The Sweet

My older Romanian son used to have a T-shirt that read "I'm Big In Europe." That seems to have been true of The Sweet, previously The Sweetshop, and later just Sweet. I vaguely recalled this song from the radio but dismissed it as bubblegum.  I can't recall knowing anyone who had any of their records or ever seeing a picture of them. It's all rather horrifying, isn't it?

 

Yet they somehow sold 35M albums worldwide. Somebody somewhere must have liked them a whole lot. Remember we all thought that Europe was much more sophisticated than us in those days.

καθαίρω

Kathairo, to purge or cleanse.

What if Purgatory is hard work but deeply satisfying?

What if it is painful hard work but even more deeply satisfying?

I know the medieval descriptions were all of fire and torment, but everyone, Christian or not, seemed to talk a lot about torment anyway, both in this life and the next. The best you could hope for, it seemed was to be forgotten and left alone. 

If there is work to be done in Heaven, designed for our pleasure in being useful, the boundary between them... well, it would just be my speculation over another's. 

Urban Graveyards, Isolated Populations

Something long believed by anthropologists and prehistorians is receiving support from ancient DNA data. Cities were population sinks, where people traveled or even moved to make money but died in higher numbers. They were places of cultural life but physical death. There was art, trade, wealth, and mixing of peoples, but also disease (both fatal and merely debilitating), less fertility, and crime. The provinces were culturally conservative, preserving the old ways and refusing to adopt the new religions and methods, having more children, eating better, and being exposed to fewer diseases.

We see that even now, even in technologically advanced societies. There is a difference in the last century in Western society because medical care is better.  We have antibiotics.  We know about quarantining, vaccination, germ theory, and sanitation. This changes the balance of rural versus urban health, as rural people have more contact with animals and urban people have more hospitals and clinics. But as we saw during the Industrial Revolution and then, the old rules of exposure to more chemicals, filth, and even just plain people still apply.  What that means for the future as medical care improves I don't know. But it gives us an idea of what conditions must have been like in Dickens' London and during the plagues, fires, and sieges. 

We now see that same pattern in ancient and prehistoric DNA. The cities left little genetic trace, while there was continuity in the remote areas. However, the beliefs and culture of the urban areas grew and spread, while those in the hinterlands gradually disappeared. It has been an odd trade-off for humans.

Archaeologists like to study cities.  Geneticists now study isolated populations. 

I mentioned that Razib had the Greek geneticist Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou on for an interview. His lab studies (among other things) isolated populations. On this podcast he talked about the Maniots and the Albanians, two groups with considerable continuity. Both are mountainous and inaccessible, and so mixed with other peoples very little.  There are such peoples all over the world, on islands, in mountainous areas, and deep in Amazonia. It is less common in the Mediterranean because trade, travel, and empires. But both groups have uniparental ancestries, both y-chromosome and mtDNA, that go back more centuries than their neighbors. Albania is only about 15% Slav and 15% Roman, the rest being ancient Balkan.  In the north the number is even higher. 

A very interesting tangent on Maniot ancestery:

"And this lineage we called the Marniot Modal Lineage because it hasn't been found outside Mani. Actually the only few instances where it has been found outside Marni these people have very large autosomal sectors, so they definitely descend their recent migrants from Mani. And by the way, just as a little parenthesis, in our study, we've found only a single example in the rest of the world. This is a real person in the world that has this deep Maniot modal lineage but doesn't have any autosomal heritage from Mani. And this person has now tested and is from an indigenous community in Latin America. And guess what? We did find that they do descend from Mani and we know the exact village and the exact clan. And it's going to be the subject of another paper because the journey of this person's ancestors is absolutely fascinating."(Italics mine.  Wild. I'm looking forward to learning what the story behind it is. It's the sort of impossibility found only in speculative fiction.)

Uniparental lineages sometimes have such oddities. There is a a rare but constant presence of a Chinese mtDNA line in Ashkenazi Jews - technically before there were Ashkenazi Jews. The joke is it explains the fondness for Chinese food among NY Jews.  I have an oddity myself, and am getting a new DNA sample done that focuses on my maternal lineage, because my U3 shouldn't be in Sweden. We'll see. 

When there is a strong founder effect it comes from a severe reduction in population. This might mean a small population migrating to a new area, or it might mean disease, famine, or warfare. Clan-based societies often exhibit these effects, and both of these groups are still clan-based, though this diminished in the 1900s.  Many of the clans have founder stories, of a shipwreck from Sicily or a small migration from Cyprus. The DNA reveals that the clan stories that people told about themselves were not true. But the kinship networks turned out to be remarkably accurate. 

So for example, a clan might claim a founder from 600 years ago with the particular story attached about where he came from. Testing the people who claim that clan descent in the various villages revealed that they are indeed all related and descended from someone in the 15th century. But there's no indication that that founder came from anywhere outside the province. This seems to accord with how human beings look at themselves, and that we need a story and we pick - or make up - a story that we like, and stick to it. But we actually are pretty good at keeping track of who our important relatives are even when the official records are lost. Clan identification is pretty accurate, despite everything else we lie about. Heck, I went to college at 18 and tried to reinvent myself.  Mostly burying some things and highlighting others, but some outright lies.  I'm not throwing any stones here. 

Some origin stories turn out to be amazingly true, even across centuries. We love those, and start to believe that most of them are based on a kernel of truth, but that's not quite what is showing out. Still, it's remarkable that it happens at all - rumors of a previous people who lived on the land who came from across the sea, or stories of long migrations from the East. BTW according to Davranoglou, the least-accurate origin stories in the Balkans come from the Serbs. Everyone is angry at the DNA researchers for exploding their myths, but the Serbs are sending death threats. 

Someone must have done the Scottish clans. I don't know the results. Mine were Wallaces, which was likely a favorite name to steal if you had to get out of town fast and start somewhere else, so I'm not confident of written records.  DNA may mislead, but it doesn't lie, though. 

250th

For the Bicentennial, I moved from Colonial Williamsburg to Sudbury, MA, Zip Code 01776, just south of Lexington and Concord. Frying pan. Fire. 

It's calmer this time. It's not following me everywhere.

Bad Things Come In Threes

So the old superstition goes.  Personally, I don't relax a bit after the third one.  

Shakespeare said it better.:  Claudius, in "Hamlet." When sorrows come they come not single spies, But as battalions.

Survey Suspicion

I never fill out surveys from medical practices asking me how they did.  I know that's part of how their economy works, but having been subject to them when I worked in a hospital, I concluded that they ask the wrong questions. They are geared to find out what box-checking the little guys did, not evaluate how well the whole system is working.  "Were you greeted when you came in?" rather than "How did the telephone tree work out for you?"

It may not be that way anymore.  My information is 10-20 years old now.  What's the word on the street for how surveys are used now? 

Take The A-Train

It was written for Duke Ellington and became his signature piece. But lots of other jazz musicians took a swing at it and I read that many consider Brubeck's version the best.

 

And Another One Bites The Dust

 James and his wife now have a substack.  I have one also, but never write anything on it. 

Is It A Premature Peace?

I do not pretend to know diplomacy and strategy, whether short or long term.  

I am seeing foreign opponents of Iran's IRG, and Hamas/Hezbollah claiming that Iran is not defeated enough and giving up enough.  I have been worried all along that we would have our usual shockingly complete opening victory but then pissing it away. It's an oversimplified and likely shallow view, I know.  Yet I worry still. Americans win and then get tired and move on to other things, and Trump has been quintessentially American in that way on other issues.

On the brighter side, I am also reading that despite the expenditure of weapons, our war with Iran has been a major setback for China's interest in Taiwan, leveraging India, controlling the polar regions, and influencing Latin America.  It has been a boon for them in terms of Russia, but at Russia's expense more than ours.  Africa a wash. I wish I knew more than bumper stickers about all this.

