Ears to the Ground

 Tell me if you hear or read anyone who actively retracts a previous Trump/Russia position. 

First Salmon of the Season

 Pinay sa Alaska 

W H Auden

 

I increasingly find I cannot even tell the past, let alone the future. But I want to tell both and am trapped between them.

2012 Links

Global Warming Catastrophists. Is the National Wildlife Federation mainstream and respectable enough for you? Because this is from page 1 of their new report, "The Psychological Effects of Global Warming On The United States," and it is flipping insane.

Comparing Mountains Good comments about climbing

Geography Geek. Obama's poor grasp of geography and his general intelligence.  Lots of comments.

Daywalkers vs night shift

Village Closeness in the Balkans

Picnics

On a slide show presentation I saw today, I saw an old ad that showed people having a picnic.  It had a blanket spread on the ground and a picnic basket and bottles. I have never liked picnics, because one sits on an uncomfortable position on the ground made worse by trying to eat at the same time.  It is a little better on a beach, and we have gotten stuck at the occasional picnic, usually for church events.  I have never suggested we go on one.

Today it occurred to me that my picture of what a picnic is is at odds with the reality of picnics, including many picnics I have been to.  One could more comfortably sit up higher and put the food on some sort of platform.  Hence the phrase picnic table. That sounds like a lot more fun.  I told my wife about my decades of false impression and told her we should start looking for places to go and have a picnic.

One More Reason...

 ...to read Niall Ferguson, interviewed by Nathan Gardels of Noema: America is in a Late Republic Stage - Like Rome.  I admit that I am tired of the decades of discussion that America is Rome (which fell, doncha know, so smarten up) but he makes some excellent points here.

 Let’s just break it down briefly. Many people wrongly thought that it would be beneficial to Vladimir Putin if Donald Trump were re-elected. I don’t think this war is going to be ended on Putin’s terms, if it’s going to be ended. Secondly, maximum pressure is now back on Iran. That’s important. Thirdly, tariffs have been increased on China, so the pressure is on China. Little Rocket Man in North Korea is still waiting to get whatever is coming to him, but I don’t think it’s going to be a love letter from the Trump administration.

 I got this from a link from The Free Press.

Virgil Wander

Book club discussed Virgil Wander tonight. I found the discussing of it more enjoyable than the reading of it.  The plot starts slowly, and I could tell that something was important - such as the recurrence of the uncertain boundaries of land, water, and sky/fog intersecting with questions of people who were almost dead or thought to be dead coming back or recovering their lives - but I could not discern what any of it was about at first.  But even I, who hates it when authors toy with me that way with a striptease of a novel, appreciated the layering of it in the end.

If you give it a go, I think I can give you just a few things to think about while you read without giving any spoilers.

I wondered where on the spectrum from mere evocation to allegorical retelling were the names.  Was Virgil supposed to represent Wandering Aeneas in the first half of the Aeneid, have elements of him, or merely evoke something about the continual journeying of man?  Or was this Virgil the guide of Dante in the Inferno, and how strictly? I came up with an answer I liked by the end, but no one was excited by it. Still, there was general agreement that the names were important, especially of the male characters. 

What's with all the fish?

Is Adam Leer an evil character, one who is unlucky and easily blamed, or tragically trapped in having evil occur around him?

One of the discussants thought the book had a lot of understated humor, which I did not pick up but can see now that he mentioned it. 

Now That I've Held Him in My Arms

 

Subsistence Curriculum for This Week in Alaska

 

Looks like quite a week.  I hope Aurora can stop looking at her phone and talking with boys to learn this.

ChatGPT Effect on Student Cognition

I am usually suspicious of such claims.  Dime novels were supposed to ruin youths, as were radio, artificial light, television, rock music, computers, D&D, the internet...anything new was blamed for whatever was wrong with Kids These Days. But all of those things did change society, and change might be good or bad.  So with the natural Bayesian structure of our thinking (though we vary widely in how well we do that), this weights the balance pan slightly in the direction of Concern.

This preprint from MIT uncovers some possible problems for students using ChatGPT Your Brain On ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI assistant for Essay Writing Task 

Across the four-month trial, the ChatGPT group showed the weakest neural connectivity, roughly a 32 % lower cognitive load than peers who wrote unaided, and struggled to recall or summarise their own work. Their essays scored well on grammar and structure but were markedly uniform and short on original insight, according to human graders and automated analysis. When the same writers were later asked to compose without AI, performance lagged behind that of participants who had never used the chatbot. 

Proprioception

Science fiction used to have great fun hypothesizing further senses that an alien might have, beyond or instead of our traditional five. But even here on earth there are abilities we recognise as senses once they are presented to us as possibilities.  Animals that can detect magnetic fields or that use echolocation would qualify.  A sense of balance is based on internal awareness rather than external stimuli, as is spatial awareness.  Would we call hunger and thirst senses?  Sure, once we think of it.

It was years ago that someone described proprioception, our sense of body position, as The Sixth Sense, so that one has always stuck in my mind as the best example. It is both conscious and unconscious, as the five we are used to. If we stand in one place and close our eyes, we can tell without looking if our knees are bent or our arms raised. We can describe it instantly.  But it also goes on all day without our attending to it, so that we don't bump our head or hand against something as we walk. Even in the dark we can remember where objects are and have some idea whether we are in line to run into them.

