The Mississippi Miracle

A few South Central states - Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama - have all seen recent gains in measured school testing.  They have been among the worst for years and are now average or better. I am suspicious of any education miracles, because they tend not to scale up, or persist, or measure what they say they do.  OTOH, even small well-distributed improvement is much to be desire. 

Here is some of the debate, courtesy of Astral Star Codex

Kelsey Piper stresses that it is literacy and continuing education for teachers focused on curriculum.

Freddie deBoer reminds us that there are no education miracles. (And he's got a list, which probably includes your favorite solution that you are just sure would work)

Derek Deek thinks there might be a little something to it, but not much. 

Natalie Wexler insists that phonics only gets you so far She likes the better teacher training, though.

Kelsey Piper shares some of the critics' doubts but still defends the strategies 

So many good observations and arguments were made that I don't want to muddy the waters much. I will note the following:

Some of the data is over more than a decade of (slower but sustained) improvement.  Some of it is flashy but only a few testing seasons.

Improvement was concentrated among but not confined to the worst students. 

Teacher training has included untraining - stressing that some popular things have been shown to be ineffective.  Note that these are not necessarily damaging, as critics sometimes accuse, but simply ineffective. 

Thursday Links

 Brain Difference Between Psychopaths and Normals Psychopaths have a 10% larger striatum than non-psychopaths, suggesting biological differences in brain structure. This enlargement is tied to impulsivity and a higher craving for stimulation. I wonder if this is part of what we see in the differences in criminality and violence that I have posted about recently. In some domains I have higher impulsivity and need for stimulation.  I'll have to think about what that means and where the divide it.

Parallel Parking Championship  I sent this to Son #5, Kyle, who is masterful at this.

Go over and check out a few controversial topics at Grokipedia versus Wikipedia. Bernadine Dohrn (21 mentions of violence, 16 mentions of bombings) versus Bernadine Dohrn (no mentions of violence except in the footnotes, one mention of bombing). Or compare Alger Hiss versus Alger Hiss.

In Almost All Fictional Worlds, God Exists, by Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias, linked by Rob Henderson  It’s not that a deity appears directly in tales. It is that the fundamental basis of stories appears to be the link between the moral decisions made by the protagonists and the same characters’ ultimate destiny.  

The tylenol/autism brouhaha is an escape hatch for RFK Jr. who wanted to claim it was vaccines but had to settle for this, which is going to amount to a medication long off-patent having to put a warning label on.  To repeat: the increase in autism diagnoses is a product of progressively milder symptoms being allowed for diagnosis. It doesn't mean they "aren't real" - there were misdiagnoses fifty years ago as well. Behavior is complicated. 

Model Cities

Articles about Model Cities are usually just "great ideas some people have" plus some drawings and proposals.  But ACX is keeping track of things worldwide - it is clearly a topic that Scott Alexander has a fondness for - and gives updates on actual projects, some with land, buildings, and people.  The Bahamas, California, Honduras, Sierra Leone, and brief reports on a few others. 

Wednesday Links

 People Versus Things I am not surprised that there is a preference between men and women, but I am surprised how strong it is. More freedom equals more revealed preference rather than constrained preference.  In poor countries both sexes are under pressure to choose whatever pays more.  Not so in developed societies.

Asch's Moral Conformity effect also holds when the companions are online. It worked for half the dilemmas, anyway. It is easier to go along with the group.

TL:DR Will AI Solve Medicine? Is AI saving us any time if we have to read about it so much? The little I did read was interesting. It sould be a great podcast if you are taking a five-hour round trip anytime soon.

Bird Dog is back from France and wherever, so Maggie's Farm is back up. 

I don't read books anymore.  I'm in two book clubs and have to force myself to read things that should interest me.  I am reading Hidden Gospels by Philip Jenkins and loving it each time I pick it up - which is seldom.  I am not who I was. Part of it is falling asleep. Most of it is that I want summarised information, which is now available in abundance. 

The Psmiths review John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, which I read years ago and liked. It is thorough enough that it is actually a summary of the book - in case you also prefer that now. But she does give some outside information as well, such as Have I mentioned that John McWhorter is a language contact specialist? If you move in the right circles, his theories about creoles are more contentious than his thoughts on affirmative action. Fun to know.

Water Skiing

 This was my era on skis, beginning at Baptist Pond in Westford in 1959. 

The high point of this one is seeing Princess Margaret smoking with a cigarette holder about halfway through.

 

Technology Replacing Us

 David Foster has a review of Peter Gaskell's Artisans and Machinery, which Tyler Cowen also recently reviewed (interior link). Gaskell is very worried about the social changes that are already under way that are destructive to jobs, to the family, and to morals.  In Great Britain in 1836. I picked up quickly what Foster highlights about the changes. Gaskell rhapsodises about the age of Squires and good fresh air.

Gaskell explicitly states that he does not mean to portray the pre-industrial times as any kind of Arcadian paradise, but to a considerable extent he does just that. His almost entirely positive portrayal of the Squire would, I suspect, have been roundly mocked by those living within the domains of a fair number of real-life squires. 

I thought of Dickens's London (and Blake's "dark satanic mills*"), which in detailing the horrible conditions of the poor in the cities neglects that people have come to these places of their own free will.  However bad conditions were, they preferred them to life in the country. Steam power may have been replacing the employment of weavers, but the weavers did not go back to the farm. 

We will naturally think of comparisons to our own day and the dire warnings about AI and robots. I'll not say that it won't be true this time just because it wasn't true then.  After all, the arrival of my ancestors in Europe in the 3rd Millennium BC wiped out a more advanced civilisation, as did the Sea Peoples in 1187BC.  It's not all upward trajectory. But David touches on that only briefly.  He stays put in the Industrial Revolution and its effects because there's plenty to reflect on there.  It's a fun read.

*In the popular understanding.  Blake's meaning is more complicated. 

Update:  Right on cue just after I hit "post," Aporia sent me Video: You're Going to Be Replaced I haven't looked at it, I only note the irony.

Tuesday Links

 Banning cell phone use during class resulted in higher test scores. As Gurwinder says, it's an easy intervention, and unlikely to do any harm. 

The microplastics worry is based on sloppy studies. 

Tyler Cowen has a theory that had not occurred to me about Trump's foreign policy goal: A unified Western Hemisphere as a counter to China's rising power.  Well, it's a theory.  And it's a fascinating new way to look at things. It does rather fall into the "first, catch your rabbit" category.

Bskings True Crime Part 5 is up. 

Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee sees bad ideas, particularly antisemitism, rising on the Right.  This ties in to my previous comments about double-siloing. The internet allows groups within groups to talk almost exclusively with each other, having little contact with larger trends. Not only are these not your grandfather's conservatives, they aren't even your children's conservatives. There was something of this among both evangelicals and libertarians in the 80s and 90s

Chushingura

 Heavy, man

 

The Wrong Toppings

 An IRS lawyer on furlough has opened a hotdog stand called Shysters.