The Palestinian Substitute Child

I have a dislike for people explaining the behavior of women without children as somehow tied to that. I grant that instincts are powerful in all of us and there may be something to it, but it's too pat, too one-size-fits-all for my taste. Thus I was not initially sympathetic to Daniel Klein's explanation of the British left's intellectually impossible attachment to the Palestinian cause and almost stopped reading after a few paragraphs. Britain and the Palestinian Word-Symbol. But I stuck with it and some pieces did seem to fit. 

Persistently tracked to their origins, all the frothy debates surrounding Palestine devolve on this point. Why the woundedness? Why the empathetic overdrive in a single direction? The Palestine word-symbol represents collective humanity - humanity as Christ-like victim of the Jews’ unbearably disturbing presence: the mental presence of Jewish ideas that draw humanity away from innocence and instinct and animal-nature, and into the burdensome world of responsibility, moral choice and honesty before our Creator.

St. Greta makes an appearance.  When he gets to the men who are as deeply enamored with that cause he locates a separate instinct there, also plausible.  He may have overshot and told a just-so story in both cases, but I think it is worth a look. 

 

US Men's National Team

I get it that you almost have to do something flag-related for the World Cup and the 250th, but I'm not sure they got quite the look they wanted for the Stadium Home jerseys. This is major star Christian Pulisic, BTW

 At first glance I thought of gondoliers.  Put a straw boater with a long ribbon on that and give him a pole.

Christian Choice

The Atlantic does sometimes have fits of evenhandedness, but they are are a generally reliable Clinton-Gore liberal source. Thus, when they are writing about matters of faith, it is nearly always from a "what's a good liberal to do" POV. They are fine with hatred of conservatives, but say it nicely. Use your words, Trevor. No rage, please, that's not us.  It's okay to write about why other leftists are enraged and how you understand it, and how the real problem is conservatives complaining about liberal rage, but with practice you will learn that sneering and sarcasm are much more effective in persuading the people we care about.

So it's no surprise what American Christians Have A Choice is about. Peter Wehner is not a terrible guy or a milquetoast Christian. He thinks Trump is terrible but went third-party rather than vote for Hillary.  (I don't know what he did last time.) But notice how the Atlantic picks and chooses what they will publish of his.  He is useful to them because of what he publishes in other places, giving them street cred.  These are subtle games in publishing, done by professionals who know how to place ideas artfully, like museum curators.  If you are interested in the whole article rather than just this intro, the Atlantic is using this one as a Facebook ad at present, so you can click through from there. Maybe. I did, anyone. 

But the subheading gives it away: The faithful can still repair the damage they have wrought. I don't know what Wehner wrote under previous administrations.  He might well have written about what damage the faithful had wrought then as well.  But the Atlantic didn't. Carter and Mondale were not a crisis for American Christians, Reagan was.  Bill Clinton was somehow never a spiritual crisis for the Church.  After all, when he was caught in sin he got Tony Campolo to meet with him and declare what a changed man he was. And then he went multiple times to Epstein Island, and Epstein was a big Hillary contributor. But no crisis.

Bush 43 was a crisis to them, but not UCC Obama and his bigoted hate-filled pastor. Nor was Obama's Kwisatz Haderach persona, both Christian and Muslim (and Hindu - remember the Urdu poetry? But pointedly not Jewish.  Never Jewish), socialist and capitalist, elite and common man, traditionalist and radical...you get the idea. Biden's Catholic past troubled by no actual Catholicism was not a crisis, not even for Catholics, apparently.  McCain was only a spiritual problem while he was running against Obama, which was a crisis for evangelicals, remember? To refresh your memory, it was only a crisis in the other direction, as evangelicals wondered whether he was even worth the candle. 

So I don't object to Trump being considered a Christian crisis, I really don't. Even when I defend him I worry that he might be William Jennings Bryan or something. Yet I resent that nothing from the left on the national stage is considered a spiritual crisis in legacy media.  Look at the list of current prominent liberals and ask how they are not a crisis for Christians? The liberals do have some who are not a crisis. Fully granted. But so what? I'm not even counting Graham Platner's behavior, because he is not making his Christian calling and moral standing an issue beyond I'm just a regular Joe who thinks billionaires are evil an issue.  Oh wait, I take that back.  He also hates Jews.  That used to count for something. I am not even counting the corruption against "Thous shalt not steal*" nor lying against False Witness. I am only looking at the Rings of Power who are gathering lesser powers unto them and wondering why the Atlantic Christians only care about the dwarven rings, and not the Elvish or Mortal Men rings. 

*"Thou shall not kidnap" is almost a better translation, and is at least a serious undertone in that commandment.

Closer to the Heart

My brother and BS King's husband were discussing Rush's current tour this afternoon. I knew them mostly by name, because I dropped out of listenig to popular music after graduating in 1975.  At first they sounded just not my sort of music, but afterlistening to a few I decided there is a lot of Steeleye Span in them.

 Were any of you fans?

When Did Modern English End?

 Colin Gurrie's actual framing was When Will Modern English End, but as he places it between 1900 and 1950 I changed it. We will have to find a new name for what we are speaking now, and I regret to say that Postmodern English does in fact describe what we have become.  There is no longer a single center or even two competing centers for English now, there are many Englishes. Pluricentrality is the term Gurrie uses. The other divisions of English have been because of historical events, the Norman Conquest and Caxton's printing press, and such are found for the first half of the 1900s as well. There were two world wars , which put English speakers in much greater contact with not only English in other countries, but the dialects within their own countries. There was a steady increase in oral communication at a distance: radio, telephone, movies, TV. This increased the colloquiality of English (and all languages, but they can make their own division decisions), the decreasing distance between written and spoken language. 

Elite Gatekeepers

Dan Williams at Conspicuous Cognition wrote Let's Not Bring Back the Gatekeepers over half a year ago, but I missed it.

 Put simply: Once established institutions lost the privilege to control the public conversation, they acquired an obligation to participate within it, which, so far, they have mostly failed to do.

It's a pretty good understanding of anti-elite sentiment from someone who only partly shares it. 

Clearing Out the Stragglers

People behave differently when they believe a task is nearly completed. We give one final push, one final try to get everything over the finish line. If it looks like its all over but the mopping up, we might relax a bit and make sure all is correct, no sloppiness, everything tied up in a bow.  But if we believe it might all slip away if we don't capitalise on this chance, we get a little crazy. We take risks, we pare everything down to essentials.  Get all the kids to high ground, even if some knees are skinned and tears shed in the process. Push through blizzard that last half hour, even when visibility is ridiculously bad.

If we are tired and have invested a lot of effort on this try we could even get a lot crazy. We play rough, snap at the others, refuse to listen. This where the idea that we will not rise to the occasion, we will revert to the level of our training comes from. We will be temporarily braver, but our independent judgment will be more random. 

This is part of the ongoing discussion about gun control. You will see statistics posted that Europe - by which they mean Western Europe - has far fewer gun deaths than the US, and also has stricter gun laws and less gun ownership. It is hoped that you will conclude without questioning that the latter has caused the former. In Europe, it didn't, it was the reverse. Violent crime had already diminished over the centuries, as Steven Pinker documents in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Access to "firearms," including bows and crossbows had been steadily restricted to property owners.  This reversed some as gradually less property was required for permission in the 17-1800s, but firing anything in an urban area was likely to be trouble. Only a Lord could do so. After the English Civil War there was real movement to keep the poor from having many weapons. Insurrection was seen as a problem, but so was poaching on the squire's land.

Notice the cultural distinction between hunting for food and hunting for sport, even way back when. You will see this again. 

Violent crime continued to go down, but in the 20s and 30s, because of the Bolshevik Revolution and the wide circulation of firearms after WWI, Europe got quite spooked about the poor owning guns, even though there was no crime increase generally. There were, however, separatist movements everywhere. Governments did not want them to have guns. 

