You Can't Argue With A Shudder

I have a friend who I discussed politics with in the early 90s. She told me that her parents "loved Pat Buchanan" and she shuddered while smiling a bit.  I had not long been conservative, so I was suspicious of Buchanan myself, so I understood her regarding him as thoroughly beyond the pale, but I noted the shudder. He was nowhere near shudder category for me. She would also make her points by rolling her eyes as well, as did my brother, who had a Jon Stewart caliber eye-roll.

It pays to notice that shuddering is not actually an intellectual argument, but it is a powerful social argument. Because it is sometimes entirely involuntary, it carries the message of "any decent person feels this way." But shuddering is not always involuntary.  It can be consciously initiated, after which the remainder is involuntary, mimicking the full involuntary nature. These semiotics circulate among groups, so that a shudder or something like it becomes not merely an acceptable but a preferred response.

We had lunch last week and one of us mentioned JD Vance.  She shuddered.  I asked why she hated him, and she gave an answer that made some plausible sense, but was thoroughly unconnected to any disgust or horror response.  It was a mere disagreement. I concluded that she has some other reason for her disgust that she did not say.  Perhaps she is herself unaware of her true motive. As she shudders at the mention of a large percentage of her political opponents, that may be the bulk of it, but the "childless cat-lady" incident, which had mentioned when it happened months ago, may represent the type of disagreement she has which is especially visceral.

The list of who conservatives disagree with is long, including each other. But I can't think of anyone who is regularly in shudder category for them.  My claim that liberalism is primarily a social position would fit with that - eye rolls are less common, and shudders nonexistent. The liberals who use them are often fully capable of intellectual arguments. Jon Stewart can do that well when he chooses to, for example. Yet they choose the purely social she-is-beneath-consideration as a primary means of persuasion anyway.

Yet that can't be.  There must be someone conservatives shudder at.

Pipedream

The Blues Magoos were considered a bad-boy group in 1967. I knew every song on "Electric Comic Book" by heart, because I was cooler and edgier than the other kids.

Time Travel Joke

Time cop: "Captain, I know you sent me back in time to kill baby Adolph Hitler, but I killed Woodrow Wilson instead."

Captain: "Who's Adolph Hitler?"

Piranesi

Piranesi is new enough (2020) that I don't want to give any spoilers. I went with my wife to her book club last night to discuss it. We are uncertain who the main character is at first, nor the Other - the only other living person until well into the plot, nor the bleached bones which Piranesi names, tends and gives offerings to.

Nor the House itself where Piranesi lives, which is populated by hall after hall of statues and is washed over day by day with interacting tides. Everything is uncertain at first and we leap at guesses. There are multiple references to CS Lewis, especially Narnia; to Jorge Luis Borges "The Library of Babel" and "The Minotaur," to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose and as we speculated last night perhaps a half-dozen other writers and artists. I recommend rereading The Magicians Nephew beforehand. 

We gradually learn that the mysterious aspects are part of an actual murder mystery with multiple victims. We are in the dark because the narrator has remarkable clarity in some thinking, but is misled and deceived in other aspects.  I was particularly taken with its issues of identity lost and gained, and the hypothesis that it is intended as a Planet Narnia example of being under the influence of Neptune, and the effect of the occult on the good versus the evil characters.

Highly recommended. Short but full.

Belichick Politics

As I read complaints from conservatives about various Trump appointees, I am increasingly leaning to the GOAT coach who drafted and acquired talent by saying "Don't tell me what he can't do.  Tell me what he can do."  It's not perfect, but I think conservatives have swung too far in the other direction looking for reasons to veto someone.

Obama 2004 Convention Speech

I remember thinking at the time that this was an encouraging sign.  Maybe the newer Democrats were finally getting it.

As Mike over at Chicago Boyz wrote: I'm still waiting for that guy to become president

Dignity

I took a walk after that last post, came back and made some edits.  Then I took another walk.

This book came to mind again.  Maybe it will enjoy a resurgence.

Fractures, Divides, Realignments

 (This one is long, and the internal links at Grim's and Breitbart [via Althouse] are long as well. And I think it's a good one to talk a walk after reading as well. We are in the beginning of major realignments in our politics, and there will be a lot of false starts and theories before we work this out.)

It was only three weeks ago that I mentioned that Public Radio was trying create a self-fulfilling prophecy by announcing fractures in the Trump coalition. I did not mention at the time, but certainly mentally included until a few days ago the split over immigration between the techbros and the cultural nativists. I thought they were only arguing over a middle ground and uneasy compromise.  I now believe I was wrong about that.  While both sides are against illegal immigration, there is not general agreement on legal immigration. There are work visas and there are work visas, after all. The agricultural workers from Latin America and the H1B Silicon Valley visas affect entirely different groups. The latter are only 85,000 individuals a year, but they make far more than then could in say, India, so they settle in, keep getting extended and can eventually establish chain migration an turn into an estimated 600,000. That adds up.

There is currently irritation among many in the tech world that in contrast to the original intent of the visas, which was to get from other countries specialty workers that we don't have enough of here, these foreign workers are replacing Americans because they will work for less. This is not always said out loud because they want to keep working somewhere and don't want reputations as troublemakers.  But some are forced to train their replacements as a condition of their severance package.

