Wednesday Links

I hate to admit it, but Virginia probably did have the first Thanksgiving.  It would be hard for the Pilgrims to have held one before they even got there.  Berkeley Plantation

A Swedish study shows that winning a lottery does not reduce crime in either the winners or their children. This rather undermines economic explanations for crime. Sumus quod sumus "We are what we are."

I asked ChatGPT many questions about this blog.  It made some mistakes of emphasis but was pretty good.  It offered to make me a timeline of the major themes. Not bad.

Capitalism Isn't Responsible for Society's Flaws; You Are.  At an interesting libertarian substack The Black Sheep. The capitalist is controlled by the consumer.

A beautiful use of AI 

Seeing With Fresh Eyes

I am in a book group that will tomorrow start The Everlasting Man by GK Chesterton. GKC is known for paradox, but paradox is only a tool of his to see things afresh. We do not see the amazing things that surround us, but Chesterton shows them to us. I was worried that because the book begins with seeing man with new eyes, especially early man, that the updating of science would render the examples uncomfortable in their wrongness. There is some of that in the book, but I was pleased to find right at the beginning an example that is even more true now that we know more about our ancestors and the domestication of the horse on the Steppe. It was a lucky chance (if chance you call it), for the horse was good food who fed himself even in winter, but was impossible to ride. One of the very few barely tractable ones - perhaps even the only one in a century - was seen by a reckless herder who had a wild idea. Chesterton's paragraph about it was a bit prescient.

Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him. 

Cutty Sark

 I understand it completed the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs

 

Rage Farms

The claim is out there that of the foreign sites stirring up anger in America, both tactically and to make money for themselves, were more likely to be conservative than liberal.  That could be. There are plenty of easily fooled conservatives out there. I don't know that to be true.  The claim was in the NYTimes, Newsweek, and Richard Hanania that I saw.  I haven't looked at the numbers myself. I suppose I would have had a mild preference that it was lots of liberals who were taken in, har har. But if it makes gullible conservatives more cautious, I'm all for that. It guess it must be easy, and there is some discussion about imitating tone versus relying on images, which I suppose I could get interested in if I were reading someone I trusted.

But it's exposing frauds.  I'm all for that. It's a win. Bring it on. 

I have seen many reports that pro-Palestine sites are much more likely to come from outside Palestine than pro-Israel ones come from outside Israel, which come primarily from Israel and America. I don't find that surprising, as internationally, the topic is largely about political tribes, with the conflict itself used for examples of fairness/unfairness rather than tracking the results.

Don't Ask "Why Is There Still Poverty?"

Don't ask 'Why is there still poverty?' but why any place got developed at all by Tibor Rutar, University of Maribor (Slovenia)

There is strong evidence that democracies above a certain income threshold – roughly $6,055 of GDP per capita in constant 1985 purchasing power terms – rarely break down, with only a few exceptions. Adam Przeworski et al. first established this pattern in a dataset spanning 1950-1990. Above, the figure shows the pattern still mostly holds from 1990 onward.

Anne Bradstreet

 

2013 Links

 Statistics - Presidential Grades 

Seasons of Friends Includes a link in the comments to a Sarah Hoyt essay about exchange students, which I have recalled many times

The Froude Society In contrast, this idea never caught on with me.  I had completely forgotten about it.  Still interesting, though

QOTD Proof  

When meaning well replaces Research in the church. Not even informal research of "we compared a dozen small groups over a three year period," but just "I talked to other people who think like me and they think so too."

Paul Radulescu - Baritone 

Pervasive Unrest

I had started a post on pervasive unrest, that when discord occurs in a society around one issue it tends to bleed over into others when Cranberry popped in with the news that foreign "rage farmers" were posting a lot of the highly charged political information on X.  Presumably similar things are happening on at least some of the other conflict sites: bluesky, instagram, Facebook, snapchat, TikTok, substack, and whatever else is out there.  Likely all of them.

I wondered what effect this would have on my thinking about the subject and decided it reinforced some of what I wanted to say, but in quite a different way than expected.  So I am just going to put down my bullet notes for now to give you ideas to play around with.

*****

There is a concept of evaporation of groups, analogous to what happens to a liquid as it evaporates.  The elements that do not evaporate off become more concentrated.  Think of salt water left outdoors in a basin for a few days.  When you come back there will be less water, and it will be saltier.  The social analogy is that as fads and fashions "simmer down" (hehe) the less engaged wander off, pay less attention, and bring less energy, leaving a concentration of core believers behind. I don't know how well this has been demonstrated, but the idea at least makes some sense. I had a related post about the SPLC and Hate Groups in 2013.

The people who went online and finally found communities of people who like to collect old license plates or are interested in the War of 1812 mostly found each other 20 years ago. It's one of the benefits of social media, but it's not likely to expand much now.

If concentrated groups encounter each other, whether IRL or online, they are more likely to spark conflict, even if they are surrounded by "mostly peaceful" protests. So the impression that people have that bluesky and Twitter have become crazier may be spot on.  Facebook is for Boomers, community groups, and young parents now, and the residual is a few people with very confrontative politics. Hell's Grannies come to life. I've about had it with a lot of my wife's old sorority sisters and elementary school staff. 

Jesse Singal is a major target for hatred on Bluesky.  Who knew?

*******

Maybe we are less angry than we thought.  If the angriest people we know ratchet down a bit we might all do better. 

Retraction

I linked to a link from Rob Henderson about women recommending more attractive women cut off more hair, which he interpreted as intrasexual competition, sweet sabotage. Bethany picked that up and ran with it and though she found some positive things about the study and its followup, she found that the study mostly did not support the competition idea very well, and actually pointed in the opposite direction in some ways. There was a telltale sign that the authors were prepared to regard any data as supportive of their hypothesis somehow.

That should remind me not to rely entirely on reading only the abstract when I relink a study.  I hope you didn't repeat the claim to a lot of people on my say-so.  If you did, please blame me.  Reading only the abstract is common for me, and it has its dangers.

Ancestors

Ancestor worship is one of the earliest and most common forms of religion. I wonder if the robots will worship microwaves.

Sunday Links

Colin Wright of Reality's Last Stand on the lack of evidence for gender transitioning medicine. Pray that whatever diseases and conditions you get have no political implications.  Doctors do well with those.  But part of succeeding at school is knowing what answers get you good grades.  Medical school selects for many things, but one of them is discerning the fashionableness of an idea, because you need to adjust to that to get through to the next level.

James, can you explain this to us? Or any other scientists I've got aboard here. Is this some superadvanced analogy to casting out nines, where you can get enormous amounts of information out of the way?

Cats Greet Men More Than Women Not at my sons' houses, they don't.

Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond  by Jane Psmith.  Three books, two of which we have discussed here.  I like any arguments against Jared Diamond

Epiphaneia at Cosmos and Taxis In Defense of Free Markets I had not heard of the site before this evening. I clicked on it because of the recommendation "Best defence of free markets I have ever read. I have read Friedman, Hayek, Rothbard and Mises—but this is the best by far." It was worth it.