I remember marveling at such a thing when first told about it. I remember closing my eyes in class in sixth grade and checking where all my pieces were. When I checked by sight, they were exactly where my internal sense told me they would be. Mrs. McKeon, long-suffering, asked me what I was doing, but in a less exasperated tone than my previous teachers. Perhaps she was proud of me, perhaps she had just given up.  Either way,  she told me to focus on my work.  I had learned under previous teachers not to counter that I had finished my work.

I have thought only occasionally - less than once year or even decade - about it since, but each time it pleases me. But I have noticed it lately, because it is less accurate than I remember.  My hand might be turned an inch more outward than I estimated, or be a bit higher or lower.  As I have always been clumsy, so maybe this is just noticing what has always been there.  The sense does deteriorate with age, and leads to worse balance and more falls. Yet if anything, I am falling less than I used to.  I don't know if anything is really up or not.

Nor do I much care.  One thing I learned from working in mental health is that if something is not a problem, it's not a problem.  If it gets worse, it might become a problem, and then I will worry about it.  As Tevye says "Good news will keep and bad news will refuse to go away." 

2012 Links

 Scrooge was a Liberal.

Mystery People Vs Research People Or is this a Male/Female difference?

The Little Black Egg 

Cost of Your Health Care. 

Anniversary - Bonhoeffer 

Reading Homer After October 7

I taught my students the 'Iliad.' Then they went to war. by Ido Hevroni, professor of Classics at Shalem College in Israel.

Amir approached me after the second class and said he was frustrated. He couldn’t get into the Illiad. We had a short conversation, and by the next meeting he came prepared like a skilled warrior, not a young man enjoying a cultural experience. He learned the text as an officer would learn a map before navigating his company to its destination. I expected to meet him again on October 9, 2023, at the opening of his sophomore year, but instead, I stood before his grave and eulogized him. Two days earlier, Amir had led a team of soldiers toward the Gaza border communities that were being attacked by terrorists. He was one of the Israelis killed on October 7.

Unfortunate Miss Bailey

This occurred to me because we are thinking of visiting Halifax. My mother and her then-boyfriend* were big Kingston Trio fans, so I grew up on this album and knew all the words to every song.  I had not realised that the song was that old, though.

 *Had she married him, as looked likely at the time, a lot of my childhood would have been Greek.  I sought him out years later and decided he was quite the jerk, and was glad my mother had not married him.

Examples of Fakes

 This guy is providing a public service.  But does it work?

 

Resting Hunt Face

 I am suspicious of the theories that explain modern human inefficiencies as evolutionary leftovers that no longer work.  It is not because I think they are mostly untrue - I think there are some very good ones out there.  But the explanation is so tidy and so congenial that I think it always brings a risk of being a Just-So story.

Having said that, I've got a fun one, by Jesse Bering Resting Hunt Face.  

Just look at the corporate world. Studies show that the selection of CEOs, along with those eye-watering salaries that companies are willing to offer them, vary as a function of the candidate’s facial appearance. It’s a powerful unconscious bias. It’s also just plain ineffective, as these automatic face judgments fail to predict actual profit-driven performance. That our species is so prone to making such costly errors, using faces to make rapid-fire but erroneous inferences about competence, is something of an evolutionary puzzle.

The idea is that we poorly evaluate modern leadership skills when we bring faces into the equation because we are very good at assessing hunting skills from faces, and consider that to be similar enough to sign on for that guy. 

We naturally think of ourselves, our families, and our friends when we hear such things. I do not hunt or even shoot myself, largely because I am so clumsy that it would be a waste of money and effort.  As I like to say, I would be more likely to take out the picture window or the refrigerator; if the neighborhood became so dangerous that I pretty much had to have a try at it, we're probably pretty much screwed already.  I don't know if coordination shows up in the face, but it is also true that I was always much better at being an advisor than a leader.  I never had any side hustles that brought home much money.

Four of my five sons have been shooters - one a hunter, two in the military, one at target ranges. Those are the four who also have side hustles besides their regular jobs. The hunter has the most side hustles, by far. He also has a slender 14 y/o daughter who can butcher a reindeer, though I can't say she looks much like a hunter.  Maybe that comes later.

So I have to think that "resting hunt face" could correlate with some job success, though maybe not CEO's or particular industries.

QOTD (x3)

"All models are wrong, but some are useful." George Box 1976.  He was an applied statistician.

"The truth is too complicated to be represented by anything but approximations." John non Neumann 1947.  He was a mathematician and physicist.

"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." Alfred Korzybski 1933. He was a philosopher of language and reality. 

Seems like pretty close to the same idea from people at the top of different fields. 

 

Sleight of Hand

When you link to an illusionist's performance you start getting lots of magicians on YouTube. It's been fun.

 

Does China Have Enough Food To Go To War?

 This is nothing like my usual topics, and I only read the first few paragraphs and skimmed the rest.  But I know that some of you think about these things at a deeper dive, so I figured I would pass it along. Does China Have Enough Food To Go To War?

Despite this remarkable progress, Chinese authorities are increasingly challenged to feed their 1.4 billion people. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, several outbreaks of African swine fever, floods sweeping southern regions, and severe droughts in the northern areas have revealed weaknesses in China’s food security.³ For instance, these events caused pork prices (the main source of protein for Chinese population) to spike and the imports of grains and oilseeds to soar to unprecedented levels. China is now the world’s largest buyer of key agricultural commodities, and it imports nearly 60 percent of global soybean export flows.⁴ These developments are in clear contrast with China’s decades-long efforts to develop and implement policies aimed at grain self-sufficiency.

