Anca

So, Chris is back in Tromsø, having secured a Romanian passport. This time there is a girl in tow, identified as a girlfriend, works at the same place, a relative of Crina's. Looks like she is living with him, though this is not announced. I haven't asked Chris about the seriousness of this relationship - he has a history of being certain it is serious when it is not, so the answer would not tell us much. But going with him to Norway...Crina and her mother are clearly pushing for this...yeah, it's possible this is...a daughter-in-law.

Even if she is not, someone equally unknown to us will be. Unless we live in a closed group that is the way it usually is now. We send children to college, or to distant cities where their relationships are people unknown to us. Even with highschool romances, we know only scraps and imagine we know more because we know some relative, or their church, or some fact about them. My oldest son married his highschool sweetheart, so we "knew" her in some sense early on. But she was quiet, quiet, and we really haven't known her until after they were married and moved back here after college - seven years after she appeared on the scene. But we could kid ourselves that we did.

With Anca, we can't even pretend we know. This is even a greater distance than usual. She doesn't speak English, and as she will be working on Norwegian for the present, we can't expect her to. Facebook, color photos, and cheap telephone calls are an enormous advantage that earlier generations of parents did not have. We might have some picture in our mind that parents in earlier eras knew more about their son's girlfriends; that's really not true. Adding together internal migration on top of an immigrant nation, with college and/or faraway military service common in the 20th C, and the natural secretiveness of a good chunk of young people - our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents may not have known much either. You have to go quite a ways back in most families before you come to a time when you could 90% count on a woman knowing her new daughter-in-law well before the wedding.

Note to family: If you go to Crina's page and click the "photo" that she commented on, you can get a series of 25 pictures of Anca Pop. Or you could just friend her, which we will likely do. We scour the pictures for clues. Three pictures in front of a church! Acch, it's the Arctic Cathedral, tourist site. Still...

I give our particulars, not especially interesting to anyone but us (and perhaps, not even to us after a while), for two reasons: I am reflecting on the phenomenon in general. Parents everywhere do this, looking at pictures and wondering "Are you, thou stranger, going to be...?" Someone did that with me once, staring at a picture wondering "Is this a good idea for my daughter? Will I like this boy?" (Answer to the first question: yes, probably. Answer to the second: no, not especially, though they were polite enough not to mention it until years later.)

I don't recall I worried much in the opposite direction. Children operate under the myth that you can just marry that one person, with the family being almost irrelevant. But you marry an entire family, like it or not. And if they are dead, you marry their ghosts.

Reason two: We have done something like this before, with Chris himself and his brother, looking at bad photos, reading inaccurate descriptions, peering into their momentary faces, trying to see behind the veil, asking "Are you...my son?" That time, they did it with us as well, asking others for clues as to who we were.

Post 3500 - Pro-Life

Two links that deserve wider circulation: I don't usually write on this topic, yet I don't think it is because I don't care. Mostly, I am cautious because I find people do not hear clearly what I say (or write). Or similarly, they have their Key Point that goes off whenever someone comes near the subject in their presence, setting off a predictable chain reaction off other people reciting their Key Point in response. I am pro-life, and am happy enough with the bright line being drawn at conception, but I don't find I am as deeply distressed as other prolife folks at the idea of drawing the line at implantation, or brainwave, or heartbeat. After that I sound about as declarative as any stricter prolifer.

I have operated for years on the general division that 20% of Americans oppose all or nearly all abortions, 20% consider any barrier to abortion a threat to civilisation, and the remaining 60% are in support of some restrictions, greater or lesser. The current numbers are a bit different, according to Gallup, and quoted in this National Review article. There is the 21% that oppose all abortions, but 38% that oppose nearly all - more than is commonly reported, I think. Those who believe abortion should be legal in all circumstances now number 26% - also more than I had thought. Between that 38% and 26%, then, there are people who identify as prolife who would allow some abortion, while some who identify as prochoice would prefer some restrictions. Most surprising to me was that about 26% - nearly all of the remainder between the two (statistical) extremes - thought abortion should be illegal after the first trimester.

I know that number is under-reported, whatever else is.

The NRO link has more discussion, plus a link to NYC41, a site which reports on NYC abortion statistics zipcode by zipcode. The "41" is included in the name because 41% of all pregnancies in NYC are aborted.

There is an additional point which comes up in recent political discussions - Planned Parenthood. There is a general impression on the prochoice side, which they try to convey to the general public, that Planned Parenthood is mostly an information and contraception organisation that does some abortions and refers out for others, but is persecuted by prolife and other conservative groups who don't want people to even have basic information. Let me mention an example of this. Planned Parenthood claims that abortions are only 3% of their services. They arrive at this number by counting every contact as equal. If you come in for a condom, or a pregnancy test, or an abortion, it is all counted the same. Left out of the calculation is the fact that they make much more money from the last-named service than the others - over half their budget. Which is more than 3% isn't it? Imagine a car dealership that made 90% of its money from auto sales, 10% from parts, claiming that because 50% of their customers came in for parts, that was "half their business." Faith magazine has an article about PP and similar PR accounting and reporting tricks. The research looks pretty solid, and it's pretty damning.

They are essentially not an honest organisation. For me, that's case closed.

Summer Song

There is comfort food; to me this is comfort music. C Am F G7 - only about a thousand songs from that era with that progression, eh? Gentle harmony, acoustic guitar that is plucked rather than strummed, light on the base and percussion.


And those glasses, reminding me that I actually was stylish then. Geeky looking, sure - it's not a flattering look in general - but at least I had company.

Just Like I Learned It...

...at Straw School in the 1960's.  Except Miss Morse played the piano better than this. Note that even for performance, everyone has to read it off the card. Some few of us know the chorus. But no one - not since Miss Morse died - knows any of the verses anymore. I sort of know the first verse, and I may be the current record-holder. It's not like Texas, where, Ben tells me, preschoolers can hear the characteristic clapping and all launch into "Deep in the Haaaart of Texas!" on cue.

We are a modest people, perhaps. Or just don't like being bothered and made to perform.




If you come visit, I'll show you where Pineconia Grange is, too.

Instability

Alt-history, whether personal or global, has always been both attractive and repellent to me.  Those of us with memory or historical knowledge always have a host of just-barely or just-missed-it stories that lend themselves to fantasies of going back and changing one little thing.  Sports fans, of course have dozens of such thoughts they can pop out on demand.

Yet I have always known it was a lie at deepest levels, not simply because to the inability to reverse time's direction, but because the very playing with the fantasy of One Little Change highlights how thoroughly the world could change with the merest tipping.  The Arthur C. Clarke story of the man traveling back in time, killing a butterfly, and instantly vanishing I recognised as true immediately.  If fact, I thought the death of the butterfly an excessive amount of interference for his illustration.  Breathing on the butterfly or not would have been equally effective at changing the world.  The story of Schrodinger's cat looks impossible, but there are truths about particles in it.  And once particles have broken the seal, are any events exempt?

Reading Taleb, and a little cosmology, and reviewing Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"* this week I will take that instability one step further.  If we were to return to some early period and have time replay, the world would change dramatically even if we did not interfere in the slightest.  The odds of some events are so close and the slippage so easy that a second iteration would turn out differently. 

We don't imagine the world this way.  We look at past events as having a certain inevitability, a narrative we can discern which explains things to us.  Christians look to the first chapter of Jeremiah and cling pretty tightly to the hope that this knowing us from before the womb means what it looks like it does, but I am not sure it does.  I think God is giving an "I know what I'm doing" message, not a "Let me give you a philosophy/science/cosmology lesson" one. (Not mutually exclusive, but it is good to keep the main point main.) 

We swung pretty close to never existing, and still do to non-existence, held in suspension by a Logos that we understand in only the slightest way.

*Did I review that?  Reminder to math/science geeks who have interest in theater.  Stoppard is your go-to guy, right from the coin-flipping bit in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" right up to, and especially including "Arcadia." None of this Obama-Tribe "Curvature of Constitutional Space" nonsense, misusing science concepts for social ends.  Stoppard gets it.  Thomasina in "Arcadia" is likely modeled on first-programmer Ada Lovelace.

Vitamins Are Not Good For You

I sent my "Tevye Channel" post to a physician friend who is also a medical researcher.  (I have mentioned him from time to time.)  A brilliant guy, and not afraid to ask my favorite question "What if the opposite is true?" or be skeptical about those who think themselves skeptics.  He mentioned his running theory that vitamins are bad for you (Note: he is big on fish oil however), remembering my claim that exercise is bad for your health.  He put in the following recent research evidence: (italics mine, if you want to skip to that point.)

Antioxidants May Not Help Patients With Alzheimer's.
MedPage Today (3/19, Phend) reported, "Antioxidant supplements don't appear
to have an impact on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers related to
Alzheimer's disease," according to a study published in online in the
Archives of Neurology. "The combination of vitamin E, vitamin C, and
alpha-lipoic acid did not lower levels of the amyloid and tau proteins that
make up the plaques and tangles seen in the brain with Alzheimer's
disease," researchers reported. Notably, "the popular antioxidant coenzyme
Q (CoQ) had no significant impact on any CSF measures in the Alzheimer's
Disease Cooperative Study antioxidant biomarker trial."

