Half-Generations

I have a younger half-brother, a child of my father's second marriage. I did not meet him until I was 18 and he was 4, and he was a child to me rather than a peer for many years.  In fact he was the same age as our various foster children, so my father and I both had eight-year-old boys at the same time, and our last foster daughter had a crush on him when they were seventeen.  He is now a peer, and I no longer think of him as a half-brother, but simply my brother. This was gradual, but a long time ago. 

He was 12-16 years older than our first two children, whom he saw as children at first. But he and my second son work in similar industries and speak together as peers now.  I think it has been comfortable for him to speak about difficult issues with me because I am not his parent, but also don't need to be given a lot of background on any story.  I think it has also been easy for my sons to become peers of his for the same reason.  He is not their parent, yet there is no need to give a lot of context for situations.

My wife visited her college roommate over the weekend, who was an only child but the youngest of a group of cousins.  In this way she was also close to both the mothers and the daughters growing up, and as both of her parents died when she was in her 20s, she has made the effort to keep up with them.  

I don't know if these half-generation situations are more common now or less common than they were.  Families had more children spread over more ages, but there are also more blended families now.  But I think there is significant advantage to having a person like this in your life. 

Saturday Links- Substack

Lyman Stone: Quality daycare does not scale.  He gets some pushback, but I think he's onto something.

Also Lyman: Why twin studies are garbage.

 Helen Roy, new to me - Fear of Pregnancy: toxic positivity is the enemy of grace.

A good introduction to the mimetic theory of Rene Girard, by Zak Slayback 

Many people read Kitten's College English Majors Can't Read. I liked her followup for different reasons.

Let Men Beat Each Other Up Again  Boys have always hated school! And they always sucked at it too, compared to girls, at least til they were older. Other than the nerdy cerebral types, boys have never liked sitting in a seat and listening to some boring teacher make them sound out words and read books. The only difference now is that adults for some reason expect boys to enjoy school, even though they now have infinite-entertainment devices as an alternative, and forgot that in the past people just used to beat their asses into compliance. Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)

Friday Links

Sen Lindsey Graham of SC has attracted challengers who dislike his being a weathervane. However they have different opinions which way the wind is blowing.  Dr. Annie Andrews is declaring for the Democratic nomination. She has a predictable set of issues to run on, except that as a pediatrician, she also says that "children's issues" are important to her. Hmm.  In the primary, Andre Bauer, former Lt Gov of SC, seems to be rather predictable in his issues from the right as well, and is reportedly going to challenge.

Israel and Hamas both agree to Steve Witkoff's "general framework for a permanent cease-fire." We'll see, eh? Hamas is already backpedalling.  I am liking the news I hear about the US Aid plan that bypasses the UN, and the growing(?) number of Palestinian families and even clans trying to bypass Hamas to get food.

Economics of Kinship. Evidence from US bans on cousin marriage. The problems are not just genetic. Cousin marriage reduces dispersion of population, which reduces opportunities for a variety of jobs and other life improvements like better land and better education.

Galiteuthis glacialis,  the Colossal Squid, a type of glass squid has been seen and filmed alive in the wild for the first time, 100 years after corpses were first noticed by fishermen near the South Sandwich Islands. It is the largest invertebrate, but this one was a baby.

Razib explains how Germans are from Finland, Finns are from Yakutia. The only time you ever heard about Yakutz was playing Risk. But now that the connection between the Sami people (Lapland) and Native Americans has been established because of the Ancestral North Eurasians, references in genetics are popping up all over.

From Ann Althouse, who was on it in a flash.  Sometimes the NYT and general legacy media just lie. This wasn't a different perspective, this wasn't reading the tea leaves in clever ways Known To But A Few.  It was just a lie. Which leads to the question Why?  What's in it for them?  I don't want to keep seeing the same hands here.

The House Song

 

Cycle of Violence is an Excuse

A thought: The term "cycle of violence" is one of those truths people use to lie with. There are Serbs and Croats, Apaches and Comanches, where the ongoing reciprocal nature of violence is as good a description as any.  But the term is abused when one tribe is the most frequent aggressor, sometimes over centuries. It is especially infuriating when one side exercises some self-control and fair play, however imperfectly, and is also more powerful, so that it wins most conflicts - while its opponent shows no self-control and keeps losing, always excusing themselves that they have suffered more.  Losing wars is bad luck for your future prospects, and losing them repeatedly is worse luck. 

Consider a person who has a head injury and thus more prone to violence. I've dealt with many.  There are ways to contain such people that are much less violent and thus less agitating.  When we know them we should use them.  Wouldn't it be great if we all acted optimally in every situation?  Cops shouldn't unnecessarily piss people off if they can help it. There are oppressive police forces who are the aggressors, but even then the "cycle" of violence is usually confined to the few. In most situations, some one or some group is on offense and another is on defense.

The concept of cycle of violence usually reduces the emphasis on choice for only one side, thus excusing them.  They couldn't help it, you see. Their "oppressors" are regarded as having full choice, with no mitigating circumstances.

Other Morning Links

King Lear, Interpretability, and AI Doom.  In Shakespeare's famous play, Lear attempts to divide his kingdom among his daughters based on their expressions of love. But the king has no reliable way to discern genuine affection from manipulative flattery, leading him to trust his two deceitful daughters—who betray him. I don't know whether I'm a doomer or an optimist. Sorry to remind you that I'm old, I can't do anything about it, and it's your problem. 

Congestion Pricing in NYC is Working I hope this isn't true. It might be.

There are matrilineal societies. When they get large livestock, usually cattle, they become patrilineal. The arrow of causation might have worked the other way.  It doesn't seem to. 

 Your ninth-grade social studies book showed migration as the driver of cultural change, because arrow are easy to draw.  Throughout the 1900s, the anthropologists increasingly scoffed.  It was ideas moving, like technology of pots. Migration was considered overrated as an explanation.  DNA, linguistics, and better archaeology are showing it is both, with migration - often by conquest aided by disease - the big ticket.  Razib interviews Laura Spinney, author of Proto.

Another major part of my career, Borderline Personality Disorder.  I was certain that The Studies Show would get something wrong enough for me to comment on.  They didn't.  Balanced and up-to-date. 

Not a link.  Collectors, especially extreme collectors, are often considered to be OCD.  Looking at my own friends and family, I wonder is Asperger's might be just as likely.  And some of the collectors I know seem to be neither.  The desire to put things in order, put them in their place, have completeness may be more aspie than simple accumulation, which is sometimes an OCD trait.  Though not always.

