Children at the 90th percentile have siblings that cluster around the 73rd, not the 50th. Those at the 99th percentile have siblings around the 84th.

Enter autism. Because there is this pattern in ASD, researchers are increasingly convinced that there are two autisms, though the mechanisms are not clear. Polygenic autism is what I generally talk about here, of engineer's and librarian's kids who actually find personal adaptations that give them an advantage in some domains while still being impaired in others: overliteral, misinterpreting social cues, low thresholds for emotion, stimuli, and chaos. Single-mutation autism would be much more likely to result in the severely impaired. I wish I had coined the term benign autism 10-15 years ago.  Not that polygenic autism is always or even often benign, and not because I would be doing a great service to the autism community by reducing stigma, but because it's a great title for an airport book and I could have retired earlier.

I haven't finished the podcast and will get to it tonight on my way to the Tolkien class.  That part is going to be on race and sports, always controversial and fun. It is one of the clearest issues of things everyone knows but is not allowed to say. Over a billion people in China but only a few marginal players in the NBA (except the intentionally-bred Yao Ming).  About 20 million from former Yugoslavia, but over a 100 players, including two of the top five currently. It's all about culture, sure.

Short takes from 2010

Breathless Gaians, Straight Out Of Kid Lit

Fancy That. Good comments, too.  

Pet Sentimentality. Rainbow Bridges seems to have mercifully gone to its final reward

Analogy , and Texan99 takes a stern tone in the comments.

 

Harry Chapin - Short Stories

 

KSW&Y

Reposted from 2010 - photos are from 1971 and 1970

In resonse to the many cries for pictures - okay, one cry - of my folk-playing days, I uncovered this.


It was actually not a band that played more than one performance, just an ad hoc collection of folkies that rehearsed once. Ted Kontos, Jack Schwartz, Larry Younger, and me. In the designation of the time, then, Kontos, Schwartz, Wyman, and Younger. It doesn't have much of a ring to it that way, so KSW&Y works better.

We were singing "Southern Man" here, a subject high school boys from NH were deeply knowledgeable about then. I hope I was already suspicious that Neil Young's lyrics were a little nuts. Two years later Carroll County rejected doing the song because as my roommate from New Jersey said "Frankly, we haven't heard a lot of bullwhips cracking here at William and Mary." To which Virginian Sam Jones replied "And also, we'll get the crap beat out of us." But I had a great unexpected underneath harmony to this on the chorus.

If you can't tell which is me, this photo from the same era might help.


I was king of the Manchester Carnival in 1970.

I look at that guy and wonder who he is.

Evangelical Suspiciousness

Reposted from 2010, not for my great post but because of the excellent comments.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence, that a young Christian I know turns out to be a 9/11 Truther, another has gone from being a mere tax protester to full-out Bilderberg/Trilateralist, and three young couples having babies have all joined the anti-vaccine movement. My first instinct was to question what the Christian schools many of them attended had been teaching, but I don't think that's it. The particular schools, in fact, would likely have provided counterweight to all those ideas. And these particular young people didn't attend Christian schools most of their years anyway.

But I wonder about the evangelical culture in general that they grew up in, if it does not encourage a sort of default suspicion of conventional wisdom. Or more likely, being in a very small minority as an evangelical in New Hampshire was in itself encouraging of that attitude, regardless of the specific attitudes taught. Or finally, is this a chicken-and-egg problem, where those who have an attitude of "things are not as they seem - there is special knowledge required" tend to be drawn to minority ideas in the culture.

"Not Much, Anyway"

Reposted from 2010

 

There is a general myth in circulation in Christian circles that if we ever started acting like we should, the world would be amazed at our example and many would be converted. I suspect this is because nonbelievers make the accusation frequently, that they cannot take Christianity seriously because of oh, it varies from person to person, but all those wars of religion, y'know, conveniently overlooking all actual history, in the service of a narrative about all those evil religious people. It can become fairly sophisticated, this inability to take in the relevant data because so much of it contradicts the favored premise. There are certainly plenty of popular writers and even actual historians who subscribe to it.

Where was I? Yes, wars of religion, and of course, Christians saying stupid things - there's a first-class proof for you; or not standing up for justice - defined variously, with negative points awarded for standing up against you for justice. There are other excuses, but you get the idea. If Christians would just stop all that, then well heck, I guess people wouldn't have any more objections and would gladly walk the sawdust trail.

But I think Christians embrace the idea for reasons of their own, also hoping it's true. It's certainly the idea behind all those stirring speeches on the scripture "If my people, who are called according to My Name..." If we just all prayed more, and repented as a people, and refrained from unrighteousness, everything would turn around. Folks want it to be true, and scramble around in the scriptures for proof that it is. For America. In the 21st C. The religious left has its own political version, less well-known but just as pernicious, but I'm not picking on them especially this time.

Not only politics. The idea may be even more pervasive when it comes to evangelism. If we would all, individually and collectively, (block that metaphor), be a City on a Hill, the heathen would bow down. If only. Contemporary Christian musicians seem particularly susceptible to this.