After WWII Europeans moved to more clearly defined ethnic concentrations.  Germans went back to Germany, Slavs went home, minorities staked out concentrated areas. Jews were mostly gone. So within borders, violence went down even further. People told themselves they were sick of war, and guns, and violence - and that was not untrue.  Yet it obscured the fact that groups had huddled together more. Separatists wanted their own boundaries as well. There was a fondness for symbolic solutions, as there usually is. The UN would finally rid us of war.  Though mass shootings were rarer than in the 20s and 30s, each one shook a nation that now had better communication. The urge to clear out the stragglers by making guns ever-harder to acquire happened in nation after nation. 

As city people moved to suburbs, and rural people moved to cities, hunting for food became less and less common. Only the very poor in isolated areas had to do it, and it became more unfashionable, something that only older, uneducated people did.  The rich who shot wildfowl for sport became unfashionable for opposite reasons, and their shooting estates were resented. 

Thus the only people to want guns were the toffs, the ignorant poor, and the violent separatists. Criminals went to other weapons, mostly knives, from Norway to Italy.  Time to clear out the stragglers, and if we get a little crazy getting over that final hump, so be it. Okay, a lot crazy.  We're so close, mate. 

Yet notice that "crime" in the usual sense was almost none of the problem. That was the excuse. Changing the culture, punishing the unfashionable, hoping to contain the separatists were the real motives. OTOH Americans became rich more quickly, and upward-mobility fashionableness in the US and Canada was accelerated. 

In North America hunting for food versus sport was much less clear. More people hunted for food they needed, and even now hunt for food that they use. As a result, more of the population had parents or grandparents who hunted and remain sympathetic to the idea even if they don't hunt themselves. (Poor people still fished for dinner in the 1960s and still enjoy it even now. Trapping and harvesting are less common in all regions.)  But there are cultural parallels in the growing unfashionableness - either the wealthy with private preserves (there is a large one even in NH) or the less-educated rural folk. You don't want to be like them, ooh, ick. An argument still made frequently is that it is "gun culture" that is the problem in America. But gun culture has very low crime rates. Drug culture, territory culture, and revenge culture have high crime rates. 

Guys love to talk about gear, whatever gear they are using: tools, camping, fishing, woodworking, and guns are no exception.  Gun guys love talking about guns. To those overhearing who have convinced themselves that gun culture is what is responsible for school shootings, it seems frightening. My brother has repeatedly said after any shooting "I don't even want to live in a society where someone would want to have that many guns." When the incident is arson, or a bombing, or someone driving a van into a crowd he finds some other way to blame right-wingers.  But the main danger you have from gun guys, like any gear guys, is that they are going to bore you to tears if you don't share the interest. However, they more often vote the wrong way and just don't get it that it is their culture that is killing children...

So it's time to clear out the stragglers.  The proposed legislation we see over and over is directed at firearms that sound more dangerous, not ones that are. It is for making it hard for you to get bad things, because those are what make you a bad person.  If we can just get guns themselves to be hated as much as they should be those Others will become safer, less violent, and America will become a City of a Hill. Like, um, London. Or Paris. Or Belfast. 

 

Believing the Worst

 I continue to be troubled by the polling Grim revealed in A Britina looks at Texas Manhood. It's not good polling, as the "reader's context" inserts, but the fact that Platner's  numbers improved, especially among 18-29 y/o's after they had been told of his sexual scandals is concerning.  I commented twice at Grim's, where the tentative thinking is that Democrats are thrashing around trying to find their own Trump in order to attract some of that masculine energy. It could be. 

As it keeps coming back into my brain these last few days, I have another possible explanation. The more criticism of him comes out, and the worse it is, the more some people will conclude "they must must be so worried about him that they are making stuff up.  That's how the system works, dude." They are anti-Bayesian, in a way: the more evidence comes forward, the less they believe it.  If the Trumpists hate him so much, the more they must be just be exaggerating the meaning of a stupid tattoo he got as a kid, and trying to portray regular arguments with his ex-wife and his girlfriends as something dangerous. He's just a regular guy like me, and they fear that.  

We saw that from the other side.  I can recall telling people in 2016 "There's plenty to complain about with Trump that's true.  Why do they feel compelled to make stuff up?" His opponents kept escalating, many of them believing the claims, with a reasoning "His followers are insane!  They support him even when we have revealed that he poisoned the entire Commonwealth of Virginia!  I mean, what does it take?" But his supporters weren't entirely innocent in that.  They very quickly moved to disbelieving all of it reflexively. Foxhole friends are what all candidates want.  Anyone can believe you when you're innocent.  Only the true believers will stick with you when you are clearly guilty.  We are seeing that with Karmelo Anthony now.

Maybe I just expected better from the people of Maine. The evidence against Platner is solid and abundant, but the more it adds up, the more people are convinced that Susan Collins, of all people, is a dangerous Trumpist, and every true Mainer has to rally 'round her opponent.

Drawing the Bow

From Razib's interview with Leonidas Romanos-Davranoglou about Maniots, Greeks, Albanians and their deep ancestry this fascinating bit rolled past, that several Indo-European descendant cultures have the motif of the hero returning and being recognised only when he draws his bow. The story of Odysseus we know, but they also mentioned also Arjuna in the Mahabharata in India. Heck it's only 3000 miles as the crow flies.  I wish they had mentioned the others specifically. There was no known contact until later, strongly suggesting that both cultures drew the story from the steppe.

I'll have more on this interview just because it is interesting 

Twa Corbies

Another great example of how to reply when folks are hyperventilating about how unsuitable the lyrics to rap or heavy metal songs are for teenagers these days. They han't heard na-thin' yit. Like most traditional songs, it comes from there or there, with roots all the way back to there, but it is Scots dialect, a Germanic language unrelated to Gaelic. It is close enough to English that you should be able to work it out.  If something seems opaque, say it aloud and see if that helps. 

 

As I was walkin’ all alane
I heard twa corbies makkin a mane;
Tha tain unto the other ane say-o,
“Where sall we gang and dine the day-o,
Where sall we gang and dine the day?”

“It’s in ahint yon auld fail dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there-o
But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair-o,
Hawk and his hound and his lady fair.”

“His hawk is tae the huntin gane,
His hound tae bring the wildfowl hame;
His lady’s ta’en another mate-o
Sae we mun mak our dinner sweet-o,
Sae we mun mak our dinner sweet.”

“It’s ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane
And I’ll pike oot his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair-o
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare-o,
Theek our nest when it grows bare.”

“There’s mony a ane for him maks mane
But nane sall ken where he is gane;
And o’er his bones when they lay bare-o
The wind sall blaw for evermair-o,
The wind sall blow for evermair.”

Ogden Nash

 Behold the duck, it does not cluck

A cluck it lacks

It quacks

It is specially fond of a puddle or pond 

When it dines or sups

It bottoms ups 

Anadromous

Thinking about gender stereotypes and behavior because of the previous post, I thought of the analogy of anadromous fish, who move from sea water to freshwater in order to breed, and wondered if that could apply to male-female mating behavior. As with the gamma bias, men exaggerate both some masculine qualities and some feminine ones in order to look acceptable to women, and women do the same in return.  This runs deeper than agreeing to go camping while also looking fetching versus men engaging in dangerous displays while also being available for discussions about "where our relationship is going." Anything to do with courtship tends to have layers within layers.

I think I'll put this analogy about fish to the female substackers I read, who would do a better job with it than I would. 

Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta Bias

 I had not heard of these until today, though the concepts of the first ones are familiar to me.

Alpha bias - exaggerating differences between males and females based on stereotypes rather than data

Beta bias - minimising differences between males and females based on stereotyples

Androcentrism is usually discussed with these as a package. This is using males as the test subjects and assuming that the results apply equally to females without checking whether that is, in fact, true.