        Researchers "gave antioxidant supplements to 78 patients with
Alzheimer's disease who were part of a study funded by the US National
Institute on Aging," HealthDay (3/19, Reinberg) explained. "The patients
were placed into three groups" where "one group received daily doses of
vitamin E, vitamin C and alpha-lipoic acid," the "second group was given
coenzyme Q (a compound made naturally in the body to protect cells from
damage) three times a day," and "the third group received a placebo. After
16 weeks, 66 patients had their cerebrospinal fluid analyzed."

        Medscape (3/19, Brooks) reported, "The antioxidant combination led
to a relatively small reduction in CSF F2-isoprostane level, suggesting a
decrease in oxidative stress in the brain, but it was also associated with
accelerated cognitive decline on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE)."
The authors said, "It is unclear whether the relatively small reduction CSF
F2-isoprostane level seen in this study may lead to clinical benefits in
AD," and noted that "the more rapid MMSE score decline 'raises a caution
and indicates that cognitive performance would need to be assessed if a
longer-term clinical trial of this antioxidant combination is considered.'"
Additionally, they said, "These results do not support further clinical
trial development of CoQ in AD." Also covering the story is Reuters (3/20,
Pittman).

Accelerated cognitive decline on a standard, concrete, instrument.  Ouch.

I made my usual encouraging but banal remarks to such things.  He elaborated in his return email.  I was going to summarise, but he speaks for himself better than I could for him.

  Vitamins are likely to cause unexpected consequences when you take them in
doses never seen in nature (almost always the case) thinking there is no
such thing as too much vitamin (almost never the case) to prevent a disease
that is separated from the biochemical function of the vitamin by several
incompletely understood causal relationships.  Another way to look at it is
that you're using a very precise tool like a scalpel, and by means of large
doses, applying it to your body with the force and precision of a grenade
launcher.  There's recent evidence on iron supplementation for example with
mortality increases...

We in medicine often fall prey to the hubris that comes from success
stories such as scurvy and vitamin C. The allure of preventive medicine and
the conceit of understanding some biochemistry are pleasant diversions from
the ugliness of complexity and a lack of clinical outcomes data.

The 15 Nations of Great Britain

Years ago, when I commented on "Ship of Fools," I or another Yank had asked if there were a British equivalent to Nine Nations of North America, Joel Garreau's marvelous 1985 work that still has great explanatory power.

Someone at SOF wrote a beauty, which I kept and published here without attribution, while acknowledging it wasn't original to me.  Probably via search engine, someone Named Ken Brown has stepped forward and claimed it is his.  I have no reason to doubt it, though I don't have any ability to confirm it either.  He has his own site, The View From Nunhead Station, which has as its current tope entry "Toward a New Railway History of Middle-Earth.

It is a thing little remembered – even by the Wise – that Dwarven miners had been laying or carving tracks along the floor of their tunnels to ease the movement of ore trucks and other gear since at least the end of the Second Age. Moria, in its time of glory, was completely spanned by such, and a cable-hauled gravity-assisted rack-and-pinion railway was laid in the to take mithril and gems down to Lorien, and return with such provisions as even Dwarves need.

Sounds like my kinda guy.

The Tevye Channel

I did the reader’s theater production in Concord.  My son hinted pretty strongly that I over-acted – “hamming it up” was the tweet, I believe.  That’s hardly surprising, as I played Tevye.  The character’s actual name was Frank MacPherson, a retired English professor in early stages of dementia, but he kept shading into Tevye.

This is because I always play Tevye.  The Importance of Being Yiddish; Death of a Milkman; and the risque Oy! Anatevka!  I don’t mean to, but I just seem to believe that all of life needs more Tevye.  I can vary it at need: depressed in A Day In The Life of Tevye Denisovitch, reflective in The Tragical History of Tevye, Prince of Denmark.  I play Tevye in real life a lot, too.

It is even odder because I have never been cast as Tevye.  I was in Fiddler as a young man and played Mendel, the rabbi’s son. Now that I look like Tevye and could play him blindfolded (one of those avant-garde Toronto Shakespeare Festival things, I imagine) my singing voice is shot and I’m too irritable to go to rehearsals every night.

My second son almost succumbed. The one time I subbed in for his director in high school, he started to make Frank Gilbreth rather Tevyish in “Cheaper by the Tuzen;” but in college he fought free, and settled down to shameless fly-catching in Chekov instead.

I actually do have a few other characters I can play, unlike Walter Matthau, who always plays the same guy.*  There’s an irritable, sarcastic Scot (can go Irish, Yorkshire, or Cockney at need), Inspector Clouseau, and Eeyore.  Scratch that.  My Inspector Clouseau is just Tevye with a French accent.

*And a good thing, too.  We need more of that guy in the world.  Think of how few wars there would be if 10% of the male populace in every country did that Walter Matthau schtik.

Christian Gravesite

In Jerusalem. Perhaps the earliest.

Worship

Elizabeth Scalia wrote a piece at First Things almost two weeks ago about the dissatisfaction of many older Catholics with mass as it is often celebrated these days. 

My son is on the leadership team at church reading over the comments people have about what we should be looking for in a worship pastor - unable to contain themselves to that question and leaking out into what they want in worship itself (More projections screens!  No projection screens!  Newer music!  Older music!)

Our Bible study friends, who came up in a particular era of evangelicalism, used the term worship to mean "an extended time of praise songs interspersed with extemporaneous prayer," which was always jarring to me, who uses it to mean the entirety of the Sunday service, and even something outside that.

Hearkening back to last night's conversation with our young friends (previous posts), they described preferences and we rolled over other possibilities - eastern orthodox rites, full-volume contemporary, emerging church. 

I have recently come to the opinion that our desired worship style is more a heart language, a mother tonge, which we cannot easily change.  We might intellectually assent that other forms are just as valid, but they just don't do it for us in practice.  They don't work for us as well.  This may be our childhood experience, our post-conversion form of worship, or one we have been in longest, but it is what our heart desires, and we think, our surest way to experience God.  It is not absolutely immutable, but it resists modification.

Whether any of us thinks that is a healthy thing or not, I believe it is a reality of worship, and we might all do better if we recognised that our preference is deep-seated and works for us but not necessarily superior thereby.  Also, that those others are not just being obstinate and unwilling to see that we would find our way much better if they would only give it an honest try, but on exactly the same footing.

I have noted from time-to-time that I seldom find worship all that emotionally moving anyway.  I think it is because I don't have a mother tongue of worship, a favorite heart language that reaches to my depths.  I have a collection of different worship experiences which are just fine but not exciting.  Looking over my mixed worship history, it is hardly surprising.  What would be surprising, in fact, is if I did have some form that really tripped my trigger.

On the other hand, there's some significant advantage in that.  There aren't any forms of Christian worship that don't work at least somewhat for me.  I don't get much of Quaker silence, and I desire it;  I don't get much regular liturgy and I miss it; I like things quite raucous and contemporary at times - much more contemporary than our 1990 version at BCC, in fact; I like black churches, eastern churches.  Pound-it-out late 19th C camp meeting I've had about enough of, but I don't need to avoid it, especially.

For me it's like a filling station.  Some of them have conveniences stores, some don't; some have a Dunkin's, some will pump for you, they bear different brands, they are easier or harder to get to, less expensive or more, with carwash or air or not.  It doesn't much matter to me.  The car needs gas - this will do.

I can get taken out of worship by people doing some part of it very badly.  I don't mean music poorly performed, but arrogantly, force-feeding a congregation what the worship team knows is good for it; or congregations clearly congratulating themselves on how right their worship is - not like those other ignorant people who aren't spirit-filled or whatever.  It takes me a while to get past that.  But if congregations just innocently do what they do because that's who they are, I find I can enter in to that pretty easily.

Cliches

The young friends (previous post) and I chuckled over Christian cliches a bit last night, as we both encounter a fair number of believers whose understanding seems to go no deeper. Their faith might, but not their understanding.

It's offputting, certainly. Yet this morning I was rereading The Professor and the Madman - an excellent story told in a ludicrous style - and ran across secular cliches strung together. Bull Durham* for writers, perhaps.  The symptoms described for Captain Minor are quite clearly a late-onset paranoid psychosis, probably schizophrenia.  Simon Winchester doesn't give us much detail, and the misinterpretation of tastes as well as sounds might send us toward another category of illness in understanding the American Captain, but the organic, or biological quality is unmistakeable. 

But Winchester, even as recently as the 1990's, doesn't bother to ask any actual professionals what was actually wrong with the man, apparently.  He reads the biographical information and notes that he comes from a pious family, lusted after naked girls in Ceylon when he was thirteen, felt guilty about it afterward but still felt lust, and attributes his later psychosis to this constellation of circumstances.  He as much as sighs that if the boy had only gotten laid a few times as a youth and not troubled himself over it, he might not have turned into a murderer.

