Recent Links

I have never heard the term "protected species" applied to Black people, in or out of sports. The anger against Brondello sounds like insensitivity to Australian immigrants to me. This has the perverse effect of evidencing that Black women in the WNBA are a protected species.

Stochastic Terrorism is applied rather conveniently. 

“Stochastic terrorism” is the idea that if you spread fear and mistrust against a target, then eventually people will commit violence against that target, and it will be your fault, even if you never specifically said the words “you should commit violence”.  

...The “stochastic terrorism” concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. “Stochastic terrorism” mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you’re too blinkered to realize that.

CS Lewis Center Summer Schedule 

Cremieux on Data Center resource use. 

True Crime is tending in one direction, according to bsking 

 

New World Record in the Mile

I grew up in an era when the mile record was broken by a little bit every few years and expected that to be normal forever. But that didn't happen, and the old record has stood since 1999.

The pacers just barely did their job - or one might even say that they didn't, as they dropped out a touch behind the record pace. If you aren't used to watching the lights at the runners' feet they display the world record pace, so you can tell at a glance if they are on it or not.  For a while on the third lap, they were not.

 

Kibbutzim

When Israel was founded, there was a culturally powerful Kibbutz Movement, which mixed socialism and Zionism and young people lived communally. It was primarily agrarian at first, as utopian communities often are. These days most people getting back to the land are doing it just because they like it, but in the 50s-70s at least, that life was pursued as having a special holiness of its own. 

The socialists now reject the Zionists with an intense hatred.  I wonder if any of that comes from seeing them as defectors from socialism.  Israel has an extensive social safety net, but it is also prosperous and free market. 

It may be only indirectly related or even coincidental.  But betrayers of the cause are treated with implacable anger. 

Golf

 No one ever got better at their job after taking up golf.  My source for this did point out some exceptions.

But You Knew That

 From Ryan Burge, who has a current primary focus on religious statistics.

I am unsurprised by this. I suspect it is the same in my own small denomination, the ECC.

Beggars Have Persistence

When we were in Chester, England over twenty years ago the was a young man on a main street trying to get passersby to purchase one of his socialist tracts. He had a standard patter in a heart-wrenching voice. Every few seconds he would interject "Please!" in a voice that went right through me.  It was hard to turn away. I had not heard anything like it, even in Romania, and I realised how professional beggars in very poor countries must have to sound because of the competition. One has to reach into primal places where we have few defenses to cut through the noise of the market. (BTW, his voice creates empathy in us. We have discussed that before.)

Similarly, when I was alone in Budapest in 2001 there was a man seated on the street in the cold, shabby and miserable. He said nothing but his sign (in English) was imploring, and nothing about himself: Food my little dog, with a dachshund beside him. The dog has died of old age inf nothing else by now, but I am still sad to think of it.

In Till We Have Faces, When Orual describes hearing Psyche weep, I thought first of the sound of the man in Chester, then of the appearance of the dog and man in Budapest.  I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her.   

Psyche's sadness was real, and I presume the Hungarian's was. 

The voice of the man in Chester hawking pamphlets was likely an affectation, either discovered or learned with practice.  Yet still frighteningly powerful.  I can hear it still. I knew that there was no discussing or arguing about socialism with the man, nor even talking about some other subject.  This was his job, he depended on it in some way, and would do it regardless. News that a war was begun or a war was over would not affect that cry.

I think of that when I see the social media photos of Gaza with lettering plastered on them, of "70,000 innocent Palestinians killed. Send our NGO money. "  No correcting of the number would matter. No questioning of the innocence would dent. "Famine in Gaza is at catastrophic levels. Send us money to give them food." That Hamas is breaking into the storage, stealing the food and feeding themselves first while starving their own people would fall on deaf ears. 

It's their job. 

Hit The Road, Jack

 

Capitalism Vs Status Quo

 I am not usually a Matt Yglesias fan, but there are worse thinkers out there, and he's not stupid. He makes an observation that instantly makes sense to me, that young people complaining about capitalism are not only not talking about a formal system of private property rights and reinvestment, not even about a general free market, which is the term I have preferred to use for clarity. They mean, with vague hand-waving, "the status quo."  That instantly rang true about the knuckleheads I read on social media complaining how capitalism clearly doesn't work, and impervious to statistics and reasoning about it.  They are talking about something else and don't know it.

Over at Slow Boring he put up To save capitalism we need radical land-use reform. (From Emma Camp at the WSJ Free Expression, whose own article Capitalism Gets a Bum  Rap is excellent as well. It's about refrigerators!)

 If you’re young, your experience of the economy is dominated by the housing situation. And the housing situation in the United States is not very good. So I think for most young people “capitalism” means something like “the status quo system,” and they perceive the status quo system to be pretty bad because they are super exposed to the single most dysfunctional element of the status quo economic system.

Now, in my capacity as a lawyer for capitalism, I am happy to point out that not only is housing the most dysfunctional element of the status quo economy, but it’s also the element that is run in the least capitalistic way.

Far and away the number one thing that could improve young people’s living standards in America would be to embrace more market-oriented housing policies.

I might even get suckered in to making myself miserable for a few days by responding to them again, by beginning with "What you are describing is not capitalism, but the status quo in America, which is a mix of socialist, free market, bureaucratic, and sometimes corrupt elements. The free market parts are actually the parts that are working the best." It won't help, but it's fun to say. 