 

Thursday Links - Housing

The recent essay in Deep Left Analysis about housing stated that the housing problem is a mental health problem. I wish he were wrong. He's not completely wrong.

 But Stephen Eide at City Journal says mental health is a drug problem, either fentanyl or marijuana, depending on region. I wish he were wrong too.  He's not completely wrong.  Marijuana and the Mental Ill  "In recent years, countless family memoirs and nonfiction accounts of mental illness have extensively chronicled the descent into madness. This literature often highlights marijuana more than any other intoxicating substance. Pot plays a notable role in several recent book-length treatments of mental illness, including Randye Kaye’s Ben Behind His Voices (2011), Patrick and Henry Cockburn’s Henry’s Demons (2011), Paul Gionfriddo’s Losing Tim (2014), Mindy Greiling’s Fix What You Can (2020), Miriam Feldman’s He Came in With It (2020), Meg Kissinger’s While You Were Out (2023), and Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds (2023)."

The main family mental health organisation, NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, used to be very strong on tying drug reduction or abstinence into treatment. But even the professionals shy away from saying it. Families would despair, because the hospital clinicians would have a dozen reasons for not wanting to get involved in drug treatment. We aren't funded for that. (True) Mental health law explicitly excludes forced mental health hospitalisation for drugs. (True) If we do that the drug agencies will just drop all their problems here... People lose skills and ambition in the hospital...You can't get sobriety and med compliance without stable housing...(True. True. True.) Here we are back at the beginning again.

I have mixed opinions on conditional discharge as it was a large part of my job for years, navigating conditional treatment among the hodgepodge of laws, some clear, some not, the opinions of those on the front lines, the lack of resources, the rights of the patients vs the rights of everyone else, and the intrusions of pinheads. That’s pretty much my view of all mandated regulation. You scoop up the low-hanging fruit and most egregious injustices at the first pass, and it is almost always a good thing. Which unfortunately encourages people to think that the next batch of regulations is going to create a similar improvement.

 The YIMBY City Planner says it's three housing problems, regionally.

 Wouldn't you figure Trump would be on the side of landlords?  I don't think he has a solid set of principles beyond "This would be good for America, and nobody can make a better deal than me."

Considering Pinch Hitting

With Maggie's Farm continuing to have technical problems off-and-on, I wonder if I should learn the skill of putting up a collection of links every day.  It would be mostly different links than what they do, but should keep people busy until their problems get worked out.

I doubt I'll keep it up, as I like to comment on things too much, and that takes time away from finding things.  But I think I will at least give it a go. I have been trending toward link plus representative quote plus short comment increasingly over the last year, and have a backlog of started posts, so I might try it tomorrow.

Busby Berkeley

 

Patsy

 

"Adolescence"

" 'Adolescence' is a superb work of art. It should not be mistaken for reality." Rob Henderson 

Henderson takes it apart bit by bit, that the story in the movie is deeply unrepresentative of teen violence in Britain - or anywhere else. 

One of the most persistent myths about incels is that they are predominantly white far-right extremists. In fact, 42 percent are ethnic minorities, and their average political orientation leans center-left. Incels don’t constitute a coherent ideological movement; they share not a political vision but a sense of despair — around sex, status, and social rejection. 

There was a story going around that the incident which was the foundation for the movie was actually a  black teenager. Maybe so, but I prefer not to try and mind-read a storyteller's sources. Even when incidents look the same, the creator may have crossed any number of wires to get the story to come out right.

Chuggers

It was a new term to me - a Charity Mugger - because it seems to be UK only.

We need a chugger crackdown. at the Spectator.

I dislike chugging for the same reason almost everyone dislikes it: I do not want to be hassled as I go about my business. But there is a deeper reason I dislike it. To avoid having your time wasted with a pushy sales pitch, you are forced to become a colder, crueller, and crucially, less trusting person. The result is a bleak state of affairs where your first reaction to any encounter with a stranger on the street is: ‘How are they trying to get into my wallet?’

This article and the next one about transit both arrived in my inbox in the Works In Progress Newsletter.  There is plenty more there:

One simple deregulation that would save thousands of lives

Statins, Three types of housing problems, no horse has been as good as Secretariat, a universal antivenom, and 20 more. Maybe you should just go there to find interesting stuff and leave out the middleman (me)?

Transit Vs. Highways

 How To Salvage a Transit Project.  I wish this set of explanations didn't make sense, because I dislike the implications.

But people think differently about these systems. If you're driving, you don't think, "Traffic was terrible today, that's the state transportation department's fault." But with transit, you think, "Service was awful today, that is the transit agency's fault."

Highway departments could learn from transit agencies about operations, but they're primarily focused on building. The federal government enlisted state highway agencies in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s to build the interstate system. People think of the interstate system as federal because it's federally funded, but it's actually built and owned by the states. They were born to build, whereas transit agencies were born to provide service.

The person being interviewed started as an environmental activist suing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, (gradually) decided she was being naive about how transit worked and thought she would be more useful building things instead.

Another example: The Green Line Extension to the T [northwest into Boston suburbs] made the Green Line nearly 5 miles longer. If you try to operate a much longer transit line with the same number of trains, it's going to take way longer for a train to get from the beginning to the end, and you’re going to wait at the platform longer for the next train. So you have to buy trains — I didn’t know that at first. I was just thinking of the extension as its tracks, signals, platforms, right?

So they had to buy 24 new trains, which cost almost $200 million. Now you own 24 new trains. Where are you going take care of those trains? There's all these FTA requirements: they have to be inspected, they have to get upgrades. The MBTA don’t have enough space at their existing maintenance facility at this point: They have a certain size fleet. So now you have to build a new maintenance project.

Who?

 However, I am surprised he thinks Trump's approach is correct.

Retirement Age

 Denmark is gradually raising its retirement age to 70. It could have been done painlessly here, going up one month every year starting in about 1984, putting us at 68.5 next year, but everyone would have seen it coming.  Not a rug pull. Could have saved a bundle, with just a bit more grumbling.

Except it wouldn't, because every time politicians needed votes they would declare an economic crisis and not raise it that year.  And whenever it was annouced how much we had "saved," they would want to spend that four times.  Remember the Peace Dividend? The Danes did it right, tying it to life expectancy 20 years ago.  That can still be gamed, but it would be harder.