 

Improvisations on Recent Themes

 Grim riffs on some recent posts here, and brings in interesting new connections. A Rare Political Post.

The Necessity of Chivalry

 

Frog Update

I have been thinking about Earl's comment that the purpose of the frog and other cute inflatable costumes is to make the police and enforcers look ridiculous for subduing a children's toy. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten thought they looked cringe and disapproved for other reasons, but several of his commenters echoed exactly that sentiment. Others pointed out that the meaning is different in places like Portland and Chicago where there has been actual violence, and the majority of other places where violence never looked like it was going to be much of an issue. In Portland, the violence is after dark. I thought that could be used as an argument in either direction, that it was dangerous disguise in some places, but just silly in others.  But people protesting in safe places can have a few reasons for wanting to imitate those in more danger. It was an interesting discussion. 

After it all, I still didn't like it but wasn't quite sure why. It may be that I see it as a tactic that the already-convinced think really pwns MAGA, but independents are unlikely to be moved by, and thus, signifying nothing. But that can't be it either, because if it truly signified nothing, I wouldn't be annoyed, would I?

 

Sunday Links

 Self-rated IQ is a terrible measure of IQ, but an excellent measure of self-esteem. Whenever the IQ debates start, it is common for people to quickly comment that they have known people with high IQ's that didn't seem that smart (and certainly not wise). I have wondered aloud how they know these are high-IQ people.  If the people in question told you that, they are likely to be wrong.

Better All the Time.  From N3, the decline in infant mortality in Africa since the 1950s. Wonderful to look at.

Also from N3 Microaggressions - weak evidence. It is unsurprisingly from the work of Lee Jussim of Rutgers, who has also exposed the lack of evidence for Implicit bias, priming, and stereotype threat.  Also, the surprisingly good evidence for stereotypes being partly true. I have written about him several times before

How To End A Sentence With Style 

I learned from my granddaughters, who have watched Ten Things I Hate About You multiple times, that it is based on "The Taming of the Shrew"

In rough terms, if you make $50K/year you are in the top 1% globally - and the globe is in its richest era in history.  We are the billionaires. 

The Rage of the Falling Elite by Rob Henderson. The first time I heard this some years ago it sounded intuitively right. It's nice to see some hard evidence for it.

This helps to explain why modern movements like Occupy Wall Street were filled not with the destitute but with college-educated professionals. These were not people starving; they were aggrieved that they were in the 90th percentile rather than the 99th. Surveys show progressive activists are wealthier, whiter, and more highly educated than the average American. They are nearly three times as likely to hold a postgraduate degree.

Foliage

Every year we say what a strange winter it is. Hardly any snow except for that one big storm...so little variety this year, just hovering between 5 and 35 for five weeks after Christmas... I point out that there has never been a normal winter here.  They are all strange. We might say it's been a wet spring, or a hot summer, or a late fall, but we don't tend to describe those seasons as strange, even when it was wet in June and dry in August and September, as this year. But this was a strange autumn, perhaps because of the rain irregularity of summer, or any of the five other standard explanations for why the foliage is doing what it is doing this year.

Peak foliage was at a normal time, but was disappointing this year. The bright reds and oranges of the maples were subdued.  When that happens, we adjust and look at the goldenness of the birches and beeches and enjoy that.  We were surprised as we headed up to Quebec City, because the drama of the foliage diminished up through NH and VT as expected, but lingered in Quebec Province even as we headed farther north. The maples were late there, and fully dramatic. When we drove out through the Plains of Abraham, almost three weeks after it was supposed to be peak, it was the best display we had seen all year.

Now we are home, and many leaves have fallen. Yet a lot of the sugar maples are at peak only now. There are large vivid patches on the hills. What held the maples back but not the others this year? People speak knowledgeably and convincingly as if they know about such thin gs, but the following year their predictions are no better than anyone else's. 

It's been a strange autumn.

 

It Depends

I have been assuming from the start that this bombing of Venezuelan drug smuggling boats has been a serious overreach by the Trump administration and illegal. I was quite surprised then when Free Press legal correspondent Jed Rubenfeld, who is extremely unsympathetic to this administration, reports looking into it and finding it more complicated. Even if technically legal and justifiable it still might be very unwise and counterproductive, but that's not the issue at hand.  If it's not legal it doesn't matter if it is wise or not.  So determining the legality is the first order of business.

It has long been a humorous cliche among lawyers that the answer to everything is "It depends." Maybe it does.

The Whiteness and Oldness

Conservative sources are stressing the white 55+ aspect of the "No Kings" protests, and often show stills and videos highlighting that. A secondary group is quite young people, disproportionately gender-ambiguous and carrying PRIDE signs.  A third group, with better signs and prominent among organisers and speakers seems to be government union and socialist groups. But it is easy to select people out of a crowd for photographs, which is why colleges always get nonwhite students, especially black, onto the first page of their websites and brochures and females onto the laboratory pages. 

An online person assured me that there was a noticeable Black, Hispanic, and Asian presence at the rally he attended "even in all-white New Hampshire." Well, he was in Nashua, which is more than 25% nonwhite, so he was shading the truth on that one. But I didn't go myself, so I wanted to get a more accurate picture. I looked at photos, but Hispanics - half of the nonwhites - are not always easy to pick out at a distance in a crowd. White hair is probably a better identifier than skin among seniors. 

I couldn't find a second black person, so I tried Boston, and couldn't find a third one in all the pictures there.  But still, that's an imprecise measure, figures in a crowd shoot. All the closer, clearly identifiable people were white save one, and it was definitely a white-and-gray-haired crowd, even when taken by people sympathetic to the cause. Nationally, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution had an interview with a black man complaining that the protest was mostly white people and there were only a few articles like that except from conservative sources.  I didn't see a lot of strollers or kids on shoulders. More electric carts and wheelchairs. But again, I wasn't there.

Historically, black people show up for black protests but not others. LGBT groups and women whose signs are coded pro-choice ("Hands off," "Women's health") show up for everyone; socialists show up with few people but great signs; environmentalists, antiwar, and Hispanics are variable. College students are variable along different lines, probably more social than group-identified. I don't know how that played nationally this past weekend.  

Also Manchester, the other city in the state 25% nonwhite. 

Do any of you know from actual attendance, an abundance of local photos from sources expected not to shade things, or reliable reporting in your area? 

Succinct Explanation

If it's not just the labor, and it's not just the capital, then what is it? D'Souza explains how Marx asks a profound question, but answers it wrongly. Not everyone at a "No Kings" rally is a Marxist, by any reading. Likely not even a healthy percentage. But signs for this and approval for this particular Marxist idea seems to be much more present these days.

 

Sports Betting

All the discussion about how sports are being ruined by betting reminds me of PG Wodehouse's story "The Purity of the Turf" in The Inimitable Jeeves. Bertie, Bingo Little, and Jeeves form a syndicate to bet on events at a school fair, including the Girl's Egg-and-Spoon race, the Mother's Sack Rack, and the Choir Boys' 100-Yard Run based on insider information.  When a competing bettor starts interfering with the contestants, they counter-interfere. 