''The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply find unbelievable.'' (''What If I Stumble'' by dcTalk)

comes to mind. I think that's rubbish. You can probably find some atheists who say that, but my experience is they put forth other reasons. If they reference Christian behavior at all, it is usually in the collective or national sense, as above. Come to think of it, though, shooting doctors who perform abortions - and heck, we all do that. That's been the Advent focus at our church for years - does come up from time to time.

My favorite example is my patient John, a charming bipolar man I knew thirty years ago. John had been a permanently baked 60's hippie who had become a Jesus Freak in the 70's. Big lifestyle conflict here, but John had a plan. He was going to go hang out with Bob Marley and convert him. But in a subtle way, not by preaching, by being constantly cheerful and upbeat. When I knew John in the early 80's he was discouraged - he had hung around Marley five years, but Bob had died a Rastafarian anyway.

But John had been ready. He had the script ready if ever called on. One day Bob Marley was going to turn to him and say "John, you're different from the rest of us. You don't smoke ganja - not much, anyway - but you are always happy." And John would say "Bob, that's because I have the Lord Jesus Christ." And then Bob would know.

I still think of John whenever I hear those sermons.

In The Stupid Places - Reprise

Remember last summer when I suggested that after checking all the logical places when you have lost something, the next strategy is not to look in the semi-logical places, but Look In The Stupid Places? One example was the refrigerator. I lost my sunglasses mid afternoon and looked in the logical places.  I did even check some of the semi-logical ones before just going out on a walk with worse sunglasses.

My wife just found them in the freezer under the refrigerator.

Shallow State

 I think I'm going to work to undermine the Shallow State instead.  That sounds easier.

Status

I am watching who is getting most upset among the liberals, and then who is getting most upset at the liberals for being upset. This giving up of news is going to prove harder than I thought.  I am still drawn to it, as a moth to a flame, with similar results.

I am noticing that the angriest people, other than the ones who are in a direct line of fire on either side, are not those who derive the highest status in their troop, but those of lower status whose place is more precarious. They are elite-adjacent in some way, and want to prove their bona fides by going on the attack every day, over and over. Are they afraid of being cast into the outer darkness if they do not perform?  Are they telling themselves how key they are to the whole operation? I AM STILL ONE OF THEM! I REMAIN LOYAL! I SHOW MY COLORS! Cheep cheep, here I am.

I had lunch with an old friend who is quite liberal, and went in with the idea that even if I convinced her of everyone of my opinions, it would not much improve the world.  She would feel crushed, I would feel bad that I had saddened her, and nothing in America would have changed. Yet when she asked questions and made comments I kept rising to the bait for a few seconds each time before drawing back and re-insisting that I had no strong interest in convincing her, only a residual one.

I hope Lent is curative.  The dry run isn't going so well. 

A clang association in psychology means a topic insertion based entirely on the accident sound.  So "cheep cheep" leads to this, for no reason at all.

Two Revisitings

Reposted from 2010

 

Sometimes after an idea bounces around in your head awhile, a new angle or better example occurs to you. Not a disagreement with what you thought earlier, but an expansion.

In the infamous post which attracted 60 comments (NO. link.), a disputant made the comment that 70-80% of gov't spending was a transfer of wealth from men to women. The idea was so moronic that I didn't even bother to correct it at first, and others on the thread seemed to be doing a good job without me anyway. (I did eventually break down on the 61st comment and put the whole thing to rest with some force, BTW, which I should have done immediately. Sorry Terri.) The heart of the argument seemed to be that men pay in more to Social Security, etc, and women draw out more.

That's how it's done, of course. We guys pay in money to a separate account labeled FROM MEN, and we all collectively get moral credit for that. Then the various governments at every level shift 70-80% of that over into another account labeled TO WOMEN, from which those general freeriders draw at will. Those few other women, who happened to contribute, just have to endure the shame of it. Because they're women, after all, and that's what they deserve. You won't see that in the budget, of course. It's a secret. The other 20-30% of the budgets go to fund all the minor items like schools, police, defense, courts, infrastructure - that sort of thing.

In imagining that, I thought of the "worst" individual examples, from the old days when we could enforce patriarchy without any of this nonsense from the weaker sex. I thought of the very traditional model, perhaps the one our parents had, of a man who went out and worked all his life, wife never employed outside the home, who retired at 65 and died at 70. His wife lived to be 80. This is the guy, according to the complaint, who is getting the rawest deal of all. He paid in lots, his wife didn't (for we are conveniently ignoring the economic value of her labor for this complaint); he collects for 5 years, she for 15. I imagined putting these wealth-transfer numbers in front of a bunch of those guys down at the lodge in the 1950's to try and evoke some outrage.

Not gonna happen. Those guys would have looked at the numbers and said "Yep. That's exactly how we want it to be. Don't change a thing. That's what honorable men do." And those are the ones, according to the complaint, who got ripped off the most.