I also want to mention computational market simulations as a source of evidence that market can self organize to achieve favorable outcomes without needing perfect competition. Gode et al. 2013 find that even when artificial traders use random, "zero-intelligence" bids, they can achieve near perfect market efficiency as long as a budget constraint (i.e., not permitting traders to sell below their costs or buy above their values) is enforced. This indicates that the market structure itself can produce efficient outcomes, supporting the idea that the "invisible hand" can work not only when individual traders are irrational, but also when the traders have zero intelligence. All it takes is a budget constraint.

 We've been wrong about what makes ice slippery

Cliched Lyrics Rock

One of my favorite genres to inflict on people.

David Wyman

As substack has gradually acquired more slop, there has been an informal move for some readers to trust only those using their real names. I think there are places where people should be allowed to be anonymous, and have found the handles people have taken for themselves informative and humorous about them, and human nature in general. Yet I don't mind different platforms having different rules, and prefer social influencing to mandates.  I see their point. A lot of the newer sites coming on board are just copying AI information and trying to get people to follow their links so that they can get advertising money.  So I will remain Assistant Village Idiot in most places, but am signing as David Wyman on substack comments.  David Foster's substack is already well-prepared. 

The Issue is Not the Issue

People say "follow the money" but that is only a specific case of a more general perspective.  People want lots of things other than money: status, mates, predictability, jobs, safety. Looking at our behavior in terms of getting those things can explain a lot. 

Wokeness arose largely because powerful people were in the way of others. They needed to be gotten rid of so that jobs and status would open up. Because they were mostly older, mostly male, and mostly white it paid to put those categories under immediate suspicion at every starting point and watch what they said like a hawk.  Cancelations were more intense in academia, media, and entertainment - exactly those places where young left-leaning people were trying to get in.  So it didn't matter if they were actually sexist, or homophobic or whatever.  Some were and some weren't but that wasn't primary.  What had to happen was a blanket reduction of people in the way, and let God sort them out. This is why there was only some protection for being female or black or gay yourself. 

Connections to the word "patriarchy" may come to mind, here. 

Even though Jews were longtime supporters and powers in the Democratic Party and the left in general, they were also often in positions of power.  Obama's speechwriters and political operatives were predominantly Jewish. That was much less true under Biden. Media, academia, entertainment had powerful older Jews gumming up the works for people who wanted those slots.

If you look at the insane and contradictory support for the Palestinians on the left from this perspective it starts to make more sense. There's no rationality to it.  The Palestinians treat women very badly, as does much of the Islamic world. Gays can be executed, and are certainly not allowed into positions of power, nor are Blacks or East Asians.  (Indonesia is a huge Muslim presence that has almost no influence in the Middle East. Too far away and the wrong color.) There is no natural alliance with the Western left. 

But those Jews have to be gotten rid of somehow, so the alligator eventually came for them too. Being good liberals who had written many books or contributed large sums no longer mattered.  The kids want those jobs in those industries. 

Poilitical Alignment from AD&D

I started a post that turned out to be too clever by half, based on the idea that liberals think of themselves as chaotic good as a leftover from the 70s when people were moving into communes and becoming Jesus people and breaking the marijuana laws and having very different fashions. That devolved into just sticking it to The Man by having different fashions and music.  Ha ha, oldsters! But as they took over the institutions - journalism, education, government, mainstream religion - they are now lawful neutral. They frame Trump as a good-evil axis, but it's the law-chaos axis that really upsets them. I think even a lot of his supporters see him as chaotic neutral, with the chaos part being necessary enough to outweigh other considerations.

That's okay as far as it goes, but it's only half an idea and when I tried to expand it the various branches kept collapsing with counterexamples in quick order.  Play with it on your own if you like.

Fuentes

I watched some of his stuff.  He's is just a troll, not a thinker in any way.  Whether he will have appeal and become important I have no idea. There is chatter about the kids who have grown up online, and where they have migrated to, and the power of short-form video and repetition - all that. I don't know. I no longer trust any short-form video myself. I like seeing the ones with my granddaughters in Alaska are in them, or my son out doing adventurous things in the cold.

All The Young Dudes

I had not known it was written by David Bowie

 

Friday Links

 Four Hands Good, Two Feet Better We did not have four feet and stood up, allowing two feet to become hands.  We were in the trees with four hands and came down. 

The Opposite of Chesterton's Fence Some fun comments

Graphs About Religion Fascinating site.  Here are two:

    Mainline female clergy are 71% Democrat, 5% Republican Female laity 47% and 44%

    Mainline clergy is much more liberal than laity   It's nice to have numbers to back that up

Lyman Stone debunks Elena Bridges, who thinks everything is about birth intervals 

1948 Olympic 100M

Contrast how varied the starts were then compared to the near uniformity of how everyone gets out now. I suspect it is coaching, film, and repetition. 

 

I loved reading the history of track and field for some reason growing up in the 60s.  I recognised the story of Dillard not qualifying for his specialty in the 110M hurdles, but likely hadn't thought of it in over 60 years.

Brisk Substack Quotes

Casual Calumny - Jesse Singal. I have certainly done this myself, especially commenting.

Unions I once enjoyed Hanania, now I find him puzzling and often disagree. I have a mixed reaction to this one, at best.  And this.   This doesn't affect me. It's none of my business.

You Will Always Have Conflicting Pressures Justin Ross.  These twin pressures on women are an excellent example in our era.

You have to know that for Fair Play Cards, there is one card for getting home goods & supplies, which is equal to the one card for home maintenance. Drunk Wisconsin has a question about this.

Cremieux on the misclassification of Hispanics in crime statistics

Thursday Links

Our cognitive genetic changes were not caused by the Industrial Revolution, they preceded and caused it, starting at least as far back as 1350 (Black Death was 1346-53, remember)  The Genetic Evolution of the Human Race and Its Consequences for the Industrial Revolution Before steam engines transformed the world, the human population that built them was already changing genetically.   

Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History on The Decline of Deviance. Where did the weirdness go since the 70s? (podcast available)

Britain's Wealth Was Not Built on Slavery 

Not All Non-Monagamy is the Same  Great comments.  The substacker Drunk Wisconsin merely wrote "clarity." 

Norway's Wealth Tax Unchains A Capital Exodus  It reduced yearly tax revenues by $448M instead of raising them by $146M as projected.  (I think the photo is Bergen harbor)

Howlin' Wolf

Didn't like this genre when I was younger

 

You Cannot Destroy The Elite

You Cannot Destroy The Elite Noah Carl at Aporia.  Carl gives examples from truly draconian attempts to eliminate the elites in The Societ Union and Mao's China, and even teases out information from records of which Japanese-Americans were interned in WWII to show that their children and grandchildren were more prosperous and educated than their peers anyway. 

I wonder if anyone has done a study on the wealth and success of the grandchildren of lottery winners? 

Attractive Nuisance - Scrolling

As I move to links of various kinds I see this results from my scrolling of various sites.  Scrolling is one of the things considered a time-waster and fairly mindless these days, and here I am, encouraging you to do more of it. 

I should be sorry, but I'm not. 

At least it is still a legitimate human being doing this to you, not an algorithm.  