Selfie Generation

Engineerlite sent me a Wall Street Journal article by Scott Atlas, of whom I had not heard who I had not heard of.  It describes how the Selfie Generation has become a problem because Boomers coddled them. * While there is something to it, of great-grandchildren and gggrandchildren not showing the same pluck, sufficient grit, the same spunk and moral fibre as their forebears, I always look sideways at such things. Damn kids can't even shoe a horse nowadays. Generalising about whole generations has limited value. Sometimes the times brings forth the women or men.  Yet even beyond that, the variance is so enormous in every generation that choosing examples necessarily involves cherry-picking. I look at my own great-grandparents, and there was child abandonment and complete irresponsibility alongside incredible resilience and effort. I doubt that the percentage of responsible versus irresponsible men and women changes that much because of who is president and what movies are popular.

 The appeal of socialism to young Americans isn’t really about economics. It’s about having someone else to blame. When you haven’t succeeded after being given every advantage, it’s easier to claim the system is unfair than to admit personal failure.

What’s tragic is that the narrative of societal unfairness is being sold as compassionate. It isn’t. It is condescension packaged as solidarity. It tells young people they are victims—incapable of rising, dependent on redistribution, owed a life they haven’t earned. It robs them of the one thing my father’s midnight taxi shifts gave me: the knowledge that I could do it myself.

Well, maybe.  But going through the effects of elder relatives I found Uncle Manfred's Swedish Socialist Songbook from a century ago. My grandfather and my Uncle Dee used to grumble about "those Reds down in Washington" in the 50s, but it looks like their wives voted for them. Damn Swedes. You'd never catch the solid Scots-Irish doing that! Except...

As lot of what we see as impressive about our ancestors is survivor bias. 

*He sent an ungated version to me.  I hope it works for you. If not, I will add to the summary to give you more flavor. 

Concealed Vs Planted

You know bsking from Graph Paper Diaries on my sidebar, but she occasionally writes for her true crime blog as well, Exhibit Asterisk. She has a new one up about how small differences in a poll question can yield different responses. Concealed Vs Planted. To believe that the police concealed evidence sounds rather passive. But to plant evidence to frame someone is a deeper level of corruption.  And in this case, it matters.

Sorry. She's dealing with a serious case, murder actually. But all I could think of was this. Starts at 2:34

(Second try. First version forbidden)

 

Debunked

I keep encountering that word in Wikipedia, especially about controversial political topics. I often sit back with a frown and say "I don't think so.  I think the idea is still standing. It's unacceptability in certain circles is well-established, but I don't think a debunking has taken place."

I happens often enough that when I encounter it now I conclude that the claim has been 30% debunked - usually the strong or extreme form only - but is otherwise intact. Some editor at Wikipedia is wishing it were so.

 I think it was in Miracles that CS Lewis asked "By whom?  And when?"

Encouraging Fertility

Rob Henderson at City Journal on having babies and having friends. It is his take on the Stone and Brooks study and recommendations I linked to a week ago. 

 The researchers asked respondents how many kids their three closest friends had, and how those friends would react if the respondent had another baby. Would they offer to help? Cook meals after the birth? Or would they worry about their career stalling or stop inviting them out?

The answers were associated, to a startling degree, with the desire to have children. For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, desired family size was about 1.7 children. For those with the most supportive friends, it was 2.8. That is a full extra child, associated with nothing more than having trusted friends who show up.

Whether we copy our friends or choose them because of similarity,* our closest friends have 4, 2, 2, 4, and 3 children.  Our college friends had 0, 2, 3, 0, 8, and 2.  Our (barely) remaining high school friends have 3, 0, 2, 2, 0, 2, and 2. We had two originally and then adopted 3 more. 

*Some of both.  Must be.  Peer pressure is more powerful as an adult because we have chosen those peers rather than just being stuck next to them in homeroom or the neighborhood when we were teenagers.

Violent Crime

There is a reason why we focus on homicide when we discuss violent crime.  There is a body that the police and the statistics have to do something with. With other crimes, people might not report it because they don't think the police will do anything. This is a complicating factor for reports of rape, certainly. There is an interplay of female reluctance to report, police willingness to prosecute, and legal system sympathy for quick and neat solutions for fair ones. Maybe the police won't care if Blacks get into fights, or maybe they'll care more and prosecute, telling the white boys to just go home and cool off. 

Still, those other crimes are there, and there are other statistics that capture some of it. Even though the numbers may vary by county, there are victimisation reports that are consistent across counties. These numbers are softer, but they ain't nothin'. 

John Lott, who draws eye-rolls* from gun-control advocates who claim he has been debunked even though said debunkings only pay off at 30 cents on the dollar, has an interesting and controversial claim that Canada and Australia have much more violent crime than America. America's high homicide rate is important, but it is a small percentage of overall crime and is most related to drug turf. Also, suicide is a large part of the "gun-death" numbers and presumably requires separate discussion and interventions. 

While the United States still leads in some categories, on the whole it has significantly less violent crime per capita than those two nations.   

I might have expected that the numbers were closer to America's than people think.  I didn't think there was any world where those countries exceeded our violent crime rate. In round numbers, victimisation reports yield estimates that 60% of violent crimes in the US makes it to a police report, while less than 40% make it to the official statistics in Australia and Canada.  Look for yourself and see if you think he deals with the data fairly.

*And Lott, the much-despised, he tore the cover off the ball..." 

SuperPlatner

I mentioned over at Grim's that the Democrats seemed to be going for an outlaw image to fit their "take from the rich to give to the poor" model. I notice that Graham has already done the "take from the rich part," starting with his parents, but the "give to the poor" part was always rather theoretical and in the future. This is similar to the original Robin Hood, or one of them, who is not on record as giving to the poor, but was beloved because he refused to rob them. And at least he robbed the rich.

Which put me in mind of this, which might be a better fit.

 "Let's rob from the rich...and KEEP IT!"

Introducing Plan A

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten Introducing Plan A, a proposal for AI safety built on agreements that recognise the principals do not trust each other. It is offered as an overall plan, but also as a stand-up comparison model 

... it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better. 