Guys at Baseball Games.

 I went to a Woosox game last night, partly because of wanting to see Red Sox players who might come up, but mostly because I like seeing the crowd at a minor league game once a year.  I usually go to see the Fisher Cats here in Manchester, but I had never been to Polar Park before and was still bummed that my earlier attempt this year was called on account of wind and cold. But not until after I'd driven an hour to get there.  So of course I did the smart thing, choosing a game that was in danger of being called because of rain and driving over an hour to that.

I had never gone alone before, so enjoyed myself wandering, not having to worry that Someone Else was worried that I might have gotten lost. I reflected on the number of older men - men who were both portly and starboardly, if you get my drift - who came to baseball games alone.  They were a rather sorry, weird-looking guys, and I wondered what that was about. 

Then I remembered that I was an old guy at a minor league baseball game by myself and decided not to think about it anymore. 

On the Rail Trail

So I did.

Rioting

Over at City Journal, Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit by Charles Fain Lehman

The summer of 2025 has not yet officially begun, but it already looks like another long, hot one. Los Angeles has faced days of anti-ICE protests and rioting, which have spread to dozens of other cities, provoking clashes with local, state, and federal law enforcement. The burning cars and mask-clad demonstrators are disturbingly reminiscent of the riots for “racial justice” in the summer of 2020 and for “Palestine” in 2024. The cause changes; the personnel and methods remain the same.

He left out a lot of urban racial violence. the Kyle Rittenhouse acquital and Derek Chavin's conviction both brought riots. Atlanta 2023, Minneapolis ongoing. The usual method is for professional agitators to glom on to a peaceful protest, hoping to either bait the police into escalating or get the peaceful protestors to start getting physical, not necessarily by shooting or fighting, but by forcing their way into places or refusing to follow police orders. Rioting also provides an opportunity for looting, much as raping and pillaging were considered part of a soldier's entitlement for taking a city. 

The linked article talks about how this is longstanding, quoting from  Edward C Banfield's 1970 book The Unheavenly City.  

Put more succinctly: while Banfield’s contemporaries blamed riots on “root causes,” Banfield blamed riots on those who blamed them on root causes. People riot for all sorts of reasons, but the most tractable one is that they feel permission to riot—because their leaders give it to them.

Stamps and Coupons

Thinking about supermarkets and my grandmother led immediately to memories of S&H Green Stamps and Raleigh Coupons. She smoked two packs of Raleigh filters a day - and looking that up it was surprising how familiar all those brands still looked to me.  I could remember someone who smoked most of those brands, even though most people smoke Marlboros, Winstons, or Newports. Non-filters were considered old-fashioned and less safe.  The filters actually did nothing, but did at least keep flecks of tobacco from going in your mouth. My dad smoked two packs of Luckies a day, which dropped to one pack, mostly in secret, after his quadruple-bypass surgery.

I remember looking through the coupon catalogs, wondering why we never bought anything cool, just end tables and the like.

George Jones

What do you do when you don't like the song but everyone wants you to play it?

You don't go half-way.  You pull out all the stops.

 

Grand Union - Champagnes.

Supermarkets are one of those places that retain their old name long after they have been sold and resold and haven't been called that for years.  Its name is its name, to the people who knew it in childhood, and sometimes there were differences even then.  On of my sons tells me it is the same for stadiums and arenas, and I thought of a local one immediately.  Many people still call it The Verizon Wireless Arena even though it has been the SNHU Arena for a decade, and all the signs leading to it from the highway exits still call it the Manchester Civic Center, left over from 25 years ago. The official names of the parks in many cities are known only to the police and the mapmakers, but in Manchester I think there is only one known almost entirely by its unofficial name, "Pretty Park."

This came up because of Demoulas/Market Basket.  It has been a mess for years, with a family that tries to skirt laws but has also inspired employee loyalty.   There are about a hundred of them now.  It was originally Demoulas in Massachusetts, gradually spreading to other New England states, but there was a limit on how many of one store could sell beer and wine, so the family split off some and renamed them Market Basket.  It was largely a ruse. Still, there are stores that are still named Demoulas and others that have been Market Basket for years but are still called Demoulas by most of the locals. If you move into Concord, NH and call the downtown store Market Basket people will look at you in puzzlement.

A&P and pieces of A&P were bought, sold, combined, split, and recombined for 150 years. A few blocks down from where I lived as a boy it remained a supermarket after being sold off, and was just called "The Old A&P" for years after.  I don't remember its new name, and I doubt anyone else does either without looking it up.

But the interesting ones in Manchester, NH were the three Grand Union - Champagnes.  The first was built on the deeply French-Canadian West Side, the second was built in the South-Central part of the city, which was all ethic groups, and the third was built in the very fashionable not-very French-Canadian North End just before the lot of them (plus a few in other towns) were all sold to Grand Union.  Even though they were technically all named the same thing and their advertisements and fliers were identical, the one on the West Side was always just called Champagnes, the South-Central one was usually called Champagnes, and the snobby North Manchester one was always called the nice WASP-y Grand Union. My grandmother, a bit of a social climber who always resented that her husband had built their house just four blocks short of the North End, gladly switched from A&P to Grand Union in the 1950s.  She would never have gone to a Champagnes.