The concepts seem solid and understandable enough, but I find it amusing that the example taken for alpha bias is Freud's psychoanalytic framework, which is wrong on entirely other grounds, and the example for beta bias is Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development which is also wrong for reasons unrelated to gender.  The male-female misunderstandings of both do highlight the other problems and cause them to jump off the page, though.

Gamma bias  is a newer idea and suggests that both alpha and beta biases can both be operative at once: societies and even individuals can overemphasise gender stereotypes in some domains and downplay them in others.  This seems likely, and a step up from the usual internet oversimpolifications.  I thought of CS Lewis praising Joy Davidman for her masculine qualities and she retorting immediately whether he would be pleased to have her praise him for his feminine ones. He was man enough to report this to his audience.

Delta bias is also from 2020 and is a further refinement of gamma, of celebrating gender atypical behavior. The discussion at the link is interesting, and a more subtle way of looking at things

Delta bias can be illustrated in terms of the three male archetypes as defined by (M. Seager et al., 2014). Each of these archetypes can be shown in contemporary public media and political discourse to be simultaneously celebrated if exhibited by females but denigrated if exhibited by men.

That is, when females display stereotypical male behavior it is lauded, but when males display it, it is condemned. It is thus not the behavior which we approve of or disapprove of, but which sex is displaying it.  Once one has grasped it, the tendency is to say "Well of course," but a second reflection reveals that we don't acknowledge that often.  It is obvious enough to notice, but not dramatic enough to shout from the rooftops.

Punk and Hippy Cosplay

Quick observation on Punks and Hippies. 

An oversimplification, but worth considering.  Relatedly, look at how many Heavy Metal artists turned out to be golden retrievers at heart while the folkies were Dobermans. As I have written in other contexts, why would wolves hide in wolves' clothing?

Bee Gees Madrigal

 

Mail Order Annie

 Story song

 

Thinking Outside The Box

Thinking outside the box is overrated, I have claimed. I would refine that to saying that many people who claim to be outside the box and have others claim that, are just in a less-common box, usually smaller. They are just disruptive jerks, sarcastic and condescending. 

Real thinking outside the box is more valuable.  I should not have dismissed the concept on the basis of the people who claim to have the quality. The entertainment industry includes both.  The posers have some value in that domain, because they take other people's innovations that are really out there and start making them more cliched with their imitative nature. But someplace early in that cultural journey from incomprehensible to trite, there is a sweet spot that is both refreshingly new and understandable. 

Not What We Teach Them

Students don't learn what we teach them.  I have repeated this many times to conservatives who complain what kids these days are being taught in school.  It's not the curriculum, it's the culture. 

I have a friend who mentions every other time we get together that if people were given more and better science education they wouldn't believe so much crap. It sounds inviting, but there is ample contradictory evidence. This APA study shows that students still believe psychology myths immediately after completing introductory psych courses, even when those beliefs were actively corrected by the professors.  To be fair, anti-myth advocacy did seem to help a little, at least in the short term. What students learn in class does not seem to be the primary driver of their opinions. Opinions come from social networks.

I think the arrow of causality goes in the other direction. People who believe that experiments, logic,m and evidence can bring us closer to the truth will enter fields that adhere to that. Not foolproof by any means, but a tendency.

BTW I did not download the whole study so I am not sure what myth is being referenced some entries above.  Most of them I can tell, but some are ambiguous - many psychology professors believe in priming and implicit bias, for example, and those are myths - while others on the list don't give enough information.  It is interesting that females are more likely to believe the myths and keep believing them.  I choose to think this supports my theory of opinions having large social components.

Recent Links

 The Myth of Assimilation at Aporia.  We assert many things in America which are not true.

To begin with, the story rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home.

Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest. 

Maternal Mortality by Lyman Stone.  No other country measures this the same way we do.  Also...

 Here, you can see that mortality rates are extremely similar across groups, with perhaps two notable exceptions: women under 21, and women over 40. This tells us that most of the effect we saw above of lower mortality for pregnant women was a product of the age difference between pregnant and nonpregnant women— but not all of it!

Free Will is Undefeated A lot has been written.  Rob Henderson adds to it with some things I had not considered before. 

 Stuart Doyle offers a useful analogy that challenges this claim. Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom.

We have evolved to consciously hold multiple choices in our minds and pick one. Why would this happen if choice were not real? 

The Hidden Crimes of Parolees. Advocacy groups will tell you that they are re-incarcerated for "merely technical" violations like missing an appointment.  City Journal shows how this is not so.  The numbers are being jiggered.

How Protests Are Organised

 Data Republican describes the specific organisations and tactics of the interrelated protest groups.

And...quelle surprise, Open Society Foundation provided $5M of the $20M funding foundation across the network. Delaney Hall was suddenly called off - an informative story in itself - when Scott Bessent declared that funding foundations would be held liable if their grant recipients were violent.

Hero

 

Multicity Flights

We are going to Orkney in the fall, which is serviced only by Loganair. We are stopping in Reyjavik for a few days on the way home. There are just too many moving parts on these flights. A lot of the problem comes from airlines wanting the other legs of the flights and punishing you for going away.  Timing of flights is also ugly.

I am tempted to book each leg separately.  I expect to pay somewhat more, but is it insanely more? 

Bass Harbor Lighthouse

When we went to Acadia, we went down to Bass Harbor to see the frequently-photographed, frequently-painted lighthouse. I am quite sure I have seen one in impressionist style painted by a friend, or posted by a friend. Perhaps it was on Facebook.  I have feeling I have not seen it in the last year or two. The painting was less bright, likely at sunrise or sunset.

It is this angle and less than this much of the surrounding area as in this photo. This group goes to many of the internet places I go and includes some of my friends.  Does this look like any painting you are familiar with?  It's driving me nuts.

 

Things We Make

 One of my book groups is doing The Things We Make: The unknown history of invention. We are unexcited, but it has some value.  It has too many extraneous anecdotes, but they are at least entertaining, and I believe accurate. I think I can save you the trouble of learning its lessons though.  His main points are that processes and process improvements are as valuable as objects, and that the era of the solo inventor is over: Everything is interactive and cooperative now.

The latter is only half true.  David Foster remembered reading a similar claim sixty years ago - just before Apple and Microsoft took over the world. So don't sell the bicycle shop just yet, Orville.  With so much available online and via AI, we may instead be on the precipice of an era of solo inventors again.

Or not. As Yogi Berra supposedly said "Prediction is hard, especially about the future." 

The Baal Shem Tov and Purpose in Life

 Reposted from 2015

The story is told that the Baal Shem was granted the privilege of meeting in this life the person he would live next to in heaven.  He was directed to go into a tavern in a small village not all that far from his home, and saw an enormous glutton there, with copious food and drink before him. The Master of the Good Name watched from the next table, marveling at the amount of food the man swallowed, wondering what this meant. Perhaps it is a lesson from G-d that I should not disdain the pleasures of this world.  This man is clearly extreme in his earthly joy, but if he goes to heaven, G-d must approve. He sat beside him.

"You must be a wealthy man," he observed, "to afford to eat so well."

"I cannot afford what you see here," the glutton contradicted. "I will die in debt to the butcher, the tavern-keeper, and the greengrocer, and my family will be embarrassed by me."

"Your wife does not approve, then?" asked the Baal Shem.

"I have no wife," the fat man growled, barely pausing in his dinner. "I have not the time."

"Then you must greatly enjoy the pleasures of the table." the Besht concluded.

"I hate food," the man replied "and I hate drink as well. Every moment of my life is a weariness to me, always eating rich food and drinking good wine."

Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer sat silently for many minutes, observing, thinking. Finally, he gave it up and asked the man "Then I do not understand.  You hate food, yet you eat more than any three men I have known.  You hate drink, yet your glass is immediately empty and you call for more. What is the meaning of all this?"

The man shifted in his chair for a moment, as if to draw breath for another assault on the plates before him.  "There was a pogrom, and my father was brought before the great men of the district and set on fire as a torch to light their banquet. I was there and watched from the shadows."