But the CEO's love it, and here is a part of the Elon Musk story: his goal is to go to Mars, and he felt the Democrats kept putting up barriers.  I don't say he doesn't believe the other things he says about America and entrepreneurship and competing in the global market.  I'm pretty sure he does. But all of that is in service to Mars.  Getting the most engineers into America at the best price is something that needs to happen, in his mind. His goal is America First in terms of global competition. Vivek Ramaswamy's comments in December articulate the position well. (Quote from a House of Strauss transcript.  Apologies if I got any of it wrong.)

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over "native" Americans isn't because of an innate American IQ deficit, a lazy and wrong explanation. A key part of it comes down to the c-word, culture. Tough questions demand tough answers and if we're really serious about fixing the problem we have to confront the truth. Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 90s and likely longer.  That doesn't start in college. It starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympian champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Corey from Boy Meets World or Zack and Slater over Screech and Saved by the Bell or Stefan over Steve Urkel and Family Matters will not produce the best engineers. Fact.

I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity.  And their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates.

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends, more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers, more weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons, more books, less TV, more creating, less "chillin'." More extracurriculars, less hanging out at the mall, Most normal American parents look skeptically at those kind of parents.

More normal American kids view such the kinds of kids with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve. Now close your eyes and visualize which families you knew in the 90s or even now who raised their kids according to one model versus the other. be brutally honest.

Normalcy doesn't cut it in a hyper competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we'll have our asses handed to us by China. This can be our Sputnik moment. We've awakened from slumber before and we can do it again. Trump's election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America.

But only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy, excellence over mediocrity, nerdiness over conformity, hard work over laziness. That's the work we have cut out for us rather than wallowing in victimhood and just wishing or legislating alternative hiring practices into existence. I'm confident we can do it.

Well, there's a lot to like here for a certain type of parent - we had no TV, we stressed science fair, etc. But there's few things wrong with it as well. The Brahmins will work for less because the company controls their H1B. South Asian IQs are far below American, but the superselect group of Brahmins is higher than the American average. So this "well, our kids just work harder" is mostly self-congratulatory nonsense. Look also at some common American virtues that aren't mentioned... Generosity, community service, compassion, honesty.  Plenty of Asians South and Northeast have those qualities, but if we are going to talk about culture, as Vivek says we are, how often are those mentioned?

Which culture is American, sleepovers or science fairs? What have you got against normalcy? Do we trust people who think all those blind people could see if they just tried harder? Learn to code? When we have the discussion for the 1000th time that lots of kids should go into trades like welding because they could make bank, while our betters are expressing contempt disguised as motivational speeches for them, do we then get why they don't go into trades? People want importance, respect, not just money.

This would be a good place to go over to Grim's and read his post Triumphant, Broken America. He focuses on the rural/urban divide which I also think is neglected. But that bleeds over into the suburban, small town, family farm vs agribiz, and tech island - y'know, this is getting messy fast - divides. America First has at least two powerful meanings in our culture. Foreign Affairs is not the only one. Steve Bannon says he will have Elon Musk out of the White House immediately. He is more for cultural America First rather than America First to Mars. 

Trump is definitely America First, but which one? I think both. His thought is to get rid of the illegals and the rest will fix itself. He will support both versions of America First and try to paper over the division, largely because he doesn't see it as that large. Neither did I until a few days ago.  This is only the beginning. The Democrats have a different version of the same divide.

True Patriots

 

Breadhenge

There was a gingerbread house competition at Old Sturbridge Village and many of the entries were quite creative.

The thatched roof is made with shredded wheat, which is quite clever.

But I liked Breadhenge best.

Sea Shanties

Since I got thinking about sailors, sea shanties came to mind.  The video I used in 2020 has been taken down, but you can still learn a bit about the origin of the term. And to make up for the one taken away, here are two for your enjoyment.

He claims all shanties sound better as heavy metal.  He's got a point.

Hornpipe

 Vigorous, eh?

Vision

Proverbs 29:18 Where there is no vision, the people perish.

I dunno, I think there's a lot more perishing when your wife has vision.

Wives are encouraged to contradict, explain, or reinterpret this sentiment.

Fetterman

John Fetterman, Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania had a stroke and seems to have become one of the most openminded senators since than.  Maybe all our Senators should have strokes. There must be a way to induce them, right?

I used to tell patients apprehensive about receiving ElectroConvulsive Therapy that a crude but surprisingly apt metaphor was rebooting your brain the same way that one reboots a computer. I wouldn't think a stroke would function in the same way, but I wouldn't have thought that inducing a seizure would treat mania and depression either.

I don't think a lot of TIAs would give you the same effect - and I'll bet that's occurred fairly regularly already with no noticeable improvement in the Congress.

So we should start with the oldest first or longest-serving?

When Liars Try to Tell the Truth

There are consequences to lying, and one is that people won't believe you even when you are telling the truth. This is so well known that there has even been a fable about it for millennia.

Some examples...

I believe there are endangered species.  I believe that we should make at least some effort to preserve them, for a couple of reasons. Yet now it turns out that the infamous snail darter never existed.  It is genetically identical to other fish in other similar environments, and there are apparently plenty of them.  But a dam wasn't built, and just now that water would have been useful in SoCal.