I have not noted that any reviewers have objected to this idiocy.  It's the cliche, the preferred narrative that missionary piety leads to pathological guilt, especially over sex (and more especially of the nice natural sex of exploiting native girls?), and the personality is forever warped.  That many boys (or girls) of pious family experience lust as teenagers and feel guilty about it, yet don't go on to murder others and be locked up for life in institutions for the criminally insane, seems not to occur to Winchester.  Or his reviewers.

*Crash Davis: You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: "We gotta play it one day at a time."

Fellowship

Young friends who are believers but have no church home were over last night. I understand why they are distant and unltracautious about church - and they do lots of things to compensated for it in keeping contact with other young believers. Most people would have some disquiet about that because they feel that all young people should have a network of strong and mature believers around them for their upbuilding and edification. For me it's the opposite, or rather, the reverse. You have to be yoked to a certain percentage of knuckleheads or you don't grow in the faith. Yeah, that sounds cute and ironic, but I mean just that. If you have nothing but great Christian fellowship (We were really blessed!) then I'm not sure you've got the full package.

The Easybeats

In case you were wondering why there was no "Australian Invasion" in 60's pop music. I always liked the 12-string guitar that the lead played, though I'm not seeing it here. A little research shows that it was Harry Vanda, and a Maton guitar (a very good brand).

Wish I'd Thought Of That

Family Culture - Orthagonal Influence

Thus the Wyman Family Culture was slated to drift into its next phase, dispersion, in 2000. Jonathan was a Junior at Asbury and was still dating his highschool sweetheart who had followed him there, part of one-quarter of the Concord Christian class of '98 who went from NH to Asbury. Ben was plodding along happily in his own self-contained way, doing well at school, playing JV basketball, surfacing into conversation with others often enough to be interesting. As one of the older boys put it, we were that reading, eccentric, high-volunteering family that won all the puzzles and contests. Tracy and I looked forward to some variation of "Mama in her kerchief, and I In my cap, were looking forward to a long winter's nap that involved lots of reading, and perhaps travel." The end of an era approached, and it was a satisfying and comforting feeling to watch our two about to be well-launched.

 My mother was dying, which took a great deal of travel up to Wolfeboro, twice a month, then once a week, then twice a week and three. Terribly sad, but that also fit with the ending of the era. My father would live on for a few more years, and I am like him in many ways, but my part of the family culture derives strongly from my mother and her side of the family, specifically her mother's side, where everyone played word games and knew poetry and talked with animation. When my mother died in October, I knew I would see little of my stepfather after (though I never expected he would forbid contact entirely).

I had visiting Romania in 1998, and after hearing Dale Kuehne mention that he had encouraged Rachel to go because he didn't want Romania to be the Other Woman in his life, I convinced Tracy to go in 1999. Perhaps this would be our new direction, one or both of us going to Romania every year. It seemed a place where we could carve out some ministry niche. But the cards fell differently and we adopted two teenagers from the orphanage instead, bringing Romania to America instead of the other way around.

The cultural divide was sharp. Jonathan graduated the week before they arrived, and Ben was finishing his junior year and looking on to college himself. Yet it never became two families. That was part of our energy and intent, to make sure that Chris and JA integrated into a family they would still have after we died, but I think Jonathan and Ben would have naturally done that anyway, or so it seems in retrospect. We were now the raucous House of Boys, with people noisily slamming in and out all the time, with more argument and less deep reflective conversation and clever irony. Irony is a weak teacher across foreign language and culture. Now we were all part Romanian. A new student at Concord Christian couldn't figure out why towheaded Ben had no accent and didn't speak Romanian like his brothers. (I think he never did get it. A full sandwich short of a picnic, that boy.) We had soccer players who knew what they were doing, but had no interest in baseball, basketball, or football. One of them does now.

Yet the continuity was also enormous - likely because that too was a specific, intentional part of our raising them. We have all become each other to some extent, which is how it should be. That makes no sense on the surface, but I think it is the grand expansion of goodness. We are each, all seven, very distinct from each other, yet there is similarity. Goodness can grow and expand, it does not have to harbor strength.

Next up, I will comment on acquiring sons at junior high age and how one raises them, which in turn sheds light on how one raises them from birth.

Romanian Spam

In these foreign-language robot spam comments I get on my back posts, I got my first one in Romanian: deratizare bucuresti. I think it means professional cleaners, or perhaps exterminators, in Bucharest.

Reader's Theater

I am reading tomorrow for a coworker's original script at the Concord Auditorium. The few rehearsals have reminded me why I loved acting and hated it, and why it is a good thing I left it. Simplest form: It is bad for my character. Ironically, I may be better at it now than I was then. No matter. Still not good enough to make a living, and the danger of descent into more obnoxiousness remains high.

Red State Blue State

Part of my ongoing correspondence. My uncle mentioned the great hypocritical irony of blue states supporting red ones, of red states that received much per dollar sent and blue ones that received little. My original replay was that the numbers looked very different when you broke it out by county, and the state breakdown was misleading. He accused me of being evasive, and not attending to the real data, aending along the following list: States Receiving Most in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. D.C. ($6.17)
 2. North Dakota ($2.03)
 3. New Mexico ($1.89)
4. Mississippi ($1.84)
5. Alaska ($1.82)
6. West Virginia ($1.74)
7. Montana ($1.64)
8. Alabama ($1.61)
9. South Dakota ($1.59)
10. Arkansas ($1.53)

States Receiving Least in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. New Jersey ($0.62)
2. Connecticut ($0.64)
3. New Hampshire ($0.68)
4. Nevada ($0.73)
5. Illinois ($0.77)
6. Minnesota ($0.77)
7. Colorado ($0.79)
8. Massachusetts ($0.79)
9. California ($0.81)
10. New York ($0.81)
My reply:

There are two separate subjects here. First, the specific data about who sends money to Washington and who gets it back. Second, why it is important to liberals to divide things into Red States and Blue States. I have seen other lists with less dramatic numbers but similar results, so I’m guessing that different things are being counted, but the trend is real. I am not contesting that for what it measures, the list of which states are net givers and which are net receivers is accurate. The problem with the data, as I suggested when I noted you get a different reading when breaking down by counties, is that suburbs, towns, and small cities pay for everything and are purple. Look at the lists again and you will see that it is highly related to population density.

Big cities and rural areas are a drain, though in different ways. But cities have one big advantage for the government, and it is why many environmentalists are advocating that people be encouraged to move to cities (quite a reverse from where they started, eh?). You can deliver services much more efficiently there. Rail passenger service is only cost-effective at high population density, for example. Delivery costs of food and goods is less. You can build one big Something rather than a lot of little ones. Highway construction is much more expensive per mile in Trenton, but you have way fewer miles to build than in North Dakota. The Big Dig in Boston was insanely over cost and probably a long time before it pays for itself. But it serves a lot of people, and I’ll bet without even checking that there are highways in West Virginia far more useless. Yet because the final number isn’t as big, it doesn’t get the press.

 It is still ironic that ranchers getting fewer, but longer and emptier highways, don’t mentally count this cost when they think about “government,” but it’s part of the entitlement mentality we all have. Highways are part of the furniture. Also, the government owns a lot of the land out west – Yellowstone doesn’t cost a fortune to administer, but it doesn’t pay anything in taxes either. Rural areas are receivers of agricultural subsidies and related crap. A lot of those growing areas aren’t especially red – Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado. Most of those central states are pretty well divided – agricultural welfare remains a bipartisan problem, which is why we can’t even get rid of the sugar subsidy.

The money comes in from the purple suburbs, towns, and small cities, as I noted. They don’t get so much back. Think where the money goes back out to. One big ticket item is military bases. But those are only partly tied to a local economy, and hardly to a state’s economy at all. Twenty miles out, the effect is pretty weak. So when the feds shovel money into Camp Pendleton, San Luis Obispo doesn’t see a lot of that bread. Yet by the calculations of the list you sent, it would look like some big windfall for “California.” Look at the list again and you won’t see a lot of places known for their military bases. Population density. That land is put to the use of underlying homes and businesses.

So the list is an interesting data point that tells us something, and it does have its ironies. But drawing a red-blue conclusion from it is pretty sketchy. The purple areas pay the bills.

 Second, the need for liberals to keep dividing things this way. Other groups have followed their lead, and to a smaller extent, some have even embraced that thinking. But generally, before you have looked at a single number or label, when you see a map or list that is drawing a Red State Blue State comparison, that map has been drawn by a liberal to show how good the people in the blue states are, and how bad those awful reddies are. Try it at home. The large exception is electoral maps, which necessarily have to be conceptualized by states. Yet even here, the automatic thinking of all political events in terms of electoral power is much heavier on the left. It’s rather chilling whenever some current legislator dies how quickly you can find writers in the Huffington Post speculating on who can be run for that office, and what the chances are of Democrats winning it. Before the body is even cold. (And yes, now that the phenomenon has been noticed, there are conservative sites who track it.) Republicans aren’t innocents on that and do some of the same. Right now they are doing altogether too much of it with the Texas-California thing. But it’s damn revealing.