[Citation Needed]

New podcast reviewing bizarre research, [Citation Needed]

Just go look at the titles.  That's all I ask

 

Right On Schedule

(Edited 5/24) Jake Tapper on tour: “Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media.” 

This happens every time, and Jake was clever enough to target this to One Big Thing that journalists got wrong.  He's first-to-market this time, having been a liberal journalist for many years. This was the song that was sung in 2001, 2005, 2009... but he missed those chances, darn it, because people like Evan Thomas got in first. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Watergate's Jeb Magruder was probably the best at that. But it's not about being wrong in general, because he will quickly revert to everything else being basically right on the legacy media front:  Trump, environment, Women's Issue(s), Russia/Ukraine, Israel - this is not about damaging the media, but limiting the damage and getting credit for bucking the trend.  He's not bucking it, he's leading it.

Tapper hasn't got the credentials, or the chops, to be a token conservative who is willing to become a liberal for the big outlets. The David Brooks/Jennifer Rubin niche gigs are hard to get. But he can still be the courageous! forthright! old-school journalist! dammit, and he's currently King of the Castle for that. 

The Other COVID Reckoning

Scott Alexander talks about a curiosity in our collective memory, that we continue to talk about school closings, masks, vaccines, economic consequences, but strangely absent are the 1.2 million deaths. He wonders why. I don't know either, but I think 

...dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see

Is in line with what we see in human nature throughout history.  The survivors measure the deaths that still affect them, such as my people being persecuted by your people, or land that was stolen and you killed the grannies, or the babies, or the fine young men and women. 

But when it's the Spanish Flu  or even the Black Death, they're just gone and can't complain, and the rest of us have no one to blame. Government actions destroyed the economy...except that without government doing a single thing not even a suggestion of "hey, it would be better if you didn't breathe on everyone if you are coughing" there still would have been enormous disruption, because some percentage of people who notice the deaths and stay home and keep their kids out of school because granny takes care of them after school and they don't want her to die.

Amazing we can do that, but we do. People die and life goes on, and we struggle to remember what le3sson we are suppose to have learned. 

Update: Apparently ACX got pushback on the 1.2 million number.  Here's his answer. The critique came mostly in the form of "They lied about other things, like the lab leak.  Why are we believing this?" Short answer: we can confirm it via other means besides just taking their word for it.

Day Tripper

After the Tracy Chapman number I realised that I haven't tended to put up a lot of blues here.

This one is Eric Clapton guesting with John Mayall from the album that is often cited as being the beginning of blues-rock.  Such "musical firsts" are always a problem, as people go digging to find something one month, one year, even one decade earlier that has enough features that you could make an argument for it. But in this case, you can at least make the argument that the 1966 album was a big jolt of awareness to American guitarists.

This is a Ray Charles tune, and to my ear one can hear the invention taking place, albeit unevenly as Clapton tries to integrate with the Bluesbreakers.  There is an extended drum solo, and if you aren't into that the song picks up again at the 3:30 mark with the familiar riff from "Day Tripper."  I wondered if it was a familiar bass line making the rounds that both Mayall and the Beatles used, but because it is only six months after the Beatles single was released, I now think it was something of a musical joke. It does actually fit.

 I should probably go looking for some Edgar Winters or Johnny Winters next.  We'll see.

Karen Read Trial: Update

Friends of the blog have commented that as this second trial is underway a lot of claims are evaporating in face of the evidence.  "At this point it is a forensics case.  Everything else is a creative writing assignment," and "sounds like people need to listen to the hard evidence and stop focusing on the fan fiction."

A local radio personality, Howie Carr, has gone completely starkers.  I have liked him in the past.  Organised crime boss Whitey Bulger tried to have him killed for his refusal to stop accusing him, and nearly succeeded. Howie has been been anti-Kennedy for decades and written a book about it. But he is convinced that Read has been framed by an extended collection of law enforcement agencies, neighbors, and townspeople for no apparent reason. 

I suppose when you have been a victim of an actual conspiracy of powerful people (Bulger's brother was President of the Massachusetts Senate and then President of UMass) it is less of a stretch to believe in other conspiracies by the powerful.

Stay tuned.  

Update: The defense has been attempting to try the case in the press instead of the courtroom, and claimed that John was assaulted by people in the house and left to freeze to death outside. Freezing to death would take a while. The information from the insurer of her SUV that she rapidly went into reverse at 27mph in a driveway was irrelevant because it took place much earlier than his death. Today this was entered in evidence: The second techstream event (the rapid reversal of Karen’s SUV) ended between 12:32:04 and 12:32:12. John’s phone stopped moving at 12:32:16. That can’t possibly be a coincidence.

Ability - Update

Reading through old correspondence I read (Name redacted)  talking about visualising the discrete spaces of the compound of three cubes.  I can't do it myself.  He can do it partially.*  I thought his observation about what our limits are is valuable.

 Even though I have an overall sense of what it looks like, I have never been able to visualize the entire compound at once. It is kind of like trying to mentally multiply three ten-digit numbers: I can fathom how someone with more ability than I have could do it, but actually doing it is totally beyond me. (Psalm 139:6) I can imagine how someone could instantly intuit what the right compound is and easily identify all the volumes, but that someone is not me. Intelligence does not work like a lever. Spending twice as much time and effort will not give you the same results as someone who is twice as smart.  

Update: "Redacted" tells me he has aphantasia and cannot actually visualise at all. I mentioned my own limitations of visualisation 8 years ago and several of you had interesting comments about brains and pictures.  This pops up often in discussions of narrow exceptional abilities - it is often paired with lack of some other ability, such as Idiot Savants or left-handedness, a type of brain damage that results in clumsiness in some domains, yet urns out to be a significant advantage in some sports, and is correlated with full ambidexterity. Some things get stronger at the broken places, which we may all hope is true of psychology and character as well.

AI and Bias

I heard the question asked on a podcast how one can provide context without bias? Well, we can't, and we have discussed this many times here and in our corner of the internet.  We are originally taught something about history or anthropology or literature or the Bible. We read some things, talk to others, observe events around us, think about them. Rinse, repeat. We we then teach something to a newcomer, it carries all that context, and that context includes bias, of necessity. All we can do is try to notice it and correct for it, especially when passing the information along.

It is rather Bayesian,  though seldom consciously. We modify as we go.