Directions

I always enjoy running across these.  I read or heard years ago that crossing a river, as here, is the most common place for these.   Route Something/SomethingA runs on either side of the river, and where they cross this necessarily happens. However, I don't know how you would measures that easily.  I suppose AI could find out just that sort of thing for you now. I always associate this North-South contradiction with different route numbers in town centers. 

 For locals, this is Queen City Bridge

Different Post-Liberalism

 On Becoming Less Left-Wing by Dan Williams at Conspicuous Cognition. He focuses on the economic understanding and the myths liberals believe. My own journey from the left, now decades ago, focused more on the data around social issues. Liberals believed myths, not only about the issues, but about themselves and their opponents. I came out from among them and worked almost entirely with them throughout my career. Many lovely people, fun to talk to and earnest about wanting to do good. But I had grown entirely suspicious of my own motives from reading CS Lewis, who stresses that self-deception is one of the main drivers of sin and unbelief, and easily heard and saw the same things in these others.  I had not seen it especially before. We saw ourselves as The Nice People, buoyed by the knowledge that our opponents were the stupid, evil people. Much of this was social, that they just didn't Get It - about music and arts, about the horrors of conformity, loving guns and the military because they were afraid - all the usual. 

Because of my life choices good and bad I found myself regarded as an outsider among my own people and I saw them for who they were. I also learned that the stupid, evil people were far less stupid and evil than I had imagined. I learned that the liberals in human services were in fact quite controlling of their charges. But mostly, I learned that a lot of these obviously great ideas didn't um, you know, work.

But back to Dan Williams, who saw something similar but not identical in left-wing economics. He summarises well and dismisses the pieties efficiently. Be suspicious who give their own good motives as the reason their beliefs must be true.  

His seven basics are worth listing.  He expands on each of these.

First, standard left-wing critiques of mainstream economics are biased and low-quality. 

Second, incentives really matter. 

Third, poverty is the default state of humanity. 

Fourth, you cannot solve poverty or create wealth by redistribution alone.

Fifth, although free markets are subject to well-known market failures, governments are run by people, not angels, who are subject to the same kinds of incentives and constraints as those in the private sector.

Sixth, there are no solutions, only trade-offs, and unintended consequences are inevitable in political decision-making. 

Seven, even win-win cooperation is inherently challenging.  

So though he describes himself as still liberal in many ways, you can see he is the sort you could ave a conversation that was not infuriating at every turn.

Wild Kingdom

They didn't actually need that stirring background music to make it more exciting.

 

Tuesday Links

They Have Learned Nothing 

The Gods Were the Good Guys All Along "Norse mythology is not an open-source fantasy system designed for entertainment studios to generate franchise material. It’s a collection of ancient stories that reflect an ancient belief system. While the stories themselves can be entertaining, the belief system did not exist solely for entertainment purposes. It existed for the same reason all religions do: to provide a framework for understanding and interacting with the world."

The War on Sex Differences Part II 

Eadric Streona The villain meets a fitting end. The question is why did Edmund keep trusting this guy?  Fool me twice, etc.  The word gemot near the end is related to Moot, if that gives it away for you. 

 Gerrymandering?  On the one hand, Utah is about 2:1 Republican overall, so however one draws the districts is likely to result in GOP majorities.  OTOH, They have four House seats and you could draw a majority Democratic district around SLC, which is not an unreasonable way to envision the state. 

Why the Developing World Needs Wider Streets  Cities are the engines of growth and gridlock screws them up

 

 

 

2013 Links

My unit was Never Crazier than that week

Hidden Data, or perhaps Invisible Data.  Opportunity Cost would be an example

The Bicycle Rider We have since learned that his only child, my grandmother, had a child that even my father never heard about his entire life. Not the most respectable side of the family, but I trust I got at least a few good genes from him.  

CS Lewis on Pride , the worst of traits

Everything is still High School, based on a Steve Sailer essay 

Substack Genius

Isabel Cowles Murphy @ The Noble Try 

The genius of substack is how much time it encourages me to spend online reading about getting offline. 

Socially Liberal Europe?

Europeans Aren't Nearly as Socially Liberal as the American Left Thinks The actual numbers on what European and other international laws and opinions are on abortion, transgender rights, vaccine hesitancy, and immigration. 

 I am not writing this in an attempt to establish which viewpoints are “correct” or “moral,” but merely as part of my broader ongoing unpaid mission from G-d to educate American progressives, a cohort of people who often fancy themselves uniquely knowledgeable but who in reality are frequently operating from a place of total ignorance. They are often the fools who don’t know what they don’t know and that makes them potentially dangerous. I want them, and everyone else, to be aware of reality so that we can have real discussions about the real world as it actually exists.

Every kid in Europe has a pony, don't they? 

How Many Are There?

One of the new worries that is going to destroy life for all of us is "mankeeping," a form of emotional labor that a Vice writer thinks is at the forefront of women not wanting to have relationships.  Instapundit linked to David Thompson's discussion, which includes a link to the original article. Thompson has a touch of Wodhusian style to his writing. The in-style, or perhaps the suckered-in crowd, has the topic on every lip, or so it seems.  Yet are they really leaving boyfriends and even husbands over this? Women like to read about such things, but that's hardly the same thing. Isn't this rather a buffet of minor resentments where every woman chooses two or three out of the twenty?

It reminded me immediately of the Groypers, or Christian Nationalists, or whatever they are.  People like to read about this.  They also approach this buffet style.  How many real ones are there?  

Are there more women leaving men over mankeeping, or more Groypers?  Show your work. 

Roll Jordan Roll

The bass is Isaac Freeman, who first sang with them in the 1940s. I can get down that low, but no one ever asks me to.

 

Monday Links

 Love Beats Hate in elections.  Even if you are the also most hated, it doesn't matter

Off With Her Hair Women tell attractive women to cut their hair. The study's authors are all female.  I wonder what it is like for women studying female intrasexual competition. Is it harder to get along, or easier? Bethany, you need to get in on researching the women who research women.

One of the papers cited in the Cognitive Dissonance link on Wednesday Nov 12 We've Been Told We Are Living in a Post Truth Age.  Don't Believe it. 

San Francisco Homelessness The slight decrease might be real, but probably isn't.  Getting rid of the tents made people more out-of sight, and thus harder to count. Also, so many people moving out of CA, especially the Bay Area reduced demand, driving down the rents. 

Related:  Did Prisons Replace Mental Hospitals? The graph is so stark and the possibility so intuitively possible that I fell for this long ago.  I did think it was likely only directionally true, because such things are complicated. But it may be even less than that.  It may obscure more than it reveals.

The Age of Toys is Over Comical.  But is it true?

Discovery Bible Study

We tried something new this week Discovery Bible Study It's a group technique.  A short passage is read aloud in full, by three successive people. The others can read along or just listen. We are encouraged to give a try to just listening, to attend more fully to the words and the flow rather than our own stray thoughts.  I gave that a try. Then three others retell the passage in succession without looking at notes. Everyone remembers different details. Then the group discusses the passage, trying to stay with what is said there, rather other connections we might make. When one person noticed that the text said that Jesus heard the voice, she asked if others present heard it. One of the leaders agreed that it did say that here, but in other gospels it included others. I thought that was as far afield as we should go and refrained from going further and mentioning Paul on the road in The Acts of the Apostles.  It is too easy for one such as I to go down such paths. 