 In that case," he said, "those bets, you know – I'm afraid you lose your money, dear old boy. It's a pity you didn't put it on S.P. I always think S.P.'s the only safe way."
I gave him one look. Not a bit of good, of course.
"And they talk about the Purity of the Turf!" I said. And I meant it to sting, by Jove! 

Schizophrenia Voices

 50-Year-Old Theory on Schizophrenia's "Voices" Confirmed by Recent Study at Science Alert. 

"In healthy people, using inner speech produces the same kind of reduction in brain activity as when they speak out loud," Whitford says. "But in people who hear voices, that reduction of activity doesn't happen. In fact, their brains react even more strongly to inner speech, as if it's coming from someone else. That might help explain why the voices feel so real."

Underlying study from  University of New South Wales Sydney, patients from Sydney and Hong Kong

This has long been believed anecdotally by people who have heard lots of schizophrenics relate what voices are telling them. Auditory hallucinations can vary quite a bit, and focusing on an individual can lead one to leap to conclusions, which is why hallucinations in literature do not fit this pattern well. But hearing a thousand versions reveals a common pattern of voices accusing them of what they fear most, or explaining to them what they have already believed. A striking example was a patient of mine who had a severely disabled nonverbal son who required a great deal of care. After his wife died he gradually developed the idea that the young man was communicating to him mentally that he hated his life and wanted to die.  The impression became overwhelming, and he eventually killed him. It is not difficult to see that this was his own wish projected onto his son.

The method they set up to test the idea was clever.  The result reminded me very much of unshakeable delusions that schizophrenics can have, now narrowed down to a brain inability to compare one narrative against another simultaneously, so that new data and explanations cannot be held firmly in the mind, and the installed narrative cannot be dislodged. The lack of brainwave answer for internal versus external speech seems similar. 

The Artist Who Mastered Water

 Frits Thaulow.  Norwegian 1847-1906. It doesn't show up as magically at this level of detail. The links give you more.

 

Further examples from The Culturist on substack. It is a wonderful site "Pursuing the True, the Good, and the Beautiful."  He is clearly a Tolkien fan, including the Appendices.

Violence and IQ

From N3 

As shown in the graph below, the prevalence of violent behavior dropped steadily with increasing IQ: 16.3% of individuals with IQs in the 70-79 range reported violent behavior, compared with just 2.9% of those with IQs of 120-129. The link held even after controlling for demographic factors, childhood adversity, substance use, and mental health.

 I would note that the graph does not go to zero, as far as we know.  That even smart people sometimes fight someone suggests that sometimes it's a good calculation. Even Jesus beat the moneylenders out of the Temple.

Among the possible reasons mentioned, I would add that in the emergency psych biz we would note that less intelligent people could not articulate their complaints as well and got frustrated by this. 

Media and Message

Various media favor types of communication. I have a face made for blogging. Substack favors long form, but its chat feature is similar to X. YouTube favors longer videos, even hours long, but reels are becoming a heavier portion. TikTok and Instagram have different audiences, though they overlap. Facebook favors memes, reels, and personal photos. Podcasts are definitely long form, but being audible, they attract a crowd on the road, more like talk radio. Or like talk radio used to be.  I don't even know who is on anymore. Of all of these I disapprove of reels the most, because they seem to be more prone to faked scenes, and can vouch for their addictiveness by the number of them I click. I don't know what's up with cable or network TV these days, nor movies. I don't go to news sites anymore, though many of my blog sites are link and news heavy.

We talk about silos in our receiving news, but we usually mean political silos, echo chambers. We are becoming double-siloed now. Instagram stars can be completely unknown on Tiktok or YouTube. Bloggers and substackers are pretty much known only to themselves and each other. Podcasters seem to cross a lot of boundaries, but are more likely to avoid political or cultural commentary altogether. Thus when I hear about young conservatives, I realise I know almost nothing about them. The worst of young leftists get highlighted by conservatives exposing them, but I at least see them, even if a biased sample. 

If siloing is bad, double-siloing has got to be worse, doesn't it? 

I Feel Free

 

Gurgi

Gurgi was a favorite character when I read Lloyd Alexander's "Prydain Chronicles," based on Welsh mythology, aloud. He is a half-man, half-beast character who speaks in rhyme and refers to himself in the third person. Yes! Faithful Gurgi will fight them with smackings and whackings! I learned today that Gwrgi means man-dog in Welsh, and is the name of a great warrior in ancient Wales.

Education Doesn't Work 3.0

Freddie deBoer on the current refinement of his idea that schools do not accomplish what they say they do. Education Doesn't Work 3.0

Our educational debates are largely useless because most people engaged in those debates assume out of hand that, absent unusual circumstances like severe neglect or abuse or the presence of developmental or cognitive disabilities, any student can be taught to any level of academic success, and any failure to induce academic success in students is the result of some sort of unfortunate error. Some tend to ascribe the failure to reach academic excellence as the result of exogenous social variables (like poverty and racial inequality) while others insist that students who have failed to learn to standard are evidence of failing schools and feckless, untalented teachers. My own perspective insists instead that as with any other kind of human ability, academic ability is unequally distributed across the population, with some destined to excel, some destined to struggle, and many destined to meet various levels of mediocrity. My belief is that this tendency is the result of some sort of intrinsic or inherent academic potential, that just as in natural talent for playing a musical instrument or playing a sport, there is such a thing as talent in school, and like all other talents, this one is not distributed equally to all people and is thus not fair. 

Please note that deBoer is very liberal, somewhere between socialist and communist, so he does not have an easy home anywhere in education discussions. His thought is because the unfair distribution of all abilities is real, and intelligence is particularly needed at some level for nearly all jobs now, a strong safety net is the only moral and fair thing to do. 

Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. - Douglas K Detterman

Teachers do not like being blamed for students not doing well, and if the above is true, one can see why. They can see right in front of them that things outside their control are affecting student outcomes. This is why teachers are quick to blame parents, and administrators, and school boards, and taxpayers, and the culture, and social media, and the students themselves. It isn't their fault, so it must be one of those others.  In fact, in the circle of education all of those groups blame one or all of the others, because while they all know they aren't perfect and could do better, they couldn't do that much better in order to fix what they see in front of them. Our education discussions are pretty much each of these groups blaming the other. Accountability or new programs are not going to fix things, but we want to believe that something is going to fix it. Maybe some new technological marvel will.  I doubt it.

But teachers don't want to give up taking credit for what they do, and that sort of goes with the territory. This is again true for all the other groups as well, the administrators, the taxpayers, the parents. We want credit and we don't want blame. You can't have it both ways. 