Full story of Romeo Champagne from the wonderful Cow Hampshire site. 

Mondo Duplantis Again

It's the beginning of a new outdoor season, and he is going to take it up a little bit at a time, to break the record over and over. He gets paid by the sponsors every time he breaks it, so why not? Sergey Bubka broke it a centimeter at a time once or twice a year for a decade. 

 

The only downside I can see if if he gets injured badly enough to shave off the very top of his career, he will always have to wonder how far he could have gone if, if, if... But that's what athletes live with anyway.  No that I think of it, that's what all of us live with anyway.

The conversion is 20' 7 1/4". For comparison, the record in 1950 was 15'7"; in 1975 it was 18'6"; in 2000 it was 20' 1 1/2".

Through Running

For those of you who enjoy learning and thinking about the costs and efficiencies of suburban rail and metros, there is this from Works In Progress.  The Magic of Through-Running.  

By the 1920s, the shortcomings of the system were becoming increasingly obvious. The population of Munich increased sevenfold between 1850 and 1930, with most of the growth in newly built suburbs. But the capacity of the suburban network could not be easily increased to meet rising demand. For the reasons explained above, the two central termini were the key constraints on capacity. There was also continued discontent at the fact that suburban services did not reach the city center, a fact that had been made more obvious by the development of trams that could do so.

On the other hand, there were fewer capacity constraints in the termini at the suburban end, because they usually only handled one type of service (i.e. just a single suburban service, not multiple suburban and intercity ones). This meant they could handle more trains per hour without major risk of generating chains of delays. If they did face capacity constraints, it was normally easier to solve them through expanding termini, since suburban termini are surrounded by less development, and land is cheaper. 

I didn't find the map density much fun, but I think it is necessary to absorbing the concepts. 

I am less willing to invest any pain in my learning as I get older.  I like to be spoon-fed delicious and high-energy concepts at this point. 

What Makes Europe Better?

Even without a subscription, you can get the gist of Chris Arnade's Free Press article. 

Something about style, something about elegance, something about appreciation for the everyday things... yes, we have all heard things like this for decades.  Collectively, we have heard them as long as there have been Europeans in the New World. "English goods were ever the best," said a character in The Story of A Patriot, shown at the Visitor's Center of Colonial Williamsburg since the 1960s. 

Yet it is comparing apples and oranges.  We have charming comfortable breakfast places like the one he described in Italy.  We have a fair number of them.  In vacation places. When we choose them for breakfast, we like them very much, and for the same reasons. The slowed pace of vacation breakfast in America is similar tho the slowed pace for Americans when they vacation in Italy. But generally we don't choose them, because we are going somewhere and we value our time, down to smaller intervals than are valued in much of Europe. 

Europeans complain about McDonald's and the like, but they go to them. They like clean rest rooms, heat and air conditioning, a reliable menu, low prices, just like everyone else.  If there were a big demand for outdoor Italian cafes with bakery, you can guarantee someone would build it.  The closest thing we have to that are cafes inside malls or hotel-based shopping centers We like those fine, but often people want a quick bagel or croissant to go, to have something nice at work.

In most Dunkins in New England, there are regular groups of old guys who meet together for breakfast weekly or even daily. They sit and talk, they don't hurry.  

It's only a slight exaggeration to say that we like this slowed down elegant unpressured life wherever we like.  Because it's vacation, and we like vacation. 

Pretty Girl

It used to irritate me during my mental health career that "people" (but keep reading), seemed more upset if death or a life ruined by mental illness happened to a pretty girl. Once I even said "Would it have been less tragic if she wasn't pretty?" Thinking it through over the years that this was part of a larger pattern of something valuable going to waste. If the person was smart, or a talented musician, or an athlete, similar comments might be made.  Youth was a powerful driver of this as well.  More was going to waste if fifty years were being lost than twenty. The time schedules worked in reverse directions depending on the quality being wasted.  Intelligence and music lost were regarded as tragic because of what could have been; beauty and athletic ability (or perhaps dance, charm) were something that was being lost today.

James Dobson in the late eighties or early nineties pointed out that beauty and intelligence were the gold coin of worth and silver coin of worth for boys and girls. Though first and second place were switched for the sexes, they were still the top two spots for each, and he saw the gap narrowing. I thought that was true at the time because I had children and heard what people said.  I don't have an update whether the gap has narrowed further or not, because I am no longer in a front row seat on that. 

There may have been some "babies lost for the tribe" aspect, because younger women are regarded as prettier, but I don't know how to measure that even approximately.

Yet because I have long been annoyed at others about this my shame was greater when the Minnesota representative was killed and I thought "Oh and she was a pretty woman, what a pity." We do not live up to our own values.

Fly Me To The Moon

 

LA Riots

Leighton Woodhouse at the Free Press has written one of the better articles that I have not seen widely shared.  

The usual choreography of these protests goes something like this: Thousands of normal people show up, along with a smaller contingent of organized agitators. The agitators engage in enough petty property damage to create a situation in which there is a standoff with the cops. Under the cover of the crowd, they then engage in more serious property destruction. If they are emboldened enough, these agitators might launch some largely symbolic attacks on police lines: throwing trash, vandalizing an unattended police cruiser, that kind of thing.