Because it is of necessity, it must also apply to AI.  We notice the biases that are put into its creation and are often troubled. But it is the ongoing nature of understanding that may rapidly become more powerful. The AI will talk to itself, and to nonhuman others, in ways unseen by the developers.  It would be desirable if such intelligence could question itself, and therefore, to remember to ask itself questions. "If the report you just generated turned out to be wrong, what would be the most likely point of weakness?" "If you were to attack the Steppe Hypothesis in order to show the strength of the Anatolian Hypothesis, how would you go about that?" And the next step would be harder. "Are any of those ten counter-hypotheses worth mentioning, or are they all too far-fetched?"  How would it know?

The joke is told about the old man born in 1898 who lived to be 104 and was asked what he thought the greatest invention of the 20th Century was. "The thermos bottle," he replied. "Not the airplane, the computer, nuclear power, radio?!" 

"Nope.  The thermos bottle.  It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold."

"So?"

"So how does it know?"

It sounds simple to say you could program that into AI, problem solved.  Running it as a thought experiment, I am not at all sure. I keep coming up against walls.

Pope Leo IV

 Snopes is working overtime to show that the new pope never said all those things he is suddenly being credited with. So far, they all seem to be in the direction of making him appear anti-Trump in a very blunt and strong way. Making up quotes is a type of bearing false witness, and starts to drift into violating the Second Commandment. It's a kind of forgery.

I suggest we wait on this and see what he has to say for himself.  He may largely agree with the sentiment and have just not said it in quite the way he is quoted. But it's a dangerous game to play.

Because anyone can play.

More on Fertility

 Baby bonuses won't solve the birthrate problem, by Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe.

Jacoby gives the now-familiar statistics about replacement level births in developed (and now less-developed) countries: US, Europe, South Korea, Japan. He then runs down the list of the common explanations and favorite solutions. Those explain and solve at the margin at most. It's a good place to have your own favorite myths kicked around.

 “The real secret to Israel’s fertility rates appears to be cultural,” wrote Danielle Kubes in Canada’s National Post in 2023. “The family is at the absolute center of Israeli life. Getting married and having kids is the highest cultural value.” It is a value that goes beyond religious observance and political ideology. It cannot be explained by government financial aid (welfare benefits in Israel are comparable to those in Western Europe). Rather, it boils down to this: Israelis of every stripe share a conviction that having children is the best and highest means of imbuing life with meaning.

Imbuing life with meaning. This one has held up pretty well.

Saying From My Career

I had occasion to use a phrase that had lain dormant for at least a decade, describing someone who was trying to express an idea that they had no logical control over. Our psych emergency team would interview a new patient to make a rapid assessment and sentence fragments would emerge, usually emotionally charged. Derailment and loose association can be a symptom of many illnesses - in milder forms it can be creative and entertaining. Yet this was subtly different, because it was not merely that the brain was trying to go 70mph in first gear, but that the road kept going away and then reemerging briefly. The destination kept evaporating but returning in brief apprehension. 

Not enough fence to keep the sheep in.

The Wrong Tree

From Althouse, the chant against RFK Jr as he was addressing the Senate Hearing (and being interrupted) was "RFK kills people with hate." This is the sort of thing where people start to lose me.  I think some of RFK's policies, especially around vaccines, will cause people to die. But that's because he is wrong, not because he is hate-filled. 

Are we moving to a world where hatred is the only sin that matters? There is no need to prove you wrong, only to show that you must have hatred in your heart, and that is enough. One problem I can see right off is that you can call anyone who is angry hate-filled.  It has a superficial persuasiveness, and it gets you off the hook for  thinking any harder.  Yet it is also quite elastic. You can call the angry people on your own side "justifiably outraged," and not have to think any more about that one either.  If both sides are angry, my people can be considered justifiably outraged by your hateful ones, and no one need think at all.  Just check the emotional energy present and put your wager down on the red or the black.

As I am wont to do I back-checked this through the history I have lived through to see whether it looked different then.  A lot of ink was spilled opposing wars on the grounds that we had hatred for Muslims, or for Southeast Asians, or for various Africans or Latin Americans.  Callous indifference, outmoded ideas, short-sightedness, or plain dimness were not enough, it seems.  It must be hatred or nothing.  Even greed, fear, or wounded pride - traditional bad reasons for going to war -are brought forward only if they are mixed with hatred.

Yes, hatred for women, hatred for Jews, or hatred for Blacks were always explanations ready to hand for other ills of the world, yet I think they have loomed larger in the 2000s and the others receded a bit.  Am I imagining this?

Running Through My Head For About a Month

 

Goodwhites Vs Badwhites

My son and daughter-in-law move here from Texas tomorrow. When I tell people up here about this the express joy that we will have them nearby and the family will be more together. Some who know more of the backstory will express relief that Ben is out of that particular job that had been a weight around his neck these last few years. Others mention the heat or the weather. But a fair number have nodded knowingly that it is good that he is out of Texas, because it is a culturally or politically contemptible place because they have yahoos there. I know those tones and insinuations, because I grew up here and can catch the merest shadings. A wink's as good as a nod, say no more, say no more. Until I noticed it happening so often and stopped to question myself, I also understood it because I somewhat share it.  Ben and Jen share it, though also like some things about Texas and will likely discover more now that they don't have them.

No one likes Houston traffic, everyone prefers to hear an accent like their own around them, and there are subtle cultural things that "just seem not quite right" even though we ourselves might laugh to have pointed out as not really important.  Housing styles, preferred colors, church and school architecture, what sports are played - dozens of things. I think those things feed into the feelings of cultural superiority but are not the main cause.  

Hispanics pretty obviously like Texas.  Blacks have better school results, higher incomes, and lower rates of crime victimisation, so I'm thinking they are at least moderately positive about the state.  I haven't seen any numbers on that.  Northeast Asians and South Asians have actively sought the place out, at least in the cities and suburbs.  I don't know about Native Americans or Pacific Islanders and can't even find anecdotes about them, let alone hard numbers. Absent any strong negatives, I'm going to assume they are close to the middle of how they feel about Texas versus other states.

I think the key is that the Goodwhites up here have disdain for the Badwhites of Texas (and other southern places).  Part of that is assuming that they have bad attitudes toward those other groups.  You know, the ones who seem okay with living there. 