If they don't have a problem with it, I don't see why anyone else should.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

During the 2004 election, a liberal told me quite angrily that he was voting for Kerry because he loved his children and cared about their safety. Well, the implication that the rest of us don't love our children is pretty stupid and insulting, and I am amazed that a supposedly intelligent person (he is a moderately-prominent local attorney) lets such foolishness emerged from their mouths without editing. There is next the irony that his children (who we know) are among the unlikeliest people to end up in the military, and certainly not in combat infantry units, so George Bush and his ilk, always sending us into illegalwarsbasedonlies, is not going to measurably affect the safety of his children all that directly. I am not even going into the radical idea that some wars might actually make us safer, or at minimum, avoiding some wars might actually increase our danger.

But if you look at the attorney's comment in another sense, in the tribal sense of who runs the country and gets the best jobs, he's got a point. He is quite dramatically a part of the elite, and he is defending his childrens right to rule by keeping his tribe in power. They're smart kids and would likely do well under just about any American government, of course, but you get the idea.

Arcadia

Book club in town will be reading (or watching) this and 3 others by Stoppard, at my request. Here, two plots almost two centuries apart are shown in the same house. The events being argued about here intertwine with the first plot, so the audience knows more than the players onstage.

 

It's When...

In the 1960s, fifth and sixth graders frequently had exercises where they had to stand in front of the class and deliver some report, do some math or spell some words, or answer questions. One exercise in particular stands out, defining words that the teacher threw at you. Our teachers were particularly concerned that one not start with the phrase "It's when..." or "It's where..." They would interrupt you with some pronouncement that it wasn't a time or a place and command you to begin again. So now the child is embarrassed in front of the class and has had their concentration broken and now has to focus on a something other than defining a word, but on not saying it's when, not saying it's when, not saying it's when...Even at the time I remember thinking If you'd just let her finish she might have gotten it.  

This was what education was in the Good Old Days: pettifogging, over-literal pedantry that you dared not question. Intimidation was part of the pedagogy. It would not have occurred to them to let the girl finish and then gently say "That is correct, but it would be better if you didn't start with the words it's when. Try again." They wanted to make sure that the bad sentence never even came out of your mouth, because then who knew what other bad habits you would develop?  Better to hit you with a rolled-up newspaper in front of the class. 

Deeper in their minds, they were reacting against a change in the language, the growing popularity of an idiom they didn't like.  Language always changes, but not in grammar schools in 1963. Grammar had been delivered to earth on tablets generations ago. In reality, the set of rules at a moment in time around 1900 were frozen in place. This is humorous, since the teachers of 1850 would have found the rules for 1900 rather suspect, and just plain wrong in places.

I still use too many commas, a relic of that teaching.

Political Gender Gap Among Young People

 (Via Rob Henderson). The Growing Gender Gap Among Young People  

From the Brookings Institute, a notably liberal think tank, comes the information that the girls are moving left, but the boys are remaining about the same in their beliefs, but all the focus is on "What on earth is happening with these boys?" At a more granular level, the young men are increasingly saying they are being discriminated against, they have higher rates of suicide, they are doing worse at school - but the young women are increasingly embracing "anti-patriarchal" values. What patriarchy are they referring to? Liberation from what? The remnant of men who just don't understand?From the outside, it looks more like they have won and are trying to eliminate their opposition entirely and drink blood from their skulls.

I must say that I am relying on the numbers here, as it does not fit the young women I know.  OTOH, the young women I know are nonsecular elites at a suburban church, or they work in retail or in restaurants which means they are students or nonelites who have jobs doing measurable work. My sample is not representative, so they might not fit the data for that reason.

For those of us who have been reading things on the conservative side - and being exposed to the liberal side whether we like it or not - this Brookings article is an excellent example of liberal assumptions being so deeply embedded that they cannot even hear their own voices, nor can their editors.  The focus on the puzzle of the boys staying in the same place because they assume that the girls are moving in the proper direction, the opinions of all decent people.  They interpret data through a lens. 

Men in particular feel isolated. Brookings nonresident senior fellow, Richard Reeves, has studied the issue arguing in his book Of Boys and Men that rapid societal changes combined with a market shift from brawn to brain have left many men feeling bereft and without purpose. Reeves, a self-described “feminist”, does not make the argument that the liberation of women is a bad thing but instead suggests finding new roles for men and a redefinition of “masculinity” in this changing world.

Redefining masculinity.  I recall hearing about that since the 1960s.  I was good at it, actually, but marriage, fatherhood, owning a home, and a mixed workplace beat it out of me. Not to put too fine a point on it, young man adopt such views in order to get laid, which is a rather traditional masculinity in the short run.  When that no longer works quite as wells, as now, they see less need to make that adjustment. I think we know what is going to be in the redefined masculinity basket, and it's going to be "be more like the girls," just like we were told in school. Or by the girls. 

You have to wonder how they are interpreting their own data.