The full plan comes from AI Futures, which had an uncannily good prediction in 2021 of what would happen from then to now. It includes a link to the actual Plan A. The ACX essay linked above is Scott's sales pitch for it. 

I don't know enough to have a credible opinion beyond the observation that these people are much smarter than I am, have good credentials that they are well-meaning, and have spent a lot of time on what could go wrong and how we prevent/fix that. 

Recent Links

 Men, We Love You.  Please Holler Back. Dating apps were originally designed to help you find a date.  They are now "optimised" to keep your eyeballs on the site. This feeds bad attitudes in both men and women, about themselves and about each other. Update explanation of my statement: The imbalance in swipe left/swipe right numbers creates automatic evidence for the theory among women that "a lot of guys are coming onto to me and lots of them are creepy," while men have the impression that "I could like lots of women and think I'm a decent guy, but even women who aren't that great are rejecting me from even a chance." 

The Weird history of "Weird."  Wyrd, which I wrote about in 2010 and reposted a few times, is only half the story.

Just Plain Rivka (sidebar) sends this along from  Anthony DiGiorgio at Off Label Ideas 

 The commenter pushing back makes some valid points, but not as strong as he is pretending. 

What do women want? 

A legislative work-around to the EU opposition to GMO foods. Approval of "lightly edited" genes. 

Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone

 Summer of '71

 

Platner

People will vote for him anyway. Spite voters are foxhole voters, who will stick with you as long as you are shooting outward, however bad you are.  People want to show how much they hate Trump by voting out Susan Collins, which is about as indirect as you can get. In the late 1800s many doubters did not consider it wise to go after Jesus, who retained popularity even among some nonbelievers, so they went after Paul, claiming that he took a gentle doctrine of Jesus and made it harsh. (I don't think Trump qualifies well as Jesus, but he is the hated president. Attacking Collins to get to him seems a proper analogy of inappropriate spite.) I have CS Lewis to thank for pointing out that the harshest words in the NT come from the lips of the Savior, while Paul talks more about Grace. 

With spite, facts don't matter. Platner is still a way of sticking it to The Man, even though he is The Man, a child of privilege who survives by crony capitalism. My own CS Lewis reference reminds me of the scene in "The Great Divorce" in which visitors to the edge of heaven do not think they have any intention of coming in.  The Lewis character remembers...

 The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs, the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the 'haves,' what they thought of them.

The George MacDonald character answers

"I have seen that kind converted," said he, "when those ye would think less deeply damned have gone back. Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already."

 

 

Baby Mega-Bonus

 We Should Have a Mega Baby Bonus. The Institute for Family Studies, Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brookes say they have spent a long time on this, and it shows.  The idea is a prefunded account that a current baby can eventually draw from when they have children of their own. The fund has time to grow, and not everyone will have the children that will enable them to withdraw the fund in their account.

 But not everybody has babies (and certainly not everyone has the 3 babies you’d have to have to claim the full benefit value). In our vision, once people turn 50, any fund value not yet claimed due to not having had kids (or early mortality) would be yielded back into a fund, which would be continually reinvested and used to pay for the next generation of seed funding for American Birthday Accounts. By our math, it is extremely unlikely that the American Birthday Accounts raise fertility enough to make unclaimed funds too small to pay for the next round of baby bonuses, because unclaimed funds have had fifty years to accrue value.

It takes a while to pay for itself but is eventually self-sustaining. 

Fun to contemplate. But like anything else, how do we sell a radical idea? 

Diabolically Evil

Is a New Report About the Humanities ‘Diabolically Evil’? at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 We invited four of the report’s authors — Kwame Anthony Appiah and Paul Boghossian, both philosophers at New York University; Katherine E. Fleming, a historian and former NYU provost who now serves as head of the J. Paul Getty Trust; and the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz — to respond to their critics. We discussed their findings, the risks of outside interference, and what they hope happens next.

Anthropology was especially singled out for deteriorating standards of scholarship because of homage to political narratives. I recall there being excitement in the anthropology department when one professor was to give an address at a major conference - this would be in 1975 - about how voices from within cultures were not being heard often enough in the field. Notably, he was a Filipino anthropologist and thus positioned to notice, but also had a direct career stake in the issue. Even at the time, I recall thinking something along the lines that this wasn't about anthropology, but about anthropologists.

Time In Palestine

 I Actually Spent Time in Palestine - Here's what I saw about their society 

An American college student notices the prejudice of extremist Israelis...

...and a complete denial of reality by the Palestinians.

 Looking back, my conversation with the two Palestinians who denied the existence of the Second Temple foreshadowed something that I gradually came to recognize: while I was more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause when I first traveled to the West Bank, I came to realize that facts are largely irrelevant for the vast majority of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists.

Erling Haaland

 My son in Tromso is very excited, calls him Superman

 

Not only the accent, but the gestures remind me of Maria, my Norwegian DIL. I don't think I know any other Norwegians well enough to know their accents.  I used to know a few, but I wasn't paying attention then.

Surprising Allies

The Knowlton Trial in England in 1877 had an immediate effect on family formation.  It was about the criminalising of publishing information on contraception, or artificial limitation of the family, as it was called then. Immediately after, age of marriage began increasing in English-speaking countries. What is surprising is that Charles Darwin, despite being an anti-Churchman did not approve of this development. Darwin and the Knowlton Trial, Peter Foreshaw Brooks over at "Persistent Ruminator."

[Darwin] would prefer not to be a witness in court. In any case CD’s opinion is strongly opposed to that [of Bradlaugh and Besant]. [Darwin] believes artificial checks to the natural rate of human increase are very undesirable and that the use of artificial means to prevent conception would soon destroy chastity and, ultimately, the family.