The Baal Shem bowed his head slightly in sadness and softly said "And so a banquet of your own somehow erases this?"

"Not at all," said the impossibly fat man angrily. "He was a poor, skinny man, a sick chicken, who gave off almost no light, even in death. It was prophesied in a dream that I too would die in the same manner. When they burn me I will give off a light that will go on for days, glorious to behold."

Perceptions and Career Choice

From Slate Star Codex over a decade ago, concerning ability versus perception in career choices.

Okay. Imagine a study with the following methodology. You survey a bunch of people to get their perceptions of who is a smoker (“97% of his close friends agree Bob smokes”). Then you correlate those numbers with who gets lung cancer. Your statistics program lights up like a Christmas tree with a bunch of super-strong correlations. You conclude “Perception of being a smoker causes lung cancer”, and make up a theory about how negative stereotypes of smokers cause stress which depresses the immune system. The media reports that as “Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer, Stereotypes Do”. 

Relatedly, a recent discussion of Tradwives and career choices. N3 is on a roll lately.  I hope it continues.

Hidden in the Replication Crisis

 Nonreplicable Findings are cited more than replicable ones. My cynical self whispered that these are things that people want to be true, evidence be damned, because it would be so cool if it were.  I was therefore pleased to read in the next paragraph that Stewart-Williams calls it Steve's Law, that Boring findings and non-PC findings are more replicable than interesting or PC ones.* The paper's own abstract says something similar

Abstract:  We use publicly available data to show that published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals that fail to replicate are cited more than those that replicate. This difference in citation does not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. Only 12% of postreplication citations of nonreplicable findings acknowledge the replication failure. Existing evidence also shows that experts predict well which papers will be replicated. Given this prediction, why are nonreplicable papers accepted for publication in the first place? A possible answer is that the review team faces a trade-off. When the results are more “interesting,” they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility.

*Also at the link are odd studies showing that birds are more afraid of women than men - currently unexplained. 

Links from 2015

 Capgras Delusion. Definition here. Very nice guy, BTW. I found he was from near my neighborhood and we had childhood friends in common. Complete remission of symptoms on a little medication, and kept asking us how he could have ever developed such a crazy idea as that his identical twin brother had been replaced by an imposter.

Myths About Scandinavia 

 Unexpected Reunion

Learning While Speaking  I teach myself things all the time

Prayer Breakfast  President Obama reminded those gathered that Christians have violence in their history.  Governor Jindal answers that we need no longer worry about the dangers of Medieval Christians but have serious danger from Muslims now.

I Got You Babe

Kyle's newish girlfriend was over yesterday for dinner with we other nine local family members, and we facetimed with both Norway and Alaska. I noticed immediately that she was dressed like Cher - 1960s era, and mentioned it. She also has the long dark hair, though not the long bangs, and not the trademark shaking hair away. It's a fun look.

 

It is immediately clear that she was the better singer and performer even then, but she was always quick to praise him and defend him, even after their divorce.  He was the better manager and businessman; he had made them famous. Looking into it, that is likely true. He had them quickly throw together an album after this song hit #1, producing it, writing some of the songs, choosing and securing permission for the others. He pushed for them to get the TV show.

Political Breakups

Via Steve Stewart-Williams, Political Breakups: Interpersonal consequences of polarisation. By Mertcan Gungor and Peter H Ditto.  In current America, political polarisation is great enough that people will break off relationships. This is most commonly a split with friends, followed by family, coworkers, and romantic relationships. Democrats are more likely to have been involved in a split than Republicans - 50% more over four studies with Independents in between. They are more likely the initiators. One study showed a lifetime total of 45% of Democrats parting from others, usually a friend.

I can imagine a couple of people I know immediately saying that this is because Democrats care more about moral issues and/or that Republicans get more obnoxious about their politics so people will obviously want to get away from them. I regard both as untrue and excuses, but you know, they do logically hold together.  Either of those could be a reason, at least for some individuals. Nothing logically excludes that, and it is tough to measure motives from the outside, especially as we are not always aware of our own motives.

The Guilt That Isn't

David Foster and I have both posted on "The Dangers of National Repentance" before. Written by CS Lewis in early 1940, it created a surprising amount of fallout for a nation in a war that was almost universally thought necessary.  Brenton Dickieson covers a good deal of the background and discussion over at A Pilgrim in Narnia, including the full text as it appeared in the newspaper. 

David has updated his thoughts over at his new Substack in The Guilt That Isn't, including a reference to Gad Saad's discussion of Suicidal Empathy. 

 Many “progressives”–and not just the religious ones–have uncritically and without reflection adopted the ideas and values of “their own age and class”–and, while doing so, they have congratulated themselves on their courage and independence of thought. Thus, they can enjoy a great feeling of righteousness without running the risk of condemnation by those whose opinions really matter to them.  

But really, you can skip all our words and go straight to Lewis's. 

Changes in Religious and Scientific Belief

I have conquered my addiction to reading and posting on Quora, but commenter Earl Wajenberg (Wind off the Hilltop) still has his.  Occasionally the fit takes him, as it does the Tooks from time to time, and he answers a question that deserves a solid answer, mostly because it should never have been asked. I thought the analogies had good teaching properties.

How do scientific theories evolve over time, and why do scientists accept those changes more easily than religious belief changes?

Science is a method of investigation, so its findings will keep changing as investigation continues.

Religion is not a method of investigation. It is a way of reacting to the awesome and the ultimately important. Therefore, it is all about the thing it is reacting to. Change the understanding of the religious object and you change the religion.

Change the understanding of the object of scientific investigation and it’s just time for another round of peer review (usually, unless you have a real paradigm-breaker).

If you’re researching a historical figure and you start by assuming she was born in England and named Mary Johniston, née Smithers, then learn that she was actually born in Austria as Elizabet Maria von Uberwalden, married at age 16 to Karl von Schadenfreude, ran away to England at age 18, took the name Mary Smithers, managed to drop her accent entirely, but never quite got around to finishing the divorce proceedings before (oops) marrying Johniston and having three kids—well, all that is very interesting, but not nearly as upsetting as if you are Johniston and discover all this about your not-quite-lawfully-wedded wife when she has a little too much wine on your tenth wedding anniversary.

The historian is like the scientist. The husband is like the worshiper.

I’m not saying that all religion is or should be a matter of having “a personal relationship with Jesus” or whoever the deity is, but a religion is about your soul or destiny or purpose, or the souls or survival of your people, so it takes a lot less kindly to tinkering than almost any change to a piece of science. Changes to science will change how you understand something, and maybe change how you understand almost everything you’re interested in, but it has to reach a rare fever pitch in a few deeply dedicated individuals before scientific changes keep them awake all night biting the pillow.

Concrete example: There is a movement in modern conservative Christianity saying, “For centuries, people have been concentrating on the issue of ‘How do I get to Heaven’ when really the issue should be ‘How do I advance the Kingdom of God.’” There is also a long-standing effort in theoretical physics to extend the standard model of particle physics so as to explain a number of loose ends and puzzles. People are going to have a lot more emotion and argument about Heaven and the Kingdom of God than about super-symmetry and loop quantum gravity, though no doubt the latter will be intensely important to some specialists and of considerable interest to a number of their colleagues. 

Recent Links

 The second malaria vaccine. Podcast with trnscript of what vaccine development looks like from the inside. "The reality of this problem is the hardness of it is set by nature, and nature is a vicious test setter." That is more than a cute throwaway line.  Vaccine objectors will talk about preferring natural solutions, but one problem is that these are natural diseases, and nature is not kind. Only people in prosperous places protected from nature think nature is kind. People who live with it know that it is powerful, sometimes beautiful, but dangerous. From Works in Progress

Also from Works in Progress: Review:Recession by Tyler Goodspeed 

 At first glance, Goodspeed’s target is the popular understanding of a boom-and-bust cycle. Consider his vivid account of the crisis of 1873. Both popular and scholarly histories have attributed this recession to railway mania and the collapse of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Goodspeed instead points out the devastating role of a surprise that had nothing to do with economics or economic policy: the great grasshopper plagues of 1873-1876, during which a single locust swarm covered an area larger than California and devastated the very regions the railroad was supposed to open to European settlers...This is why recessions remain essentially unpredictable. Any perceived regularity is likely to be a statistical illusion.