I believe climate warming is real, and that human activity is responsible for at least some of it. Yet it turns out that despite the widespread belief that it is causing more and more powerful cyclones/hurricanes, the trend over the last fifty years is neutral, and in one ocean actually a bit less. Tell people that and they will insist you are a climate denier. Claim that the temperature figures are being jacked to make them look worse and you will get sued and ruined by people who have deeper pockets than you.

Many people, especially Boomers, still think the world is becoming overcrowded and don't know about plummeting Total Fertility Rate. At least in the medium-term, it's going to be a lot of problem for a lot of countries.

Covid-19 was real and the vaccines do work, but now there's a lot of people who don't believe in any vaccines and we are seeing a return of conquered diseases.  How did that happen? Well, there was something of a conspiracy to lie about the origins for openers, insisting that it must be bat soup instead of the lab next door that was one of the few working on coronavirus gain-of-function. When Trump cut off international flights he was called racist and Democrats made a point of attending Chinese New Year. Then when everyone was feeling cooped up, a spring protest just made for liberals to get out and walk around for an afternoon pops up around George Floyd - a sad case and worth a look and some complaining, but not a poster child for racial injustice.  Too ambiguous. Kamala Harris said just before the 2020 election that she wouldn't trust any vaccine that came out under Trump. Donald deferred to the states a great deal and his symbolic actions were sometimes destructive. But the important thing was that he must be blamed - and more people died. Oh gee... too bad, mate.

No one thought that any kind of coup was under way on Jan 6, 2021. People worried that the protest might get out of hand and some people might get hurt or even be killed. But mostly people laughed nervously. The few out of the many had some dangerous characters but were mostly ridiculous. News outlets got lots of up-close action photos. Did they get those at the other protests that year? Or in Ukraine?  Or of Mexican cartels? One guy carried off a lectern and my son said "It's clear he was just taking a political stand." Trump's behavior was atrocious, yes. He made things worse when he had at least some power to make them better. But The Insurrection? Really? Yet that is the approved pearl-clutching terminology now, as if we all suddenly holed up in our houses and started living off canned food in fear. 

DEI has some nice ideas behind it, but it should not be an overriding value, or we get dead people in Los Angeles. And Chinese universities start outcompeting us in key areas.

Consequences of lying.

The Wheel of Fortune

I had monthly lunch with my St. Paul's guys, and as we are over 70, we talked about medical issues again, however much we try to avoid it - our own, our spouses', our friends'. We mentioned assisted living facilities that parents or friends had gone to and the exorbitant costs for services we could still easily provide for ourselves. Yet for those that seemed best, allowing the most flexibility and freedom, we wondered when the optimal time to apply would be.  Some have ten year waiting lists, and we try to calculate. It helps if you Know Somebody, but the main criteria are your immediate need at the moment of moving in and your ability to pay.

It occurred to me that we are in the exact reverse situation we were in fifty years ago, trying to impress a college that we had amazing abilities, especially cognitive, but very little ability to pay for their services, so that they would offer us as much as possible. Now we are attempting to show we are on the verge of qualifying for significant services, especially ones to compensate for cognitive decline, but have an unquestionable ability to pay for them indefinitely. We once wanted to look as competent as we could, now we are trying to shade toward showing off our incompetence.

I am thinking that Boethius, he of Wheel of Fortune fame, might have some apt quotes for this reversal, but none are occurring to me.  That's what happens when one is but a dilettante, with partial knowledge of many things.

Quicker Than Camels

 Gifts of the Magi

"And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way."

Dutch Skating A Century Ago

 

Pine Haven Boys Center

I worked at a school for "emotionally disturbed" boys 1976-1978.  Most had been diverted from juvenile justice because someone hoped that they weren't really criminal and could be rescued with some sort of a behavior program. It was run by an Italian order of priests and brothers. We used corporal punishment, such as having to kneel in the hall at night. The bigger boys preyed on the smaller ones a lot, and a lot of staff physicality stemmed from breaking up fights or restraining one boy from another. But sometimes boys were struck.  I remember doing it once myself, and if you told me I had done it other times I couldn't contradict you. I now wish I had done much better at holding my temper, especially verbally. I suppose it is good for an arrogant young man to learn that there are things he is just not good at. Yet not at the expense of others, which this was.

I got a call from one of the boys today, now sixty. I remembered a good deal about him, though he is one of the few whose memory for events is greater than mine.  He updated me on who had done hard time for murder, who had been murdered in prison, who had died of overdoses.  He is seeking civil damages because one of the staff, who I vaguely remembered, had sexually abused him. I know a couple of the boys had grown up to end up on sexual offender lists in various states, but didn't mention them. 

I doubt we made anyone any worse.

I wonder if we did any good.

Are Beliefs in Free Will and Determinism Genetically Influenced?

Plenty of ironies in the topic, rather like the joke that  Kierkegaard disproved the idea of determinism, and believed he had been destined to do so. 

The preprint The Freedom to Believe in Free Will: Evidence From an Adoption Study Against the First Law of Behavioral Genetics essentially strikes a blow against the idea that our belief in free will is influenced by our genetics. 