This is the place where I usually go on to point out the good things about character and habits that school do and should do. Yet this time I'm not going to. The first thing is to understand this point about differences in all abilities, including intelligence.  It is always of some importance, in every time and place, but in the last few centuries in the West it has become primary. It's not fair that this ability which is so important is not evenly distributed, but nothing is. Always, everywhere, in every environment, the number one thing people need to succeed will be unequally divided.  Blame evolution, which is ruthless. Blame fate, which is blind. Blame God, who at least might have some plan about what the unfairness is supposed to accomplish, even though it bothers us. 

But inequality is the universal. 

Writing and Thinking

The act of writing reveals to you, in quite a brutal way, just how many of your thoughts are merely feelings. You really have no idea what you actually think until you attempt to write it down. Dylan O'Sulliavan 

Even then. 

Why You Are Probably An NPC

Gurwinder, over at The Prism (sidebar) had an essay about everyone being some sort of NPC (because it is efficient to take thinking shortcuts), about two years ago. He identifies five types of NPC

1. The Conformist.  I say - yes, I have said things like this about other people before.  I also say ouch.

2. The Contrarian. I also say yes, he is echoing some of my themes about such thinking. I also say ouch.

3. The Disciple. Less often, but reliably, I have expressed this as well.  Not as well. And Ouch.

4. The Tribalist.  I complained about this group for the whole first decade of this blog. BTW, ouchies.

5. The Averager.  A much better version of things I haven't said quite often enough. OUCH, dammit.

He offers an interesting solution to these thinking shortcuts.  Ouch to that, too.

Saxon Village

 From "The Age of Arthur"

                     Model of the Saxon village of Feddersen Wierde (Museum Burg Bederkesa)

One of the best excavated pre-migration settlements of the Saxons is Feddersen Wierde, on the north-western coast of Germany. The Feddersen Wierde site was excavated from 1955-1963, and at its peak in the third century, the settlement featured 26 longhouses and had a population of about 300 people. The early Saxon village was abandoned in the fifth century and it is quite clear why. The whole population seem to have gotten into their boats and migrated elsewhere.

"Elsewhere" presumably being East Anglia through Kent in the land of the Britons.

My first thought looking at this was This would be a great setting for a Dungeons & Dragons module. I have not made such a module for decades, but I still think that way. 

Ed Sullivan...

 ...delivered when he called it a variety show

 

Still Stuck on Empathy

I keep mulling it over, trying to get the concept and phrasing as clear as possible.

Empathy and projection are nearly the same thing. Our ability to feel what another person feels is dependent on what we believe we would feel like in their shoes. This is especially true when we are considering people at  distance or in groups, and thus political empathy is always a red flag for projection. It is not a useless skill. "How would you like it if someone did that to you" is a technique we introduce in childhood, and remind each other of even as adults. But it can go horribly wrong, believing that we understand someone we do not.

I have written several times over the years that not taking the Lord's name in vain refers to not forging His signature under our ideas, rather than bad language. Projection is forging someone else's signature under our sentiments, and thus a sneaky way of convincing others (or ourselves) how compassionate we are. We pretend to fight their battles when they are merely our own.

Mental Illness Diagnosis

 

 The link on X is here

The original article including the research is here. 

The article at Skeptic focuses on the worrisome and inaccurate things that have been told to succeeding generations about poverty/inequality, climate danger, and threats to democracy. They make a pretty good case that succeeding generations believe worse things about the country and the world, making their anxiety and depression about it more reasonable. I concur with a lot of this and don't want to supplant it. 

However I do want to add to it, and clarify this a bit.  Note first the wording, especially the terms "challenges" and "identity." The former suggests something ongoing, and the latter is a phrasing that Boomers would be less likely to use, though they have the concept. The identity of the young is more tied to who they think they are.  Older people are more likely to point to what they have done. I am outgoing...I'm ambitious...I'm something of an idealist Versus I'm a mother of three...I'm a teacher...I'm a joiner. That may account for at least some of the difference. The numbers may not just be the difference between generations, but something that happens naturally with age. Boomers might, if you asked them, acknowledge having had mental health challenges that they called by a different name when they were young, but consider that past and no longer a big deal. Stories like "When we first moved to a tiny apartment in Peoria and I was at home with two toddlers..." or "When I got back from Vietnam I wasn't in good shape..." might suggest what I mean there. We didn't call that a mental health challenge then.

The generations are made of the same stuff genetically. We have had different experiences, but they have more similarity than not. To find this much variation in one direction along an important axis tells me that some other things must be being measured. Fear? It is a staple of 60s panic that children had drills to take cover under their desks in case of nuclear attack. You might get drafted and sent to war. The percentage in poverty wasn't that different 60 years ago, but we were much closer to parents and especially grandparents who had experienced serious poverty. The possibility of "not succeeding" meant hunger, not embarrassment. There were more diseases and accidents that would kill you young or middle aged. 

I am also seeing some definitional problems between how we would have explained things then and what we call them now. Mentally ill was not the usual term, and mental health was even less common.  Worried and anxious are similar concepts but force us to speak about them differently.  This is true for sad, blue, or depressed as well.

Finally, we are being shown only a portion of the full graph. We are seeing the middle 50% of it, with 25%  truncated off each end, making it look more dramatic. That 27% of Boomer males that endorsed having a mental health challenge likely had more serious issues - like a disability or serious prejudice - to get anyone to even notice. Teachers, youth pastors, online polls, and doctors offices actively ask you how you are doing on specific topics. So do parents, who have a readier vocabulary of psych terms now.  I had a dozen symptoms of anxiety* as a child, but no one ever asked me if I was anxious. I can now recognise post hoc something of how this affected me and how I responded, but would I say that a mental health challenge is a part of my identity?  It probably depends on how the question is asked and what led up to it.

Yet suppose that my correctives only explain half the variation, and the above graph tells us something real about attitudes.  In addition to genetics, I also believe in incentives. The graph tells us that men get less attention for emotional or adaptation issues than women, and everyone gets more attention for them now than we did then.  Is that a good thing?  Dunno. A clever person could make an argument either way, and most would say it is mixed but lean in one direction. We don't want real problems to be ignored but we don't want overattention to create problems that aren't there. 

Let me offer an additional possibility. Giving something a name creates more permanence. We experience depression or anxiety differently if we believe it is temporary, tied to our unemployment or a breakup, than if we believe it is something we are prone to, or even are.  

*In children, lots of problems present as anxiety. You have to know more emotionally to process bad feelings into something more nuanced, like resentment, depression, or guilt. Until then, being anxious is about all you can manage. 

21 Years Ago

The Red Sox had given away the 2003 ALCS to the Yankees in one of those terrible collapses they were known for. This year they had been down zero games to three when it was the Yankees who had the greatest choke of all time, surpassing even the many Boston versions. 

Derek Lowe pitching on two days rest. It lacked drama, and most fans remember the world series instead (Pitchers Tim Wakefield, Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez, and again Derek Lowe for the final win.) Until the middle of game four, which I watched at Granite Dad's apartment, I was sure the Red Sox were going to find some way to throw it all away again. After all, they had throughout my life, and even before. They killed our fathers and our grandfathers, and now the sonsabitches are coming after us!  But Derek Lowe was amazing, and even I dared hope. 