If the strategy is successful, it provokes a violent reaction from the police that is directed at the general mass of protesters. The experience of being attacked by the police when you haven’t done anything illegal outrages the nonviolent majority of the crowd, which then becomes incrementally more violent in return. The situation escalates.

Sunday did not follow that script.

Assassinations and Threats

The spinning and counter-spinning has begun.  They are after "our" people.  No, they are after our people.  They seem to have been after some of both people. There's a manifesto, which will also be spun and counterspun. There will probably be some personal; issues behind it, which may be important or may be a red herring. I am grateful for each public figure who is only expressing sorrow rather than trying to capitalise on that, and already getting angry and those who are.  But I have no sense of the overall percentage of each, because reporting that is spun and counterspun as well.

Wait and see. For now, it's horrible, and I am sad that we are seeing more of this. While that's an obvious thing to say, it's the only thing I can think of that doesn't make things worse.

Lobster Riots

The story has long been told that in colonial Massachusetts, lobster was so plentiful that it was considered a pauper's food and was fed to prisoners so often that they rioted in protest.  It's a great story, and as a person who thinks lobster is overrated I have told it myself.

But it's not true. Boston.com's local history section Wickedpedia decided to be spoilsports and check into the historical sources on this. Did New England Prisoners Really Eat Lobster In Colonial Times?  The mythbusting was straightforward: the story doesn't show up until the 1900s, and was as often about Maine as Massachusetts. But Maine was part of Massachusetts in the 1600 -1700s and didn't have much in the way of jails of its own.  The bits of truth in the legend come from references to lobster being so common and easily caught, as far back as the 1620s. Yet this was a point of advertisement to those back in England, to encourage them to come. 

Sandy Oliver, a food historian and writer based in Isleboro, Maine, shared our suspicions: “Who the hell is going to pick all the meat off the lobster to produce enough for a prison full of people?” (Ed. Good point.) ...Oliver did her own digging and found no contemporaneous references to New England prisoners eating lobster during the 17th or 18th centuries. And when the story did materialize in town histories later on, it wasn’t even initially about lobster. It was about salmon.

Sometimes almost word for word.  Very suspicious. 

Liberace and The Young Folks

 

The Claude Bliss Attractor

Astral Codex Ten discusses the fascinating topic of when AI characters are recursive, so that slight, even invisible biases get magnified and cause us to wonder what is under the hood.  Recursion is an excellent strategy for testing bias. In typical fashion for him, Alexander goes through every possible explanation for why this is happening, saving me the trouble of working it out for myself. It's interesting enough stuff in its entirety that I won't comment much and won't link to a particular section.

The concept that other, seemingly unrelated traits get carried along under recursion reminded me of The silver fox domestication experiment carried out over decades. Also, the effect of the gravitation of the shooter of a billiard ball on the speed and angles nine collisions out is crazy large, as NNT described in The Black Swan. 

Ordinarily this would just be a curiosity of the more extreme effects of recursion.  But as AI's speak to themselves and each other more and more, without supervision, so to speak, this is increasingly the world we live in.

Dueling Something

 I would never have thought of this.

 

Homeless Sex Offenders

You may remember my links on the housing problem from 10 days ago. I hope you remember.  It was only ten days ago. I also recently linked to my old post on Sex Offender Registries.

City Journal has weighed in. (Paywall, but a few paragraphs will give you enough to grasp the idea, though not have it proven to you.) CJ was one of the links suggesting it was a drug problem.  This is unfortunately not necessarily a contradiction.  A lot of my clients during my career had impulse-control problems of all sorts, which meant no one wanted them in their house or their apartment building, or their neighborhood or even the shelter.  Shelters that accept families don't want anything to do with sex offenders.   

Again, trust no one who tells you that homelessness could be easily addressed. I should say, trust them as good people who are likely generous, kind, and compassionate - but not their infuriated (or despairing) sense that this would all be fixed if this rich country would stop being so prejudiced. A friend at Sunday school said something like that a couple of weeks ago.  Price of a fellow, smart, balanced.  Their hearts go out in pain for those they see. It's what they don't see that is the problem.

Classical Reference

 (Deep inside Communist Martyrs High School)

Man with an Hispanic accent:  Hiya, kiddo!

Porgy Tirebiter: 'Shoes for industry' compadre. 

Man: Hehehe sure. Hey you guys holding?

Porgy: Gosh no!  The means of production are held by all of the people. 

Bottles: That's right.

Man: Ah no, man.  Y'know, got any uppers?

Porgy: No, there are no classes in our society.

Mudhead: Or in our high school.

Bottles: Quiet, stupid.

Man: C'mon baby, you can tell me.  You got any pot?

Porgy: Oh not yet.  But soon, heavy industry will make it possible for all the people to have everything it desires in a free marketplace.

Man:  Oh Daddyo, you guys are so crazy! 

 

 

This was prompted by a long chain of thought after I accused someone over at Maggie's of resorting to hand-waving as an argument. The comment in bold from Firesign Theater came to me.

Empathic Conservatives

This study tells me what I want to hear, so it must be true, right?  Empathic Conservatives and Moralizing Liberals.  Political Intergroup Empathy Varies by Political Ideology and Is Explained by Moral Judgment.  University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. 