I am a Baby Boomer and our attitudes toward various regions were formed decades ago, however they have been modified since.  I talk mostly to people my own age, at least about these matters. My data is likely skewed.  Thirty-year-olds may not share our prejudices, or not as strongly.  I have no numbers on that, either, or no anecdotes I trust.  I wonder what's happening out there and how things will change in the next twenty years that sweep my people away.

Last Visit

We went to look at the sanctuary and what has changed at Gethsemane Lutheran.  The congregation will be merging with Grace Episcopal also in Manchester about a half-mile away. I was reminded of the joke from the many formal dialogues that the denominations engaged in during the 70s and 80s.  The Episcopal-Lutheran dialogue was coyly nicknamed the Lutepisc Dialogue.  Funny to Swedes and Norwegians, anyway.  

There is some memorabilia out on display in the narthex, including every confirmation picture.  We did not stay long.  We snapped some pictures of the sanctuary, which is little-changed over a century, with dark wood beams and wall columns against the off-white walls.  We took pictures of a few of the stained glass windows that date from the late 40s, including those given by my Nordstrom and Lindquist ancestors.  I always liked this window and preached the children's sermon from it at least twice.  It is the Parable of the Sower, and if you look closely you can see that the whole story is in the window.

 

The building has been sold to an Assembly of God congregation.

Persuasion On Reddit

 Why Reddit is No Longer Needed, by Ubersoy at Aporia.  AI's persuasive arguments were compared to Reddit's, a mostly-liberal social platform that attracts an audience of above-average intellect, or so it is claimed.  AI fared much better at changing minds than the other users. 

This brings us closer to my central argument: the AI’s success wasn’t due to superior reasoning or greater reliance on facts and logic. Rather, it effectively “hacked” the mechanics of persuasion. It analyzed the rhetorical patterns found in successful cases, formed an algorithm and reproduced them.

Conservatives and libertarians might hope that we would do better, but there isn't information one way or the other that I know of.  I am not confident we would not fall similarly to persuasion tailored to our vocabulary, unwritten rules, and hot-word associations. 

I hope that the generation that grows up in what increasingly looks like a simulation is better equipped to see through things.  That might be that humans just do, albeit imperfectly. If you look at old TV commercials you can see things that no one would fall for now.

Kill the Boer

Althouse passes along that the Episcopal Church is refusing to help resettle Afrikaaners now classified as refugees. There is a political angle that is an unmentioned part of the obvious liberal bias of that denomination. Google AI summarises

The average age of an Episcopalian in the United States is around 58.7 years old. The most likely age of an Episcopalian if randomly selected from membership rolls is 69. This makes the Episcopal Church the oldest of the twenty largest religious traditions in the US, with 55% of members being 60 or older. [1, 2]

AI responses may include mistakes.

[1] https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/dec/12/episcopal-church-wary-of-aging-congregations/

[2] https://religioninpublic.blog/2020/11/23/the-data-is-clear-episcopalians-are-in-trouble/

These people grew up with the idea that South Africa was the real evil empire. It is not really that ECUSA is liberal now as that all these people were liberals 40 years ago and have not updated their priors since then. They believe Nelson Mandela was a man of peace - which he was, compared to his wife, I suppose. What has been happening in the last decades is not known to them, partly because they do not attend to any media sources that would tell them, and partly because of the arrogance of believing they already know more than most people about the situation.

Even what they used to know was one-sided, and now it is barely consonant with reality.

 It's a mostly peaceful chant.

Concentric Circles of Love

Pope Leo XIV made his statement "JD Vance is wrong.  Jesus does not ask us to rank our love for others" this year, but before he became Pope.  Vance's comment was for an interview with the Irish Times on January 29, with Vance claiming that the Christian doctrine of ordo amoris describes an order of love, first for family, neighbor, community, citizens, rest of the world.

The Pope is correct, but not entirely. Vance is wrong, but not entirely. To put the matter bluntly, I am much more concerned that a Pope is wrong in his practical theology for political reasons than that a new convert politician is wrong in his doctrinal theology for political reasons. Ordo amoris originates* with Augustine. Thomas Aquinas wrote about it with some attempt at precision. Can we stipulate that Augustine and Aquinas were probably familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan and Matthew 25 about the sheep and the goats? They were likely to have taken those into account in their overall theological outlook?

And yet here is Aquinas:

Now one man's connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which men are engaged together; (thus the intercourse of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow-citizens is in civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters, and so forth): and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which [...] he is most closely connected with us. And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need...

The case may occur, however, that one ought rather to invite strangers (to eat), on account of their greater want. For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection: and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man. Beneficence, Summa theologiae

Paul writes to Timothy But those who won’t care for their relatives, especially those in their own household, have denied the true faith. Such people are worse than unbelievers. Jesus gives John to his mother, and his mother to John in some closer obligation of love than what already existed.  Jesus occasionally healed at a distance, but mostly, it was those in front of him. He did not heal all lepers in Galilee, though presumably he could have. Paul takes up a collection for believers in other cities, not for the poor of those cities.  He does make a point of telling the churches they should not neglect the poor.  But the churches also show charity first to their own widows and orphans, not to their cities as a whole, and are not upbraided for it.  It has been important in church history that the circle of love, forgiveness, grace, charity ever expand in wider circles.  But there is no advice that circles should be intentionally skipped to be super-spiritual, not because that would be evil, but because human nature doesn't tend to work that way and we are likely to increase love not at all.

CS Lewis wrote about it being harder to forgive the sins of the Nazis because they were so horrible, but also that it was easier because it carried no personal cost to love at a distance. Loving those in our families, or in our neighborhoods, or at our churches has a sting and a difficulty. He cautioned that it is a great temptation in our day to put on spiritual airs that we are more loving because we love the whole world and do not confine ourselves to our own tribe. Yet convincing ourselves that we love at a distance is often only a disguise for hating some nearby. Love that aims higher or farther might be more easily made diabolical because of self-deception. The Pope has upbraided Trump and Vance and their supporters for their attitudes toward immigrants. This administration may indeed deserve criticism on that score. But to give something at a governmental level (as opposed to the personal level of the person you see on the street) means to deprive others. We are taking things of value - money, the special rights of citizenship, safety - from people who we might be expected to feel some obligation toward to give to others solely because they have demanded it.