Philosophers and psychologists alike have long debated the etiology of beliefs about human agency. Recently, empirical investigations have shown that lay beliefs about free will and determinism represent stable and important individual differences. Despite a perennial interest in the sources of agentic belief, genetic and environmental influences on such beliefs have never been studied. We administered a battery of items assessing these beliefs to a unique sample of 394 adoptive and biological families with adult offspring to investigate the origins of agentic beliefs and their relationships. We found significant differences between adopted and biological offspring and between the parents of such children, particularly in beliefs about determinism. Biometric modeling revealed especially surprising results: unlike the vast majority of traits studied in family designs, agentic beliefs appear to be weakly or not at all heritable. Since genetic factors might be regarded as typical of the "initial conditions" in philosophical thought experiments about free will and determinism, it is especially ironic that beliefs about free will and determinism may be among the traits least influenced by genetic differences.

This is one of those ideas where you walk around and and stop suddenly and say "But wait, then that means..." Fun.

Joke du Jour

For those who don't read Maggie's Farm, there is this.

Joke du Jour.

Muktuk

I ate whale New Year's Eve, in the form of muktuk, which is the skin and blubber together. John-Adrian brought it from Nome.  In general you cannot buy it, you can only trade it with a Native for another subsistence food.  In his case he trades his smoked salmon for the stuff, which he loves.  "I could eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner." I thought it was almost flavorless and tough to chew. Rubbery. His wife and daughters don't like it.

Three of the four liked Moxie when they tried it, though, so I guess we are even.

Weirdos Against Tyranny

Nexuist on X  

You ought to think about how bad every American school is at teaching and how bad every American university is at preparing and how awful every American company is at hiring and how terrible every American agency is at governing and yet despite all this we’re still #1 GDP

According to bsking, Scott Alexander has said something like "We are a nation of freaks, weirdos, and absolute lunatics and I suspect we will never fall to tyranny because of it."  I can't find the exact quote, because it looks like it is behind the paywall at "Contra Hoel." Yet it sounds like him and I suspect it is largely true in any event. 

I think the statements are true and largely related. This is not to discount that many sober and even boring individuals have been the backbone of American society. Yet even some of the Bagginses have a Tookish streak, and that has made all the difference. For the first statement I think the key is recognising that everyone's schools are terrible, every nation's companies and agencies are foolish, but only in America do we dare to say it out loud.  Finns tell you how wonderful their schools are as do Romanians and South Koreans. Across Latin America people will tell you that their local economies are kinder, protecting the dear old street sellers of corn tortillas or the fishermen.  And they are still poor. 

Going further afield and relating it to resisting tyranny, it is not just armed resistance in some coordinated fashion that is the difficulty for tyrants.  The wags and comedians who point out that a bunch of hillbillies have no chance of taking out a single military base are missing the point. It is the uncooperativeness, the constant nagging frustration of officials who can't get people to even stand in line properly or fill out Necessary Forms.  We are cranks, we wear them down until it's just not worth the candle to make us  behave.  This is true of the guns as well.  Americans don't have any chance of holding a crossroads near Camp Lejeune for even an afternoon, certainly. Marines out on leave would handle that without even calling back to base. But if you want to know why owning guns has a lot to do with resisting tyranny, imagine going house-to-house to confiscate them in Baltimore, Burbank, and Billings.  Good luck finding people who want that job.

Super Bowl

We were at Old Sturbridge Village, and Christmas Carols were sung at the lighting ceremony. I don't need the lyric sheets no matter how many verses are sung, and I know not only standard harmonies but some of the extra frills learned over the years.  I sing loudly in a crowd.  Son #5 looked at me and said "Christmas Carols are your Super Bowl every year, aren't they?" They are, and I couldn't be happier.

Joseph's Song

 

Cocktails with Mrs. Claus

Well, many of us wondered, y'know?

Happy Boxing Day

 

Greatest fight of all time. I discussed it in 2018. Briefly, Hagler was the better fighter, but Leonard and his people outwitted him at every turn.

Merry Christmas

 I thought I would mix it up.  You should find something to like here.

One Sidebar Entry Added, Four Removed

I have added Dwarkesh Podcast, which is Dwarkesh Patel doing "Deeply researched interviews:"   They run 90-120 minutes, so they are tough to fit in, but I loved the one with David Reich, which included all that is new in ancient genetics. For example, now that we know that we have 2-4% Neanderthal DNA, we leap to the conclusion that we must have had 2-4% Neanderthal ancestry at some point in the past. Yet because what we have kept is concentrated in particular areas (not cognitive, as we would expect, but disease immunity and cardio-metabolic), this suggests that the percentage is pared down from a larger pool and 50,000 y/a 10% or even 20% of our ancestors were likely Neanderthals. That's only the beginning.  If there were waves of homo sapiens moving into Europe, each mating with Neanderthals and bringing a supply of more social and cooperative genes, then We may be the Neanderthals, gradually having our DNA eroded, breeding and rebreeding with progressively more sapiens DNA. Also, now that we are just about sure that Yamnaya had some limited plague resistance and thus conquered peoples who had none, decimated by disease proceeding 50-200 miles ahead of the Steppe invaders we have other replacement questions.  There seems to be the y-haplogroup R1b wave which we knew about, but now also evidence of a primarily female mtDNA wave of Steppe women outcompeting natives without the boys in tow.  Somehow. Put your imagination to work on that one. The fearsome steppe warriors run out of grassland for their horses and lose to the forest dwellers already in place in Europe, who take their women, who somehow replace the EEF females.