 

 My father had died the year before, and my mother three years before that. 

The Great Feminization

Bsking sent this to me,* then I started seeing it everywhere. As I worked in predominantly female departments at the hospital my whole career, I have some experience with this. However, I feel an extra need to be cautious thereby, as the people who are my examples each have personalities that I liked or didn't, and this may influence me too much to safely generalise. So let me start with just one observation about psych nurses working together. If that doesn't go too long I may go on to a second example.

When I started at the hospital in the late 70s, a lot of people still smoked. We didn't have to go out for smoke breaks, because you could smoke right on the units.  We even rolled cigarettes for the patients, as that is a group that uses nicotine to "get normal."  It is a stimulant that promotes short-term alertness by the very effective method of inhalation, but also calms the jonesing that crops up about 30 minutes after the last one. But nurses would take smoke breaks together a few times a shift. The line staff would resent it, because nurses got to get away from noisy, angry units of patients asking for more cigarettes and coffee, or demanding to know why they were still there, or had to take medications, or couldn't stay up all night. But we knew the answer and didn't bring up the complaint.  They had important things to discuss and decisions to make. 

While this was more than 50% excuse, it wasn't entirely untrue. Managing a unit of psych patients can be impossible. Particular diagnoses can create shift wars, or are litigious, or create danger for other patients. So for years I thought it was just their method of all getting on the same page, definitely a female one, but quite workable. I rather admired it as an informal, organic solution.  Only when new approaches to women with Borderline Personality Disorder started to catch hold did I start to change my mind on that.  In fact, it was well after the changes were underway that I questioned myself - and them. I began to see it as a constant power struggle over whose authority was going to hold the day. This also involved alliances and rewarding others with parts of their ideas being incorporated As this sometimes involved undermining decisions made by the doctor or by the whole treatment team (which had already made lots of compromises with each other) this could get nasty. 

And I finally saw that getting to the best answer was not the point. I would kid about the Old Girl's Network, but it was truer than I knew.

I don't see nurses in teams anymore, only those with clearly-defined duties, so I don't know where this has gone.  Nursing homes also have teams of nurses, but i no longer have any idea what the dynamics of those arrangements are. 

No second example.

*She, my sons and I have been having email conversation.  I will pass on that she has mixed feelings about this, seeing its point but wondering if it leaves out some valuable information. Here is the third paragraph of one of her emails. 

It strikes me that a problem of feminism for a while was overgeneralizing the bottom 5-10% of men, but the new "things are too feminized" crowd actually seems to want to act like they don't exist. Any plan for "men" that excludes the most aggressive and violent men is missing a huge issue that every society spends a lot of effort on dealing with, and a quick look at homicide data reminds us that other men are the most likely targets for aggressive males. So basically, any time you go to corral the most troublesome men, you are going to get widespread female agreement AND widespread male agreement, meaning it will be easier to crack down.

 

Reading List

Razib puts up a reading list every month, which he often organises by category.  This month the first section is Hallowe'en-related with books on shamanism, the occult foundations of Nazism,  plus two books that I knew more about. Europe: Was it ever really Christian, which I reviewed three years ago, and a newer book about horror,  Morbidly Curious: A scientist explains why we can't look away. by Coltan Scrivner. Some of you out there like these related topics, so I am passing it along.

Nose Ring Theory

Also called the Septum theory, because it does not refer to delicate single nostril ring or piercings, but to the more major piercings through the middle. I had not heard of it until this week, but the idea is that women with that kind of nose ring are anti-male, angry, and devoted to victimhood. 

I would have guessed environmentalists myself.  What we watch online is likely to be self-reinforcing.  If you are shown a clip of an anti-male (likely young) woman with a prominent nose ring and click on it to hear the rest of what she's saying, you are likely to get other women who say much the same thing, and those will have a higher percentage of nose rings. If you get an environmentalist, you will start seeing more of those.  It won't take look before the algorithms start finding more and more concentrated versions of them. 

I go to the supermarket a lot, and we went to the pumpkin festival yesterday.  I see a fair number of young women with nose rings at public events.  I don't see any on the rail trails or at JV field hockey games, only occasionally at church. They wear black and they are sometimes in couples with other women, so that may imply an increase in anti-male sentiment, but I talk or nod to everyone, and they seem to respond as often and as pleasantly.  I haven't kept a tight list. 

So if you want to research this, I think you will need a sizable questionnaire to find out what their attitudes are.  You can go one-at-a-time with a five point scale of ten questions about attitudes to men, I suppose, but that wouldn't be more than an association. They look more like lost souls to me, rather sad. There's no algorithm selecting more and more intense examples for me, so I'm sticking with my Lost Soul Hypothesis for the time being.

Monday Links

 Banned Books 

Nobel winner Joel Mokyr Not just knowledge, but conditions which allow the interaction of knowledge.

 Which Side is More Biased?   

 David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About These Eight Things by Ted Goia at "The Honest Broker"

I have mixed feelings about the conclusions, but I think it is worth reading and thinking about. 

Radically Chic Political Violence 

Now Wait a Minute

This is one of the truths people use to lie with. Apparently it is circulating nationally now.

"See all this red in New England? 

You know how many Congressional seats are held by Democrats? 

21 

How many are held by Republicans? 

Zero 

Don’t talk to us about gerrymandering when this is what Democrats do"

 

Let's pause a minute. Those gerrymandered and disenfranchised residents in the large red areas of Vermont, New Hampshire, and especially Maine? Those are moose and pine trees. Some of the blue districts are moose and pine trees as well.  In the center of NH it's fish and deciduous trees. If the shading plan was different, you would see a lot of purple. 

You might be able to carve a Republican district out of central Massachusetts or eastern Connecticut, where races can be competitive. The two New Hampshire districts are both competitive, as is Maine. Both parties gerrymander nationally and there are lots of strange looking districts. Maybe the Democrats are worse. But districting is tricky, which is why the Supreme Court case a couple of years ago had math which none of the nine justices seemed to understand. If you are trying to make black influence proportionate, do you create more districts where it's close, bend white districts so that there are enough black people that white candidates have to court them, or safe districts so you can just count heads of how many blacks there are in Congress. Now factor in Hispanics, and in a few areas, Arab or Asian votes. 

Links from 2012

 Grand Canyon - A Review Great comments

Not from me, but from Tigerhawk Shutdown Silliness in 2013.  Same timeline both Obama's and Trump's second term, if that means anything.

 ESPN had a list of the top 100 baseball players of all time. My disapproval neatly summarises what you need to know all-time statistics.

The Sadness of New Hampshire Hospital Christmas 

Doctors and Statistics. 

A Word About Peace 

Only a Joke  I have no memory of what the Rickles basketball joke was now.