So also Francis William Newman, the agnostic younger brother of Cardinal John Henry Newman. 

 Newman, also writing entirely from a foundation void of orthodox religion, felt this was misguided. He argued that a large amount of poverty can be attributed to vice and social problems, not the mere size of population. He then laid out how he thought the neo-Malthusian view would exacerbate these problems. He worried that an expansion in birth control would result in an increase in men’s demands of women’s sexual access (an argument Louise Perry and others make today) and would lead to more behaviour focusing on achieving short term pleasures over long run fulfillment.

Charles Darwin, pro-natalist. 

*********** 

Dave Barry is perhaps a less-surprising pro-natalist. Sex

Links From 2015

 Obviously 

36 Righteous Men 

 Girl Books. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole with this, I also did a 2007 post on Female Characters in Heroic Fantasy which linked in turn to my son's post Books for Girls, Books for Boys. Almost half his life ago now... 

A bad play is evocative of marvelous nostalgia The Old Homestead, Swanzey, NH 

Bad Doctrine about being a Christian Nation.  Lots of comments

School Cell-phone Bans

 Research on banning cell-phones in schools.  Interesting way to test a variety of measures. 

 National Evidence From Lockable Pouches National Bureau of Economic Research

The short version is that in the first year there were increased disciplinary incidents and decreased student subjective well-being. This was attributed to the disruption of the change. In further years the disciplinary incidents returned to baseline and the student subjective well-being improved to measurably above the previous baseline.  Test scores were not significantly affected.

Magic solutions are seldom magic, especially in education.  It all looks so easy from the outside.  Remember Daviess County KY and its 13-year (1997-2010) intensive experiment to build better brains? I really though that one was going to work.

Are you part of...a chain?

A visitor to our church this Sunday asked this, hesitating and laughing at herself, as she knew that wasn't quite the word she was looking for.

"A denomination?" I smiled, filling in the word she was looking for. "Actually, that's not a bad word.  Maybe we should switch to that so that people know what we mean." 

Two Out of Six Myths

 Another Six Myths About Gender, Race, and Inequality. These two are free, the other four are for paid subscribers only. These are short summaries, but don't skim, as at first glance we might think they are saying something else. The first is about what Democrats and Republicans think that other people would do, not what they themselves would.  For the second, most of the funding is not specific to either males or females, only to humans. The graph shows the research amount dedicated to one sex.

Celebrating the 250th

I am going now to mow the lawn and water it.  It seems like one of the most American things I can do. I am admittedly on shaky ground historically, as I doubt that George Washington mowed his lawn very often, and Ben Franklin likely advised others to mow, but avoided it himself. Hot dogs may have come in just before the Centennial celebration, but fireworks were set off in 1777, so 1776 was at least possible. Drinking too much predates colonial settlement by centuries. 

So I'll stick with mowing the lawn. That's the plan.

Update:  Well, sort of. I picked up donated food with my granddaughter for the halfway house. I went to a neighborhood party and traded a Sam Adams for a freshly-grilled sausage.  Not really barter, because we both would have happily given them away, yet it's more fun to trade, isn't it? I listened to a great American blowhard with calm patience. A parade of golf carts went by, three of them. My stars, I do hate those things, but in a retirement park... I looked up and then there were seven of them, all decked out in spangly R/W/B stuff and honking. I found a new place to nap out by a fountain that no one visits, with a swing and a canopy and tacky little garden statues. 

I moved a heavy object for Vacation Bible School (July 6-10) toward the car with my 1.5 arms - one good heave over the stone wall with my healthy arm - and decided discretion was the better part of valor, stopping a quarter-way along. When you worry that men are going to get in over their heads, don't ask "Do you need help?" because the answer is always going to be no.  Ask "Is that a a two-person job?"Tracy loaded it into the hatchback with me.

The golf cart parade came back with 11 carts, honking even more, and the lawn is now mowed. Rain is expected. The sausage is coming back on me, or something else is, but my, my it was good. 

Yankee Doodle Dandy

"Boy, she doesn't have a very melodic voice!"

"It's a man.  It's George M. Cohan." 

I also noted that he largely recites the song, rather like Maurice Chevalier used to get away with: For little girls grow bigger every day!

 

Men are allowed to get away with that more often than women. In his case, he was talented musically, just didn't have a good voice.  Vaudeville teaches you how to get around that.

 

Spelling

We discussed spelling reform at pub night last night.  

You really want to come to our pub night.  We also talked about Gettysburg and Fred made his joke about the cunning linguist for the sixth time.  He just can't contain himself.

You may have known that cniht was pronounced k'neecht, the ch as in Scots Gaelic loch. Knight. No longer a good spelling, but here we are.

In terms of English spelling many of you already knew that scribes who wrote in Latin or French applied conventions from their own language to English and printers from the continent did not always have good command of English, leading to the use of gh for that raspy throat sound more common in German (hoch) or Scots Gaelic (as above) or adding an h to c or s to represent an English sound that hadn't a letter. ch, sh.  

The Great Vowel Shift occurred just before the growth of printing and the conventions of that became messy, because the vowels moved around in the mouth and what was considered a long vowel and short vowel changed with it.  This gave us all oo, ai, and all manner of ei and ie. U wasn't even it's own vowel until then, but quickly became four sounds: super, mute, put, putt. That brought in all the ou, au, ui, eu confusions. 

There were attempts at standardisation in the 1500s, but they were largely ignored. Printers did what they wanted and things calmed down a bit without intervention.  But regional variations persisted and people were stubborn about it. Imagine that.