Also Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize interviewed about the history of oil being the history of the 20th C. Great overview, including the following concepts worth pursuing in your own minds and research: How Hitler Lost The War (oil. Churchill was a technological visionary who converted the British Navy to oil between the wars despite the pressure to keep using good Welsh coal, and tanks by the end of WWI instead of cavalry charges). Or in the oil companies today, molecules versus electrons.

Oil companies are investing a lot in renewables. Is there a bunch of skill transfer here that actually means that these oil companies will be really good at deploying solar or something? There's a difference among some companies. Some companies say yes. They look at offshore wind and say, “We're in the offshore oil business, we can do offshore wind.” You see that in Europe where Equinor, which is the Norwegian company, or BP, or Shell, or Total, are big in offshore wind. They say, “We have skills in that.” Solar's a little different. Exxon is now going into mining lithium, thinking that they can use skills that they use for that.

But the US major companies say basically, “We do molecules, we don't do electrons.” That's where the difference is. The European companies say, “We can do all of it.” The Americans say, “We have no comparative advantage in electrons.” But there's a lot of interest in hydrogen because that's another molecule and to a degree, hydrogen can substitute for natural gas for instance.

And

There are hundreds of really interesting characters in the book, but the two most important characters, one is named Supply and one is named Demand. That's something that you've got to keep in mind with all the other drama that goes on.

I dropped 1) the now-defunct "You Can Hear Us in the Streets" podcast, which my son ran out of First Methodist Houston; 2) the defunct (Zach) "Lowe Post" basketball podcast, which will be replaced whenever Zach comes back on another show; 3) "Lingthusiasm" which sometimes has good content for an entire episode but more usually has titbits, delivered in an annoying, self-congratulatory, we-are-insider-grlls tone; and 4) Gone Medieval which has shot its bolt in terms of content years ago. I gave the last two a very fair shot because of topic and they increasingly disappointed. A few more are on probation, frankly.

Students Are Irrelevant

When my brother worked at UC Irvine decades ago I complained about the lower academic standards for athletes, relative to the performance of the others at their own school.  I can see that Cleveland State, which has many students who pass only a few courses and leave, might make an argument that its basketball players with shallow credentials are representative of the whole student body, so what's everyone's problem? He protested that lots of people "belong" to the school who are not students: maintenance and security people, food service, faculty, administration, alumni, and the whole surrounding area, especially with state schools. He felt the athletic teams also represented them. This was an entirely new idea to me, naive but grouchy. Students are the whole reason.  Yes, they come and go and are fungible to some extent, but they are not optional.

Since that time I have observed that this phenomenon has intensified.  The money that comes with students one way or another is the point. Most people go into teaching because they want to pass on knowledge, so the individuality of students still has meaning to those. But increasingly, students are simply conduits for money, and the other people of the institution, as listed above, are the college.

The Violence Advantage

There seems to be an evolutionary fitness advantage for males to be violent, or at least their used to be and it has probably not entirely dissipated in the last few hundred years. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, of Dunbar's Number* fame, looks at both modern-day hunter-gatherer groups and medieval Icelandic records, which are quite detailed and concluded that violence is a net positive for the murderers, despite their increased likelihood of being murdered themselves in ongoing feuds and vendettas, but if they survive, their brothers benefit hugely compared to the brothers of non-murderers. To prevent things from spiraling completely out of control, small societies develop customs and spontaneous government to partially rein things in.

...what they do is introduce social institutions that allow them to manage violent behaviour, especially among the young males. These include marital arrangements that increase the number of people who can lean on badly behaved individuals, charismatic leaders (whose friendly advice we heed out of respect), communal feasts (where we bond) and, especially, men’s clubs (where boys who fall out are made to sit down together to make peace – without, by the way, actually talking about it, just by bonding).

But it doesn't fix it all, not by a long shot. The Perils of Group Living. So much for the myth of the peaceful savage. 

*The number of people we supposedly handle as a group maximum, variously estimated at 75-150 individuals. It is one of those things that is generally agreed upon but poorly evidenced.  It just seems right.

Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier?

Lyman Stone, my favorite demographer - okay, the only demographer I know by name - has a go at the data to see what it shows. There are some strong showings, some modest ones, and a good deal of messiness from which solid conclusions should not be drawn. Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier? Right off, he looks at the possibility that happier people get married, for which there is some evidence.  However, he eventually finds that unpersuasive.

In general, marriage seems to raise subjective happiness scores, definitely in the short run and less so in the long run, but noticeably.

Stone is a research fellow at the Institute of Family Studies. Lots of good articles at the link, including fertility crisis, a long series on boys at school, and the effect of AI girlfriends.

The Sadness of NPR Christmas (in 2006)

Reposted from December 2006.  I have come back to this many times, as it is one of my most-visited posts. It is some of my best writing, looking back. I captured something that resonated with other people over the years. 

I have no idea what they do for Christmas at NPR now. I suspect the mask is increasingly off.