On to reprising 2013  

Oranges and Lemons

I mentioned before that my children (and bsking) went to a Baptist high school that had strict guidelines about popular music. Three girls were not allowed to sing "Kokomo" at an assembly because of the mention of "chemistry." The JV basketball team that got horribly stomped every game was not allowed to take "I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again" in warmups because of a King James Version word no longer allowed. The kids got around it. One of the seniors cheered the annual film about the satanic influence of rock "because I get to hear all my favorite bands."

Meanwhile, my children were listening to British folk music on the way to school, with its beheadings, rapes, maimings, fratricide, and the like. 

You can't be too careful.

 

New Hampshire Drivers

Growing up, we always said that Massachusetts drivers were the worst. Drivers from Quebec on their way to Florida were also notorious.  It may be common for one area to blame another for road problems. It did used to be sports cars and muscle cars which were a nuisance on the highway.  But these days it seems to be large, empty, luxury pickups. Pickups used to be a workers care, used to haul tools or materials around.  Now the trailer hitches suggest that they are used more often to haul boats or skimobiles. The beds look pretty undamaged. 

The speed and even the calculated suddenness of noise I don't mind so much. Tailgating is another matter particularly when the headlights are elevated up into your rearview. I think the communication of tailgating has changed slightly from anger at getting you to go faster to an entitlement that they are signalling that they want to pass.  This rapidly escalates to anger when it is not obeyed, but it seems almost nonchalant at first. Of course I own the road.  I'm bigger than you.  

On my way to Quebec City it confirmed again that the it is now the New Hampshire drivers who are worse. Things were better in Vermont, even in North East Kingdom, and better still in the Province of Quebec. On my way home it wasn't far beyond the Connecticut River that I saw the familiar bad behavior of my fellow Granite Staters again.

The Man Born Blind

We are still in our series about the seven signs of Jesus in the Gospel of John, and today was about John 9 and the man born blind.  It is curious at the end, and the pastor admitted that what Jesus said is a little puzzling, though he offered an explanation. 41 "Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains." 

Unlearning is harder than learning. The Pharisees were in worse shape because they thought they knew it all, and even when confronted with the amazing refused to reconsider their priors. We saw the same thing about the healing on the Sabbath. But...but...but it's the Sabbath, Jesus! Don't you know the rules? Aslan would say that he knew the Deep Magic before the dawn of time. 

Political liberals and conservatives in the church both accuse each other of refusing to reconsider their priors for cultural and tribal reasons. Reconsidering my priors is one of the things I reliably bring.  For me, the difficulty might be changing my mind a third time, believing that I have heard it all. I suppose it's turtles all the way down.

Lake Willoughby Amish

We saw a traffic sign at a resort town warning about possible horse and buggies in the road.  We assumed this must be some hired summer entertainment giving rides. No, it was Amish families in horse-drawn buggies. Researching it later, I learned that about 20 families had moved to the North East Kingdom of Vermont about a decade ago.  Because they have so many children and their population keeps growing, they are always on the lookout for inexpensive farmland. There are quite a few families in the interior of Maine now. 

But it's got to be a tough way to make a living.  The land is cheap because the place is cold and full of rocks.  Shallow soil, windy conditions, and hilly.  There is wood and water, I suppose that helps.  But farmers have been moving out of northern New England for about 200 years for good reason. God bless them and I hope they succeed.  If anyone can, it's them.

Remember they don't want you to take pictures. 

Phantom Lover

 A remarkable charm. 

One could almost say we really empathise with her.

Nuances of Toast

The phrase quickly became legendary in my family when Dave Barry put this out in his column in the 1990's, which we likely read in one of his books. It was a sendup of wine reviews.

 Enough Wine and Anyone Will Take a Mud Bath 

 Yes! Nuances of toast! I bet they exchanged high fives in the Pretentious Phrase Room when they came up with that one!

In Quebec City I found an example of just this. 

 

Thrift Store

While traveling I saw a proposal that if everyone in the US bought their next item of clothing from a thrift store it would be good for the environment and teach us to live more simply. The comments were unanimous as far as I could stand to read that people loved to shop at thrift stores, and therefore this was a good idea.

If 350,000,000 people bought an item from a thrift store, the poor would not have much selection left, would they?

Mind Your Own Business

I disliked Obama getting himself involved in things that were none of a president's business. If there was a racial angle to it he just couldn't avoid inserting himself by arranging a Beer Summit, or pretending that Trayvon could have been his son, so he had to come in and care. Presidents are not supposed to weigh in on court cases that are barely underway, and a lawyer especially should know that.

But Trump is several times worse. Just ridiculous. The Super Bowl Halftime Show should be something he expresses no opinion on. Nor should the name of the Washington football team be part of his remit. I appreciate that there is some aspect of political tactic that just seems to work, which is probably intuitive rather than planned for him. And it may be that he can't get what he wants done without things like this to create chaos and get everyone worried about the wrong stuff. When he distracts his opponents into these things it might give him room to operate. But I still don't like it. To someone like me, who has never had conversations where this level of chaos would be an advantage, it seems unnecessary.

Prove me wrong, as Charlie Kirk would say. 

James

 Commenter James (Bellinger) has a short story out in Creature Feature.  Very retro cover.

Canada Is Not For Sale

 I saw a lot of T-shirts and hats with that emblazoned on them while I was in Quebec.  Well, I thought, the shirts are for sale. I don't think there is any real danger of Canada becoming the 51st state, or the 51st-63rd. However, my second thought was That's what Scotland said also. 1707, I think. 

 

Frogs Against Fascism

So while I was gone, there has apparently been an increase in Amphibians for Antifa, people dressed up as frogs at No Kings! rallies. I'm glad we are finally returning to intelligent discourse, rather than...well, never mind. Somehow this is going to be the meme that turns the tide, I hear. Frogs are taking the country by storm, as they once did Egypt.

 

Thursday Links

I should be home by now, but I wanted to keep life easy on my return, so these were prepared in advance

Sex Differences in Work Preferences. at N3 

Dueling articles at the Institute For Family Studies:  Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy jobs for men will solve the working class marriage crisis.

It Would                          It Wouldn't                        Maybe Taylor Swift Getting Married Will Help

Let's Not Overstate Support For Violence   It matters whose ox is being gored. 

The Myth of the Sommelier 

Links From 2012

A sad, somewhat prophetic post on Racial Consciousness. When someone like me finds white identity appalling, we forget that 18-34 y/o voters did not grow up in the world we did. They have grown up since the 90s or even 00s.

I did a series on Fashionable Politics that I think still holds up. There are ironies in the comments.

Fashionable Politics. 

"Fashion" Definition  

Again with the Fashionable Politics. 

 

 Faith "Did we really go to the Grand Canyon?" I asked my five-year-old granddaughter.

La Bastringua with Foot Pecussion

 Just in case you wanted to learn

 

Tuesday Links

 Education's Elephant in the Room Russell Warne at Quillette. Everything I've been saying and more. I would add that teachers see results in their classroom and project this to other classes and eventual lifetime success. But they are often wrong on both. 