The study suggests questions.

We did Mark 1:1-15.  I noticed that these verses highlight the strangeness of the scene for the listener, almost like the beginning of a movie. There is the reminder that this was prophesied centuries ago - that doesn't happen every day, does it?  John is described as a strange, almost storybook character: strange location, strange clothes, strange diet. This alarming figure announces that an even more alarming figure is about to arrive. Heaven is torn open - whatever that means - and something doveish comes into view. God speaks. The second, more alarming figure is baptised and goes out into the wilderness for forty days, with wild animals, angels, and Satan around.  In a very few verses we are told "All bets are off in this story.  Anything might happen. You are now encountering things you never have before, and it's going to get even more weird." 

It was a new way of seeing it for me.  I like this approach.  

12 (x14) Things Everyone Should Know

. 

Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche refers to itself as N-cubed, which is cute, but I will continue to use NNN.  It has a regular feature of "12 Things Everyone Should Know About..." which includes Violence, Dark Triad, Evolution and eleven others, and counting. The whole series is here. Without a subscription you only get the first one or two of each, but those are often interesting as standalones.  Plus graphs!

The most recent is Conspiracy. Few people endorse even all the conspiracies on their own "side."

But the single strongest personality predictor is narcissism. Narcissists are particularly prone to conspiracy theories because they have a strong need for uniqueness, are prone to paranoia, and can also be remarkably gullible.

He breaks them down into those liberals check the box for and those conservatives do, along a continuum. So I guess I likely have narcissism held in check, because I looked at some of those conspiracies and said "OK, not really true, but hey, based on a true story. There's evidence for some of that!" My sons are forbidden to comment about the narcissism.

QOTD

Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it. Mike Tyson

How Does This Land Now?

 

Gratitude

 Quoted by Mike Woodruff at The Friday Update 

 Several hundred years ago, after 17th-century British Bible commentator Matthew Henry was mugged, he wrote the following in his journal: “Let me be thankful: first, because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, because although they took all I had, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.”

Groypers

The is a lot of attention being paid to Rod Dreher's recent discussion of left-right extremism including antisemitism at The Critic," Welcome back to Weimar." This includes a statement that 30 to 40 percent of conservative political and think tank staffers under 30 are followers or fellow travelers of Fuentes. 

Grokipedia has an extended article about Groypers, the decentralised group under Fuentes's America First banner. Whether you read it now or come back to it at the end, I recommend it. 

Meanwhile, look, it's Rod Dreher, Jake. I used to like him, three or four Rod Drehers ago, but he has a long history of enthusiasms, plausibly sounding an alarm but then crashing and burning and embracing some extreme for a year or two. I would describe most of these claims as Based on a True Story, but there are a few here who I know would describe that as too generous.  You are free to weigh in in this space to remind the others of your reasons.  When last I heard of Dreher he was trying to convince us that Hungary was a deeply Catholic country, which faith undergirded its "traditionalism," for which they were unfairly maligned. Maybe based on a true story. But not true.

But, dissident alt right Groypers.  How worried should we be about their numbers and influence?  If you look at Dreher's claim in context it keeps weakening with every return glance.  Conservative staffers under 30.  How many is that? - and that is the group most dedicated to trying to take those jobs to shift things its way. What does "fellow travelers" mean?  We know that in the past lots of real antisemites kept trying to hide behind claiming "no, we're just anti-Zionist," or were "isolationists who thought that Israel received disproportionate attention but didn't claim that the number should be zero." Some of those really meant it even then, though when the chips were down most revealed that they just hated Jews. Yet this is a different generation, farther removed from the Holocaust and so counting it for less. For comparable distance, not many people cared about the Belgian Congo Genocide when I was young. Not quite the same for cultural importance in America, I'll admit.  But it gives an added perspective. At least some of the "fellow travelers" are concerned more about isolationism than anything, because I have heard them. If you look at the amount of military action even antiwar presidents like Clinton, Bush, and Obama have engaged in, you can see why that might be high on their list of expensive things to get rid of. Such people at least give a listen to other versions of isolationism.  Those fellow travelers?

Next, look how much of Dreher's evidence comes from alt-right antisemites in Europe - and even then it's in the form of "I talked to some guys who really know about this, trust me." I wrote about the real story behind "the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe" over a decade ago. Color me unconvinced. He is also worried that they might undermine Vance.

I'm convinced the Groypers are bad enough.  I'm not convinced they are numerous enough. Startup groups are often good at trying to create an impression of bigger numbers than they warrant. Thousands of listeners to a daily show, you say? These noise and disruption tactics might well give them outsize influence, and such things can build. But how many agree with them on an issue or two, not everything? Dreher retreats to the idea that some of the supporters just want to "burn it all down?"  Meaning what, exactly?  Real burning?  Restarting conservative definition from scratch? Getting rid of some Washington insiders pulling strings? 

They can do real damage, especially if they have wealthy backers behind the scenes who want to use them for their own purposes though they don't agree with the goals.  Think Russian and Chinese support for Western environmental groups, or Middle Eastern countries which hate the Palestinians but find them useful tactically.

So tell what you know and what you guess.  How many are there? 

Brisk Substack Links

 Art Deco Trains. Love this

Peebo Preboskenes takes back everything negative he said about AI 

Henri Biva saw everything  

The Shrinking Middle Class There are problems with this, but the new phrase is that it is "directionally correct"

I told you so.  Long Walks . Of course, now that the word has been getting out, I am doing less of it.

 

Trivia Contest

 

Sitting Across From Donald Trump On The Subway

Ann Althouse tells Grok her dream.  

Vandy's Crisps

For those of you who want to spend $2.60/oz on potato chips.  No, I have not tried them.

"Pints With Jack"

You may remember that I had this podcast on my sidebar for a long time.  I will be forever grateful to them for guiding me through Till We Have Faces after I had been unable to even like it my first two tries. (I now agree it is Lewis's best, ahead of The Great Divorce.) But in the early seasons they took five minutes of chitchat at the beginning of every episode, which grew to ten minutes and then twelve. It's not that I couldn't reliably just jump ahead, but that landing at eight minutes they sounded like they were just about to get into content, and at ten minutes, and eleven. The irritation was not worth it.

But it is still suggested now and again on my phone, and the topic was going to be Till We Have Faces at the Annual Petoskey CS Lewis Conference, which I have considered going to the last few years. 

At 22 minutes of talking about what beer or tea they were having or chatting with the guests about how they had all met, I gave up. Still not recommended. 

Friday Links

 In case you wanted to know what the worst of leftist radicals are advocating. 

Why ChatGPT sounds the way it does 

Singal on the Great Feminisation Theory Part II - Soft Spots 

Honest Debate by Scott Alexander in 2017.  I no longer have much confidence. But it's nice to read someone more hopeful.  I think that one of the problems is that people are sure they are willing to listen and fight fair, but quickly aren't. Maybe you first have a series of debates about other subjects, with secret ballots of which of the two is arguing more fairly. After a few rounds you should have a better pool to draw from.