Back to the map-drawing and list-making by states. I don’t think the liberal focus on this is a good thing. It obscures a lot of important information, as above. States are not that homogeneous, even the small ones like New Hampshire. But there is a deeper need, quite unattractive. It is the need to demonise, to put people into convenient categories and just regard them as stupid or evil. I have always thought that liberals are quick to accuse others of racism or sexism because they are projecting. They think that is how the world works, that people just naturally divide others into competitive categories. They focus on one set of divisions where they think they are more innocent, ignoring the ones where they are worse.

This relates to the other reason it is liberals driving the red state-blue state conceptualization of the country. They are actually only about 15-19% of the voting population. They are the leaders (dare I say rulers) of a coalition which includes blacks and unions plus some smaller groups. But being able to paint a whole state blue, and discussing everything in terms of the near-balance between Us and Them allows them to inflate their impression of who agrees with them. Which is why they are always amazed when stuff like Sandra Fluke polls against them.* The left-right political division is a leftist conceptualization from the early 20th C that they have used to great effect. But countries aren’t really divided that way, none of them, never have been. There have always been a variety of groups with shifting interests – just like countries, which sometimes switch sides in a war.

 *How can that be? I thought more than half the country supported women’s rights? Why does more than half the country hate the poor and women? Uh, check your premises, that’s how. And whenever feeling righteous is on the line, liberals stop thinking. Okay, that’s true of everyone. But for some reason it is just a million miles from liberal understanding. It’s a mob psychology that scares the pants off me.

The Blizzard

I first heard this at scout camp, which would have been 1965.  It had the Kingston Trio sound I grew up with, and I thought it must be old - at least a generation. It had great emotional power for me for an odd reason.

I had been at YMCA camp since age 6, but this was my first (and only) year at Camp Carpenter.  I didn't have especial nervousness, and rather liked being able to pick up a couple of merit badges on the cheap, as my scoutmaster, old Wally Webb, he of the 42-year pin and Silver Beaver award, was very strict and didn't want any hotshots moving through the ranks too quickly.  The whole village, named after some group of Indians, of course, went on an overnight hike and campout at the end of the lake.  I was one of the youngest and a little odd, and my two friends were in other villages.

There was a thunderstorm, which woke me in the middle of the night, at which point I noticed that I was the only one around.  They had gone somewhere and left me behind.  It later turned out they were only "about a hundred yards" away at a makeshift shelter.  But as far as I knew they had gone back to camp, so I headed back in that direction.  There was a path that ran along the edge of the lake, and I later calculated on the map it was less than a mile, but I was a rather forlorn 12-year-old trudging back, with an unraveled sleeping bag and soaked clothes.  I don't think I cried, but I was feeling rather abandoned and cast aside, a child with no father and no one who seemed to care.

When I got to the regular village, it was empty.  You'd think I would be relieved to be back in dry, familiar territory, but I was worried I was in big trouble.  When reveille was played in the morning, I wondered if I should hide or go to morning assembly and face the music.  I elected to go, standing all alone in my troop's spot as the flag was raised before breakfast, trying to stand at very good attention and be precise in my scout oath and movement. (At that moment, I actually was grateful to Mr. Webb for teaching me properly. I hoped it would keep me out of trouble.) I marched into the mess hall at the proper time and sat at our village's tables. There was nothing set out for me, of course, so I went over to the window and grabbed plates and bowls - they looked like this, remember?

- and got in the line for getting seconds, figuring I would have to wait a bit, but at least would get something. I didn't dare ask anyone for anything.





You may wonder how a boy of twelve could be so foolish as to think he would be the one in trouble over such an event, rather than the adults and older scouts charged with keeping track of me. You forget what a different world it was, and how it was automatically assumed that children were at fault if anything went wrong. I was in trouble, at least at first. Irritated men came over to ask me where my troop was, and why I had left it. Not until I was safely home, and my mother had heard the whole story and angrily followed up on this was there any acknowledgement that I was the victim. Even then, they apologised to her and she relayed that to me as if I should feel vindicated. No one ever said a word to me.

At camp, I finished out the week amidst whispers about the boy who had run away from his village. Children are easily distractable, plus I was back in contact with my two buddies - they believed me and commiserated, anyway - so it wasn't too bad, actually. The walk in the dark and sitting alone at breakfast were the worst of it. There were awards on the last night and only a few of us had completed the Mile Swim, so I felt I had proved myself in some way. Then it was final campfire, with songs we had learned and a few new ones cooked up for the occasion. "I'm Henry VIII I Am" was #1, and the counselors did a takeoff called "I'm Docked For The Summer I Am," which of course I still remember all the words to.

The second to last song was "The Blizzard," which I had never heard. It's maudlin, and I had considerable susceptibility to such then, but there was also an immediate identification with the man traveling alone at night, looking forward to home and someone who love him. Then the "hundred yards" part really had me tearing up. It was just like what I had been through. Except that he was in bitter cold, and died, of course, but other than that it was about me.

I picked the Jim Croce version mostly for novelty, and because it's not quite so overdone.



Not until years later did the ridiculousness of this song come to me. It's friggin' horse, Mack, not a human being. What kind of twisted loyalty to a non-sentient creature causes you to refuse to walk into the house so that you can pretend his last moments were less tortuous because his pal had stayed behind with him?

Who Goes Nazi? Reprise

Searching for something else, I found this post from eighteen months ago, Who Goes Nazi?

Not The Point

I keep wondering if it is only my liberal friends, or if it applies to all liberals, but I get a lot of emails and work comments that focus on the (supposed) humor of how ridiculous conservatives are.  Often there is even an explicit comment of "I can't believe Santorum/Gingrich/random evangelical pastor from Podunk/ is saying this!  What are they thinking?" Or more revealing still, a comment about how easy this is going to be to make fun of - that Leno or Colbert are going to have easy pickings.  Knowing smirks are common.

And then nothing.  No follow-through.  No further reasoning is necessary, apparently.


How easy something is to make fun of as a measure of its rightness or wisdom.  Only in high school.  I don't see how it is making the top ten reasons for believing something otherwise.  Lord knows I've got plenty of reasons to leave the Republicans behind, but every time I try I meet one of these brain-dead Democratic arguments at the first corner and have to just sit down and sigh.

It is a specific variety of the general set of arguments of "research showing how stupid conservatives are," and "mind-reading how Republicans have reasons other than what they say," and "evidence that the Right is selfish and evil."  But this might the most important, the crown jewel.  If only we can show that there is something ridiculous about these people then everyone will come over to our side.  It must really strike a chord - how else would Trudeau have stayed in business all these years? (Slight credit.  Trudeau can sometimes make fun of his own, a healthy sign.  But it has strange limitations. Mostly, it's humorous only to his tribe, because it's not much more than sneering.)

Some general rules:
1.  Everything is easy to make fun of.*  Even middle-school kids accomplish it.  Professionals have an ability to do it with that extra flair, twist, and delivery - that last 1% takes talent - but it's still easy.
2.  If someone is trying to be serious, it is extra-easy to make fun of them. 
3.  If sex, food, or money is within fifty meters of the topic, it is easier still.
4.  If your audience already agrees with you, you don't even have to be funny.
5.  I can take the things you hold dear and make fun of them with no effort - funny enough that a group of knuckleheads I select will forward it to each other. (Which isn't funny enough for me to bother, BTW.)
6.  It's not an actual, er, y'know, intellectual argument.

It is not accidental that the conservative NPR-humor is most comfortable is PJ O'Rourke, an ex-liberal whose strength is making fun of people.  I love PJ - I think he brings real observational skill and wisdom to the American scene.  But it's not lost on me that snark is his oeuvre. 

*If you read outside your culture or time period this becomes embarrassingly obvious.  Liberals seem to be prisoners of current events and intellectual fashions.

Stop The Presses

I picked the right day to wonder what was up with Nicholas Nassim Taleb, it seems.  He's all over the news.

I have said all year that I am unexcited by the field, but the Republicans have only to notify me who they have nominated in November and I will cast my vote - but that Ron Paul might make me rethink that.  As of Taleb's announcement, at a minimum that qualifier is gone.  The Author of The Black Swan, who is not a libertarian, neither Republican nor Democrat, not especially political and deeply involved in other projects - has "come out of his library" to campaign for Ron Paul. 

He notes four major issues, and Paul is the only one addressing them with the severity needed.  Taleb uses words like metastacised, chemotherapy, and hyperinflation in his little speech.  The deficit, he states, is 90% of the problem.  Then the fed, then militarism rather than defense, then resilience and energy.  He is notably less excited on the Ron Paul difference in those categories, yet he still gives him the edge.  And once you've put out that 90% number, the rest doesn't matter so much, does it?

OK Nassim.  You've got my attention.

Social Media and Politics

A new Pew Report, high points here, notes that 18% of social networking site users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone because of their political comments.  Liberals are more likely to do this than conservatives, 28-16. Moderates less.  Fascinating report.

I think that would be me, were I a user, having much opportunity to feel hurt because some friend tossed me over.  But it wouldn't be because of anything I brought to the conversation - it would be my response to what someone else brought.  I'm not good at staying away from that stuff.  I seem to believe strongly that wrongness needs reply.

It doesn't, not always.  Perhaps almost never.