We devote a lot of resources to trying to equalise student outcomes. However, when schools have a good curriculum and experienced teachers, individual differences in student achievement widen. Yes, struggling students do perform slightly better—but the most able students show greater gains.

War Over?  I am skeptical partly because it has been a fixture in my life since 1967. Inertia. There have been too many false alarms.  OTOH, even if this is only some solid improvement and resetting, that will be an enormous success.

Publisher apologises to Melania and pulls book. 

Reading Books Made a Man of Me  For me, it was more that reading books set the table. Perhaps the same thing.

Chinese Dams Hold Billions of People to Ransom 

 Nowhere is the impact of damming shared rivers more pronounced than in Asia. An estimated 718 billion cubic meters of water flows from the Tibetan Plateau every year. Of this, only 35 percent – roughly 250 billion cubic meters per year – flows wholly through China. 48 percent of Tibet’s water supply flows into India through rivers like the Brahmaputra and Ganges and, to a lesser degree, into Pakistan through the Indus. Whichever nation controls the Tibetan Plateau controls the water supply of nearly two billion people.

Quebecois Folk Dance

 

Links From 2012

How to Win at Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Mutants 

Tribalism 

The YouTube video that I linked to a month ago of the one episode of "It's a Dog's Life?"  I linked to it in 2012 as well and promptly forgot it.  I could swear I had never seen it before

Old Lefty 

1984    

Oeil Au Buerre Noir

 I'll stick with French-Canadian music for a few days. 

 

O Canada

 The Canadians have a great national anthem.

 

Sunday Links

We will be in Quebec City for a few days.  I would not leave you bereft of entertainment here. 

 Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow 

Rob Henderson continues to excel at links, if you want to eliminate the middleman 

 Support for Political Violence 

Dogs as soulmates 

Justice Barrett is Not Afraid  A friend of mine was at Notre Dame Law School with her, and as soon as she started speaking in class and challenging her professors the class consensus was "Well, there goes the book award."

Steve Sailer Was Prophetic in 2010 JK Rowling: Britain's Most Important Cultural Conservative 

 

Impaired Reason

 Warning: Political Ideology May Impair Your Ability To Reason Steve Stewart-Williams

 The news isn’t all bad. The researchers also found that individuals who engage in more analytical thinking are somewhat immune to the reason-impairing effects of ideology. Admittedly, the impact of analytical thinking was modest and inconsistent. Still, the finding does show that reason can sometimes prevail.

Well, if that's the best I can hope for, it's still worth it to try. 

New Study on Tylenol and Autism

 Tylenol and Autism: Cremieux brings a new study from Japan.  It is a great example of how researchers can systematically remove biases and confounders from an experiment.

As luck would have it, more evidence has come out since that systematic review was published. This new evidence came online at the beginning of September and evidently everyone missed it, but it is considerable. Given what we already know—it is highly unlikely that acetaminophen has any role in autism—, it’s nothing new: it reinforces the knowledge that acetaminophen does not cause autism!

It is long and involves statistical methods I am not familiar with, but someone in the comments had a ChatGPT summary, which I was able to get a better grip on. 

Pep Band

My granddaughter plays flute in the pep band for Goffstown Area High School.  The outlook has not been sunny in football for Mudville this year.  The band has taken to calling itself the Condolences Band

Top Gear

The show always slips my mind, but whenever it is mentioned I remember how much I love it.

 

Graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral

There is temporary stick-on graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral.  You can read all about the people who dislike it or are embarrassed about it all over the internet, so you don't need my help there. Yet I did find something humorous bout it all.

David Monteith, the Dean of Canterbury, said: “There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. There is also an authenticity in what is said because it is unfiltered and not tidied up or sanitised.  Above all, this graffiti makes me wonder why I am not always able to be as candid, not least in my prayers."

A quick glance tells you that the one thing this graffiti is is smoothed rather than raw, inauthentic, filtered, tidied, and sanitised.  It looks nothing like any urban or underpass spraying. It is as if your graffiti was a backdrop for Veggie Tales, except Vischer and Nawrocki would have been more orthodox. 

I once read that the only continuing doctrine of the Church of England is doubt, a three-legged school designed by MC Escher. I have yet to see convincing counterevidence for the denomination, though I still stand much indebted to NT Wright and the like. But this isn't even very good doubt.  It's introductory doubt.

I also have to wonder at the last line, about candor and prayers. Surely one doesn't get to be Dean of Canterbury without having asked "Are You There?" or "What Happens When We Die?" Even Judy Blume, not noted as a great theologian or even a deep thinker, was able to manage that. 

Shield of Skuld

 Shield of Skuld is a relatively new substack about Vikings - myths, language, literature - by Irina Manea.  That's a Romanian name, so I dug in a little further.  She got her PhD from University of Bucharest but now teaches in Germany at what looks like a private high school. She also teaches online for Signum University. I have only read a few entries, but they look good. 

From that research I learned that New England Moot is still at Studio Labs in Derry. Sorina Higgins encouraged me to speak at it two years ago but I felt I was out of my league. I almost went that year. I just found out today that it is on again for next Saturday, October 18. The irony is that Studio Labs is where my second son works now. I think I should make an effort to go this year. OTOH, that's Pumpkinfest in Goffstown, and we have guests coming. OTOOH, the husband in that couple is a longstanding Tolkien fan and might like to go. Decisions, decisions.

Using the Term "Fascism"

 Fascism Can't Mean Both a Specific Ideology and a Legitimate Target By Scott Alexander at ACX. We must not forbid the term, for it has a meaning and a use.  Yet it is now reduced to a vague meaning and Americans are increasingly saying it is alright to silence them, to do violence against them, and even kill them. When a target becomes more general, and violence against it more acceptable, we will see an increase in violence.

Dr. Alexander is even-handed as usual.  He is a liberal but criticising the left more strongly on this one.  He does not let people on the right off the hook and gives examples of where they have done the same. But in the end he concludes that we have reached a danger point and it is getting worse.

Still, as an entirely supererogatory matter, I personally won’t be using this word (fascist) when I can avoid it. 

Update:  Based on the comments, I am adding this video. It is best known as a union song that Pete Seeger sang, but it quickly broadened.  As Seeger was a communist, that was quite possibly his intention.  Plausible deniability was a specialty of his Oh, we're just trying to organise a union here, and they call us communists...We're only here because we're against the Vietnam War and they call us communists...We only want to clean up the environment and they call us communists.  A lot of those present each time were indeed there for only that one thing. But the stark message was still the same: you were good or you were evil, and you either joined in with the singing and you didn't. 

This is ten years old, and in 2025 many are now willing to criticise Obama for not being communist enough.  Others believe that but will keep it under wraps, knowing he is still idolised by many on the left, especially among the older people who are sometimes the only ones you can count on to show up for protests. But the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. I am a dinosaur with no influence, but at least I know it. My gentle liberal friends on FB haven't yet figured out that they are speaking only to each other, unfriending a few more each year, used only as decoration in the revolution.