Of the 103 who were asked by a sixth-grade class, only Kurt Vonnegut answered with advice. 

 

 

Recent Gurwinder Quotes

 "The way to use chatbots is not to ask them what’s true but to tell them what you think is true and then ask them for feedback. This lets you learn without eroding your ability to think for yourself."

"Lessons learned are quickly forgotten unless they were learned in terror, or sorrow, or shame. Wisdom can always be rented for free, but it must be purchased with pain."

" ...while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing."

Russia Hoax and Ukraine

Steve Hsu interviews Scott Horton (transcript available) author of Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine .  Horton is a libertarian and antiwar activist and discusses the War in Ukraine at the beginning and end of the podcast, but the bulk of the discussion is about the accumulation of evidence that the Russia Hoax was coordinated by the FBI and CIA feeding information to media sources under the direction of the White House. Particularly disturbing was the amount of information coming from the bottom up, with agents reporting there was nothing to it, only to be told by their highest authorities to keep the investigation going anyway.

New Dog

We adopted a small terrier mix and renamed her Maggie. I mostly just call her "Fish Breath" which made me think of Sweet Molly Malone. 

I always think I won't like the Sinead O'Connor versions, and then she just knocks me flat.

 

Northern Lights

I saw them once in the 80s while camping in the north country in the middle of the night.  Despite many attempts I had never seen them again, and my wife had never seen them.  Over the last few years, the most likely night have turned out to be cloudy. Our sons and their families on the Arctic Circle see them often, including absolutely spectacular sightings.

A FB posting from only minutes before sent us out into the cold, and we did get to see them. One can often see them better through the camera lens, and if one can keep the camera still (I cannot - I have always had tremble) with the aperture open the effect is multiplied. My wife got this shot last night. Not spectacular, but real.

Wednesday Links

 Everything is Television  Social media is becoming constant short form video.  "In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol."

Cognitive Dissonance It has happened again. A new paper, based on a tranche of unsealed historical documents, casts serious doubt on a piece of social psychology research from the mid-20th Century. Shocker!

Herodotus Validated  The Scythians used human leather on their quivers. I never trusted those guys.

How the Letter E Almost Ruined English Poetry  It includes good descriptions of the loss of grammatical endings in Germanic languages and even more in English and how that influenced the accenting of syllables.

Jesse Singal on the "Feminization" Discourse - Part 1 This provides some context on how even mild versions of Helen Andrews claim are utterly rejected in many fields of the academy, with shockingly little evidence.  I know, I know, in our section of the blogosphere we've known this for years.  But it is still new to some people.  Part II discusses how Singal thinks Andrews's overall argument still has holes.  (Leah Libresco Sargeant at The Free Press points out that if the theory were entirely true, highly feminized professions like Pharmacist and Veterinary Medicine would have collapsed. )

Dialing For Dollars

 Early Social Media roping you in.  You had to know "the count and the amount" in Dialing for Dollars.

I wondered when it had gone off the air, because I associated it with the 1970s, and it turns out it hung on for a long time, with some descendants even today. Our memories of the cut-ins will likely be different, because it was local programming with regional variations.

 

 

Tuesday Links

A Review of Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by Nick Herbert

Ruxandra Teslo on AI and Drug Discovery.  Transformative new drugs are already declining, and AI may not help much. A bit depressing.

In Defense of Men by Will Storr.  The part that continues to surprise and irritate me about this is that I have been reading this for years, but most of America, especially women,  seems to find this new.  Of those who have heard it, many think it is untrue and an example of men whining to even mention it. We don't understand that women have it so much harder that the struggles of men do not even bear mentioning.

Speaking of Organ Donation, this from Sensible Medicine. The Ultimate Medical Drama. One cousin of mine donated a kidney to a sister who has PKD. I am no longer close to either and don't know if the "tyranny of the gift" applied in their case. 

The níðstǫng in Gesta Danorum at Saxo Grammaticus, an entire blog about the Gesta Danorum. This one is about curses, a band a wizards, and a horse's head on a pole. I actually quoted the Gesta Danorum in my final paper for English. I no longer remember what the quote was, but am certain it was not anything I had read myself, not even in translation. I lifted some quote from another source and copied the footnote. It was there purely for show. 

Jonathan Smith at The Orthosphere glares over the top of his glasses at Pope Leo's new "Mass for the Care of the World." Quite the heated discussion follows. You might want to make a stiffish brandy and soda before settling down to this one. 

Settle Down, Now

At a hotel in Montreal, my son and DIL were in a cluster of four rooms at the end of the hall. The second night, the other three rooms were occupied by students preparing to go out after midnight for a Hallowe'en party, in and out of each others rooms noisily. It was bad enough that Ben eventually called hotel security, which improved things a little.  We debated whether with would be better to go out into the hall and make the request oneself rather than call in the fuzz. Which would be more likely to escalate things?  Which would be more likely to work? 

Jen thought that the best solution would be to go out into the hall and saying "Our daughter is having an organ transplant tomorrow and needs to be well-rested."  That seems hard to top. 

The War Between the Sexes

That's what we used to call it, and it had both a serious/angry, humorous/affectionate tone to it, plus plenty in the middle that was pointed. Hearing about a radio celebrity publicly criticising his soon-to-be ex it occurred to me that he would have a ready audience of guys prepared to take his side and believe his version automatically.  His wife could also fin such an immediate audience as well should she choose to.  I sighed. Well, that's the way of the world.  It was ever thus...no, wait a minute a lot of this is new! I am embarrassed that this never occurred to me until I was today-years-old, as the new saying is.

The increase in divorce since about 1965 has created a stable percentage of adults who are divorced. 15+%.  It would be higher, but people remarry.  Add to that the people who have had longterm cohabitations that ended, many unhappily. Counterbalancing this are the previous relationships that were deeply unhappy but they did not divorce. This can hardly have been good for the general opinions men and women had of each other. Still, it seems to have been more contained than now. There are also those who remarry more happily the second time. How the reduced frequency of marrying at all fits into this seems multisided in terms of everyone getting along. However, I note that a smaller percentage of recent generations have to keep at least one person of the opposite sex happy. It would seem that at least one fence of the pasture is down.

I'm not much concerned with the actual measurements of this at the moment, not until I have some idea of the balancing.  Yet I note that this is new, and likely contributes to our national er, discussions more than I had thought to credit before. One more pool of disaffected people.

Shutdown/Reopening

I noticed that two of the eight Democratic senators who voted for reopening were from NH, a very purple state, so I looked up who the others were. Five of the other six were also from very purple states, Durbin of Illinois being the exception. Viewed from an entirely tactical perspective, the usual results when one party decides it needs to cut its losses is that the members in most jeopardy appeal to the leaders and say "You're killing us here. We need to switch or you have to give us something really nice to compensate with our electorate." When the pressure gets too much, the leader gets them a couple more votes from ultra-safe districts where they aren't going to vote for the other party no matter what. 