The incentive for change and action may be there, but not through democratic means. This is made more disconcerting by the fact that this is coming at a time when democracy could yet again be in peril this election year. But what exactly are men experiencing which could make this scenario a potential reality? Well, young men are overwhelmingly the loneliest demographic, with 63% of men aged 18 to 29 reporting being single, compared to 34% of women in the same age group.

Um, who are these young women married to, then? Is polygamy now common in that age group? Did no one ask that question and think "OK, maybe that loneliness thing isn't as accurate as we thought."

Outdoor Boys

I thought John Adrian was going to be on the show again this weekend, because they filmed in Nome about ten days ago.  He and Jocie had Luke, Rebecca and the boys over for Filipino food while they were up.  I'll keep you posted.

Maple Sap

It has been quite cold the last 10 days or so. This week it is going to be freezing at night, warmer during the day, which is ideal for lots of sap flowing up and down.  Our local producer says he may be boiling as early as Wednesday. He and his wife are teachers and it's school vacation week.  Great timing.

There Are People In The Bible

My wife did Sunday School for the little ones this morning, her cherubs, as she calls them 3/4 year-olds. There was a skit with quick costumes. She was unsure how much of the lesson they got, but one got to be Jesus and another Matthew. Skits are sometimes repeated with others taking the roles, because many want a turn or three, and it does reinforce the lesson. I thought a moment and then reassured "Well, even if all they learned is that there are people in the Bible, that's a good thing." Adults develop the idea that the Bible is mostly about rules and miracles. Maybe they know some parables or Genesis stories, which is great. It strikes me as important though that the first thing that clicks for children is that there are people, and they do things, and one can identify with them in some fashion.

Married, Cohabiting, or Living Unpaired

Rosemary L. Hopcroft at the Institute For Family Studies has an article Selection Explains Some—But Not All—of the Benefits of Marriage For Young Adults. The condensed version: Marriage and cohabitation provide about equal physical health benefits over living unpaired and both provide some mental health advantage on some measures.  But marriage confers (and yes, causal, not just co-occurring) additional mental health benefits as well, specifically in reducing antisocial behavior. 

Not shocking, but an interesting refinement to my usual opinion.

Marc Cohn

Perhaps The Opposite Is Also True

Why Do People Believe True Things? by Dan Williams at Conspicuous Cognition.

I have read things like this several times, perhaps even many times, especially over the last few years. Yet it is so counterintuitive that I revert to my "Why do we have a problem here and how can we fix it" default on topic after topic. Like the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, in which we recognise an article in a field we know about as fatuous and inaccurate, but turn the page and instinctively trust the next article about Palestine or Trump, there is something virtually automatic about it.  We have to intentionally try in order to ask ourselves "Have I got this backwards? Have I reversed the arrow of causation? Am I too trusting of the wrong people?" Over a decade ago I had a lengthy series May We Believe Our Thoughts? (It's rather a heavy slog, not least because I didn't have an editor.) 

Think of the economy, society-wide crime trends, vaccines, history, climate change, or any other possible focus of “public opinion.” Not only is the truth about such topics typically complex, ambiguous, and counter-intuitive but almost everything you believe about them is based on information you acquired from others—from the claims, gossip, reports, books, remarks, opinion pieces, teaching, images, video clips, and so on that other people communicated to you.

Moreover, to organise all that socially acquired information, you relied on simplifying categories, schema, and explanatory models that reduce reality's complexity to a tractable, low-resolution mental model.

It is a wonderful article in many ways, especially at the beginning. The puzzle is not why there is poverty, but why there is wealth; not why there is ignorance, but why there is knowledge; not why is there crime but why is there gooc civic behavior.  Yet it misses the most important point.  He lauds rationalism and the Enlightenment, scientific worldview, and the precious few in modern society who are free from superstition because of their education, their training.

Even extraordinarily complex institutions designed, refined, and shaped over centuries with the explicit goal of generating knowledge—institutions that constitute humanity’s best and most successful attempt at generating knowledge—still often fall short.

Those institutions do not "fall short." That is far too mild a phrase. If they are better than the default of ignorance, it is only marginally and intermittently.  They aren't close. I have a group that meets for lunch monthly, and one of the smarter members bemoaned just a few days ago that people believe misinformation because they aren't taught critical thinking.  I objected, and later sent a short rant by email to the wider group, including the three not in attendance. It is not intelligence or education, there is some other quality, perhaps humility, perhaps a grumpy skeptical-of-the-skeptics attitude. I wrote privately to two of the six later "P, you saw my little rant about not only questioning other people, but oneself. T can testify that I have hit this button at least twice before, once quite hard, over the last few years.  No one has taken me up on that, ever. The smartest people in the world - and I mean that sincerely.  The other three may all be smarter than the three of us. But the humility to be wrong seems to be an entirely different thing." 

My exercise over the next few days will be to look for clues: educated vs. less; male vs. female; old vs young; liberal, conservative, libertarian, communitarian; religious vs non; profession type - whatever occurs to me.  I have some initial suspicions which I will try to erase, or better still, consider the opposite.