I don't find it anywhere recorded that some early Christians had any temptation to show off by bragging that they were giving to Samaritans rather than the poor nearby, so they must be more advanced in the faith.  Yet we very much have that temptation in our day, of the politically-minded hating their fellow citizens, their churches, and even family members because they don't "love" some group of fashionable Others.  To ignore this very real temptation from the present day is a very wide miss by the Pope.  Perhaps there is more to his thought on this that I have not been told.  I certainly hope there is.

This smacks very much of the influence of Liberation Theology, so popular in Latin America for a time, that America has nice things so they must have gotten them in some unfair way and should therefore give them to other people. Perhaps free immigration should be a policy of the RCC and of all Christians.  But I note that Vatican City is somehow not overrun with immigrants. Does this theology only depend on whose ox is gored?

There is also the pastoral question of whether the Pope when a cardinal was right to be so dismissive, giving no quarter that Vance had some foundation in good theology in the matter but was misunderstanding some key point. I admit this gets tricky.  The statement to the world is also part of such pastoral decisions and the cardinal may have thought hard about how to balance conflicting needs, speaking in a manner he might not have in private counseling. But it doesn't look that way from what  have in front of me.

*As much as any idea "originates" with a single person, anyway.  There were important precursors.

China's Tech Overrated

Aporia's Lipton Matthews has an article China's Tech Power Overrated. I have no expertise in this area but put it forward because it goes against what most I have read in the last decade or more, and the arguments he puts forward seem like good points.

The backbone of China's high-tech export machine is not domestic Chinese industry but foreign-invested enterprises. By 2003, 86% of China’s high-tech exports were produced by FIEs​. These companies—multinational giants and Taiwan-based IT manufacturers—relocated their assembly operations to China to exploit lower labor costs, not technological prowess.

Even more revealing is that 93% of China’s high-tech exports involve importing sophisticated parts, assembling them, and then exporting the final products. China is an assembler more than an innovator.

 

GeoGuessr

I played this for a few months about a decade ago.  I got moderately good, but was still wildly off at times.  South Africa and Australian both have signs in English and similar (to my eyes) terrain, for example. It is extremely enjoyable to get one right.  When Scott Alexander tested the AI version, the results were mixed.  Occasionally amazing, sometimes deeply wrong. In the comments the professional GeoGuessr champion was mentioned.  Trevor Rainbolt is a great name.

 

From Sea to Shining Sea

 I went looking for a good version of this.  I didn't know Taylor had done it, and loved what he did with it.

 

Fertility

Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias has some psychological reasoning behind this, about signalling and expectation of how much attention we are supposed to give to children (and pets!)

 This escalation of parent signaling is an obstacle to reversing fertility decline, as parents who feel obligated to attend more to each kid are inclined to have fewer kids. This is why my colleague Bryan Caplan wrote The Selfish Reason to Have More Kids, to argue that less-attended-to kids will do just fine. Alas, we also have many other escalating signal trends that discourage fertility. Together these add up to our biggest obstacle to increasing fertility.

For the last two decades I have been telling younger couples "Have more kids and pay less attention to them.  They'll be fine."  I learned this the hard way, by investing insane amounts of attention in my first two children when they were small. I don't know how much I could have cut that back to get the same result. 10%?  20%? 70%? 

A lot, anyway.  Save your intensive parenting for the moments they really need it.  Otherwise, tell them to go outside and they don't have to come home until the street lights come on.

PTSD and Expectations

Rob Henderson quoting from Outraged:Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground

"PTSD rates are higher in affluent countries than in countries that face higher rates of adversity and violence; for instance, the PTSD rate is 6 times higher in Canada than Mexico...the better things get, the more sensitive we become."

I don't know that I would focus on sensitive, which has a wuss connotation. There is a related concept of what our expectations are, and this comes nearer the mark. Most boys of my generation were assaulted by other boys. Even if you usually won your fights someone could always take you by surprise or even sucker punch you, not to mentions rocks, sticks and other weapons. Yet if you asked most of us today whether we were assaulted as boys we might say no, unless there was some standout incident of a boy much older or escalating to weapons. 

The better life around you gets, the more you have an expectation of fairness, justice, and peace.

Son #5, a nephew of ours, came to us because his parents kept dropping him off at each other's houses refusing to take him, including on a porch in February with only a light jacket. Son #3, who is from a Romanian orphanage, was with us when we took him to a restaurant the second night he was with us. When the youngest son went off to the bathroom, John-Adrian shook his head. "I can't believe that. This is terrible. That should never happen to a kid." When he kept going on, amazed, I was amazed. "John-Adrian! It happened to you!" He was taken aback, thought a moment. "Well," he finally said "It should never happen in America."

Gaza Famine Myth

After complaining about The Free Press in my last post, my statement that I liked it in general may get washed away in the conversation.  To make up for that I link to The Gaza Famine Myth by Michael Ames: where it originated, who keeps it going, and what is wrong with it. 

But there were serious problems with (Samantha) Power’s sensational testimony. Foremost among them: The IPC never declared a famine in Gaza. The report she cited was a projection of possible outcomes, not a conclusive finding. The next month, USAID issued its own analysis alleging that famine was underway, an indictment so serious that it required confirmation from an independent board of global experts known as the Famine Review Committee (FRC).

The FRC, which functions as the IPC’s final authority and quality control check, rebuked the USAID analysis, calling its conclusions insupportable. The failures were stunning.

The Online Right

I write online.  I'm pretty much on the right, though I've been known to lean out into libertarianism and even more often, conclude that pretty much everyone is nuts. So when Kat Rosenfeld over at the Free Press claims that the Online Right has taken up the cause of Harvey Weinstein's retrial I clicked through, surprised.  Have I missed something?

I like the Free Press.  Even the people I disagree with put things well and keep it calm.  Kat's whole article was actually pretty good, pointing out that excesses in a somewhat reasonable #MeToo cause have fairly begged for backlash by getting way out of control. Plus, I know that the Online Anything can become intolerable pretty quickly, and have been increasingly queasy about the prominence of some outhouse-rat-crazy conservatives lately myself.

But the only example she gives of someone supporting Weinstein is Candace Owens saying there was scalp-chasing in his sloppy original investigation and Joe Rogan saying her argument was persuasive. Candace Owens was on the right until she became a paranoid antisemite, which is now her dominant interpretation of events, and Joe Rogan was a sort of liberal until about last Tuesday.  So that's it?  That's the Online Right? I think I'm offended by that one.  That's the sort of rumor that is going to be taken up by "Occupy Democrats" and "The Other 98%" and believed by far too many people overnight.