*******

Year-round, NPR tends to the bittersweet, the witty rather than uproarious, the world-weary rather than the cynical, the poignant, the melancholy, the wistful. These are the attitudes of the Arts & Humanities crowd, roused to righteous anger only against those who try and rouse them to righteous anger, charmed by everything but tending to observation rather than full-bore participation. NPR has the best describers of the vignettes of daily life, of which Garrison Keillor is the archetype.

Christmas kills them. They can access faith only via nostalgia, and that well soon runs dry. Real traditions include Mom, and going to church, and immersing yourself in that whole crowd of idiot relatives. Far better to have your Christmas carols instrumental, where the mood can grip you without the trouble of the lyrics. The programs at NPR are dignified, properly appalled at the deterioration of the season into commercialism and "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer;" into the violent games or garish decorations.

This works well enough for that percentage of their audience that still holds to the Christian faith. We fear no nostalgia, and deplore many of the same things about the season. Instrumental carols and lights that don't blink are fine with us. The secular audience must be okay with this approach as well. Perhaps with NPR guiding the tour they can trust that however close the bus gets to the edge of the road it will not go over into actual religious assertion. We'll get out and take pictures of the view.

I don't have the same sense in my bones for what the Jewish storytellers are experiencing, but it seems much the same. They grew up slightly alientated from the culture's holiday, but having something of their own to build nostalgia around. Now they seem alientated from that as well. And those who had little or no faith tradition - they're trying to find something worth saving in all this. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a sixpence in your shoe - it's supposed to be for weddings, but they try to make a holiday out of the same sort of elements.

Emotional distance has its advantages, and these makeshift Christmases don't seem to be tragic. There is a sort of courage about them, and shafts of real joy, and the nobility of those who refuse at least to be hypocrites. But story after story in December, as these deeply artistic and sensitive people try to capture the season, carries the theme of searching, of something missing, of arranging the dried flowers as beautifully as possible because no new ones will bloom.

Those of us who are believers are tempted to throw up our hands and say "Oh for Pete's sake! Relent for just a few days a year and allow yourself to be immersed in the faith of your youth. You'll get more out of Christmas that way. It'll do you good. Why is Jesus the one thing you can't keep?" But I think it is our own inattention to the season, our own taking it for granted, that causes us to think this way. We are so aware of how many things pull us away from Christ at Christmas that we have forgotten how dangerous it is for those outside to look in. They sense, as we should know but have forgotten, that to step inside might mean never coming back. If emotional distance does not bring warmth, it at least brings memories of warmth, with no danger of burning.

The Obama Machine Collapses

David Samuels writing in Tablet: Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment, about the invincible Obama news-manipulation machine - think fiction writer Ben Rhodes - rapidly collapsed.

I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics a decade ago, when I reported on the selling of Barack Obama’s Iran deal for The New York Times Magazine. By the time I became interested in the subject, the outcome of Obama’s campaign to sell the deal, which had become the policy cornerstone of his second term in office, was a fait accompli. The Deal seemed odd to me, not only because American Jews were historically a key player in the Democratic Party—providing outsized numbers of voters, party organizers and publicists, in addition to huge tranches of funding for its campaigns—but because the Deal seemed to actively undermine the core assumptions of U.S. security architecture in the Middle East, whose goals were to ensure the steady flow of Middle Eastern oil to global markets while keeping U.S. troops out of the region.

It is a good inside-baseball look at media manipulation.

I was reminded of a Facebook argument, back when I was still on, of a friendly acquaintance posting "THANK YOU OBAMA!" because the price of a gallon of gas had gone down to $2.11. I replied that gas had been $1.86/gal when he took office, and presidents don't much influence the price of gas anyway, as other powerful forces (including Congress and other countries) were always pushing and pulling their own donkeys as well. There were four quick replies, all from educators making assertions with no sources, but assuring me that I was wrongwrongwrong. Each switched to a different tangent, about Bush or renewables or Republicans not liking BHO because he's black.  I counter-replied "$1.86," and gave a source. Two more reassertions, and I replied "$1.86."  I was unfriended. 

Trump understands new media and new politics better than they do, but he is not otherwise a good candidate. There is moaning that Hilary was a uniquely bad candidate, then Biden, then Harris and Walz, and that darn Obama destroyed the Democrats' bench, but there's a reason for it. They all believe this nonsense.  Hilary may have been a National Merit Scholar, but she still doesn't understand that "price-gouging" in an emergency is actually the quickest way to stabilise prices so that small businesses don't go under. To be fair, she may know but just lies about it, knowing its appeal. Democrats are masterful at getting you to think in anecdote rather than numbers.

Nehemiah 8:10

 ¹⁰ Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” (italics mine)

Do not feel guilty about enjoying good things at Christmas. This day is holy to our Lord. And send some to those who have nothing. This day is holy to our Lord. Does this sound obvious, trite?  It is obvious.  It is trite. Yet somehow we don't keep the points close enough to our hearts and have to be reminded of one or the other every year. It may be that our impoverished minds cannot hold both thoughts together, one always pushing out the other.

God is like Old Fezziwig in Dickens.

Public Radio

We had the classical station on in the car for a few minutes yesterday.  The lovely piece, by someone who was considered the greatest of the Spanish Renaissance, ended and the news came on.