I don't think this means there are fewer ultra-safe districts for the Democrats this time, but that the ultra-safe districts are worried about primary challenges.  This is also very standard.  When one party dominates entirely in a place, factions within that party become more powerful and important. Dominic Cummings is convinced that most national party politics is about the members in safe districts competing for power within their own party, not against the other party. It Takes a Village You Didn't Build. 

When there are close votes with defectors from purple areas, there are claims of hypocrisy that they never cared about the principles they were shouting about 24 hours ago, only about their own advantage. So now it's all "Har, har! You never cared about hungry people at all, did ya?" I think that is always in the front of the minds of politicians in general, but I don't conclude from that that it is all hypocrisy.  I believe they do care about these things somewhat. I think I am more angry at the hyperventilating from supporters who were shouting "plague o'er the earth" yesterday if the government did not start SNAP benefits immediately who are now upset at the cost to the party of it happening. I'm not thinking of a recent Republican equivalent, but I expect there is one there somewhere. There usually is. 

 

Monday Links

 Wealth, War, and Worse A short history of the Plague

Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia.  We can learn an enormous amount about evolution in general

Sally Satel reviews Unshrunk. She is right because she agrees with me! I suspected from the start that Laura Delano had Borderline Personality Disorder, for which medications are not often useful. As the story unfolded it became inevitable where the story would end. She got off meds, endured the pain of learning to reduce impulsiveness and make good decisions, and got older. All three help.

Good and Evil are Native Pagan Concepts  at Norse Mythology and Germanic Lore 

The green energy myth is condemning Africa to Poverty 

 

 

Sunday Links

 A video of Ted Cruz getting quite exercised about the growing antisemitism on the right.  Good for him.

Highbrow Misinformation   Even without a subscription you can read the part about climate.

The highly-literate and abundantly fertile Psmiths cleverly review a book about why having children should be easier now but is harder. 

Also the Psmiths, reviewing The Real Korea   I did not know this.  Not even a little bit.

The quest for perfect communism was also assisted, ironically enough, by the fact that only half the peninsula was heading that way. In the first years of the two Koreas, the line of demarcation between them was very poorly guarded. This resulted in a vast demographic sorting, analogous to India’s partition, but far more thorough. Many of the most idealistic and educated South Koreans, who tended to harbor leftist and communist sympathies, headed North to create a worker’s paradise. This further added to North Korea’s human capital. Conversely, a torrent of former landlords, entrepreneurs, and Christian activists fled South.  

 Arctic Frost Is a Real Scandal, by Eli Lake.  I'm sure it is, but I think of Bullwinkle 

 

O Waly, Waly

The Water is Wide, I cannot cross o'er

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that can carry two

And both shall row, my love and I 

Sometimes I think I would like to have the verse on the bench that is our headstone.  Mrs. Wyman disagrees. It is a good verse for when one has died and the other remains. 

 

The Water is Wide has a jumbled history, as most folk songs do. I did not know until I read the Grokipedia entry that one can sing "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" to it.

France Is Already Doing This

When I have discussed reduced fertility and possible pro-natalist policies that would help, I not only quote "things to try," and "reasons why we aren't having children," but my commenters are likely to offer their own ideas. However...

France has already implemented most of the modern pro-natalist wish list (reducing income tax rates based on the size of the household, cash payments to mothers at birth, cash allowances for families, subsidized child care, universal paid parental leave, school cost payments, and housing subsidies for families with three or more children), though many of these programs are means-tested, and the French state has been ideologically pro-natalist since the interwar period. In total, France spends about 3.6% of GDP on family programs, rising to 4.7% if you account for the indirect income tax adjustments and pensions benefits (the highest in the OECD). France does have the highest fertility in Europe… but this is largely due to the exceptionally high fertility (TFR = 2.95) of non-European immigrants, who account for 22% of total births. Rather than bringing French fertility to replacement, the French pro-natalist state overwhelmingly subsidizes large families in the massive Arab and African populations (which makes the problems of population decline worse, not better). Contrary to the Age of Malthusian Industrialism hypothesis, native French fertility (TFR = 1.62) is at the high end for Europe but by no means exceptional.

(From Arcotherium at Aporia "Communist Pro-Natalism")

Comeback

In an online argument I read last night a young man was furious at how difficult the economy is for young people now, citing familiar statistics about housing costs (new houses were 1/3 the size in the 1960s) and wages (exclusive of benefits, the much smaller percentage of people working at that level, and more) and college costs. 

He fell into a trap laid by an older person who partly agreed with him, stressing deterioration of services by cheap bastard companies trying to gouge us. He described the amazing meals and service in airplanes compared to what they served now, and how little space we have. There was an exchange of agreement. 

"So how was your last flight?" 

The boy bit, and complained about a transatlantic flight last year. 

The older man: "I didn't even go up in a plane until I was 41, and not to another country for ten years after that. Yeah, life is tough for young people now." 

Infant and Maternal Mortality

"America’s maternal mortality rate is shocking: In 2023—the most recent year for which there’s reliable data—almost 19 in 100,000 women died in childbirth. (The equivalent figure in the UK was 12.67.) Among black women, the rate was 50 in 100,000. Every American should demand better care for mothers—and be grateful to Carmon for her reporting." (Iris Carmon, author of Unbearable.)  Kara Kennedy "Progressives Can't Bear Pregnancy" at The Free Press

Numbers like this circulate a lot. Aaron Sorkin* had one of his characters rant over a decade ago about everything the US did wrong, and nearly every number had the same explanation. The black numbers are much worse in many categories, and they are 11% of the overall population. If you apply that to the quote above, you will see that our mortality rate is not shocking - our black mortality rate is shocking. The rest of the country, including Hispanics and Asians, is about the same as the UK. This applies to education rankings, longevity, homicide, incarceration, and more. If you do the quick math in your head and multiply the black rate by whatever factor separates them and then apply it to the whole, the numbers match up moderately well. 

The followup questions are all variations of why. There is an automatic leaping to the conclusion that it must be about racism, or poverty, or lack of access, or medical professionals paying worse attention to black women.  Yet when you try to illustrate with real data what people are sure must be true it turns out to be hard to nail down. Because the mortality numbers vary somewhat by state, inequality is probably part of the answer.  That could be some of it.  But it is well less than half the explanation, because the numbers are the same for blacks in other countries.  For every country to be exactly as racist, or blacks there to be exactly as comparatively poor is less likely than the probability that something genetic is happening. Survival in Africa was different from survival in Pakistan was different from survival in London. That this entire evolutionary history vanishes in a couple of centuries is too much to ask. 

Other countries talk about racism, but we are one of the very few countries that actually are multi-racial.  I have long been irritated at Europeans sniffing at us when they are just short of a Viking invasion for whiteness overall. Plus, their record with Jews and Roma is still poor, and recent immigration is not going smoothly. The Anglo Canadians don't even get along with their French, who were also white Northern Europeans. Sorry, that was a tangent to an old soapbox of mine. 

None of the three links address full reasons for the maternal/infant mortality rates racial disparities, but they all bring out interesting possibilities. 

I think Cremieux's is the most interesting  and most thorough

Peter Frost  at Aporia has one about Mother-Fetus Mismatch that was surprising.

Plus some data from Europe. I am wondering if the UK definition of Asian is different from ours, or the countries that make it up have a different balance.