HT: Volokh

Karl Popper Quote

“Any social science which does not teach the impossibility of rational social construction is entirely blind to the most important facts of social life.”

HT: Andrew C. McCarthy

Nationalism and Alcohol

An excellent quote from an American diplomat in 2007, improved upon over at Volokh in 2012.

Cultural Gap Link

Yuval Levin has commentary on Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart and the general topics behind it.  His view is that the formation of the New Lower Class and the New Upper Class are not that strongly related.  In his view, the former is simply falling apart, and the latter has little effect on that. 

Many of the other critics of Murray's book make the claim that wage stagnation and loss of good jobs for lower-middle and middle-class workers has driven the collapse of family formation in Fishtown, not some moral deterioration that we should tsk-tsk at.  Sometimes this job loss is presented as the result of bad economic policies left or right, sometimes as fairly inevitable given the world economy.  Steve Sailer would note that everyone is ignoring the effect of immigration, especially illegal immigration, in creating this.

I do think it is likely that the technical advances since 1960, plus the addition of women to the paid workforce, should have made Americans fabulously more wealthy, but we have squandered it and learned bad habits.  Now that we can afford to divorce, we've done lots of it, and "family" income now supports two dwellings.  We have been able to afford college majors - perhaps even the education itself - that does not produce anything of job value, so we've done that too; a lot of talent has gone into areas of refinement, or knowledge for its own sake, or enjoyment - all of which used to be available mostly to the sons of the independently wealthy.  In a constantly growing economy, there was always a way to use that knowledge.  We can now afford to entertain ourselves lavishly, and boy have we ever.  The new normal for how much choice and fun we think we should have has taken over enormous chunks of our economy.

I have opinions on all that, which I leave off for the moment in order to talk about family formation, as that is nearer to the parenting topic I have been pondering more lately.

The simplest fact is that the world has changed and is changing.  Some have the skills and attitudes the era calls for, others have to scramble.  The rules have changed.  It is now more imperative that couples remain married - which makes this data from The Witherspoon Institute troubling.  I am not encouraged that young people still endorse the idea of getting married if they don't know what that means.  It is more important to live modestly and delay gratification, because volatile economies, even if they generally reward you, are going to have scary times.

The Virginia Postrels of the world believe that new jobs will keep being added, because they always have. It's not a bad argument, but I am reminded of the opening of Taleb's The Black Swan, in which some Lebanese were certain that their battles and upheavals are temporary and everything will go back to normal - because it had for a thousand years.

Hmm.  I should see what Taleb is up to lately...

Truths

Dubbahdee sends along an article by a design company showing how graphic presentation can make different impressions - all of them true - arise from the data. They disguise their own slant - if they have one - admirably well, though if I had to guess I would think they lean left.

The examples given by Darrell Huff in How To Lie With Statistics are more linear.  This example is a little subtler, not only relying on our immediate visual impression, but on our quiet assumptions as well.  I will repeat, BTW, that the Huff 1954 book, though all the dollar values should likely be increased by a factor of ten now, should be required reading in highschool.  When folks take it into their head to design a canon to suggest for secondary education, that title is nearly never on the list, but immediately assented to once someone suggests it in the comments.  List-makers tend to favor books which teach Great Ideas.  Seeing through Bad Ideas may be more to the point.

Spam and Word Verification

Since shutting off the difficult captcha word verification system on the comments, I have been getting a ton of spam, much of it Russian.  Fortunately, with 3400 posts it has all been buried in old things that no one reads anymore.

Whiplash

One new thing in the public discourse I have absolutely not gotten used to is liberals waxing nostalgic for the years 1945-1963.  Those wonderful years when unions were strong and regular folks could get good jobs and there were neighborhoods and social capital and the evil rich weren't gouging us, etc.  Krugman's The Conscience of A Liberal absolutely floored me, as I was still expecting liberals to be in Robert D Putnam mode (2001), wondering if sociological research that might gum up diversity goals should be suppressed. 

But OWS seemed to have a fair bit of Good Old Days nostalgia, and those days were boomer childhood.

After a lifetime of trashing the 50's - sometimes for very good reasons - in favor of more recent eras, you would think they would have some dim awareness that they have been saying the exact opposite for decades.  Nah Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Atheist Disagreement

Atheists claim that they don't have a religion, and are in fact quite insulted when it is suggested.

Well, you keep making sacrifices at altars, we figured there was a religion in there somewhere.

Didn't We

The story behind is sort of my story - except Jimmy Webb (MacArthur Park, Galveston, Wichita Lineman) could actually write music. He didn't sing well - I've got that on him, I suppose. I sang this one solo when I was in highschool having learned it from Richard Harris's overdramatic album. A lot of folks covered it, apparently. Heartbreakers were a specialty of mine.

Text And Subtext - Part II

Two unrelated points. I try to make a precise distinction between sinning and repenting and saying that something isn't a sin. Seared conscience, hardness of heart and all that. But I have to admit that even people whose emotions aren't on the line don't often get the distinction, as per my first post and the cognitive dissonance of "nice people," and "sin I really disapprove of." This also hearkens back to my post of a month ago Not Really, Really Wrong. How much harder it must be for younger people, already in a world awash with rejections and with the cultural imperative to find a place in the world, to get what I am driving at? The students that bsking mentioned would likely have trouble with even implied rejection, never mind explicit.

The logical distinction, as important at it is, may just be lost 90% of the time. At that point, are we not punishing them for the quite minor sin of not thinking very hard when their bell has been rung?

 Second point. The misunderstanding perpetuates because the ones who stay are the fighters, whether righteous or chip-on-the-shoulder or both, who want to insist that homosexuality is no sin and want to change the church. Those are the gays and lesbians the church rulemakers encounter most, and quite naturally - but quite wrongly - assume that's what all gays are like. Most gays and lesbians I know are not at all activist, and in fact tend to find activists a little tedious. But to church groups, there seems to be a Let's Nip This In The Bud attitude that is harsh to those who don't deserve it.

One Cheer For Obama

As we move into the election, folks may note that I have much less to say than I did four years ago.  I am unexcited by the Republican offerings.  However, as I have said from 1996 on, the Republicans can pretty much just notify me in November who they have nominated and they have my vote.  I find much wrong with them.  I continue, however, to find prominent Democrats dangerously insane.  That's not a humorous clever statement.  I mean exactly that.

As people I get along with and want to see socially, Democrats and Republicans are about even-up.  Some wonderful and some appalling people. I cannot imagine how these reasonable, fun people can even vaguely consider the fools and criminals they nominate.  Presumably, they feel the same about me.

As we come into the home stretch, I would like to review what we were worried a President Obama might turn out to be.  People had differing worries, but they fell into broad categories.

1.  His default position is not merely liberal, but quite radical, which he covers with dissembling words.
2.  He is a narcissist who believes too much in his own persuasiveness and cannot listen to others.
3.  He is ridiculously inexperienced and unprepared.
4.  He is a dishonest Chicago-politics thug.

I think the other usual criticisms descend from these, alone or in combination.

The envelope please.  I think all those things turned out to be true, but not as horribly as they might have. He is a Chicago thug, as he revealed in the bailouts and via Eric Holder's DOJ.  He continues to have a starry-eyed confidence that repeatedly discredited liberal ideas will work this time - but not to the CPUSA extent we feared.  He has allowed such types too much power in his administration - but Bill Ayers is not SecEd, for example.  He has had no clue what works in an economy, but after his first wild dice-throws, has stopped coming up with brilliant new ideas to fix things.  Just the standard stupid DC jobs-program and "investing" in this, that, or the other thing that the Republicans do about as much of.

In foreign policy, Obama has been quite leftist in rhetoric, but quite centrist in action.  I don't think he's got a plan, and just wings it with one-worlder sympathies at times, but I have come to think that foreign-policy plans are overrated.  Hillary Clinton seems to be running things, which is an improvement over what Obama would have done on his own,  (See Economy, fixing, for example).  My worry with Hillary was always that she had too many plans, but that seems to have receded.  She does the work without getting a lot of glory and seems modest and realistic in her goals, after a liberal-hope-drunkenness to start.  Perhaps she is just weary, but it works.  I think she would be a decent president at this point - far better than Obama or Biden.  Note how measured, and in retrospect accurate, her comments about the Arab Spring turned out to be - even though she had to keep pretty close to the cheery Obama line on that.

I absolutely never thought I would say that.  Let me stress that I don't think she would be an excellent or desirable president, but that I would not fear a Hillary presidency.  Good for her.  Hard work and limited goals sorta kinda won me over.

So one cheer for Obama, one-and-a-half for Hillary.

A Little History Of The World

I listened to the audio book of this a few years ago and was charmed. It was written by EH Gombrich in the 30's as an introduction for children. When I started listening again last week I wondered when it would be appropriate for my granddaughters.

I stopped about halfway through. There are two related flaws, only one of which I noticed the first time. Taken together, I would no longer recommend it as history - though it does remain charming.