 Why Did the Murders Stop In Baltimore? The information has been out there a long time, including Grim's discussion here, that homicide is is a problem in very few neighborhoods and even a very few people. 

Baltimore follows this pattern. In Baltimore’s Western District, 72 percent of murders between 2015 and 2021 were attributable to a small number of men, mostly organized into gangs. The same analysis estimated that the area’s gang members accounted for just 2 percent of the district’s population but as much as 75 percent of its shootings and homicides. 

The Cost of Longevity  Cremieux Recueil.  I don't know if this level of advancement is true, but pretend it is.  More than anything, I wonder it will mean for church life and family life.

 If we have a revolution in everything related to what I’ve listed so far, we conquer the travails of living. We become effectively immune to our environments: an end to infections, an end to degradation from plaque accumulation and the stress of glycemic spikes, a practical end to withering. It also means an end to wellness culture—no regimented dieting required, no extra benefits from structured exercise programs and retreats. You’ll be able to drink and party and you’ll be no worse off for having done it.

Rag Doll

My son in Norway has a Rag Doll cat. I am not up on cats and had never heard of it. But I sent him and his fiancee this cover of the Four Seasons songs.

 

Best Choice

When asked what book he’d select if he was to be stranded on a desert island, G.K. Chesterton famously quipped: Thomas’s Guide to Practical Shipbuilding.

Golden Age of Jazz

 The 1958 Esquire Photo Shoot in Harlem.  I am not knowledgeable. Less than half the names in the photos were known to me, including none of the women. But it was still fun to poke around with it.

Accuracy Vs Sycophancy

 Training Language Models to be Warm can Reduce Accuracy and Increase Sycophancy. Nature, via Gurwinder. 

 Artificial intelligence developers are increasingly building language models with warm and friendly personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy and companionship1. Here we show how this can create a significant trade-off: optimizing language models for warmth can undermine their performance, especially when users express vulnerability. 

Well that's ugly.  Although maybe as I get older I will want more and more sycophancy. 

Update: There are ways to adjust the settings to stress accuracy at the expense of friendliness. Just like with people.

The Lament of the Sole Survivor

Colin Gurrie has done a moving adaptation/translation of 40 lines of Beowulf that occur about three-quarters of the way through. The old man is not named, nor mentioned in any other part of the poem, but Gurrie thinks the lament is the key to understanding the main theme: strength inevitably declines into nothingness.

He’s lived too long. He’s sure of that now.

Sea spray flecks his cheek. He’s close to where he found the barrow. Just one mile more, although a mile for an old man bearing a heavy load is no small distance.

He utters no word of complaint — who would he say it to, anyway? — and keeps going.

It wasn’t always like this. Once it was good. He was young and the world seemed to be young with him. The hoofbeat of horses, the screech of hawks flying overhead, the sound of the harp, he can hear them all still when he closes his eyes.

And then there is nothing. Not even the servants who used to polish his armour. They’re all gone now. Taken by death, or bloody battle.

And yet some things still remain. The golden cups, the sword that once won him glory. Things. Just things. There’s no one left to swing the sword, no one to carry the cup.

He has lived too long. A warrior is not meant to walk bent with age. He should have died before, a good death on the field of battle. And yet he lived, when better men did not.

He carries his bag to the barrow. The mound is empty now, but he will fill it. He’ll fill it with a lifetime of treasure, an immense inheritance he would sooner bequeath to his son or his sister-son. But they are gone, so it goes to the earth, the mother of us all.

He stands before the mound, and places the sack down. He takes out a single cup and holds it up before the barrow, as if he were drinking her health. Then he speaks his word of bequest.

“Hold these treasures, Earth, now that men no longer can.” He looks at the cup, and down at the treasures. “These things once came from you. So have them again. The bright helm will tarnish. The sword will grow dull. The coat of mail that even iron could not bite will be, at last, devoured by rust.”

He places each item carefully in the barrow, giving each its place of honour. And, as he sets them carefully down under the earth, he says the names of the friends who once carried them, of those who lived not nearly long enough.

The wind carries his words into the far distance. Whether anyone heard them, not even a wise man can say.

The essay about reading Beowulf also links back to something of the mythic part of its origin-story, the Ash-lad (cf the name Cinderella, a female variant of the story), the unnoticed, uninspiring, often third son who goes on to great deeds. The modern poet Robert Bly took up the theme in Iron John, explaining why this still appeals in our culture, whether about males of females. It is about coming-of-age, whether one is Harry Potter, Anne-of-Green Gables, or a Disney Princess. We are all the orphan or third son making our way in the world when we start out. Let's see what we might make of ourselves.

The Beowulf poet sees it all as a long decline, but we still must take up the task. The Giants will defeat the Gods in the Gotterdammerung, yet I am still on the side of the gods and will fight on.

Electric Fish Treatment

They are apparently good for treating pain, even chronic pain, and this was know to some civilisations thousands of years ago.

Anteros, a freed slave of the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, had decided it was a good day for a walk on the beach. Damp sand stuck to his bare feet as he walked, probably deep in great thoughts about matters that continue to remain a mystery, when he felt shock travel from his foot to the rest of his body, knocking him out of breath. The source of the shock, upon close inspection, was a live torpedo ray.

“Although he initially suffered an excruciating cramp, the pain he had long endured from what might have been gout miraculously disappeared,”

Migraine and epilepsy were also treated with it. 

You're Gonna Have to Serve Somebody

See Christopher B's first comment under my recent post Can you control your own beliefs? 

Everyone is putting up their Bob Dylan posts this week, so I suppose I should have a run at it too. Simple and profound. Though some of your will may be free, you will obey forces without thinking about it. You will serve somebody. It is best to at least be aware who that is rather than kidding yourself.

 

Volunteering For Auschwitz

Mark Stoler over at Things Have Changed updates and reposts the story of Captain Witold Pilecki , who volunteered to go to Auschwitz when it first opened in 1940 to learn what it was and gather intelligence for the Polish Home Army. He was there for two-and-a-half years coming close to death twice, before deciding to escape and bringing out his plan for liberating the camp.

It took four months for Pilecki to cautiously make his way across Poland, finally reaching Warsaw and the Home Army.  To his bitter disappointment, the proposal for the attack was not endorsed by the Home Army leadership which did not have the arms, ammunition and transport to carry it out.  The Poles made an attempt to gain logistical support for the operation from the British, including bombers and planes to carry airborne troops.  They sent Pilecki's 11 page report to the British who dismissed it, believing the report to be a gross exaggeration, and declining to help. 

That is a common story of disbelief in the West, not crediting the reports brought from Germany and especially the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe. There is ample evidence of real information making it to the highest levels of power in Britain and America, especially from the other David Wyman , the Holocaust scholar from UMass Amherst. But whether people "knew" is a slightly different question.  Our ability to not see and not believe what we do not wish to be true is present at every point in our "dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime." The first courage is to see oneself. Pilecki himself wrote in his report "Camp was a proving ground of character. Some - slithered into a moral swamp.  Others - chiseled themselves a character of the finest crystal."

In the Battle for Warsaw Pilecki was captured and sent to a German POW camp.  He was liberated in 1945 but went immediately to the Polish Guard in Italy to fight the communists.  He was secretly executed after a  show trial in 1948. 

... a former prison guard who watched over Witold during his imprisonment approached the Pilecki family, telling them "I want to help you because your father was a saint  . . . Under his influence, I changed my life.  I do not harm anyone anymore." 