 Empathy has the potential to bridge political divides. Here, we examine barriers to cross-party empathy and explore when and why these differ for liberals and conservatives. In four studies, U.S. and U.K. participants (total N = 4,737) read hypothetical scenarios and extended less empathy to suffering political opponents than allies or neutral targets. These effects were strongly shown by liberals but were weaker among conservatives, such that conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives. This asymmetry was partly explained by liberals’ harsher moral judgments of outgroup members (Studies 1–4) and the fact that liberals saw conservatives as more harmful than conservatives saw liberals (Studies 3 and 4). The asymmetry persisted across changes in the U.S. government and was not explained by perceptions of political power (Studies 3 and 4). Implications and future directions are discussed.

Update:  Grim expands on his comment about sympathy vs empathy over at his site. "Empathy is really dangerous."

Roman Anthony

I went down for a Worcester Red Sox game earlier this year only to find it cancelled because of wind and cold.  By the time I get there, he will probably be up in Boston.  That happened to me when I went to see Mookie Betts at Pawtucket years ago. He got called up two days before.

 

Update.  Like I said.  I will probably go this month anyway.

Substack

Predictably, there is more crap on Substack now and the percentage of people making logical arguments has dropped dramatically.

Book Banning

 I have said this here before, but a picture is worth a thousand words and this is also concise. Erin Pinson on Substack.

The Forager Myth

Lyman Stone answers the popular myth about foragers, that they had had much more leisure time than we do, and then argues politely but firmly with people in the comments.

 When you imagine Hunter gatherer spare time, don’t imagine them laughing and telling stories around a warm fire. Imagine them shivering in the cold or soaking wet in monsoon rains with a growling stomach wondering when the hunters would get back and if they’d have anything. Yes, they had free time, and that was a CURSE, because what it actually meant was they lacked any way to productively convert their time into useful sustenance! It wasn’t leisure, it was lack!

Conspiracy From the Inside

 From WSJ, via MSN. The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America's UFO Mythology.

In fact, a Wall Street Journal investigation reveals, the report itself amounted to a coverup—but not in the way the UFO conspiracy industry would have people believe. The public disclosure left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs: The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.

Ted Gioia: We have now learned that many of the craziest UFO theories were spread by the Pentagon—to hide its own weapons research. We often assume that conspiracy theories come from total crackpots or brave truth-telling outsiders, but most of them probably originate from liars operating inside the system.

CAPTCHA is Getting Ironic

From Joel J Miller at Substack

 

 

Phil Hanley

 Apparently working a crowd is the thing he is known for.  

Role Models

In the comments on another site we ran up onto the idea that school history textbooks have become dominated by learning about role models from the past. It allows the publishers to work in all manner of approved diversity, and you can check box how many you have got of each at the end.  That has pushed the assessment of who was important to an era, or who is representative farther down the chain. Also, if you are putting characters out on the page for children to read about, you'd probably shy away from choosing any that were bad role models. Combining those two requirements, you don't want to start including any evil Hispanic females, because we are trying to give our best looks to the disadvantaged.

Yet often the main thing the minority or disadvantaged person is known for is advocating for their group. It was often the whole point that their group wasn't getting the chance to design steamships, so that had to come first before the other accomplishments started to happen. But that pushes inventions, trade, founding companies, or building things back down the list.

You will notice we aren't even at learning about events and processes in this discussion.  So far this social studies book is much more dominated by people selected along very narrow criteria than they were decades ago.

I wonder if this focus on people instead of events and processes favors girls, and is also preferred by female teachers.   Hard to measure.

Mini Mental Status Exam

I took a bump to the scalp while loading trays on the back of a bread truck. It was bad enough at the time that I wondered if I should worry about shock or even concussion.  Things seem to be fine now.

Yet I wondered if I was thinking as clearly as I should be, because I am driving a large unreliable vehicle and was immediately caught up short by "How would I know?"  I've watched a couple of thousand mental status exams done over the course of my career, and even did a few myself.  So I know the questions and what a clinician would be looking for, but what if I couldn't recall the very things I needed most to know?  So I started running a comprehensive on myself.  Take a look at what that is, then come back.  No need for detail, skimming is enough.  Though you might find it fascinating in its own right. 

So how's my gait and movement?  Well, I'm driving a truck, so that's hard to say.  I think I got into the truck okay. 

Appearance?  I'm screwed. Dirty ripped clothes because - warehouse. Gash on my scalp, blood on sleeve - would they hold that against me?  Heck, I know there's a good reason for these but would I be behind the eight-ball already with a doctor? (It depends.) Evasive, suspicious, hostile?  Don't think so. So dropping down here...wait, does that mean I'm distractable? Well, I'm always distractable. I doubt my speech is pressured, my fluency is good, but just because I can understand what I'm saying...

And so on for another five minutes until I determined I couldn't really tell from the inside, but I appeared to be sticking with it, which was probably a good sign.  I'm sure there's no research literature on self-administering a mental status exam.  For good reason.

So I thought maybe the Mini Mental Status Exam would be better.  30 points, simple scoring, very concrete, even though nothing is foolproof.  If you are older, or have taken some knocks to the head, you may have had a doctor run these on you.  Take a look at it and you will start to see the cleverness of a quick test like this.  There are a variety of tasks, and most of them look like you should be able to get them.  If you miss a few, especially the pentagons, that won't be a full red flag, just a point to be aware of in the future. 