Conservatives get irritated by slants they consider ubiquitous and fairly obvious, but in the hands of liberal journalism natives I can see why the bias might not be obvious at first. There was a story from a Palestinian source that the Israelis had killed twenty in a strike on a hospital. They noted that it was one of their last functioning hospitals. The station did report that hospitals are sometimes used as cover by military forces - according to the Israelis. That is, they reported it briefly, then in the same sentence went on to quote a Palestinian source that there was no military presence in the hospital, but women and children were killed and there was a neonatal unit. So Public Radio can truthfully report that everything they said was a fact, and that they pointed out both sides.

Except they didn't. They led and closed with the Palestinians and stressed the children and babies. They want you to feel bad for the Palestinians and to wonder if the Israelis are lying. They could have quoted other sources at different length to give the opposite impression.

The next story was about the Utah Senator who replaced Mitt Romney saying that he supported Trump and wanted to see him succeed, but was sometimes going to disagree with him and wanted the President to understand this was a good thing. I have no doubt they reported factually, but what are they trying to get you to think, and in fact make happen in self-fulfilling prophecy? That the Trump coalition is already starting to fracture. They could have quoted other senators or featured a different story.  This was one of only three in the news break after all.  Not everyone would think the Utah senator's thought were the most important thing at 6:30pm just before Christmas.

I forget what the third story was.  I asked my wife to turn it off anyway, but it had an equally sly slant.

I can see why a person who already had a similar POV even mildly would fail to notice that they were being manipulated, drip by drip, all year every year, and even when they changed to other carefully curated news sources, certain that they were independent thinkers who were coming to their own conclusions.  That's part of the art, to convince you that you arrived at the station all by yourself.

Jure Plaudant Omnia

 

I Sit Beside The Fire and Think

I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago,
and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.

                                                            JRR Tolkien

 

Matryoshka

 

Here Comes Santa Claus

Shopping background music is almost entirely secular now, but even that seems to be coalescing of various renditions of fewer and fewer songs.  I swear I am hearing "Here Comes Santa Claus" more than anything else this year.

It is not my favorite.

First, it is the worst example of trying to clumsily inject vaguely Christian sentiments into a Santa song to try and rescue it spiritually.   "Hang your stockings and say your prayers..."

Peace on Earth will come to all if we just follow the light
So let's give thanks to the lord above
'Cause Santa Claus is pretty much like Jesus

Secondly, what is this "Santa Claus Lane?" It's part of a parade in the Gene Autry version. I guess.

No, I am not linking to it or putting up a YouTube off it.  Ruin your own Christmas.

Wyman Family Christmas Letter 2024

Two of our sons’ families had medical issues this year, but those are their stories to tell,
not ours. It is enough to know that these affected us as well, and everyone seems fine
now. We are grateful to know that our love is not powerless even at a distance, and many
of you prayed for these people this year.

Piles of Rocks
If you like piles of rocks, Ireland is the place to go. They have geological piles of rocks,
such as Giant’s Causeway and Cliffs of Moher; prehistoric piles of rocks such as
Newgrange and Carrowmere; castles and abbeys standing or no longer standing. They
also have roads that put you on the edge of death for hours at a time. The R-roads are like
driveways renamed as two-way routes with rocks or hedges brushing the side of your
car…the L-roads are like bad driveways. But people still want to pass you. On the
positive side, we found a variety of GF fish-and-chips, saw CS Lewis sites and the Titanic
museum in Belfast, and Tracy enjoyed the prehistoric sites as much as David did. She
reads every historical marker wherever we go and every plaque on a wall. Librarian,
remember?

“They’re Eating All the Fruit!”
Jocie, Quinn, and Bella went to visit the Philippines two weeks before John-Adrian and
Aurora left Alaska to join them. They had a 110-degree difference between takeoff and
final landing in February. Aurora was envious of her sisters having a banana tree right in
their own yard and feared it would all be gone when she got there. Coming from Nome,
where a single large party in February actually can eat up most of the fruit in town for a
week, her worry is not as crazy as it would sound. They also bought an igloo-shaped
home in the interior of Alaska as well as built a second home in Manila. Jocie is
recognized in public there because of her million-plus social media followers. John-
Adrian is the man of a thousand side-hustles: king crab, salmon, gold detection, poker,
caribou. He has been a guest on “Outdoor Boys” twice, so more people have watched
him catch king crab than any living person. Aurora plays both basketball and volleyball
in 8th grade, while the two younger girls enjoy costuming and appearing on camera with
Mom.

10,000 posts
David has now put up 10,000 posts as Assistant Village Idiot since starting the site in
2005.
 

Foot Clinic
When one ages, one acquires diagnoses, but this was the year of the feet. Plantar
fasciitis, bunions, gout, arthritis, hammertoe, smashed big toenail, extra bones in the foot,
a red birthmark that disguises symptoms, high arches, plus general unexplained
inflammations that come and go… and some more disgusting things. At one point we had
four impaired feet with four different diagnoses. Perhaps we should donate our feet to
science when we go.

Speaking of Side Hustles - Chris and Kyle
Chris has started a side business of renting midrange cars, which he identified as a market
gap in Tromso. Maria works too hard and too long, so no side hustles for her! They have
bought an RV to vacation with, which will hopefully help her relax. Though if they are
bringing the dogs…. I keep telling my children that life is more genteel without animals.
 