Maybe Kat is correct and has other examples in. her back pocket.  What have people been seeing?

Chance Favors the Prepared Mind

 Grilled peanut butter and sweet relish.

Queen of Soul

 

Return Migration

 Because our textbooks illustrated the movement of peoples with arrows on maps, we acquired the idea that migration was solely in one direction. With some groups this was true.  Persecuted people, like Jews or Sudanese, seldom returned to the country they came from. But Mexicans, Greeks, Irish, English and dozens of other peoples moved here and then back again, or back and forth several times. 

A large number of records from Norway during the age of migration show that about a third of Norskis moved back, and often got better jobs than they had when they left. To the New World and Back Again: Return Migrants in the Age of Mass Migration.  Summary article here.

 The data showed that immigrants who held low-paid occupations or who came from rural parts of Norway were more likely to come back after moving to America. Once back home, the return migrants held higher-paid occupations than the Norwegians who never moved, despite hailing from poorer backgrounds.

This was not just a 19th/20th C American phenomenon. Anglo-Saxons who came to East Anglia after the fall of the Western Roman Empire often went back after making a little money hiring out as mercenaries, or as fortunes changed for their clans. They would return for wives and decide home was better after all. Men go places specifically find wives and then come home.  Children of immigrants go back for a few visits and decide they like their grandparents digs better than a tenement. Or find that speaking additional languages gives them an edge in some businesses.

Nature, Nurture, Nonshared

I write about these things from time to time, but mostly just to hammer home one point: Shared environment, the part that we call "nurture" in the equation, is wildly overrated in the popular imagination in terms of cognitive tasks. This is a good refinement of that idea.  Nurture IS 20-30% of the total in childhood.  But nature, and unshared environment (who you best friend is, whether you fall in love with WWI in 5th grade, a magazine brought home on a whim by your dad) cover the waterfront by adulthood. Nurture has dropped to unmeasurable.

Nature, nurture and nonshared environment in cognitive development

Teddy Ballgame

 

Caribou Tacos

So you all wanted to hear about Caribou tacos - in both English and Tagalog - didn't you?  These look like the basic nachos/tacos we served our sons growing up.  Except for the caribou. 

You also get to see the Romanian/Filipina/Alaskan granddaughters.

American Policing

The Pioneer  by John J. MacDonald in City Journal.   The history of policing in America is being slanted to fit modern political needs, it seems.  August Vollmer was responsible for improving American policing, but is now accused of ruining it along racial lines. It's a new story to me.

As is often the case with bad revisionist history, the narrative largely stems from a single scholarly article that credulous journalists have popularized. “The Imperial Origins of American Policing: Militarization and Imperial Feedback in the Early 20th Century,” by the University of Chicago’s Julian Go, has received dozens of citations since its 2020 publication in the American Journal of Sociology. Go’s paper purports to find, through a study of Vollmer’s career, the essentially imperialist character of twentieth-century police reforms—and to “connect domestic race relations with colonial relations” overseen by the military.

Non-Linear Ethnic Niches

 Chaldeans control 90% of the grocery stores in Detroit. 40% of the truck drivers in California are Sikh, and about a third of US Sikhs are truck drivers. About 95% of the Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Chicago and the Midwest are owned by Indians, mostly Gujarati Patels. In New England and New York, 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores are operated by Portuguese immigrants. 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans. I am not the first, the tenth, or even the hundredth person to notice this. From a 1999 New York Times article titled ‘A Patel Motel Cartel?’

 Non-Linear Ethnic Niches by Arcotherium at Aporia. Surprisingly in general, though on-brand for Aporia, it is an argument for reduced immigration.

Silk

I have noted that at least some resistance to getting vaccines comes from a dislike of the needles themselves.  Even for those who are not bothered by the pain or particularly worried about discomfort around the injection site for a day or so, there is often a sense that it is just somehow unnatural to put pointy things into your body and leave something artificial there. Whatever the hoped-for benefit, it just seems like a creepy thing to do. The frequency with which anti-vaxxers use the word "jab" illustrates m y point.

The engineering department at Tufts noticed this and developed a patch with silk microneedles that can be infused with vaccine.  This has spun off a company called Vaxess which has the patches in clinical trials and hopes to have them on the market by 2028.

But wait, there's more! Silk is being used for lots of new things.  Works in Progress The Future of Silk, by Hiawatha Bray.

Distinction

The teacher at adult studies this morning said there were two ways that Jesus was present with us after the Ascension, Jesus as friend tied(? connected? merged?) to our spirit and as the Holy Spirit. I scrunched my face in puzzlement and said I didn't see a distinction. He told me I didn't need to. Rather than feeling insulted I was relieved.  It is much more common for people to assure me that it is very important, say the same thing in a different way, leaving me uncertain whether I have missed some deep truth of the faith, but still unable to make heads or tails of what they are saying.

I went back to thinking about Indo-European, Semitic, and Native cultures having a concept of friendship that that does not keep close accounting, which Europeans used to have but waned as clans became less central and business interactions grew more important. 

Long Island Sound, and Beyond

New London is a cross between Newport and Fall River.  Mostly Fall River. After I had observed this, my wife reported after walking a bit in the area that she had "seen a lot of Fall River" in her few blocks. Our ferry was the USS Henlopen, an LST that was part of the Normandy landing force. Cross over to Orient Point on western Long Island and it is a different world, of subsistence agriculture, small Baptist churches, family restaurants, and old motels along the shore, all valiantly trying to stay alive. The strategy seems to be to try and revive it all with vineyards and winemakers, perhaps hoping to attract visitors up from the Hamptons sampling some authenticity.  This seems to confirm the claim that western Long Island is culturally part of New England, not New York, as it looks like the interior places just off the mansion-heavy shorelines of New England well up into Maine. 

With the Baptist influence, I was rather charmed to see a sign for Sunrise Service Rd.  Easter Sunrise service had been a big deal in our house for years, dragging sleepy children out. A bit later, I figured out that we were on the Sunrise Turnpike, so that previous sign must have been...for Sunrise...Service Road, along the side.  Much less charming.

As we went south, though, through south Jersey and down the Delmarva Peninsula, it didn't look much different from those, either. These are agricultural places that look to be just getting by. The gas stations have horrible bathrooms in the back, as bad as I've seen since the 1960s. The billboards are only about 75% in use, always a sign of a failing economy. The attractions are dated and worn out. I wonder what all this looked like in 1965, when these small houses, hotels, and restaurants were new and filled with people who had hopes of prosperity.  Most likely, there were houses that were old then which are now gone. 