Remember the rabbinic caution "Perhaps the opposite is also true." You can comment here, certainly, but if something seems too hot for public consumption, communicate with me at my backup email that I seldom check (but will now) asstvillageidiot    gmail.

Seeking?

 A response in First Things to a UU flyer:  It's an odd seeking that allows no finding.

"Memory, " From Gigi - Update...

 ...on my recent post about the song "Ah yes, I remember it well" from Gigi, Memory. 

Recently-discovered photographs reveal that Honore Lachaille's recollections were correct all along about his evening with Madame Alvarez. An unused photo from Vogue Paris dated April 1903 shows Alvarez in a gold gown, sans one glove, with a clearly visible moon in the background.

An aged Lachaille reported "The bitch has been trying to make me appear crazy and dim for years. Did you ever see 'Gaslight?' I feel thoroughly vindicated."

Madame Alvarez was unavailable for comment.

Reposted from 2010.  I still chuckle whenever I think of this now.

Reviewing the Review

I have been working my way through 2010. I'm about a third of the way through.

I wrote at greater length, which I noted before, but this time I also noted that my commenters replied at greater length as well.  I assume there is some correlation, that most people are less-willing to write more than a few sentences about a few sentences, or even a link to a long essay.  If they wish to reply at length, they would be more likely to do it there. Only on the posts where I took overlong to make sure I had closed off the escape routes - a regular five-part essay every day, and often as tedious - did all of you feel you could reply in like manner.

I do wonder if other factors were at play.  I often repost things that cause me to think  This is still true, or even more true. I'd like to show that this idea or problem has been around a while - or indirectly brag that I saw this coming years ago. Perhaps you were writing at greater length because the ideas were newer then and we were all more curious to explore them. We are briefer now because we have planed and sanded them a bit. Or sadly, more likely, because we feel we have thought enough and have Our Opinion now. On that score, it may be worth looking again at things from 2010 that we think are a bit tired now. 

There are other things that I tended to post and are filtered again into what I repost.  I will talk about those as we go.  Soon I will intentionally post a set of very short statements from that time, just so you don't get worn out.

For now, this one still seems largely true, and perhaps has ever been.  Political Faux Pas. 

Remember to comment here, not there.

Snake in the Produce

I go to this store fairly often

Venomous Snake Found In Bananas

Ukelele Orchestra

 

Disappointing News

Reposted from 2010.  The comment that these activities are good for their own sake, regardless of whether they improve overall brain power, is well-taken.

 

Daviess County, KY had an intriguing program to build better brains, by teaching music, chess, foreign language, and folkdance to every single kid in their system, K-12, every year. Not so that they would all be musicians or chessmasters, but so that many areas of the brain would be stimulated and integrated. It was called Graduation 2010, because this would be the year that a class had gone all the way through the program for 13 years. I was very hopeful that this would reveal important new information about education that really worked. Preliminary signs were mildly good.

I tried to track down the data today, wanting to see how much improvement this county-wide, broad, intensive program worked. I had trouble finding it - already a bad sign, as it would likely have been trumpeted and big news if the gains were dramatic. That no one is talking about them suggests... ah, well.

The final verdict: There might have been a slight increase in test scores for the county compared to the state average, but not much. And a few measures even went slightly down over time in the Daviess County. It may not be worth the candle.

Chicago Versus Barmen

Reposted from several previous years. I will be fasting from either news, or alcohol, or some of both for lent and I am easing into it beforehand.  Much of the next two months will be reposts, mostly from 15 years ago.

 

My son sent me a link to the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, a 1973 document composed by evangelical luminaries with a social justice orientation, including Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Lewis Smedes, plus others whose names I did not recognize. I looked up the others. They seem like nice people.

I expected that the declaration would start with general principles of Christian social action that were not especially controversial or arguable, and then overreach in what followed to unwarranted conclusions. That makes for interesting discussions, certainly. I also expected, because of the word “declaration,” that it would carry echoes of the Barmen Declaration, Karl Barth’s courageous confessional statement in Germany in 1934. I wondered if these would be echoes more of style than of substance.

I was wrong on both counts. The Chicago Declaration goes subtly wrong in the first paragraph, embedding worrisome assumptions in the rest of the document. Sentence two doesn't really follow from sentence one here.

As evangelical Christians committed to the Lord Jesus Christ and the full authority of the Word of God, we affirm that God lays total claim upon the lives of his people. We cannot, therefore, separate our lives from the situation in which God has placed us in the United States and the world.

I take such statements apart by putting them in other contexts. If a document is consonant with Christian doctrine, then it should hold up, with appropriate modification, from the mouths of other Christians in other times and places. If it does not, then there are red flags.

I cannot fit this declaration in any way into the words of Jesus. I cannot imagine Paul writing this, nor Augustine, nor Aquinas. That is not an automatic write-off, of course. We can justly and honestly extend words of Scripture to new situations, deriving truths for today from ancient truths. In fact, this is what we are called to do. But those little red flags go up again. We can perhaps imagine Luther, Calvin, Wesley, or John Paul II venturing into these discussions. They are closer to us in time, and wrestled with political and social questions as they applied to the Church.