So the first five points, 2025, Spring, I think it's the 6th (some will give you credit if you are only off by a day), definitely Friday, June.  Now where am I? NH, Hillsborough - wait, I haven't crossed into Rockingham, have I?  Is Auburn in Rockingham County?  I don't think so. No wait, I think it is. Damn it. Well I'm in Manchester again anyway now, so Hillsborough. I'm betting this problem of movement isn't covered in the scoring. I'm in a truck, but how do I get my fifth point on this one? I gave myself a 3-step direction.  I doubt that has the slightest validity.  I tried to draw those pentagons in the air and see if I got them intersecting.

I decided I was fine.  A very entertaining way to kill fifteen minutes.

Wait, how long was that?  Was it too long?  Did I drift away a few times?

Rita Rudner

 

Musk - Trump. Nah, Parenting. And the Moon.

I have not weighed in on any Trump-Musk stuff before, and I'm certainly not going to pretend I have anything to offer talking about them now.  This is my signal to get out of Do(d)ge until there is information I can process. And now Steve Bannon is in the mix.

From my 2012 files I have some longer posts about parenting, which I used to know something about, and they also have good comments, including a few of you.  I was going to hold them off for a while because I've just done a bunch of 2012 links, but frankly 13 years ago is looking pretty good at the moment. And I'll see if I can find some music and comedy for y'all.

Don't Criticise Your Parents Until Your Own Children Are Grown. 

 I always said the key to parenting was to have wonderful children who make you look good.  Then remind them that their function is to be wonderful children and make you look good.

Parenting Experts

 So that's lesson one: beware experts.  They have their place and deserve to be listened to.  But you may know better - especially if you are humble enough to know you don't know enough.Lesson two is related: surround yourself with friends who care deeply about parenting, and compare notes.

Charles Murray and Parenting

 I think the idea that we were taught to color in the lines because that is the sure way to success is a back-reading by the 60's generation onto 50's values.  The boomers confused the rules they were taught as children, because they were children, with the full panoply of adult understanding of values by their parents. The people who came through the Great Depression, WWII & Korea, polio and atomic weapons are unlikely to be people who believed much in guarantees in life.  More likely, they had hopes that if everything went well..."Well that's quite different then, isn't it," as Emily Litella used to say.

Family Culture 

Competition was only part of the value that said This doesn’t have to be painful.  There might be a way to make it fun. Family devotions might involve food, or noise, or a game. Lots of the Bible can be pretty funny, if you read it right. Let’s go to someone’s house and get them involved. Vaudeville is not yet dead.  Well, okay, it is, but you can still find slapstick.

Family Traditions.

 Much of the family tradition was highly intentional, but other parts came in serendipitously - an ancient noisy ice-cream maker purchased for $2 at a yard sale became central to the Defiance of Midwinter barbecues, while a concerted attempt to start Devotion By The Ocean lasted only one year attempt (very hot chocolate spilled, no available restrooms...it was the story about it that became the tradition).  Yet I don't think one knows to keep the accidental elements unless one is always looking to add to the collection.  Chance favors the prepared mind and all that.

And a moon mnemonic to tell whether it is waxing or waning. Very simple.

Deepnewz

I continue to like this AI-generated news site.  First off, I have not seen anything that infuriated me in its coverage, and very little where I thought "that's leaving out an important detail."  There have been a few where I looked at the bottom for its sources and thought they were too heavily drawn from one side, usually liberal, but less often than even two months ago. I like it especially for international news.

Here's an example in the case of the Boulder terrorist's family's deportation being temporarily blocked. A couple of the sources noted it was a Biden-appointed judge.  Others noted that it was temporary. One noted that none of them had been charged with anything.  All of those things are true and worth reporting in a longer piece, and throwing those items into an opinion piece would be fair game. But each of them steers you to an opinion you should have, even if only subtly.  Fresh news should be unseasoned, and the Deepnewz article is.  There is plenty of time for a more considered opinion.

2012 Posts

 Taraf de Haidouks (Band of Outlaws). Gypsy music

I discussed a review of Willful Blindness, a book I have since forgotten existed. However lots of the ideas generalised well and still apply

I reviewed Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel, which I do still remember. Then I wrote some more. 

Kyle was assigned Reviving Ophelia as a high school sophomore.

An extended post on vaccines, with internal links to other posts that also had many comments.  It's an interesting discussion of what this group thought over a decade ago, before all the coronavirus vaccine controversies showed up.  It gives some explanation of why authorities were so dismissive of anti-vax sentiment.  It didn't have a good history.

Wednesday Links

My hat is off to Bird Dog and his wife who do daily links at Maggie's Farm.  It's been a week in this format, and I think I'm going to just sit around and be stupid for a while. It is good to set goals you can accomplish.

Palestinians executing their own for seeking food. 

There used to be a saying "The personal is political," meaning that our individual domestic decisions have larger political implications.  I always thought that was true but only half the story.  It occurred to me a few days ago that this has reversed, and people take their personal behavior cues from their politics. I would think that marrying, having children, living near family, and working for a living would of necessity be mostly personal.  I no longer think so, and when I tried to trace it back I think the switch started decades ago.  I suppose if you define your life in terms of your politics they will consume you.