For all that, I don't the revolution has a snowball's chance of succeeding. I just worry about a lot of pain before it settles down. If ever.

 

Update on "Spiritual Warfare"

 Douglas2's comment has been added. It goes in a different direction than the rest of us.

Wednesday Links

Is Donald Trump a Socialist? Tyler Cowen is a libertarian economist

The Origins of Homo longi and the Denisovans. This is available only to paid subscriptions of Razib Khans, but an underdiscussed point jumped out at me. Who has access to a fossil remain is often quite contentious, with some researchers holding a specimen out from circulation for years, even decades until they feel they have finished all they are going to do with it. There is a big push among younger researchers to make everything available as soon as possible.  It is the sort of thing that occupies a great deal of the time and energy of those in the field, but does not make it to the science reporting that shows up in the popular press.  I remember something similar, but even more extreme, has happened to the Dead Sea Scrolls

The very informative power of a single fossil, and the scarcity of remains, has often generated human drama in the field. Berkeley anthropologist Tim D. White took 16 years to finally publish his team’s analyses of Ardi after its 1994 discovery. Toumaï, the name for the human-chimp-gorilla common ancestor discovered in Chad in 2002, has already engendered a couple decades of controversy with disputes over who should be allowed to analyze the remains. The scarcity of high-quality fossils owes both to the small number of hominins alive at any given time before agriculture, and to the fragility of our skeletons. But this scarcity means that human fossils are a precious commodity whose control and distribution can make or break careers; the re-possession of the original “Hobbit” remains in Flores by Indonesian researchers from its Australian discoverers was initially nearly as big a story as the diminutive humans themselves.

Why Did Slaves Rebel? There is a parallel to revolutions, where it was not the poorest who rebelled, but those who had more status and believed they were unfairly deprived. Modern parallels of resentment of elites or "the 1%" have some similarity.  Those angriest at the 1% are those who believe they should be the 1%.

I Will Quit if Zohran is Elected.  Lots of New York is bright blue, and has been in high dudgeon*  over the layoffs and stoppages of federal workers.  I wonder how aware they are of indirect losses like this?

*What is low dudgeon?  No one knows. 

The Five Stages of Grief in Fantasy Football

Wikipedia: According to the model of the five stages of grief, or the Kübler-Ross model, those experiencing sudden grief following an abrupt realization (shock) go through five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Though widely used, the theory is empirically unsupported, potentially harmful, and of limited practical value.

Well, I'm glad that people are finally catching on that this model is less than helpful. People who grieve have a variety of emotions at different times and do not progress through stages. It can actually screw them up to convince them that they are at one stage and should be progressing to the next stage.

However, I have found that this model does apply to Fantasy Football, when the players you drafted in the first few rounds aren't doing well.  This is based heavily on the Ringer FF podcast this week.

Week One: Denial. It was only the first game of the season.  It takes a while for the offense to gel.  

Week Two: Anger. The QB isn't throwing to him enough. He needs to get more carries.  

Week Three: Bargaining. Maybe I could trade him while he still has value. Not everyone in this league is paying attention.  

Week Four: Depression. Nobody is going to want this guy.  I'll have to bench him.  

Week Five: Acceptance. I can't cut him altogether because he might come back.  I'm stuck with him on my roster for the rest of the season.

Gun Violence

The Free Press is holding a debate about whether we would be safer without the Second Amendment.  In announcing it, Isaac Grafstein writes the following:

Among wealthy nations, the United States is an outlier. Our rate of deaths from gun violence is about seven times higher than Canada’s and nearly 340 times higher than that of the United Kingdom. No other country at our level of prosperity faces the same level of risk from gun violence.

I tire of having the same argument repeatedly.  I have to assume that the writer has at least been exposed to the idea that the important number would be the overall rate of homicide, not those specific to guns. In other countries, people blow things up.  They stab people with knives.  They run over bystanders with vans. Yet somehow this does not stick in the mind, even among those who are specific gun control advocates. The idea just hangs on that if there hadn't been guns available to the killers, those people wouldn't be dead. It's ludicrous.  I used to say that I knew almost a dozen people who murdered or were accused of murder, but when I counted it up it's more like two dozen over the years. I don't know the means of death for one of the ones who killed his father, but of the rest, none had used a gun. I know my sample is unrepresentative, as all had some mental health involvement and all were white, but still, that's a remarkable percentage.

I don't know how one even has the discussion if one of the key facts does not even penetrate. There is something sticky in some minds about the idea that those people wouldn't be dead were it not for gun availability. And that's not even counting the "lives saved" part of the equation. Male suicide probably go up because of gun availability. The rest of the deaths don't seem to by any measure. 

 

Bring It On Home To Me

So many good versions, but I had never heard this one.  R&B foundation, some country, some Dixieland.  Nice mix.

 

Experts

Phantoms...who had faced the journey to the bus stop-perhaps for them it was thousands of miles-and come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs , the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the "haves," what they thought of them.  CS Lewis The Great Divorce Ch 9

I am hearing too much of this anger against experts and authorities not because they have been wrong nor even because they have lied or slyly deceived, but because they are perceived as arrogant - and some of them certainly are. I believe in disruption, but not all disruption.  Bilbo thought that an invasion of dragons might be good for the people of the Shire, but in the end only indirectly upset their applecarts. Are we silently cheering on RFK Jr only because he is making The Experts uncomfortable?  If you think you have better reasons, what are they?  He is more arrogant than they. When challenged he changes the subject and counteraccuses. When he says that relying on experts is not science, that is "a truth that people use to lie with," as a psychiatrist friend of mine used to say. Those words are true, but he expands that into "I don't have to listen to anyone," like a schoolgirl slamming the door to her room. Science means trying to get it right, not just mocking experts.  After all, if you are the experts now, what is to stop people from mocking you when the dead are counted, with even more justification?

He has the facts largely wrong.  Even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while, but when challenged on medical knowledge he will respond that Big Pharma contributes lots of money to politicians.  He is providing the explanation for why they would be wrong if they were wrong, but has evaded the part where he shows they are wrong. Maybe the setback on deaths from measles or rubella will not be extensive.  Perhaps the number of people who died needlessly will be small, with only a few unheard people carrying tragedy for the rest of their lives. Maybe we bounce back quickly. 

I worked with doctors and researchers my whole career, and a lot of them are arrogant and know less than they think. They can be disdainful. If you are not prepared they can make you feel bad. I don't know that much about experts in other fields, but I have seen the acrimonious, even career-destroying arguments between opposing camps in a half-dozen fields. Childish, illogical, unfairly argued, corrupt - and somehow we have more knowledge about many things than when I was a boy. How did that happen? Was all of it from tearing down and disrupting?  Did that fix everything?

Maybe I'm just reading the wrong people.