There is an influence on change that is largely overlooked. King Charles tried to keep a lid on things in the 1630s by not calling any Parliament for over a decade, but with the Scots and the French and the damn Puritans, military money was needed. The Star Chamber dramatically censored printing in 1637 because there was a lot of information that they did not want in circulation, especially about the troubles with the above. During the religious quarrels leading up to the English Civil War in the 1640s, the nobility had a longer and longer list of complaints, Charles had an increasing need for money, and secrecy.  Good luck with that.  But to do this he needed Parliament, which increasingly opposed him. Even his allies in the nobility had had it. He called a Parliament but it didn't do what he wanted, so he disbanded it after three weeks - the Short Parliament. The Scots attacked and decided to settle in in the north, hovering around and looking like they might head to London. Now Charles really needed money to pay them off, so he called another Parliament and this one - the Long Parliament - lasted two decades.  One of the first things it did was execute his major counselors.

Yes, I know we haven't gotten to any spelling yet.  We are just about to. The Long Parliament disbanded the Star Chamber, and all its acts became null. Printers poured into London and put out pamphlets, broadsides, and what might roughly be called newspapers. They provided up-to-date reports of battles, sometimes in only a day. This speed was previously unheard of. Prior to this time, such reports were printed with justified margins , which looked elegant and nifty.  But to justify margins printers added in letters, so that three words in a line might have an -e at the end, no longer pronounced but recognised, or a doubled consonant as in magicall or grass. This slowed down spelling standardisation quite a bit. 

But with speed now of the essence readers cared less about elegance and printers just spelled things the way they thought they should.  Even better, they spoke English rather than Dutch or French as their first language.This only fixed about 10% of the problem, but it  was something. 

 

Egypt wins on PK's

 Great hat.

Soccer

It's a good sport, especially live.  It did not televise well until about twenty years ago, which hampered its professional growth, and there still is the problem of low scoring. A three-minute highlights film is about all you need even for a World Cup game.  I understand why people who have taken to the sport like to watch the whole thing, start to finish, but the same can be said of golf and tennis, which most people find unwatchable. If you know something in depth, you see more than others and it is more interesting to you. I have never watched a videogame competition, but young people who have played that particular game and gotten good at it will see things I don't and recognise the excellence of some moves. 

There has long been a quiet political undertone to soccer, and not-so-quiet as well.  Soccer has been a mixed sport, played by immigrants and prep schools, making it a liberal natural. Sssshhh. But the World Cup has gotten problematic for liberals now.  This is a background item that is causing collisions in progressive brains.  

They liked soccer because Americans weren't good at it and had to eat crow. Especially, it was European (!) and Latin American(!) Swoon.  Now it is even African and Middle-Eastern which should further stick it to The Man, but it's too late.  The American women's team has long been dominant, which was hard enough to swallow, but at least was anti-sexist. Now the men's team has been pretty good throughout the 21st C and there is a lot of hand-wringing over whether a good liberal should root for them or not. 

I will mention again that NPR missed a trick by not adopting World Cup coverage as far back as the 70s. It's a fun alt-history to imagine how that would have played out. It would have changed NPR's audience a bit, and that would have influenced it. They would then be involved in sports broadcasting, a different world. (It could conceivably have expanded to rugby, with less coverage but still some every year.) They would then have to deal with the interests of immigrants as they really are, not as they imagined them. 

All for the want of a horseshoe nail. 

Even Cooler Than You Thought, Eh?

 

Baumol Cost Disease

Or Baumol Effect.  I had never heard of it until today.  Because all prices are relative, if the price of something goes down...No, I am not going to dare explain it.  I am reading a paper by Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution and keep thinking I understand it, but the next page reveals that I probably don't. I really thought I had it when I grasped that when productivity improves in one facet of building a house, the wages go up even in areas that have not improved, because they are now the bottleneck that prevents the houses from being finished. But I think I am oversimplifying, as I am told it applies more strongly to services than to manufactured goods. 

It was recommended to me as explaining a great deal about economics, as it is a principle that works across countries, across industries, and across time. It is independent of regulation, though regulation keeps trying to correct it.

So have at it, with my blessing.  I'm going to try something else. 

Progressive Intellectuals

Image v. Reality  at Fake Nous.

My usual audience will wonder Why are we going over this ground again? It's a fair cop. This will look like many other discussions we have seen here and at our small corner of the internet.

First, it's a great name for site.  I was determined to link to something from the main page; the host is a philosophy professor with significant libertarian leanings. He doesn't pull punches.

I have spent many years around progressive intellectuals. They fill the academic world and the elite cultural circles of our society. As a group, they seem to me incredibly deceived and self-deceived people—much more self-deceived than right-wing intellectuals (of whom there are far fewer). Their worldview revolves around self-serving lies, and much of their self-image is practically the opposite of reality. 

Second, many of the themes I have tried to tie into the Dueling Intellectuals debate over the years are in this article. Echoes of the various tribes will show up.

That is the first element of progressive self-deception: they style themselves warriors against prejudice, but they are the biggest force stoking prejudice in our society. They think that their prejudice is different because the group they’re attacking is actually bad. They don’t see their stereotypes as stereotypes but just as the truth. That, of course, is what all bigots think. 

Many leftists seem to live in an alternate reality in which our society—including the most left-wing-dominated of institutions—is filled with neo-Nazis bent on hurting women and minorities at every turn. In the academic world, you can hear people talking about how biased the academic world is against women, in the very same meeting that everyone present agrees to give women preference over men in hiring, and no one notices the dissonance. Constantly talking about how the other side has all the power, while being constantly directly confronted with their own side’s power. 

 Third, some new insights I had not thought of, or not articulated as clearly

 This sort of echo chamber tends to make people overconfident, to make them ignore problems with their worldview and even take increasingly extreme and implausible positions. Conservative intellectuals, by contrast, are probably more self-aware because they keep hearing criticisms from left-wing intellectuals. (But this is not true of the right-wing masses, who ignore the left-wing intellectuals.) 