 

Stone and Hanania

I have followed the Fertility Crisis a fair bit over the last decade, before it became the hot topic it has become more recently. Thee is a lot of discussion about why women aren't having children, why men aren't getting married, whether it's too expensive, too socially unpopular, with twenty theories for each of these. I have engaged in the discussion and highlighted a few possibilities myself.  It has started to become like the discussions of "what should we do with the schools?" or "why aren't people going to church anymore?" Anyone whoever had an education or was ever in a church thinks they are an expert with a unique perspective which they should feel free to pronounce on.

I don't mean to sound entirely negative about that. There's no obvious answer and the discussion can be interesting.  Also, it's got lots of numbers and graphs.  I think on all such discussions I get quickly exasperated with the people who don't bring their own numbers and graphs or worse, won't look at anyone else's because they have a Theory, dammit. We don't need no steenking graphs.  We have the answers.   

There have been a couple of recent additions to the discussion which have caused me to step back and think "Maybe I have been missing a basic point.  Let's look at this."

Lyman Stone, whom I have have admiration for, thinks there is a huge flaw in the numbers in that the decrease in children per woman measures the number of births rather than the eventual completed family size. There is still a decrease below the level of replacement, but the overall drop is only about half as large, or even a third as large, as historical levels up until very recent times. Babies and young children died a lot before reaching an age at which they could reproduce.* I have linked to him putting forth variations of this for a couple of years now.  He and others (Ruxandra Teslo, Cremieux Recueil) have thus thought that a few moderate solutions might be enough to turn the tidce, rather than trying to find the big societal makeover that is going to fix everything. Stone just updated and discussed with new numbers from Turkey, which has been a controversial discussion in the last decade.

 

Next, I have just read Richard Hanania taking a 30,000-ft view and wondering if there actually is a problem at all.  For what human beings want out of life, not only individuals but entire societies seem to manage their fertility rates moderately well, and have throughout history. Because this is against a background of constant catastrophe, how automatically we do this has been obscured. But one of the things that humans want is some respite, some alone time. In most eras it is hard to afford even a little of it, but as prosperity has increased we can afford to have more - and maybe that's fine. I should point out that I started by liking Hanania, grew tired of him because of his reluctance to engage opposition fairly, but have come back on board a bit this year.  He is quite intelligent and an original thinker.  I just wish...well, never mind.  that should be enough.  I don't have to live with the guy after all. 

*It helps to bear this in mind when we look back (or abroad) at societies where women have children at what we would consider horribly young ages. Life was uncertain for the entire tribe. Catastrophes could reduce population quickly.  When a man had enough resources to support children he was expected to take a wife, or more than one.  When a girl was old enough to conceive, she was expected to. The cultural excuses arrangements for that were varied, but catastrophe was the underlying problem which had to be repeatedly solved. The increased prosperity of Western Europe allowed both sexes to marry later or not at all. (See our old friend the Hajnal Line.) As the rest of the world gets prosperous, they are doing the same.

Can You Control Your Own Beliefs?

A guest post at N3 discusses how much of our belief system is installed at least in broad outline by circumstances and genetics.  I have my suspicions.

Wherever the climate is hot and humid - from Singapore to the DRC - people tend to be both more xenophobic and more conformist than the global average. Why? Because hot and humid climates are rich in pathogens like bacteria, fungi and parasites. The locals’ wariness of strangers comes from a heightened fear they might bring infection. And their learned conformity is a form of behavioural immunity to ensure nobody deviates from the practices they know will keep them safe from contagion.

I'll bet there is something to it, but my reflexive association with conformist is Swedish. People from Appalachia are traditional, but are they conformist? And they are in a different contagion environment than humid port cities of the South anyway.  Is there anything we can legitimatelyn measure, here? I kept thinking of exceptions, and lack of clarity about definitions of things like conservative or religious. So I am bringing it up here as a thought exercise.  What language we learn as a child is entirely circumstance. But what things are fully under our control, or even partly?  We think of ourselves as free agents, and dislike ceding any territory to those who would point to aspects of ourselves we seem to have absorbed without due reflection.

Fifteen years ago I did an extended, nay overextended series May We Believe Our Thoughts? (MWBOT) There are links to research and essays on the topic by people smarter than me if you want a deep dive here.

This seems like the sort of topic where even if you are self-deluded your personal anecdotes are likely to be mines of information for the rest of us. 

Creative Problem Solving

Decades ago I took a once-a-week inservice for 6 weeks on creative problem-solving. I remember little of it, but the one thing that has stuck with me was "Imagine that the problem is ten times worse. Then imagine that it is ten times less. This usually brings clarity."  It did then, as I tried to address a personal problem in that way and hit upon the idea of leaning into something rather than trying to ignore it. Worked.  Usually, when one asks "What if this were only one-tenth as big a problem?  What if my debt were a hundred dollars instead of a thousand?  What if I had to work two hours of mandated overtime instead of twenty?" it is clear we would just ignore it: Yes it's unfair, but not worth my time.  

Thus it was gratifying to learn from Real Clear Politics that this was a favored strategy of General Eisenhower. (Instapundit CWCID) Whether he applied that as President Eisenhower I don't know, but I do know that the complaint against him was running the country from the golf course - which looks remarkably wise at the moment.  Cal Coolidge and the ten boulders coming down the mountain toward you and all that. Ike probably exaggerated and over-intervened in Suez, but underestimated how much political hay would be made in his second midterms from a brief, shallow recession. That is too limited a data set for me to draw conclusions.

I seldom remember the strategy now, because problems are manageable. Yet it would likely do me good to list them and run the exercise.  

Barocha

I have asked for this to be played as the benediction at my funeral. 

 

Let me know if they forget

Blessed

Blessed are the peace-makers, not the peace-lovers. I am not taking that thought any further, only reminding you that the two are not synonymous and may even be opposed at times. Look first into what it might mean for individual conflicts, tempted by no thoughts of politics. Only then should you very tentatively wonder "How shall we then live" in a corporate and even national sense.

I grew up UCC in the Vietnam era.  I never heard anyone suggest it meant anything but being antiwar. I now think it is a great evil to narrow it that way, suggesting that our clergy was more into feelings and social acceptance among the literary class than Bible application.  I have since lived among those who leaned so far out on the other side of the boat that they fell into the sea there. 

Hilbert Table

James speculates that a Hilbert Table might be just the thing for a banquet in heaven. I knew it must have something to do with David Hilbert the eminent turn-of-the-century mathematician, but had to look it up. 

"...as many dimensions as guests, everybody sitting next to Jesus and kitty-corner with every other guest." 

Gilbert and Sullivan Festival

The New England Gilbert and Sullivan Society will be doing all thirteen operettas September 4-7 in Concord, MA.  Tracy and I will be attending at least one, TBD. We have friends from college whose oldest daughter will be singing.

Tricolon

 The tricolon is a rhetorical device of three parallel words or phrases that express related ideas.  We love them.  They just sound better.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The few, the proud, the Marines.

It works in 60s pop music, too

 

How It's Played

As I understand it, Iran is one of those countries that leaks its wish list to compliant media sources, claiming that the US has agreed to those terms.  They can then claim that Trump is backing out of a done deal.  It apparently works very well on the American press. 

Text vs Image in Palestine

Maarten Boudry writes a long, evidence-filled essay about the Gaza Genocide, They Don't Believe It, Either. There are some still pictures with text in them, and some fully-labeled graphs.  The one moving picture is a 90 minute video of a guy talking into a microphone. So the excitement isn't exactly jumping off the page. There must be some of his opponents who would work their way through the whole thing and attempt to answer it in kind, but I'm not recalling any in the popular discussion. 

They are competing on different playing fields. 

Relatedly, there is a world of difference between saying that Israel has done some terrible things and someone should stop it vs claiming that the Jews are responsible for all our problems. Classic Motte-and-Bailey argument.