 It is in the old history style, focusing on battles, kings, and changes in official religion. As we moved away from that lots of folks sniffed that we were moving to History Lite and it was all some anti-American, anti-Western, anti-male, anti-something tripe - an effort to evade the hard work of learning concrete information. There's some truth in that, but much less than half. More modern historical treatments focus on what families were like, or how cultures viewed death, or trade. We spend more time on domestic architecture, migration, and relations among groups - things that had always been present, but only brought forward when they impacted the big stuff.

I greatly approve. If we wanted to know about the history of Papua New Guinea, or heck a newly-discovered planet, we would care not at all about their intrigues and coups and wars. We would want to know what their lives were like, and how that developed. Wars and rulers would influence that, but it would be those which were in the supplemental role.

Gombrich hits some of the big items in cultural history - one could hardly ignore the Renaissance, even if one believes (as I do), that it was a long process starting around 1100 rather than an explosive one starting in the 15th C. But he underemphasises such things. I don't like my history that way anymore. Relatedly, his perspective is very much that of standard narrative bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, which emphasises how wonderful rationalism is contrasted to faith or trade or technology, achieved by ignoring such things as its connection to the French and Communist and National Socialist revolutions. I think reasoning a wonderful thing, and one of the great forces for good in Western Civilisation. But unchecked, it has unintended effects, just like everything else in the world.

Gombrich does not state his early 20th-C continental rationalism explicitly for children. But it is strongly implicit in his choice of materials, and perhaps more pernicious thereby.

Text And Subtext

It came to me secondhand that friends at church are distressed that many Christians want to treat homosexuality as a sin different than the others. They (we) are thus less tolerant because we accept people with other sins in the church but not that sin.

I get annoyed at that because the shoe is on the other foot. We are being asked not to treat homosexuality in the same manner as other sins, but just the opposite. We accept thieves if thieves repent and endorse honesty; accept liars if they repent and tell the truth; accept the greedy if they renounce greed and embrace generosity. Yet here, we are being asked to accept the sinner who says his actions are just fine, and no business of ours anyway.

Yet there is one sense in which they do have a good point. In terms of content - the text - their complaint hasn't got a leg to stand on and makes no sense. Adding in the irrelevancies that they have met some nice gay people now that they are more out in the open, or that their children "do better" with this because they have gay friends does not add anything to the discussion logically. (As for friends and nice people, I likely have more gay friends than any of them. what part of "theater major" and "social worker" eluded them?)

Yet the logically irrelevant aspects point strongly to emotionally relevant ones.

It is absolutely true that there are Christians, perhaps even a lot of us, who do regard homosexuality as a worse sin than others, who have a visceral anger or condemnation that is greater than what we bring to dishonesty, avarice, violence, or even heterosexual sexual sin. I know people like that, including ones who become irate when their "personal issues" are pointed out to them, denying it hotly. (BTW, the old pop psych idea that these are folks afraid of sexuality in general or doubting their own heterosexual nature I reject as silly. Bring some data and I might listen, though I think such data would be hard to come by. That is a fantasy of those who disagree with them, stated because it feels good to believe and might sting when said. But there isn't any evidence for it.) They insist either that they don't hate it any more than other sins, or that they do, because so does God. They can quote you the verses on that. Not that they hear contrary verses, of course.

So. If my friends are ignoring the text and attending only to the subtext of the debate, they have some defense. But there are good reasons for backing off from subtext interpretations as anything more than supplementary data. They are far more susceptible to our own biases and emotional states than pure text arguments. Even the socially skilled among us make mistakes often in this. The nuanced expressions of irony, understatement, and hints of condescension or disapproval are missed at times even among friends. We "get it" more often than not, and so approximate that we always do. Not even close.

Next, we all need to learn to stand or fall by what we have actually said.  Adhering to text aids that.  It also keeps us in better contact with past ages and later ones, when we read the former or are read by the latter.

It is a sad thing that so many of us move quickly to the "nice people" standard without realising it.  "Nice people" slides very quickly into "pleasant people" as the standard after which we will put up with any amount of sin from entertaining folks.  Worse, we then begin to regard the prickly and stern, or even the socially unskilled, as "wrong" because they have disrupted the social comfort; not noticing that we have substituted social comfort for moral categories.* There is a certain cognitive dissonance, perhaps, in maintaining a friendship with someone who you feel is engaging in a great sin, and so one or the other has to give.  I likely have areas where I do the same thing, and my response would be to cut you off and no longer be your friend.  Not necessarily better.

*Rule of thumb.  If you are absolutely sue you don't do this, then I call it very likely that you do it in some disguised form.

Family Tradition

I neglected to mention in my previous posts about creating a family culture - I had forgotten how central and intentional it was - that our family culture included an enormous amount of creating traditions that were ours, that were distinctive.  Defiance of Midwinter Barbecue, Easter Breakfast, praying for every ambulance that went by, cool trips to avoid Hallowe'en, repeated foods and songs, or pilgrimages to used bookstores or restaurants.  Christmas always included the same advent ceremony at dinner for four weeks, Jesse Tree, reading Best Christmas Pageant Ever aloud, Lucia, cutting the tree - half a dozen other customs which might be shared with the same friends every year, but were more often unique to our household.

We were well-embedded in this before we saw the Dobson book Let's Make a Memory, which stressed the importance of this for grounding a child in a family and the world in general.  Come to think of it, I don't think we ever read it, just knew it was there and told friends to go that route.  Children are naturally conservative about such things in their earlier years - in highschool the bonds begin to chafe a bit, and they resist some of it, but in general they come to see it as part of the definition of what their childhood was, or even who they are.

For us it was important to make all things new, though we drew almost entirely on traditional elements.  That's who were were, I think, and perhaps who we are:  a kaleidoscope turn of familiar bits recreated.  Much of the family tradition was highly intentional, but other parts came in serendipitously - an ancient noisy ice-cream maker purchased for $2 at a yard sale became central to the Defiance of Midwinter barbecues, while a concerted attempt to start Devotion By The Ocean lasted only one year attempt (very hot chocolate spilled, no available restrooms...it was the story about it that became the tradition).  Yet I don't think one knows to keep the accidental elements unless one is always looking to add to the collection.  Chance favors the prepared mind and all that.

So, my young friends expecting their first and wondering about parenting advice, I would suggest you put this high on the list.  Make traditions.  Never be afraid to steal good material from other families, but have confidence that you might come up with good things on your own.  And invite folks over.

Anniversary

Yesterday came and went without my noticing it.  I quit smoking a year ago.  I don't miss it.  Very occasionally, the idea of sitting alone with a night cigarette appeals, but it doesn't last.  I sometimes notice the smoke-smell on others and don't much like it.

All very anticlimactic

Anti-terrorist plans

From the NYT story about bin Laden's last days, we get the interesting story that his wives were arguing, and one accused another of turning him in to American intelligence.

So my plan is, give terrorists more wives.

HT:  Steve Sailer

Side-Effects

On my favored theme of labeling legislation and regulations for side-effects and expected effects, the same as we do for pharmaceuticals and to a lesser extent, food, financial products, and other purchases, there is this excellent article Two Cheers For The Welfare State.  I think most conservatives assent to this view of significant government intervention in areas of justice and system, but caution about possible unintended consequences.  Just really ticked at being accused of wanting no government at all whenever they question any new thing.

Assisted Suicide

Wesley Smith, a rather more precise thinker than most in the bioethics field, sends along reports about what has actually occurred under the assisted suicide programs in the Netherlands and in Oregon. Short answer - not a wholesale abandonment of principles, but an erosion of them, along the precise lines critics predicted. The checks against abuse are not always observed. This isn't news.

However, there is a difficulty in the government reports, which claim the proprieties are being observed, despite their own data stating otherwise, if one reads closely. Worse, data is being destroyed. That's rather chilling. To get legislation allowing assisted suicide passed, promises were made to those who objected. For example, it is required in the Netherlands that there be an ongoing doctor-patient relationship out of which this decision comes. Yet the median number of weeks the patient knew the doctor who wrote the poison prescription is 12. I am thinking at the moment of the doctor I have had for fifteen years as a contrast - and I wouldn't say she knows me all that well despite being a talkative and curious person.

The usual outraged blogger response is to Get The Word Out, reasoning that when all those people who drove a hard bargain find out that the government lied to them, they will be furious. They will take action. They will demand a change. I am not very convinced of that at present. I think the opponents were looking for an excuse to be talked into it. I don't think we actually do care very deeply about the moral issues we get exercised about. We care deeply enough to want someone else to do something, and are willing to help out in some small way, such as voting for them or signing something, or occasionally making a call.

Perhaps we fear becoming morally outraged because it has a bad history, such as the 30 Years War, full of religious pretense and devoid of Christianity. Secular attacks on the faith always stress such things, not even vaguely interested in actual history, it seems. Moral modesty and caution is hardly a fault. Yet I think it is more. Determined groups who seek to break the seal on moral issues and create a trickle usually succeed, as Christians seldom have the intensity to care about all issues and defend all fronts. We hope to slow the decline, or hope that the horrors will be few (as there are always a few horrors anyway, no matter what laws we have).

Modest Prayers

I have a tendency to believe that my prayer is more deserving, and God more likely to answer it, if it is more modest in scope.  I doubt that is good theology.  One has to stretch to find Biblical support, as God seems if anything asks us to be rather expansive and reckless in our asking.