There is always an enormous difficulty in making a general rule, as the situations in which Christians have some political influence and those in which they have none may call forth different responses. Whether we consider that The Man in Jesus and the Apostles’ day was the Roman power or the Jewish religious authorities, it still remains that the early Christians did little or nothing to influence them in how they should corporately behave. That would suggest noninvolvement. But most Christians have lived in times and places where at least someone in the Church had power, sometimes dominant power, and we developed a whole set of guidelines for that. The contradiction for social justice types is if they want to point to the first few centuries as pacifist because they were noninvolved, then it rather undercuts their claim that we should be involved when it suits them. You can’t have that both ways.

Though as in all complex things, it may not be either-or, and there may be ways through the swamp.

As to Barmen similarities, there were no especial echoes. Presumably the 1973 signatories would approve strongly of the 1934 document. Certainly there is no requirement that they echo form or style, but I don’t find the newer document cutting so deeply to the root as the earlier one, as here.

Barmen:

8.25 - 6. "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age." (Matt. 28:20.) "The word of God is not fettered." (2 Tim. 2:9.)
8.26 The Church's commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ's stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through sermon and sacrament.
8.27 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.

Chicago

We acknowledge that God requires justice. But we have not proclaimed or demonstrated his justice to an unjust American society. Although the Lord calls us to defend the social and economic rights of the poor and oppressed, we have mostly remained silent. We deplore the historic involvement of the church in America with racism and the conspicuous responsibility of the evangelical community for perpetuating the personal attitudes and institutional structures that have divided the body of Christ along color lines. Further, we have failed to condemn the exploitation of racism at home and abroad by our economic system.

I will note additionally that the Religious Left often portrays itself as a counterpoint to the Religious Right, formed as a necessary corrective to the excesses of Falwell and Robertson. (I wonder who the left would quote if they didn’t have those two knuckleheads? Perhaps other knuckleheads would rise.) The date on the Chicago document would suggest that the opposite is true.

There’s more to say on this, because I don’t think the 1973 document is entirely wrong. The Religious Right does indeed often defend a traditional religious culture, and hence a status quo, rather than the eternal gospel.

Chicago Versus Barmen -II

I was planning on going in a different direction in my criticism, but the idea of confessing Other People's Sins kept floating into my mind. I regarded it as a distraction at first. Jaed's comment, quite well-put, highlighted for me that this was in fact the main issue.

It is highly reminiscent of CS Lewis's "The Dangers of National Repentance," written in 1940.* I wonder if that was in the back of jaed's mind while writing. If not, you absolutely have to read the essay, jaed. I cannot find the naked essay, but David Foster over at ChicagoBoyz includes it, along with his own excellent commentary, here. I found additional commentary at an interesting site, Isegoria. The key weakness of the Chicago Declaration is that it is confessing other people's sins. It occurs to me that this goes to the root of the greatest danger from the Religious Left, of which they seem blithely unaware. (The greatest danger from the right I am not presently discussing. There are two, actually.)

*The reader is supposed to immediately think "ooh, during the war, then." This is additionally important because of the reference to "Colonel Blimp," a political cartoon between the wars that portrayed a retired military man who was stupid, uninformed, reactionary, and supported Churchill. A few years later, no one who had found such condescending amusement in the character was laughing anymore. Churchill, and Blimp indirectly, had turned out to be right, and those who had sneered at him had to swallow the knowledge that they had nearly destroyed their country. Not that they did swallow it, of course. They found other people to blame. But they were at least exposed for the others. The most poignant of his portrayals was not drawn by the original cartoonist, for reasons that will become obvious. A cartoon drawn after the fall of Paris shows a British soldier evocative of Blimp shaking his fist to the east from an English shore. It was captioned "Very well, alone."

Who Goes Nazi?

Reposted in full from 2010.  I have reversed the order of this and the next one from blogger to newspaper style

From Bookworm, via The Anchoress, CWCID Instapundit, is this piece from Dorothy Thompson from 1941,Who Goes Nazi?

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times–in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

Who Goes Nazi? - Continued

In the essay it pays to not only find with relief the person most like oneself who Dorothy Thompson thinks is not vulnerable, but to identify one who is as well. I would hope to be something along the lines of Mr. A, with a dash of Mr. H. I fear that I would be Mr. G – indeed, am quite worried that I would have been in another set of circumstances. Eugene Ionesco, in “Rhinoceros,” seems entirely puzzled by who goes Nazi. His characters inhabit mere madness in society, where anyone and everyone becomes inhuman for no reason at all. Thompson believes she has a dividing line “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t - whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.” We would call this a moral compass today. I draw a somewhat different line. Thompson is certainly drawing her composites from people she has actually met and observed, but also gives them a neatness that authors use to make a point. I defer to her observations, but am comfortable adding to her interpretation.