*When I went looking for the Aaron Sorkin tirade from over a decade ago that the US is not the greatest country in the world, citing the infant mortality statistics.  Graph Paper Diaries was the sixth search engine entry. 

Repeal the 19th Amendment

Apparently this is a thing now.  I have heard it suggested humorously for many years, and quarter-seriously by some men looking at the voting demographics and not liking the results. The premise seems to be that women are fooled by charismatic charlatans who can't deliver on what they promised.  Well they are.  But this is one of the main ways that men get to have sex, so you may not want to advertise the point too loudly. This also points up a major weakness of the scheme, that men also get taken in by women who um, don't necessarily have their best interests at heart.  Or by men who have great advice what will work with women.

I imagine you could ask advertisers for their opinion who would tell you with a straight face "Oh!  Oh sure! Men never spend their money on stupid things, which is what makes our job so hard!"

Thus the best you can manage at that point is "Okay, men are also fooled by politicians and stupid ideas, but women are fooled more often." Pretend it's true. How are you going to repeal the amendment?  Where are you going to find the votes for that, even in Congress which is predominantly male. Secret ballot? How are 74 men going to convince their wives and daughters that they weren't one of the 67 who voted for it? But say it works by some wild chance.  Now you have 100,000,000 angry women who will then blame men - with some justification - for everything that goes wrong.  I mean, even more than they do now. Tell you what, Mack. Why don't you find that country and get back to me how moving there worked out for ya.

So it's obviously trolling women to convince them everything would be better if they were more like men. Well. I suppose that would be a refreshing change from what I have been hearing from women since fifth grade, but I think that will have the same success rate as trying to repeal the 19th. Shaming people always works so well, y'know?  

 

Not a Pet

 Man explaining his leashed cat to store security:  It's not a pet, it's a "lack of support" animal to prevent me from becoming too conceited.

Next woman in line: It's not working. 

Politics and Religion

Politics and religion have been dancing a long time. And every time it happens, politics ends up leading - and stepping all over the feet of religion. Mike Woodruff "The Friday Update" Woodruff is senior pastor at a multi-site church in the northern suburbs of Chicago.  My wife has been reading me quotes from his updates for a few weeks now, and I always sigh at what new Christian site she has found that I'm not going to like.  But I am entirely wrong about this and I find his simple style engaging.  I think he is doing what I do, only better.

I have aware of this concept for some time - it is very much part of Lewis's teaching, such as the "Christianity and..." of Screwtape, several of the essays in God in the Dock, and most chillingly, in That Hideous Strength. I thought we came to "the fell incensed points of might opposites" (Hamlet) in the 80s and 90s, when I was assailed by the mostly-decent but quietly self-righteous believers left and right. I was not good at being nice to either of them. 

It is back with a vengeance now, or maybe social media just gives a platform to the worst of them.  I don't think Episcopalians have heard many sermons on demon rum or adultery over the last decades - the priests reserve the hellfire and brimstone for the evils of Republicans.  I suspect it has the same effect as the old sermons did, scaring the bejeesus out of the already converted and making sure they don't dare leave and go out into the void, but chasing the unconverted away. I cannot believe the tone and accusation I am hearing from men and women of the cloth, spoken with the absolute certainty that is itself a red flag. 

Yet that isn't the whole story. Simmering up among the online young is a Christian conservatism with many good aspects, but entirely too welcoming to old demons in new disguises.  I don't know these children that well, and I doubt they will listen to one such as I.  But I have seen this before. I recall the revival weekends on church signs: Faith. Family. Country. " 

“If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.” CS Lewis The Four Loves.  Yes, if even love can fall, and can fall farther than mere lust, so too can love of family and love of country. The higher a thing can rise, the greater is its fall.

My own words would be that if a Christian develops any politics, the danger of the political beliefs becoming the faith is so great as to be irresistible without Divine aid.  Our tendency to self-deception is bottomless, whether we go off a cliff or sink into the marshes. The demon discovered simply hides one level further down. 

Are the Narnia Books or Lord of the Rings Allegorical?

 Earl at Wind Off The Hill (sidebar) has a new entry on this long-debated topic.

Old School

Shilo Brooks and Coleman Hughes discuss Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions, which came out almost 40 years ago. Sowell considered it his best, and it is the best of the four I have read. Tearing the argument down to the studs - the constrained versus unconstrained view of humanity - is greatly clarifying. 

Paul Anka Looks Young

 He was young here.  19.

We sat on the couch for prayer time tonight and I asked my wife to put her head on my shoulder. I started singing the song and she joined in.  For one line. Then we both said "That's all I know."

So here it is. BTW, I hadn't realised that he wrote the English lyrics to Frank Sinatra's "My Way."

 

Permanently Installed in a Back Closet

 

It pops its head out once in a while.

Why No Elections?

 I'll bet he had fun writing this today.

 

 

 

Michael Adams, KY Secretary of State

@KYSecState

We’re getting calls about polls being closed. They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry.

Shifting Values

It is interesting that liberals have become more and more European, and have oriented themselves toward Western European comparisons, just as Europe itself is disintegrating. They have castigated conservatives for being provincial and prided themselves on being internationalists.  But international means China, Japan, India, Indonesia, and Singapore now.  Europe still has plenty of juice and will for a long time.  "There's a great deal of ruin in a nation," as Adam Smith said. But the world is turning, and the new version is not well understood by either conservatives or liberals.

Norman Greenbaum

Before "Spirit In the Sky" with its fuzz bass, Norman Greenbaum was part of Dr. West's Medicine Show and composed this half-psychedelic, half-Roaring 20s novelty hit. 

Believers noted "Spirit in the Sky" was theologically weak right from the start. No Christian would say "Never been a sinner, I never sinned."  It seemed to be one of those California Jesus Freak things. People now know Greenbaum grew up in an observant Jewish family - big surprise, I know. But still...California or maybe Colorado or something. 

Well, there is even more to the story than that.  He was from Malden, MA, and was obsessed with Westerns as a boy.  What he was picturing was being inspired by a cowboy "dying with his boots on." Looked at from that perspective, a vague, general I've been a good person would be about what an average Jewish boy might think of Cowboy Christianity.

Less Parenting

 The Free Press has a new article The Secret to Parenting:  Do Less of It. I don't need to read it to know that I agree with it.  I often say to young couples about children "Have more children and pay less attention to them.  They'll be fine." It is analogous to the Rules of the House of God in the book of the same name about medical residency after med school.  The chief resident would tell the first years do as little medicine as possible. This was not laziness, but wisdom.  Over time, the author learned that the second half of the lesson was save it for when you really need it. The same applies for parenting.  Some children will require a lot (though even those should have as mujch time on their own as can be managed). All children will have episodes where they requirte more parenting. We found that once we mutually reached the conclusion that the current behavior required some sort of heightened response, defining what was wrong usually pointed to the answer.

I wish we had learned the lesson earlier.  Our first son in particular could have benefited from less pressure.  He would have done as well with half the effort. The three adopted sons all had periods when they needed more intervention, but we had learned to back off more by then and it was doable. 