I have a friend who worked long amongst liberals who had tiring and irritating prejudices.  But she took a new job that involved a lot of work with bluer-collar guys who had different false beliefs, about contrails and power lines.  There was a general cynicism that everything was not what it seemed and was either a sham or a shady plot by the worst of the powerful.  CS Lewis noted much the same nearly a hundred years ago. It was not merely different prejudices, but a different kind of prejudice.

 

Grover Cleveland's Grandson

I keep forgetting this bit of NH trivia.  George Cleveland, a grandson of Grover Cleveland is still alive, up in Tamworth. We used to vacation up there, and bsking's family is quite familiar with the area. Her father Mike, also a commenter here, lived in the next town over when younger and they have a lake cabin up there.  It is in the borderland where the Lakes Region leaves off and the White Mountains pick up.

George is my age, but I've never met him and don't know that we have friends in common. 

Raining Tonight

 

Semantic Shift

 I noticed today in an older book, The Memoirs of Count Witte, that he uses the word "practically" to mean in every practical sense: "I was practically the head of the Odessa Railroad." We would interpret that now to mean "I was almost the head of the Odessa Railroad." It's one of the fun things about reading older works, sensing the changes.

Trans Advocates

 No One Expects the Tranish Inquisition - Helen Joyce  

A Requiem For Nutrition

 Two years ago from Cremieux Recueil Food Probably isn't Making People Smarter or Dumber 

It is thorough. You can almost hear him thinking "Someone is going to bring up this objection right away.  Let me nip that in the bud." I understand that, and my overlong essays of ten and fifteen years ago illustrate it. He casts far afield to head critics off at the pass (metaphor alert: where he can nip them in the bud) with a long discussion on the Flynn Effect, the observation that IQ's have been rising across multiple populations for over a century*. The first guess that people have on this is nutrition, because that has been shown to be true in terms of height, and nutrition has varied within cultures and among cultures because of war and famine, creating rather dramatic natural experiments. It was not a crackpot theory. However, when looked at more closely it hasn't held up.

 We have noted that 20-point Dutch gain on a Raven’s-type test registered by military samples tested in 1952, 1962, 1972, and 1982. Did the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1982 really have a better diet than the 18-year-olds of 1972? The former outscored the latter by fully 8 IQ points. It is interesting that the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1962 did have a known nutritional handicap. They were either in the womb or born during the great Dutch famine of 1944—when German troops monopolized food and brought sections of the population to near starvation. Yet, they do not show up even as a blip in the pattern of Dutch IQ gains. It is as if the famine had never occurred.

 

 Iodine improves IQ in fetuses; adults as well? A meta-analysis of relevant studies says no.

Micronutrient supplements in Nepal and Indonesia; exposure to lead; even Ramadan 

 Among the White British students, the month of pregnancy Ramadan took place in wasn’t related to test scores, and among Caribbeans, the same thing was true. But, for Muslims, scores were lower if their mother was pregnant during Ramadan, and maybe lowest at two to three months in. (But even that is only one point difference.) 

*And has now stopped, puzzlingly. 

Come From Away

We went to see Come From Away at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith.  That theater has some uncomfortable seats, but the production was good enough that the cast quickly overcame that and I no longer noticed. The script is about the 38 planes diverted on 9-11 to Newfoundland, Canada and stuck there for 3+ days, with the locals unexpectedly on the hook for taking care of them. If a production comes by, you will enjoy it.

 

The Letter

 Joe Cocker's movements are described as energetic and idiosyncratic. They always looked like some sort of neurological damage to me. It's a real contrast to Leon Russell, who looks as if it's not actually very interesting to be playing at a rock festival.  But I loved Cocker's voice. 

 There was a time in late highschool, 1970 or '71 when girls wore those blue boots with big stars, called "Joe Cocker's"

Are "Free Speech" Advocates Really Just Closet Racists?

No.

Oh, like you wanted some evidence or something?  If you must.  In fact, they show slightly more racial tolerance.

So-Called "Intersex" Individuals

 This particular post on Substack by Dr. T is good enough that I reprint it in full. In my comment there I noted that when I worked with Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome patients in the 90's, the former were always clear that they are female and the latter that they are male.  They are a large percentage of the folks that trans advocates like to call intersex and imply that they are ambiguously gendered, but they do not in fact undermine the binary.  Dr. T assured me that this is still the case.

 Having accused my argument of being reductionist, simplistic and outdated, the SubStacker I quoted in my previous note went on to accuse my argument of an even worse transgression.

“[Your argument] also willfully ignores the existence of intersex individuals, whose biological reality defies your rigid binary, as well as the progress made in countries like India, where legal recognition of identity is increasingly based on lived reality rather than just chromosomes…”

I did not “wilfully” ignore “the existence of intersex individuals”.  My note did not mention disorders of sex development (abbreviated as DSDs) because the existence of congenital biological conditions (present at birth) in which the development of chromosomal, gonadal and/or anatomical sex is atypical do not challenge the binary (female/male) and immutable (unchangeable from birth until death) nature of biological sex in the human species.

In common with most biological scientists and health care professionals who treat people with DSDs, I do not use the obsolete term ‘intersex’ for a number of reasons.

First, the term ‘intersex’ is stigmatizing because it implies that ‘intersex’ is a person’s identity (as in, “she is intersex”).  In contrast, the term ‘DSD’ refers to an often debilitating biomedical condition that a person has from birth and throughout their life, not who a person is.  The use of DSD in place of intersex seeks to put the person first, as we do when we say that a person has a disability, rather than saying that the person is disabled.

