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.

Half-Generations

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

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

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

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

Saturday Links- Substack

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

Also Lyman: Why twin studies are garbage.

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

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

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

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

Friday Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House Song

 

Cycle of Violence is an Excuse

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

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

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

Other Morning Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Thursday Links - Housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Considering Pinch Hitting

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

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

Busby Berkeley

 

Patsy

 

"Adolescence"

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

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

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

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

Chuggers

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

We need a chugger crackdown. at the Spectator.

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

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

One simple deregulation that would save thousands of lives

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

Transit Vs. Highways

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who?

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

Retirement Age

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

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

[Citation Needed]

New podcast reviewing bizarre research, [Citation Needed]

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

 

Right On Schedule

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

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

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

The Other COVID Reckoning

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day Tripper

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

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

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

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

Karen Read Trial: Update

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

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

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

Stay tuned.  

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