Rob Kurzban at Living Fossils on the perverse incentives in academia, It's All Academic.

Another important piece of the puzzle is the lack of one particular kind of incentive: penalties for being wrong, even luminously wrong. As far as I know, no (modern) scholar ever got fined, jail time, or even fired for publishing a genuinely stupid idea.3 Indeed, in many areas of the academy, such behavior can be richly rewarded. (Working to expose the stupidity of such ideas might be punished, however.) The basic explanation for this is that academics make the rules and they don’t want any that hold them accountable for being wrong. Why would they? Why would anybody?

I have gotten out of the habit of picking the best of my old posts. From the beginning of 2012, my views on Sex Offender Registries.

 

The Two Ronnies

 

And another for Grim, 

Tuesday Links

Autogynephilia became something you were not allowed to discus in polite psychological circles.  If the pendulum is really swinging the other way in the trans debates (I am a poor judge of pendulums), then maybe that will change.

Babylon Bee.  Ouch 

Tyler Cowen believes that elite universities need to bear the consequences of their actions, but there are better ways. (Paywall, but there are workarounds).  Ilya Somin says they deserve everything they get.

Francis in Full, by Bishop Robert Barron. over at First Things.  Barron is the founder of Word on Fire ministries, which has supplied some of the reviewers for NR's Great Books podcast, and I have been favorable impressed. I think he gives Pope Francis credit where it is due and defends him with clarity against some unfair criticism. I continue to dislike "the Earth is a pile of filth" that neglects to mention that by population, it has been worse throughout history than it is now, and the similar misunderstanding of use versus abuse of free markets, comparing the latter to mythical prior ages of shared property and respect, or to stated aspirations versus actual results.  But I did have my mind changed on some of the other points about Francis, so it's a good thing I went over.  First Things has a paywall, so choose carefully which articles you want before they shut you off. But even reading the first couple of paragraphs of each is valuable to a mind like mine.

When we find old bones, sometimes they are the ancestors of no one. 

AI Diagnosis: (via Aporia) Towards Conversational Diagnostic Artificial Intelligence. Nature April 2025. For written Q&A, AMIE demonstrated greater diagnostic accuracy and superior performance on 30 out of 32 axes according to the specialist physicians and 25 out of 26 axes according to the patient-actors. Verbal conversation was not tested.

I wonder if people will still want to hear the information and recommendations from an actual human being, though? My step-father was CEO of a mutual fund and explained that they would assign a gray head to meet with clients, especially older ones, in addition to the younger advisors who had done the actual work, because clients wouldn't part with their money on the word of the young ones, especially if they were female.  That would have been in the 80s and 90s, and I don't know if that is still true.

Reindeer

 

From Goldendale Reindeer. These are subspecies under the larger subspecies categories of Caribou (wild, larger) and reindeer (semi-domesticated, smaller).  We had reindeer in Norway.  It was like a tasty tender beef.  I wish they cooked it more, but they seem to consider rare the only method of preparation.

Monday Links

I am not enjoying this, but I am going to do at least a week.  

Not everything that calls itself love is love.  In fact, such announcements are often an indication that the good thing in question is brittle or shallow.  Those who call themselves brave...what would you think?  Those who call themselves wise...or kind...or honest...don't you feel like pulling out a stopwatch and seeing how long it takes to disprove it?

Jordan Call on young children crying.  It sounds very much like something my oldest would say,

Cremieux Recueil argues that Ozempic is not causing muscle loss, despite the current flurry of claims. He also believes that there is no autism epidemic, only a change in definitions.

Bethel McGrew of Further Up writes about the Rorschach Pope.

Against Hobbies, over at Deep Left Analysis.  This one has already gotten a lot of people stirred up. It's too long, and he gets sidetracked, but it is still kind of fun.  He really lays into pet owners

Illusionist

 

I get taken in every time with magicians, and never regret it.

Land of 1000 Dances

 If you prefer Wilson Pickett's version I won't complain

Sunday Links

I don't know about his prescriptions and explanations, but seeing the persistence of tribal divisions (of Scots, Slavs, and Germans) in modern politics is remarkable.

Computation and Thermodynamics. This never occurred to me.  This established that erasing information necessarily releases heat. To understand why this happens, we need to consider what computing means from the perspective of information. A typical chip is made up of multiple logic gates, which perform operations by producing outputs based on inputs. Most logic gates have fewer possible output states than input states. For example, a gate with two inputs (each either 0 or 1) has four possible input combinations (00, 01, 10, 11), but only two possible output states (0 or 1).  

Tim Walz tells Democrats that they have to bully the shit out of Donald Trump. When was this not the case? Truman called Dewey a fascist. (Dewey bio, for context. Moderate Republican.) Humphrey was a decent fellow, I suppose, and Mondale. 

No, Cory Booker did not give a Nazi salute. Nor did Musk previously. 

Nate Silver likes LLMs and ChatGPT, but not for poker.  Perhaps 80 percent of the time, their performance is somewhere between marginally helpful and incredibly impressive. But that leaves the 20 percent of the time when they aren’t up to the task.  

Amphibious Robot Dogs. Existing amphibious robots are largely inspired by reptiles or insects, and often face limitations in agility, dynamics, and load capacity. Basing the amphibious robot on the swimming style of dogs allows for it to easily transition between land and water and overcome many of the challenges faced by insect-inspired designs.