Men in Packs

Prehistoric hominids traveling in packs suggested the Yamnaya to me, though those were much later - just last week by this time scale.  Men might travel in packs for lots of reasons, trade and hunting being two. But advance scouts out to attack others and take their women was a major one we don't talk about much.  The tribe didn't do that for you until late in human history.  The Genesis accounts seem horribly barbaric to us, of neighboring groups exchanging children - or more likely, just the brides - as a sign of cooperation. But that's actually pretty advanced in terms of human behavior.  Sending the young men out to get their own mates before they could be considered adults was common for millennia.

Lots of them died in the process, sure.  But they were usually the hot-blooded extra crazed young ones anyway, and it was good to send them out to do the bloody work. A couple of women each calmed the survivors down a bit, and you could send out the next age cohort. The men were trained and bonded together, which worked out great for the other pack activities, trade and hunting.

I think of this when I see the reels by young women complaining about patriarchy these days. A few thousand years ago, half the young women were captured and half the young men were killed. And that's not even including disease, injury, and famine. Kids, the wives and husbands available now are a pretty good deal, comparatively.

Save The Children

 From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine

 

The Obstacle is the Point

Megan McArdle and others have explained why we learn more from failing (oversimplified, yes). It is a good message to teach, that failures are just a setback and resilience is better than talent. Sometimes we learn to try harder, or earlier, or smarter. Sometimes we learn that we have to find a partner with complementary skills. Sometimes we learn that we aren't a pro athlete, but we can make a career as a coach, a YouTuber, a trainer, a writer. I wonder if there could be an educational model that teaches children to pick a goal they are most likely going to fail at - a science project that they can try again next year, a history project that they have to look at differently next year.  It is sort of like the St. John's Great Books curriculum model, but aimed at younger students. The important thing is to not fear throwing things out.  This only partly worked.  Back on the horse.  

This does still carry a covert message of the important thing is to be king in the end, however, if we let it. When my sons were at a small Christian high school, there were a few years where there was great success in sports...followed by a few years of very few wins in any sport. At one of the parent meetings, there was discussion of how difficult this was to go through, but they were glad that their children had learned these lessons young. One parent was having none of it. He worked in a positive-attitude sales field and fired back "Why are we talking about the lessons learned from failure?  Why not teach them the lessons we can learn from victory? Our God is a god of victory!"* There was a Victory Christian School in the area, but we did not consider that for our children. I I think we learn from both Solomon and Job, myself. Many biblical characters had both sets of lessons. 

I don't think the lessons of failure leading to success is the Christian point. The obstacle is the point. God could accomplish these things we strive for almost accidentally with a word. This world is a school, not a factory. The learning does not lead to doing, the learning is the doing. 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is our friend.  It is an implacable teacher. It may be why we live in this universe and not another. 

*My children and bsking's family might guess who this was. 

Stick Library

 Via "Pineapple Street" on Substack

Recent Links

 The Isle of the Dead It has an evocative sound, doesn't it, like The Well at the World's End and The Young King of the Black Isles? Lewis declared it impossible to write a story that lived up to the title.

 Nehalennia has long remained a controversial figure, with all sorts of theories arising over the years regarding her origin and how she is depicted. Yet the latest research indicates that Nehalennia was a Germanic goddess who had a particular connection with Britain.

The illustration is attributed to Andreas Bonn, but it looks far too modern and nothing like Bonn ever did. That this is a watercolor by Peter Spier fairly leaps out at me.

David Foster reviews Red Plenty

How might this actually be accomplished? Stalin mocked the idea that planning an economy required much in the way of intellectual depth or effort. Get the chain of command right, Stalin seemed to be saying, build it on the right ideological principles, and all that was left was a few technical details, a little bit of drudgery to be carried out by the comrades at Gosplan with the adding machines. But it turned out to be a little more complicated than that. 

The DSA Sweet Spot  Nate Silver looks at who are the voters of the Democratic Socialists, and notes that the strongest group are people with high education and low income.  This has been said before, and discussed.  The finding is consistent across groups in America, which makes it more likely that it is measuring something real, but there's a catch.  The effect is not that large. Education itself is stronger. Note: There is a reference to Omnicause voting.  I interpret that as more social aspiration than ideological.

Colin Gorrie of Dead Language Society is writing a book about English before it was English, that is, from Proto-Indo-European through Germanic through all the subsequent splits to the beginning of Anglo-Saxon, first written down in the 600s.

Bernard-Henri Levy does not agree with Niall Ferguson that historians have lost the war against antisemitism. This is just another chapter in the long war against truth. 

Post-truth was not invented in Silicon Valley but in the Agora of Athens.

It did not come after truth; it was born alongside it, as its shadow.

It is that force which, with the death of Socrates, seemed for a time to triumph and plunged the Fergusons of that age into despair.

And yet.

In the end, it is the spirit of Socrates that prevails, while his opponent Gorgias sinks into oblivion. 

 

Up and Coming

Gout Gout is an 18-year old Australian runner whose parents are from South Sudan. He has stunning speed, but is inconsistent, likely because he is so young. He is on track to pass Usain Bolt and has already broken his junior records, but so many flash out after a promising start.  This is a sport where no one can hand it to you.  I feature him because you might be hearing about him everywhere in a year. The name does rather stick in the mind. 

 

I have mentioned over the last few years that there are too many up-and-coming runners to keep track of. We had Quincy Wilson in the 2024 Olympics, and 2028 is likely to be better.

How to Talk to Someone Who Is Still Inside The Spell.

 Mary Jane Murphy, on Substack, writing about talking to trans activists and friends still "inside the spell." It is good advice for any difficult discussion, but she makes it specific.

1. Refuse the vocabulary without attacking the person

Language is where the spell lives. Every loaded term you adopt is a conclusion you have silently conceded. “Assigned at birth” presupposes that sex is assigned rather than observed. “Cis” presupposes that everyone has a gender identity. “Trans women” presupposes the category exists as described.

You do not need to fight about every word. You need one calm, repeatable move. Mine is this: “That’s contested vocabulary, it embeds a conclusion I haven’t agreed to.” 

2. Ask questions you do not answer...

3. Pace before you lead... 

 4. Plant seeds and walk away...

5. Wait for the wobble... 

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.