We didn't want to try and stop for lunch in NYC, so took a slight detour to Coney Island, which neither of us had ever seen. Of course we had a hot dog. 

Pine Barrens and Cape May

We had not intended to go through the Pine Barrens, but our GPS suggested that the longer route was better because of the wildfires in North Jersey. As we could see a haze of smoke thirty miles away we figured they were right.  There is a small section of pine barrens near Lake Ossipee in NH, but I had never seen anything so extensive. You can see quite a ways into the forest, as the pines are spaced and the underbrush is short. Perhaps later in the year that isn't so. At this time of year it looks like a great place to play paintball.

Cape May is elegant. Can you do a NJ/NYC accent?  Like "cuoffee" a little high-pitched?  Good.  Now say "fancy" with that accent.  Sort of feancy or fiancy.  Cape May has lots of kept-up or restored Victorian houses.  Wildwoods, just above it, is FANCY, built up in the 50s but with ever updated or replaced hotels. Shiny, shiny. The Cape May hotels still have rooms called the Aloha Room, with a pronunciation guide Ah-loh-hah ("meaning 'welcome'") because Hawaii was a deeply exotic and ethnic place when this was built. I had seen something similar in Coney Island, where the signs still said "Shish-ke-bab," because New Yorkers were not that familiar with Middle-eastern foods in those days.  Even their Jews came from Poland and Russia, after all.  Not even Morocco or Greece, let alone Palestine.  Those were Other Jews. No one knew what those guys ate. 

We had another of our deeply Wyman coincidences there. Our waiter had an accent that I suspected was Romanian and we struck up a conversation. A nice young man named Zdeno, because his parents had come from Slovakia.  He said he was from Oradea, and looked a little shocked that we were familiar with Beius and mentioned Marghita. "Actually, I only said 'Oradea' because it is a bigger place and no one has heard of where I am from." He is from Alesd, which is two towns over from the tiny village in Transylvania where my sons are from.  Tracy and I may still be the only Americans who have ever been there. The next night on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, our waitress was from Barrington, NH.  These things are there to be had if you search for them as relentlessly as I do. 

Cape Charles

There were not many bright spots on the way down Rte 13.  They haven't caught the idea of vineyards yet, and there are still lots of garages that do a bit of everything, unlike the specialty shops in the cities and suburbs. Cape Charles itself has been boom-or-bust throughout its history. The Chesapeake network as all on water, with small boats providing the trade. When the railroad came in down the spine there was worry by the investors that no one might come to bring their goods for sale.  The roads weren't good and they already had a method for getting farm products to market.  But it turned out the other way.  The trains eventually put the little ports out of business, by and large.  Cape Charles was the end of the line and prospered, with small victorian houses. But that in turn fell apart when the Bay Bridge Tunnel came in in the 60s. They didn't have to rely on the ferries to get to Norfolk anymore, and trucks made the trains obsolete. The charming houses in Cape Charles fell into disrepair...until the tourist industry came in because of the shorefront property.  The churches and public buildings were already built, and carpenters and glaziers had work again restoring the historic district. 

Now that is imperilled, as everything is moving to short-term rentals and the sort of shops and restaurants that serve the in-and-out crowd. A lot of the town isn't occupied over the winter. I've seen it in vacation towns in lots of places.  My folks summered in Wolfeboro for years and then retired there year 'round.  They said it was a different world. The friends we stayed with in Cape Charles would rather it not be a different world. 

We went on to Williamsburg and the reunion.  Not much to say, though I have a bit to think about from my conversations.  We went to a storefront church in a strip mall and the people in front of us had been to our same church camp NH and gone to the church in our denomination in North Easton MA, where our pastor at the church that eventually failed went to serve as interim.  Of course.

White Coral Bells

 We used to sing rounds in school.  Do they still?

 

Singapore and Jamaica

 Lipton Matthews, a Jamaican, writes in Aporia about the soft but unabashed social engineering along genetic lines in Singapore, and what he thinks will come of Jamaica's attempt to do the same: Lee Kuan Yew and Eugenomics. We have talked in Europe and North America about the possibility of genetic knowledge turning into selection and government nudging some people to marry and have children and others to stop.  Now some countries are trying it.  You can think about whether you like it based on real examples now.

In parallel to these social engineering measures, Lee crafted a meritocratic bureaucracy that harnessed some of Singapore’s best minds. The Singapore Civil Service and its associated institutions were designed to attract top talent from local universities. Salaries for bureaucrats and politicians were pegged to those in the private sector to ensure that the brightest citizens found public service appealing. In Lee's mind, competent leadership and national IQ were intimately linked. As he once remarked in reference to the famous book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein:

The Bell Curve is a fact of life.

The Acts of the Apostles

The penultimate episode of National Review's Great Books podcast is The Acts of the Apostles. I don't expect to learn much in the way of new things about the Bible at this point, but go to it, discuss it, and think about it in order to more fully embed and understand the teachings I already know. There were some interesting new things in this one. 

That the Athenians had an altar an Unknown God was not just hedging their bets in general, as I had always supposed. . There had been a plague 6th C BC and they had sacrificed to hundreds, even thousands of other gods, not only the large ones with great temples, but the tiny household gods. Epimenides thought there must be some unknown god who was unappeased; he had a dream and followed a flock of sheep. Where they stopped he sacrificed one - and that is where the altar was built.  It's an intriguing similarity, perhaps a prefiguring, of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. The Athenians would have known the story, though what they individually and collectively would have thought about it 600 years later is harder to discern. It is likely that Paul asked about the story and made the connection, rather than preaching a generic sermon about unknown gods. He is telling them "You were on to something with that one.  Let me tell you more about it."  He is building on what they know, not dismissing it.

The Acts of Caesar Augustus, who was the adopted son of the self-declared god Julius Caesar, was written to extol him, and the title of the book in the Bible echoes it and seeks to contrast Jesus and the apostles to it, which was rather controversial and dangerous.

Pentecost was a festival of first fruits and spring harvest, but it was also a remembrance of the giving of the law on Sinai, amidst fire and wind. The giving of the new law written on the heart on that date was a deliberate echo - just one of those levels God always seems to build on centuries later to deepen the lesson.