Second, calling people who have DSDs, “intersex”, is both scientifically indefensible and an insult to the humanity of these people.  The people who used to be called “intersex freaks of nature”are not located somewhere on a sex continuum between a woman (a female person) and a man (a male person).  Nor do these people have a sex that is other than female or male.  The claim that DSDs create a variety of sexes, other than female or male, usually ranging from three to six other sexes, but even extending to a multitude of other sexes, is scientific sophistry serving the transgender political agenda.

Third, the social and biomedical challenges faced by people with DSDs have been weaponised by transgenderists in their war on the material reality of biological sex.  By including the letter ‘I for intersex’ in the LGBTQIA+ acronym, transgenderists claim that people with DSDs have ‘a queer gender identity’.  This has done a great disservice to people with DSDs and their families who are focused on ending the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs and who do not want to serve as clown fish in scientifically ludicrous attempts to disprove that sex is binary and immutable in the human species.

The main source of the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs is the mistaken belief that all people with DSDs are sexually ambiguous, meaning that, at birth, they can not be classed as either female or male and so need to be arbitrarily assigned a sex by their birth attendants.

DSDs encompass over 60 different congenital biological conditions and are relatively common, affecting approximately 2% of live births, but the vast majority of these live births are unambiguously sexed either female or male in terms of their chromosomal, gonadal and anatomical sex, even though one or more of these determinants of sex are atypical to some extent.  Less than 0.018% of live births are affected by a rare DSD that either causes a mismatch between chromosomal (male) sex and anatomical (female) sex or results in anatomical (mainly genital) sex that is so malformed that it is not classifiable as exclusively female or male, but is never both.

The former type of DSD involves disorders of testicular development or disorders affecting the synthesis of testosterone produced by the testes.  In the absence of the masculinising effects of testosterone, a foetus will follow the female developmental pathway in utero.

Wednesday Links

Mary Parker Follett The Godmother of Management She saw the invisible authority of common purpose as more powerful than hierarchical authority

Just Plain Rivka  has been added to my Tuesday Zoom book club and now her substack Logic and Morality goes on my sidebar. I think she said she has twelve children age 2-23, and now the the youngest is out of diapers she wants to create a change in her life. Just a remarkable thing to say, eh?

Data Republican on the one paranoia to rule them all. I remarked long ago that wherever a paranoia starts, it seems to slowly work its way to the Jews. I worked with paranoid people my whole career. I have to suspect that for all the focus on Musk and Bezos, the current focus on billionaires owes something to the old trope about "Jewish Bankers." Yet even I have been amazed at the speed and intensity at which it operates now. It has come to this:  I don't dare ask my brother what he thinks. He has been sympathetic to Palestine for a long time, but not at the expense of the Jews until Obama's first presidency. 

Strange Women Lying In Ponds 

I had heard that there is linguistic evidence of isolated words making it from Indo-European into Chinese, a completely unrelated language, but all I had seen before was names of tribes from Central Asia showing up in some very early Chinese records. Those Steppe barbarians got around, after all. But this is a clear word itself, mit in Old Chinese means "honey." As in Indo-European *medhu, found in descendant Greek methy, amethyst but most recognisably in "mead."  The contact point looks like Tocharian B, a wild eastern outlier of PIE that split off early. 

Tuesday Links

 Islam in America by Reiham Salam. American Muslims, especially those young, female, and US born, believe that Islamophobia is rampant. The evidence for this is not only missing, but backwards

Low-Conscientiousness Losers are Bad Senate Candidates  by Josh Barro. 

No, the failure to cover the tattoo indicates something different about Platner: Like John Fetterman, he is a fuckup. 

The death of the Summer Job You learn to deal with unreasonable people and are treated as a low-status individual. But you also learn some small competencies and in a narrow venue, people depend on you to get it right. 

Harari Vs Henrich For those of you who follow the overview of evolution. The prevailing 20th C view was that increased intelligence gave rise to language which gave rise to cooperation which produced culture. There is a developing consensus that this can't have been how it happened, and may even be reversed.  Henrich says it's Culture to Cooperation to Language to Intelligence. We have discussed this here before, most recently a year ago  

How Vermont Became Ground-Zero for the Anti-Israel Movement  This infuriates me. 

Wrong Eyeglasses

 

Sehnsucht

My college roommate was from Wayne Township and knew one of these guys. This song should have been a natural for us, but somehow it just wasn't cool enough at the time.  Too much Four Seasons in it. I didn't even like it much until about 20 years ago, but I must have listened to it because I knew all the words. I love it now and feel it was an important part of my childhood. 

Except it wasn't. There is no particular girlfriend attached to it, just all of them, and some I wanted but never had. Nostalgia lies and tells a different story.

Happy beginning of summer

A Billion Years

Instead of booksignings on tour, the new thing is to go on podcasts and get interviewed when you have a book come out. Steve Stewart-Williams of Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche just had A Billion Years of Sexual Differences come out. You can listen to him at any of these places, and most have transcripts. I have listened to a few and I also read him, so I eventually decided I don't need any more on this particular topic. at the moment.  But here you are, as much as you want. Well, actually, there are more.  This is enough.

We Can't Just Lie About This  Skeptiker

The Dissenter   

Keep Talking  

The Good Fight  Yascha Mounk, who interviews a lot of very good people.

The Overthinkers  Christian perspective

Links From 2015

 Slogging Through Woods on a Slushy Morning

(Jump Off The Page Title)  The first appearance of JM Smith, our resident geographer, in the comments

Hillary, perpetual martyr. Inserted irrelevantly into a public conversation

Ion Mihai Pacepa Evidence from the highest-ranking Soviet defector that Liberation Theology was intentionally created by the KGB, who arranged for an agent to become head of the World Council of Churches to introduce the concept into Latin America.  I had forgotten the story.