Another Aspect of Concern For The Poor

 We discussed the restoration of Lazarus to life this morning, and specifically the oft-mentioned verse "Jesus wept." Why would he weep?  He knows that he is going to raise him.  Everything will be good again. At first glance it makes no sense.  Lewis offers that it is because Death is still the ultimate indignity. We skip too quickly over that part when we contemplate our own resurrection.  It wasn't supposed to be this way. Jesus was there for the creation of life and the creation of man, and he knew better than any other what was lost. That is in fact why his rising again is important. Without it, the good creation, Life, goes under the waves and is lost forever.  Everything was for naught. Joy would have meaning only for a moment, and suffering would have no meaning at all. 

I have always thought that the fatalist "death is part of life" is a twisting of the meaning. Death is not part of life; the new life transcends death, it does not negate it. 

Jesus does not evade this, he leans into it.  People are always dying, always being born blind, always going hungry.  When he says "the poor you will have with you always" he emphasises this. This world and perhaps the whole of creation is fallen and that will never be fixed, only transcended, especially on the last day.

This is why looking to fixes in this world is dangerous.  The fantasy is that if we just allowed the market to work freely, or just taxed the 1% more, or created more technical marvels then things would be fixed.  Even if we scale that back to "well, I mean pretty much fixed" the temptation is unchanged. It is the desire to get away from the shared pain, to have done with it all and be able to go outside and play. 

Any of our endeavors might help, and we should put great effort into that because of the life that we share with all the others.  But the temptation to want things to be fixed eventually descends into horror and cruelty, because we will excuse great cruelties and injustice in order to achieve this unachievable goal. I don't know how many tip-offs there are of this, so that we might recognise in ourselves that this demon has inhabited us.  But one is certainly when we believe that it is someone else who must fix it, that we have no part in the work at all. 

I had a patient years ago who was so delusional that he was unemployable. He collected a disability check, but felt he still should always do what he could for others. He got up every morning and swept the sidewalk on his block. It was the landlords' job, and the city's job, and the shopkeepers' job, but it was something he could do, so he did it. In the winter he would shovel it before sweeping it.  When he got old and could not shovel so much he felt bad about it. He also thought because he had food he should always give some away. When manipulators and thieves would take advantage he hit upon a new scheme.  He made a little extra each meal and would bring that little down to street level and look for someone to give it to.  I only knew bob a short while forty years ago but his example has stuck with me.  He had found a way to not only give back, but to be part of.  

We are called to be forever part of helping. Solving is a skill that can greatly aid helping, but solving is also a great temptation that leads to despair, and anger, and blaming others. The bastards.  Everything would be solved if it wasn't for them.

Shadow of My Own Heart

 

I had not ever heard of her.  Janis Joplin was considered the pioneer of white-girl-sings-the-blues, but Rose brings more style, more pain, a few years earlier. Come to think of it, I'll bet there were plenty before Joplin, but not in my ken.

Was Aethelred Really That Unready?

Aethelred only partly-deserves his bad rap in the history books.  His military actions are generally condemned, but even at that, he had a harder road than most other kings.  The Danish invaders were more formidable in the late 900s than even the Great Heathen Army of 865.  Aethelred bought them off for much of his reign, but did choose to fight them in ineffective ways intermittently. Buying them off was probably the best strategy most of the time - history teaches that wars are always more expensive than we pretend when we go in - but in retrospect historians thought this only encouraged the Danes to look at England as a renewable resource for raiding.  Better, they thought, to have defended fiercely at some earlier times. Yet he turned the tide a bit by hiring some Danes to protect England against other Vikings. While this is always a risky strategy, it can work for a long time.

So easy to say in retrospect. The disastrous Battle of Maldon was under Aethelred and considered partly his fault, but as the poem commemorates, the decisions of others were the problem.  It is one thing to say later if we were going to fight so arrogantly and stupidly it would have been better to buy them off this time as well, had the English fought and won then the subsequent raiding would probably have been different.  In that context, the execution of many already-settled Danes was a second disaster, because it gave the invaders reasons for revenge in addition to loot. None of it worked out, and it is agreed that he was not a good judge of character and chose terrible advisors.  This was ironic given that his name Aethel-red means "nobly-advised." 

Yet that is the real meaning of "Unready" at the time. It meant poorly-advised.  (Those who took German or know a bit of its history will recognise Rathaus as "advice-house" or town hall.) When he wasn't supporting the various nobles who were out for themselves rather than for him or for England, he did reasonably well. Despite the attacks and hemorrhaging money the institutions of government, not created by him but still new and potentially insecure, continued to function so that trade, law, the Church, and agriculture held up through it all.  More recent scholarship has tried to describe how exactly Aethelred accomplished this, but it is first noted that the whole thing might have collapsed but it didn't.  He must have done more than a few things right. Then, as now, people take for granted that life goes on and has some day-to-day predictability. But survival and success are never guaranteed. The take wisdom and effort to remain in place.

Sunday Links

Universal Basic Income has little to no effect in developed countries, but yet another study shows effectiveness in a poorer country 

A couple of years ago I highlighted the gathering of obesity research done at SMTM that point to chemical exposures, primarily lithium, as being the main culprit for weight gain. At the time, there was not much that consistently worked for weight loss, only calorie reduction and increased activity, which tends not to be sustainable. It sucks when reversing what got you into this mess doesn't seem to help get you out of it.  In response to a collection of criticisms, SMTM updates its defense, and I think the case looks even stronger now.

Why Is Switzerland So Rich? 

It's not just that Wikipedia gets it wrong, it's that they won't back down   

Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era.  "The writer of one of Tyler’s favorite books of the last decade on cops who won’t police, a marriage that shaped a nation, and the optimistic case for South Africa." I liked the podcast because it revealed how wrong my supposed knowledge about South Africa was. Oppressions I believed in were false, and ones I hadn't thought about were true.

Wind Off the Hilltop

 Earl has placed new material on his site, and surprised me with poems by Dorothy Parker.  I admit, I have only known her as a wit and an epigrammist (Asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence she said "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.") But her poetry! 

 The Little Old Lady in Lavender Silk
 

I was seventy-seven, come August,
  I shall shortly be losing my bloom;
I’ve experienced zephyr and raw gust
  And (symbolical) flood and simoom.

When you come to this time of abatement,
  To this passing from Summer to Fall,
It is manners to issue a statement
  As to what you got out of it all.

So I’ll say, though reflection unnerves me
  And pronouncements I dodge as I can,
That I think (if my memory serves me)
  There was nothing more fun than a man!

In my youth, when the crescent was too wan
  To embarrass with beams from above,
By the aid of some local Don Juan
  I fell into the habit of love.

And I learned how to kiss and be merry—an
  Education left better unsung.
My neglect of the waters Pierian
  Was a scandal, when Grandma was young.

Though the shabby unbalanced the splendid,
  And the bitter outmeasured the sweet,
I should certainly do as I then did,
  Were I given the chance to repeat.

For contrition is hollow and wraithful,
  And regret is no part of my plan,
And I think (if my memory’s faithful)
  There was nothing more fun than a man! 

 

Some others

Sanctuary 

Song of Perfect Propriety 

Inventory