In my comments over at ChicagoBoyz, I got sidetracked into the specifically German and specifically Nazi aspects of the parlor game. That is a good grounding for discussing the modern question, perhaps, but not so useful in itself. For we are not in danger of actual nazis coming to power, but of a half-dozen variants of tyranny whose future is obscured. There are the great national and international movements, of course, which is where our minds run first. But the more important personal questions occur on a smaller scale. All of the characters who Thompson identifies as being likely resisters of nazism have resisted milder versions of groupthink and lust for power before. As CS Lewis notes in Screwtape, having something that one likes for its own sake, caring nothing for the status or advantage in it, is a powerful defense against attacks via vanity. “…defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."

Mr. A might have made something of his family connections and education to move into positions of greater prestige, but has chosen not to. The reasons are not clear, but seem to be related to some idea of who one is, of finding a place where one fits rather than making oneself over to fit. Or worse, making the places over so that one’s self can have its way. We see the same in Mrs. F’s and Mr. H’s abandoning career for romantic love, and Mr. K’s leaving off business and profit to do what he likes. The young German, most of all, has given nearly everything to avoid being a Nazi. James and Bill, the servants, do not fit my theory of nazi-avoidance in any obvious way.

The flip side of my theory fits also. The labor leader and the spoiled son have certainly gotten along by making others give things up, remaking their environments to fit them. Mrs. E has given up her very self, but there is a twist to it: she wants others to be made to give up their very selves as well. Something of the same might be said of Mr. C. He has sacrificed to get where he is, but the prize has eluded him. He also wants a “fairer” society which would reward him for his true worth – and punish those who did not acknowledge it before. Mr. J has divorced himself from his Jewish heritage and history and is entirely a man of the present. He approves of this new and powerful method of organising of society, believing that because he is post-Jewish, the new elite will reasonably exempt him. They worship power, so does he. He expects to get along fine. He does not yet see that they worship power not in the individual, but in the collective – and he is forever outside.

Mr. B, the wealthy sportsman, and Mr. G, the brilliant rationalizer, present a different case. Both automatically trim their sails to the prevailing winds, while retaining an alertness for their own main chance. Neither has much of an actual self to give up or impose on others, though both are content to go along for the ride of imposing.

Thompson is describing individuals from the upper reaches of society – they were all invited to this party with servants in attendance after all. I think that is the proper focus to take. Most shopkeepers and wage employees don’t have much say in the tyrannies of government. They can attempt to rise in the world by signing on to a rising tide and becoming a big wheel, or they can draw attention to themselves by visibly opposing it, but the little people can affect the world only with considerable effort.

TikTok

I scrolled randomly through TikTok today, after taking the bait and clicking on granddaughter #3's (13y/o) 8,902nd entry, which was again a still picture of her with music I don't recognise playing.

There are a lot of paranoid people out there, with evidence for the amazing conspiracies they have discovered that is unbelievably bad. I worked with paranoids all my life and thought I had heard it all, but oh man, finding hidden meanings in Simpsons or Family Guy episodes was new to me.* There are also lots of people who want to talk about how terrible their relationships are/were, how completely unreasonable men/women are, warning other women/men not to do this/fall for that. Mostly women talking specifically to men or to other women, but some are just telling off the whole world. There are also testimonials to apple cider vinegar helping you develop your Third Eye if you take it just so, and descriptions of how doctors are lying to you for money, but their expensive product shows how you are among those who are Not Fooled.

SNAFU.

*I advanced my theory years ago that paranoids pick up whatever is in the air at the time they believe that Something Is Fishy and take that as their explanation.  When I started in the 70s, the new paranoids thought it was the CIA after them - okayt, it's probably not accidental that that one keeps coming back, but work with me here. When the Godfather movies came out it was the Mafia. Satellites, chips in the brain, a restricted group of countries (no one thinks that French Guiana is after them. It's not in the air of discussion), and every president.  I was going to say that no one was paranoid about Gerald Ford, but Squeaky Fromme did shoot him, so you never know.  Religious people develop religious delusions.  If they were vegans they would find food things, druggies think they are in danger because of how much they know about other druggies.

Hypocrisy

I know that Jesus reserved his worst condemnation for hypocrites, and I see the sense of that for those who have stopped moving because they believe they are already fine.  But isn't it actually a good starting point, or even half-way point? Lewis would say that a wrong attitude goes to the root, and beginning from a false premise means that you will have to eventually unravel the whole blanket eventually, so why not start with purity, however small?  But in terms of behavior, of making an attempt to be better than you feel like being, isn't pretending to be calm better than anger?  Isn't fastidiousness better than lust?

The Pharisees specialised in loopholes.  They knew the law of not walking far from home on Sabbath must be obeyed, so they created an exception that if you had previously put a loaf of bread, a candle, and (I think) salt in one place less than 2,000 cubits from your own house, you could call that a house and walk a further 2,000 cubits. (Orthodox rabbis define this differently now, in  terms of "beyond the city limits" with definitions of where the limits were as well, but it is the same principle.) It was this violating the spirit of the law while technically (very technically) observing it that he regarded as among the greatest of spiritual dangers. Yet isn't it better to start the training by limiting one's steps in any way at all?