It's not insane, of course.  It does have the effect of our attending to the exercise of seeing what our daily bread is, not our daily bakery.  Likely, it also strengthens our idea of God as parent, as that is exactly the strategy children (eventually) learn works best with Earth Dad.  Yet Dad never suggested he was giving crowns and precious gems in quantity in any event, so that analogy was never exact.

Spring Training

Commenter Michael is livin' the dream and going down to watch Red Sox spring training starting this weekend.

A-Soalin'

We often sang this in the car when the boys were small, not always at Christmas.  In their first few years, they grew up in a culture that we gradually moved away from.  I told a young friend at work that she had already spent half the childhood time with her son, just turning six.  She was not pleased, but I don't mind - it's true.  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.  When I write about family culture, it is a touch odd that the earlier, likely more formative culture, cannot be accessed by them as easily as the later culture. We remember much less of our earliest years - except for Ben, of course who insists that he remembers everything.  Once in his rage he insisted that he knew something before Jonathan because he had dreamed it before he was born.  Didn't give an inch, that boy.

The Shallows

Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows details his concern that the internet is changing how we think - and not for the better. Apparently our attention spans are decreasing, and we can no longer think hard for extended periods.

I wouldn't know, myself, my brain having been destroyed by watching too much television as a child.

Judging Dachshunds

We have had three Wire-haired Dachshunds over the years.  Their only value, I think, is how fun it is to watch them run.  (Biddledeh-biddledeh-biddledeh) Two running together is even better.  Yes, I know about them being bred to go down and fight badgers and all that, but really - I haven't been much bothered by badgers, or even ferrets around here for some time now.

So there's the running, and beyond that it's mostly begging and barking at entirely innocent and respectable visitors for no apparent reason.  Plus, us waiting for something to go wrong with hips or back and hoping that we don't have to carry a whimpering, semi-paralysed animal across town to be put down. Like I did last year.

There is a Dachshund Club of America, of course, and in their description of what the breed is judged on at shows, they offer these gif's of what their movement should look like.  I can't tell the difference, which suggests I should not take on a second career of dachshund-judging.

Cubs Up Close

Retriever sends a link of a photography project to get ground level wide-angle shots of African animals up close.  Think about it.  Not easy.  They use "beetle cams," which they also show.  Very cool.

Making Yourself Stupid

James's post Believing Headlines Makes You Stupid put me in mind of an informal experiment in a college Speech class. We were discussing small-group dynamics, learning about Harmonisers and Tavistock Observers and the like, and were assigned group projects from a list. Our group measured changes in measured intelligence when the group dynamics changed.

Bear with me in my description of the set-up. 19 in the class, three in my group, leaving sixteen subjects. Everyone took the "Stranded On The Moon" test, in which you have to rank which items in the crashed ship will be worth carrying to help you survive on your emergency trip back to base. It's a flawed test in many ways, but over time a consensus of answers result in stable scoring. You have a parachute What for? That's out - no atmosphere. But wait! We could carry things in it!

We ranked the scores and told people where they had ranked in the class, then divided them into four groups to take the test again. But we did not tell them that we had put the top four scorers together, then the next four, #5-8, then #9-12, and #13-16. We set them the task of taking the test again as a group.

 Group B, with scorers #5-8 got the highest score (by a lot), and Group C with #9-12 finished second, a little ahead of Group A, the top four scorers. The professor explained to us that this was a fairly typical result - every few years a group would pick that experiment off the list and it usually ended up that way. His observation was that knowing you had a top score made you unwilling to listen to others as much as you should. Having an only decently high score provided the right balance of confidence and humility. You could appreciate that someone else might have an insight you missed, while still believing that you were basically on track as to what was required here.

The last group, BTW, just got discouraged and fairly random.

This doesn't generalise to everything, of course. Had the top four known they were the top four they might well have done better as a group than as individuals, being more willing to listen to other "experts" than to random others. If Group D knew that Group B could improve so much, they might have worked better together and gotten somewhere. But it is revealing about the default setting people may have when they are told they are a little better or worse than the others.

Brainiac - An Unnecessary Review

Reviewing Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings Brainiac, about the worlds and history of trivia buffs, is unnecessary.  If you like that sort of thing, you will read it if it crosses your path whether it is well-written or not.  If you don't, only the knowledge that it brings something else to the table - neuroscientific research, anthropological connections, startling political or religious tendencies of the breed - would attract you.  A negative or positive review will only move the book up or down on your list a limited amount.

It's fine.  It's funny but not uproarious, solidly informative, and touches all the bases you want it to.  Our recently-discussed family culture being what it is, I have friends and relatives who keep occurring to me while reading this, who will have it lent to them when I'm finished.

The structure is similar to Jennings's Maphead, each chapter discussing a single aspect of triviadom exhaustively: college bowl quizzes, radio history, or Stevens Point, WI all threaded loosely together with his discussion of what it's like to apply, get selected, compete on Jeopardy, and return to regular life.  Rather like "I'll take geocaching for 600, Alex."  So Jennings has learned to think that way, in lists and categories. Update: On p 136, Jennings makes the association between 50's black-and-white photography and morality contrasted with 60's color, realistic, more complicated world. I've been harping on this for years. There is a powerful association here that completely overwhelms logical thinking and further solidifies the narrative for emotive, aesthetic reasons. Not to mention that for boomers, the primary perpetuators of this nonsense, they are describing the morality they were told when they were eight years old versus the one they were told at eighteen, and drawing Important sociological and cultural understandings from this. Ah, this is perhaps my one contribution to understanding the times, and thus I am Likely annoyed simply because it has never caught on.

St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe

Perhaps there are still those in England who think of the king's arms and clothing when they read that church name, but these days I'll bet most folks try to figure out some connection to CS Lewis or Narnia.

Nesmith Revisited

The negative comments about Michael Nesmith on my post with two songs by him were a surprise, but even more surprising is my own surprise.

Hmm.  Rather clumsy sentence, that.

My default position from youth is that The Monkees were not that musically talented and were a packaged band.  When it turned out that one, at least, had some talent that became my new default position.  I don't think I thought anything else about it, just plodded along with the unexamined opinion.  The offending lyric, when looked at, is indeed shallow and selfish - never noticed that.  He does indeed seem arrogant, once you look for it - never looked for it.

I'm going to bet that 90% of our opinions are like this.

Iditarod

John-Adrian fractured his ankle playing indoor* soccer, just in time for the doggies to start arriving in Nome.  So if you see a Romanian in his mid-20's limping around on the news coverage of the Iditarod, odds are high it's JA.

*It's Nome, in the winter. I'm assuming indoor.

Albanians and Ottomans

Pursuing other leads altogether today, I chanced upon the comment that the Ottomans before 1444 rather easily asserted dominance over Albanian tribes and families because those were too busy warring with each other to fight off the invaders.  Each hoped to use some alliance with outsiders to their advantage against their purely local competitors.

This is a far more common history than tribes unifying to fight off a common enemy.  All those sci-fi movies about every nation on earth working together to fight off invading Martians and such? Those were American movies.  Other countries don't think like that.  Tribes have to reach a certainly level of impulse control and self-observation before they can even consider such unity.  Germany was not a unified country for most of the 19th C, and nationalistic movements did not gather steam in general until the American Revolution proved that it just might work.  Nations are a late development.  Empire, separate nations being made to work together, is the older form.  It works great until it falls apart, at which point it gets bloody.  Simpler, though.  It relies less on humans generally making sense and more on a few humans making sense.

It causes us to misread history. Native Americans did not perceive a Europeans-versus-Indians conflict, but a more complicated equation of seeking alliances with the better European tribes to gain advantage for their tribe against other native tribes.  Yeah, we really prefer the white-guys-genocidally-eliminating-red-guys narrative now, because of how much life sucks for Native Americans, but it just isn't true.  Similarly, once Crusaders made it to the Holy Land, they discovered that Muslims were not all alike, and Muslims treated these new European Christians as potential counterweights in their own battles with other Muslims.  They emphatically did not regard the arrival of Frenchmen and Italians as a hegemonic invasion by Europeans, or see them as automatic allies of the Christians in Constantinople, but one more puzzle-piece in the jockeying for position for power in Antioch and Syria, Jerusalem being somewhat secondary.

Afghanistan is impossible to conquer because the tribes cannot ally.  That seems backward, but it is true.  Yet what good does it doe them?  They remain incredibly poor, except for the few. Ha ha you stupid British/Russians/Americans.  Guess we showed you, huh?

We don't see it that way now.  We retrospectively apply the distinctions we think they should have applied: Albanians vs Ottomans, Natives vs Europeans, Muslims vs Christians.  Those fit our current politics.  They have little to do with how people saw the conflicts then.

We see this on an even more micro level.  Icelandic males did not see the competition from American servicemen coming, and kept their focus on outdoing each other. (The stereotype is that females pick up on the threat from the arrival of exotic females much more quickly.  I don't know if that's true, though.) White supremacists worked hard to keep black people down while Jews and Asians came in and ate their lunch in the job market.

Working together is the exception.