Archive of Old Radio Shows.  It's still there! 

The Afterlife In Popular Opinion.  Lots of comments. 

 

Recent Links

 The Shocking Truth About Fairness, by Lionel Page. 

 The idea that ruling ideas about fairness are an ideological veneer used to placate dominated groups is, however, unsatisfactory. If what matters are actual relations of power, why do powerful people need justifications in the domain of ideas? What role do these justifications play?

I think "unsatisfactory" is the right word. Everyone uses justifications for what they do, except in cases of extreme power imbalance. But this cannot be the whole story. Perhaps strange women lying in ponds distributing swords IS a good basis for government.

What's New In Biology from Works in Progress New drugs, vaccines, and therapies

The Commodification of Christianity  by Freya India, a newish Christian.  Interesting for us, as we have young relatives, one in particular, trying out Christianity

And as if in answer, Bench Press and Be Baptised by Josh Code. 

What's the Tax Rate of the Forbes 400?  A National Bureau of Economic Research estimate puts it at 24%, six points less than the national average of 30%.  This is for all taxes, including international, BTW.  But David Splinter has a detailed critique and finds that both numbers are wrong.  The real number should be 38% for billionaires, 25% for everyone else.  But wait, there's more! If we add in yearly charitable giving, the top 0.0002% give 59% to the citizenry, and if we add in their end-of-life bequests, it rises to 73%

Victor Borge

 Always a joy.

More on Cognitive Genetics

Robert Plomin is a big name, and I think I have seen some of those other names with his before.  He has a King's College lab in the UK. The Genetics of Specific Cognitive Abilities, from a special issue of the journal Intelligence. Some knowledge of the Cattell-Horn-Carroll Theory of Intelligence will be needed to follow the terminology, even if the concepts are already known to you.  It is a hybrid that describes cognitive skills as a hierarchy. The most commonly researched is the most abstract type of intelligence that is closely related to the g-factor. That it is heritable is well-established, though the usual arguments about how much and what the interaction with nurture is remain. The other levels of intelligence usually regarded as less heritable and more responsive to what comes from the environment. To solve a new math problem requires abstract intelligence. To remember mathematical techniques you have been taught is considered more a product of what you have been exposed to.

So this one is interesting, because it finds that the second level of intelligence and abstraction is about equally heritable. Even more surprising, the specific abilities, the least abstract, are similarly heritable.  It's one study but it's worth paying attention to. You might go down the rabbit hole with this one, but I think you can pick up a fair bit with one pass. 

"The Nature of Nurture" is a fun phrase, anyway. 

 

 

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

Adult Sunday School is reading John Mark Comer's The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry this summer. It will change the blog, I imagine. My prediction at present is that my posts will more often be links, because that is what has happened so far as I have eliminated hurry the last few years. I will try to not dispense wisdom.  If wisdom happens, it will be largely accidental.

But I admit I don't know. We'll see.  

Jonathan's Fence

 

This was an upgrading of an 80-y/o deck at my son's previous house. Much of the framing underneath this was kept, but the upper portions which had long been exposed to weather and people were 100% replaced, as you see. It was built on New England soil, so frost heaves destabilised it over the years. I had previously built a porch that included many of the features of this deck.  However, the construction was a bit different, and my son was doing the adaptation - I was mostly there just to be a worker bee. This railing you are looking at was the result of compromise upon compromise. Nothing was square, and attempts to correct that only seemed to make things worse.

The proper choice, in some sense, would have involved lots of digging, leveling, and replacing it all. But it was a deck on an old house.  The next owner, in fact, made some modifications to it that were changes, not merely corrections of what we had made. Putting twice as much effort into would have been inefficient, in retrospect. Even though a close look would reveal some adaptations that weren't quite perfect, it might fairly be said that this was the best choice. 

We don't uproot or tear down Chesterton's Fence until we know why it was put up.  Then, as you will. In this case, it was put up because it was necessary and was good enough. My son had to learn along the way what compromises would be necessary to be "good enough," and make choices. The next owner can do as she will. But she would be wise to know why the compromises were made, because they might be "good enough" for her also, and even the owner after that. 

There is a New England saying that is likely used in other places.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  

Value and Worth

Amy and Becky want to start a restaurant.  Amy will be the chef, Becky will be the business manager. To get started, they ask their friends Caitlin and Dierdre to lend them some money. At first, the restaurant has no value. But after a year or two, it is doing well.  Whatever we call the overall value of the restaurant, each of the four women owns a percentage of that and is "worth" that amount of money. 

Let's not even talk about the part where the state wants to raise taxes on the business in some way.  Let's pretend the tax rate is zero. But Amy is frustrated with something about the deal.  She doesn't like working with Becky, or she thinks she can make more somewhere else. Something.  She wants to take her percentage of the value - which she does own - and cash out. If she does, there is a strong possibility that the other three cannot rescue things efficiently with another chef quickly enough and the restaurant goes under. The remaining "worth" of all of them is pennies on the dollar.

Or Dierdre has a crisis in her life and needs to take her investment money out. The other three attempt a lot of juggling, restructuring, and negotiating, but it's not enough and the business goes bankrupt. Again, now instead of having 25% of something valuable, everyone has 25% of scattered restaurant equipment. Any of the four might try again with another restaurant or business and succeed. Each might still have market value, but now they have little "worth" unless they become part of building something else.

If you try to smuggle in some idea of a different kind of worth, like the worth of the labor they put in, or whether they are worth something just because they are human, or their infinite worth in God's eyes you are changing the subject and being deceitful.

I just explained billionaires to you. 

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.