I hope so.  In practical experience sometimes hypocrisy is the best I can manage, and I pray to be at least willing to do that.

Lily The Pink - Repost from 2010

I knew, even back in 1969, that the reference was to Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. But I didn't know, until I looked it up for this post, that Elton John, Graham Nash, and Jack Bruce were all in the original UK version, or that the song was based on an older one.



As for Lydia, she was from north of Boston, and there is a well-baby clinic with that name in Salem, founded by her daughter. Her 19th C patent medicine for "female complaints" - presumably menstrual discomfort - contained, among many other useless herbs, gentian root, which gives Moxie its distinctive aftertaste. It was also 20% alcohol.

Thus, Jonathan, Mrs. Pinkham's 19th C herbal concoction was the original Whixie.

PhD's

"I believe PhD's should be safe, legal, and rare." Helen Dale

I don't know if I actually believe that, but it just looked like a fun thing to say.

Cousin Marriage

The Case for Banning Cousin Marriage.  Do you want to raise your group's IQ? Ban cousin marriage.  There's five points in a generation right there. At the lower end, it can be the difference between living independently versus always having to have supports (including informal). And as group/national IQ is likely more important to your quality of life than your individual score, you should get your tribal elders convinced of this post haste.

Autism and Invention

An article that is already a bit dated from 2021, but sums things up nicely. This is one of Simon Baron Cohen's favorite topics, and you can find it in several forms across the internet. Is There a Link Between Autism and the Capacity for Invention? 

We can infer the existence of the Systemizing Mechanism in the modern human brain because 75,000 years ago, we see the first jewelry. If I make a hole in each shell, and thread a string through each hole, then the shells will form a necklace. And 71,000 years ago, we see the first bow and arrow. Again, the same "if-and-then" algorithm: If I attach an arrow to a stretch fiber, and release the tension in the fiber, then the arrow will fly.

and 

We went to the Dutch city of Eindhoven, where one-third of jobs are in IT and which is home to the Eindhoven University of Technology, much like MIT, and where the Philips Factory has been for over 100 years. We found autism rates were twice as high in Eindhoven compared to two other Dutch cities, Utrecht and Haarlem, matched for demographics. This is again consistent with a genetic link between autism in the child, and a talent in pattern-seeking among their parents.

There are an enormous number of anecdotes about Tesla, Edison, Musk, Gates, or Newton.  It is less common in females, but there is evidence that Emily Dickinson had autism. The best explanation I have heard for the gender difference is that women have an array of heritable social skills and/or the societal reinforcement nearly everywhere that they show more social skill, that disguises some of the Asperger's symptoms. 

My people. Not that we can't be extra frustrating in some ways, but I understand that thinking and humor quite naturally.

Christmas 2010

An odd way of doing nostalgia, even for me.

Three carols sung at Greenbelt in England (usually Northamptonshire).  They like to do "Beer and Hymns" there. You can hear the beer in these hymns.

Joy To The World

Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Shouldn't it be 'ark the 'erald Angels Sing in England?

Once In Royal David's City

At the planning for the department Christmas party that year, in mock outrage: "We are not going to have three divorced women singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus!"

The Wyman Christmas Letters are still fun, even years later.

More Recent Links, As Promised.

Are We Headed Towards Idiocracy, by my favorite demographer Lyman Stone.  More mythbusting, as he has good evidence that our dysgenic worries are misplaced. 

 Sweden Open to Sending Peacekeepers to Ukraine, and they aren't the only ones in Europe.   DeepNewz The EU is divided, but I like that they are increasingly accepting some responsibility.

Related: Zelensky signs agreement mediated by UAE about return of POWs.  I had not realised that the UAE was taking such a forward role in such matters.  I am liking DeepNewz, especially for international, better all the time.

Canada is in worse shape than I thought, especially WRT immigration. (Aporia magazine.) Much of this was only vaguely know to me.

Last Boys at the Beginning of History via Rob Henderson

UN Aid to Hamas

 United Nations relief went to the leaders and not the citizens, according to the Jerusalem Post. The Israelis presented recorded evidence to the US, but Biden insisted all 250 trucks of aid go anyway.

I don't have a lot of confidence that anything will much work in Gaza.  But why on earth do we think that Trump is going to do any worse? 

Kenneth P. Green

A senior fellow at Canada's Fraser Institute, Green holds. PhD in Environmental Science and has published widely. His name was passed along at book club.  Recent articles include

Canada must build 840 Solar Power Stations or 16 Nuclear Plants to Meet Ottawa's 2050 Emission-reduction target.  

Canada should match or eclipse Trump's red-tape cutting plan.

Canada should heed Germany's destructive climate policies. 

I think I like this guy.