Family Culture

There is a literary technique also used in films, I’ve heard, of telling a story from multiple points of view.  Nifty idea, sounds like fun.  I don’t know if I could do it myself.  This comes up because in any discussion of family culture, there are many characters on the stage.  In my case there are three other major characters – my wife and two oldest sons – plus a host of other greater or lesser voices who have joined us or watched us over the years.

My wife, for example, would not naturally think in terms of creating a family culture, except that I have been using it so long that the category is familiar to her.  Most children, equally naturally, would not think to call it anything other than Having a Childhood, until well after the formal operations stage. (Tangent – and such tangents are part of our family culture, mentally and conversationally holding your place and then resuming the old conversation – I used a Piaget stage because of familiarity and simplicity, but the Michael Commons model is probably better.) Still, they can think in such terms now, because once heard, the phrase family culture suggests its meaning pretty readily.

Here’s the further complication: our family culture has changed over time.  Where we started, in values, intensity, and practice, was somewhat different when the boys were younger.  The culture that formed them is but dimly remembered by them now, while the derivative culture of their teen years – and now even the cu Romanian years looms larger.  It’s only fair.  What I think of as my own childhood is heavily weighted to the later years, which were likely less formative.  It’s the way of the world.

All this to highlight that this is my view of the matter, but other fine minds might organise it differently. Here is what I believe we taught.

To Nurture and Enjoy.  Good motto, bumpersticker version.  That’s us over there, nurturing and enjoying.

Success is defined by God, not the world or current culture.  Yet there are enormous dangers in this idea as it plays out in practice.  We easily deceive ourselves, rationalising our personal desires or our group norms and calling them God’s opinion. We had both positive and negative responses to those worries.  Positive: Seek those who have tried to both contemplate and live a life in Christ.  First, that means the people physically present.  You can’t choose your relatives, but you can choose your friends, and the supporting characters in our drama were folks whose culture aligned with ours in significant ways. Second, the intellectual culture should be largely Christian.  Western Civilization is not a synonym for this, but it leads all others, so we immersed in that, for our own enjoyment and their benefit.  In our case, that was enormous doses of read-aloud fiction well beyond their supposed level of understanding (Tolkein and Lewis every four years); history – stopping at roadside markers and launching into unrequested lectures, medieval events, costumes for any era; embracing liturgical and historical Christian traditions much more than most evangelicals…all of this leading to

Learn everything that crosses your path – and go looking for more.

No need to list these for this audience, just nonstop information download – everything was an educational experience.  Hey kids, did you know that King Oscar II of Sweden…You know the drill. I would note that we consistently played and won all manner of trivial pursuit/college bowl/puzzle-solving/scavenger-hunt activities.  Except that folks like us tend to cluster with others of similar mind, so we didn’t always win. 

(We didn’t lose to strangers very often, though.  There are many stories of victory as part of family culture.)

Competition was only part of the value that said This doesn’t have to be painful.  There might be a way to make it fun. Family devotions might involve food, or noise, or a game. Lots of the Bible can be pretty funny, if you read it right. Let’s go to someone’s house and get them involved. Vaudeville is not yet dead.  Well, okay, it is, but you can still find slapstick.

I left a thread hanging, way back at the beginning, and no longer have a good segue.  But mentally holding your place while you wander around talking about other things, then coming back to that bookmark – yeah, that’s part of our culture, remember?  About those negative responses to the human tendency to rationalise our own desires and group norms and call them God’s will.  Question Assumptions.  Frequent commentary there as well, pointing out other people doing just that -  health and wealth gospel; confusing politics with faith; I-think-God-is-leading-me-to-marry-that-really-hot-girl; funny how poorer people don’t get nominated for church council; the general unreliability of feelings. Actually, questioning assumptions is the nice way to put it.  Having a critical spirit might be more accurate.  That one’s more mine than Tracy’s.  Paul says not to have one of those.  I can’t understand why not.  It’s the only way to learn self-criticism.  Okay, I’m not supposed to say that, but it’s still true.  There are distinctions here, of course.  I am leaving those aside to get across the family culture point.  Sometimes I operated on the right side of those distinctions, sometimes not.

This is only the beginning.  Yet I might not bother with all the rest.  What else is involved in the specifically Christian parts of the culture will be along, however.

An Englishwoman in the Antebellum South

David's comment on my Charles Murray post linked to his own most recent post over at Chicago Boyz.  It is a wonderful piece about the books and journals of the actress Fanny Kemble, with copious quotes from those works.  Though long, it is so good that I want to give it more play than it would get as a link from a mere thread, and so highlight it here.  She was a shrewd observer and vivid writer about Americans in general and the antebellum South in particular.  If you have read de Tocqueville, her writing is an excellent compare-and-contrast of the American character as seen by an outsider.

David's interspersed comments are valuable as well.  It pays to remember, in all discussions of human nature, American exceptionalism, whether we are a "Christian Nation" or not, and what we have brought to the world, that America really was, and is, an experiment, an entirely new item upon the scene; in no way perfect or in all areas superior, but an enormous leap forward for all of humanity.  Not only did the rest of the Anglospheric colonies imitate us, rather than Britain (and certainly not continental Europe!) as they grew into maturity, but England itself imitated us and our freedoms.  As our parent country, they found ways to do us one better at times, of course.  Kemble's writing is unsparing in its criticism of the evils of slavery, even in theory.  But she, and independent observers in general, very quickly adopted the American notions of freedom as the norm.

Charles Murray And Parenting

This is not necessary to my own postings, but I thought I would get it out of the way, as I think it interferes with thinking about the intersection of public policy and family creation.

I have only read excerpted portions of Murray's new book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, those that are in reviews and discussions of same.  I don't know if it is a strong idea in Murray or only in his reviewers, but the claim is made repeatedly that there was a social contract in America that persevered throughout our history until the 60's or so and then has weakened since then, for whatever reason:  young people, especially young men, were instructed that if they worked hard and did not live profligately or immorally, they would have enough in time to support a family, buy a house with a bit of yard, and have a decent life.  That America, with its loss of jobs, lack of respect for the working poor, inability to communicate these values or whatever, is no longer able to offer that contract with young men is seen as a great failing.

The idea has been circulating a great deal in these last years of recession:  We used to be able to offer guarantees to young people for good behavior.  Now we can't.  We've failed.

I think that is a gross misreading of history.  I don't think that is what Americans have primarily taught the young from 1609 - 1960, and even in its strongest years, my parents' era and the Greatest Generation, it is subtly but importantly different from the real teaching.

There is unquestionably some of this thinking throughout our history, showing up in our inspirational and patriotic literature.  But those are a special form of distilled communication, not the entirety of our values.  My reading is that we were instructed to work hard, keep our noses clean, and play by the rules, not because these were a guarantee of success, but because you could blow it at any time.  You could do something stupid and your career or health or marriage would go up in smoke.  You might get second or even third chances, but they were not unlimited, so you had best be careful.

I think the idea that we were taught to color in the lines because that is the sure way to success is a back-reading by the 60's generation onto 50's values.  The boomers confused the rules they were taught as children, because they were children, with the full panoply of adult understanding of values by their parents. 

The people who came through the Great Depression, WWII & Korea, polio and atomic weapons are unlikely to be people who believed much in guarantees in life.  More likely, they had hopes that if everything went well...

Well that's quite different then, isn't it, as Emily Litella used to say.

If the generation that believed in that contract most turns out to have believed in it only partly, then the whole enterprise is suspect, isn't it?  As I look back over Civil War correspondence and social agitation of a century ago and Puritan diaries I don't find that this was the American Dream at all.  Gatsby's green light, Twain's life on the Mississippi, Jack London - heck, even the Hardy Boys and Chip Hilton, are not about guarantee but aspiration and Best Chances.

I'm not letting the Greatest Generation off the hook entirely here:  I think they likely did oversell the idea of predictability and deserved reward, whistling against the wind with eyes averted when it came to the bad luck which might find us all.  They likely underemphasised misfortune, hoping to keep it at bay for their own children by denying it.

My generation, in turn, went one step worse.  We not only taught that keeping the rules were a guarantee, but that you could even break a few, so long as you mostly stayed in line, and still have success.

I read the analyses about jobs disappearing forever and the economy changing, and whole industries being outsourced or automated and I fear for my children and grandchildren.  Will they have work, or will jobs only go to the few in the future, with the many scrambling to carve out a poor existence?  But much of the fear may come from the false idea that there has been a system in place for 2-3 centuries that is now going away, and WHAT'LL WE DO? What will Emily do for a job to feed her family!? (Well, she's only four, so it's not all that odd that we can't slot her into a well-paying gig in our imaginations at the moment.)

It's nonsense.  Every American generation has had to adapt to a new economy, a new world, a new culture and reward system.  Every future has been an unknown, which looks utterly predictable and even inevitable when we look back on it.  The looking back is the illusion.

I worry that whatever advice I give may not apply to the rising generation, and may make difficult things sound easy, only to discourage the young parents who have a hard enough job anyway.  But I doubt I should hesitate on that basis.  It's nothing new.

Next up, as promised, I will talk about creating a family culture.