What We Do With Our Time

I recommend pausing it early and often to look at the categories and absorb them.

Doing nothing

Meeting with friends

Cooking 

 First radio cleared everything else out, then TV.

The Starving Children of Utopia

 The refusal to see or remember the Holodomor  by Elana Gomel

 When I was a child, we lived near the central train station in Kyiv. I love trains, and the station, with its beautiful 19th-century industrial design, was my favorite. But my grandmother seemed to be ambivalent about it, even though we had to take a train to our dacha quite often. When I asked her about it, she said, “I remember the women.”  

Biblical Philologist

 Sent to me moments ago.  I could not wait to share it with you.

 

College Socialism

 Why College Turns People into Socialists.  To be technical, it should be "How" college turns people into socialists, but it's an otherwise accurate essay. I am going to send it out to some people I know for their reactions.

 The subsidization of student clubs poses similar problems: one’s tuition funds all student organizations regardless of that group’s productivity or ideology. When I was enrolled at Columbia, for instance, my tuition money funded “Students for Justice in Palestine”—a group that periodically declared their desire to murder me—and as a tuition-paying student, I had no option to opt out of supporting the group’s atrocities. Similarly, my tuition funded many clubs with little use to the college “society” at large. Several clubs did nothing but throw parties all semester. Under a capitalist system, such defunct or unpopular organizations would not stand a chance, but at a university, all student clubs, kept alive through shared funding, survive regardless of popularity and functionality.

Habits For America in an Age of Disruption

 Ben Sasse's speech this year at the Manhattan Institute's Hamilton Award Dinner

 Americans are going to need better habits than we have right now to help our people, our citizens, and our republic thrive. Because virtue has always been at the heart of what it takes to keep a republic. To borrow Lincoln’s metaphor, it’s the golden apple in the silver frame. Politics, the silver frame, is the stuff we do to secure our rights through ordered liberty, but life—the daily stuff that’s made up of community, affections, and habits—that’s the golden apple at the center.

 It put me in mind of CS Lewis's quote in Mere Christianity 

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

Please Mr. Postman

When phones were shared, voicemail was unknown, and calls were expensive, families had 1.2 cars, and your girlfriend was so far away, you really could make your whole day revolve around when the mail came. Daily despair. Has she ceased to love me? Was it something I said?

 

Data Republican Part II

 America250: The "Fourth Founding" Part 2, The Standing Army, Named.

 

I have said before that in the mouths of Democrats, democracy seems to mean "us being in control." If that seems unfair, take this example as evidence. The use in this context is much closer to my newly-recognised definition that to what we were taught in civics class. It is not merely an anti-Trump well-he's-so-horrible attitude either. This has been said as far back as Tom Dewey, and including such figures as Bob Dole and Mitt Romney.

The Strategies:

#1   Enable Responsible Conservatives to Vote for Democracy

#2   Reduce Social Demand from the Right. (means "status")

#3    Engage the Left (What could be more neutral than that?)

#4    Build the Movement (More NGO penetration)

#5    Accountability 

Recent Links

 Where is Teacher's Union Money Going? 

The report, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), Gevura Fund, and Rutgers University, among others, found that of the NEA’s $450 million annual disbursement budget from fiscal year 2025, less than $46 million, or 10 percent, was spent on activities directly representing the union’s constituents.

Initial impressions reading the Qur'an (instead of about the Qur'an) 

Fifty years ago Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood, by Jo Freeman in Ms. magazine* 

Lyman Stone on declining long-term fertility rate being exaggerated Number of live births was much higher than overall child survival rates until around 1920, when they matched up in the West. So graphs that show only the former give an appearance of decline in family size that is much less than we think. In fact, he thinks the current decline which has everyone so worried is more fixable than we think. This is counter to much I have been reading.

*linked in in a substack article By Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warbythat sees continuing behavioral differences in men and women from the y-chromosome bottleneck 7,000 years ago. Among hunter-gatherers, males and females reproduce in similar numbers.  With the rise in agropastoralism (think herders, Steppes, African cattle raids), the percentage of males reproducing dropped to about 6% that of females. 

 The development of farming and then animal herding greatly increased the number of humans—which continued to have evolutionary consequences for our species—and created productive assets (farms and animal herds) worth fighting over. Successful male teams (typically organised as clans) wiped out unsuccessful male teams and took their women as spoils...This is why young schoolboy sporting teams regularly crush adult women’s national teams in team sports such as soccer. It is not that schoolboys have the strength advantage over women associated with adult men (they are often not particularly advantaged around age 14-15). It’s simply that human males are much more likely to “get” teamwork at a visceral level.

 

Journalism

“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.” — Christopher Hitchens 

Old Guys At Denny's

 Old Guys At Denny's at 6AM

Having Better Day Than You Could Ever Dream Of

From the Babylon Bee

The closest Denny's is in Nashua, and I have had distressing experiences with the fish at Denny's while traveling. But Denny's is not the point, that's a stand-in for a thousand Chatterbox Cafes and Betty's Diners in the country. 

We have Pub Night at Ollie's, and it's not as great as above (because less than 35 years) and not as elevated as the Inklings (though we did did have a significant harumphing about the filioque clause), but it's got some similar elements. Wives in general may be disparaged, but never in specific. My St. Paul's group, and our 50-year "Bible Study," since we stopped studying the Bible and divided by sexes to talk twenty years ago are similar experiences. 

Start now, guys, to have as many years as possible under your belt when you retire.  

Why Costco Pays $30/hr and Target Doesn't

 Why Costco Pays $30/hr and Target Doesn't  Justin Kuiper explains it.  At least one DIL shops at Costco even though it is over 50 miles RT with tolls. I factor that in as a shopping cost and so have never been, no matter how good the deals are. (But ridiculously, I consider 10 miles RT 5x/week to other grocery stores to be just old-guy entertainment. Gets me out of the house...I was going to the rail trail anyway...I'll combine it with other errands...excuse #4...excuse#5...)

But it's just interesting to know about SKU's and business models and why fewer varieties of ketchup are better.

Data Republican Reports

The Fourth Founding: How the unelecteds plan to rewrite the Constitution. (Part I) 

If people keep adding "national treasure" after her pseudonym, maybe it will become a formal title.

In 2013, 9 Foundations responded to a speech made at the Independent Sector Annual Conference, "Our Common Purpose." The goal: citizens’ dialogues that would produce “a broadly shared agenda of national priorities” by 2016. They didn't do that.  They talked a lot to each other but produced no report. 

In 2018 a Republican billionaire asked the American Academy of Arts and Sciences a question and funded a foundation to answer it. “The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship was established in the spring of 2018 at the initiative of then Academy President Jonathan Fanton and Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., Chair of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century.” 

You will notice these two things are not the same. "An agenda of national priorities" is not "what it means to be a good citizen." But the foundations kept giving each other money and people and in 2020 renamed the commission "Our Common Purpose." 

What came out was not a civics pamphlet. The commission produced 31 recommendations including proposed constitutional amendments, expansion of the U.S. House by at least fifty seats, eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, ranked-choice voting nationwide, and a universal expectation of national service. The question about good citizenship had become a structural blueprint for a different republic. 

A lot of people like one or more of these 31 recommendations, but they cannot in any way be called a broadly shared agenda of national priorities - especially as there had been no "citizen dialogues" to produce it. Rockerfeller Brothers Fund president Stephen Heinitz, who had made the original "Our Common Purpose" speech, was by now president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and saying that "the nation-state system and representative democracy are showing signs of of being obsolete." 

Well, maybe so, but who died and made you king? I find this deeply concerning. 

Update: The foundations are Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Kellogg, Open Society Foundations, Carnegie Corporation, Hewlett Foundation, Packard Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation. What did you know about each before this moment?

Rise in Testosterone

I thought I had been hearing for years that testosterone levels in American men were falling dangerously.

I guess not