Kyle has a new job with Orkin and his photography business is gradually but solidly
gaining altitude. He seems to have a particular magic capturing dog personalities. It’s a
lot of hours and a lot of driving, but he is still very comfortable in Duxbury. His sister
Meg, plus her husband Matt and daughter Penny, are nearby and a great blessing.
 

Director of Communications-ish
Ben continues his job search to land in Northern New England, and Jen is fine with
putting her job in the rearview mirror as well. They keep thinking they must have
replaced everything in the Texas house over the last few years, but it is dangerous to say
such things aloud, isn’t it? Jen’s parents came up go to the Head of the Charles, and we
saw a fair bit of them then.

“Nana, These Kids Are Eight.”
Tracy was obsessing over artistic details at Vacation Bible School, but fortunately had her
granddaughter Sarah along to put things in perspective, as quoted above. Sarah goes with
David to pick up food for the halfway house. Useful and entertaining gal. When Heidi
was unavailable at church one week, Emily was attempting to take over the CE office
because “I’m the only one who knows where everything is!” Emily was thinking she had
the inside track on being Lucia queen next year, but none of the adults want to run it.
(David sure doesn’t. Tracy is wavering.) So Emily is considering doing it herself. I swear
that girl is training to run a small country. Jonathan, Heidi, and Sarah are wondering
whether they would want to live there…

Fertility Crisis - Thought

It came up at book group today that there may be some connection between the last generations having fewer children and the longer periods that children live with their parents. If you have six children, you dare not let the first one stay home. Or perhaps they have more of a peer/friend relationship when they have 1-2 children. Or perhaps the children have less incentive...well, there are a dozen hypotheses, aren't there? Is it associated or causal or coincidental?  Which way does the arrow of causation run?

I would think it would take even more childbearing years off the table and depress the number of grandchildren even further. Which would mean less role for Nanas, if there were only one grandchild between the two daughters, rather than seven. Does this feed on itself generation after generation?

Just thoughts on my walk.  I kept coming up with explanations and then seeing a hole in my reasoning a hundred steps later.

Killing CEO's

 There are stark age differences in who approves Younger people actually approve by a small margin.  Older people disapprove by a large margin.

Everyone seems to be wringing their hands at the number of young women who are influenced by how hot he is.  This is disturbing, but has been happening for years.  I recall similar gushing and sympathy for the Boston Marathon bombers.

Yet the congratulations and approval started before anyone knew who he was, based on their approval of the act. I am relieved that his motive seems to be psychotic, not political.  But the people cheering him on do not have that excuse.

Oldest Christmas Carol

Jesus Refulsit Omnium, from the 300s. The music is of course much more recent.

It is known in English as "Jesus Light of the Nations."

PRE- Indo-Europeans

Not Proto-Indo-Europeans, whom everyone usually talks about.  Immediately before that. 

I wrote a longer post which I barely understood myself about six months ago. It is more detailed, but also less coherent. I am giving the information to you in shortened form mostly for myself, to lock the overview in. The rest of you are just along for the ride, in the hope that you may be interested in the simplified version yourself.

There was a group on the Lower Volga that was mostly Caucasian Hunter Gatherer. Some of them moved south through the Kuban steppe and the Caucasus into Anatolia near Trebizond on the NE coast of Turkey on the Black Sea. Those became the Hittites and other now long-extinct groups. Another group moved west toward the Dniestr and mixed with Ukrainian Neolithic Farmers and a half-dozen other groups. Everyone sat and fermented for a while, still mixing with nearby others, and then suddenly burst out in all directions (called a star phylogeny) conquering their neighbors. Some of them keep the women as wives or slaves while killing all the males, others kill everyone. 

They thus start to differentiate, but the men speak the same language, have the same customs, and maintain trade connections with each other. The similarities fade, and trading narrows to nearer groups.

One of the downstream star points are the Corded Ware, which give way to the Bell Beakers, groups that replicate the previous expansion of fermenting for a few centuries, then exploding into a star phylogeny of its own. Most but not all European ancestry comes from this explosion.

From The Studies Show

Stuart Ritchie: ...and all they do is add extra noise and also add a bit of stigma. Now, I don't know about you, Tom, but when the word stigma comes into a conversation,  I always feel that maybe rational discussion is kind of about to go out the window. I don't want to be completely sort of blanket about this...

Tom Chivers: (sardonically) Yes.

 

Stuart: ...but yes, I do worry. You're about to tell me that I'm not allowed to talk about some true thing. 

 

Tom: Yeah, right. Yes, exactly.

Not Playing Fair

I am cherry picking, yes. Confirmation bias. Selection bias. All those things. We can all choose carefully and find examples of our opponents being stupid and evil. So sue me.  He's right, it's funny, and it is highly revealing.  Please note the women sitting near Breakup Guy who have a similar inability to distinguish between facts and emotions

 

Philippians 4:7

Then the peace of God, which is beyond all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  

In our discussion of the Parables today, our patristics expert informed us that the word guard does not only mean "protect," but also "confine, keep in custody," so that the heart does not spill out any of its worst contents on others, such as unkindness or contention.  I had never thought of it in those terms.

In my case, that is the more important meaning.  I can endure the unkindness and contention of others pretty well.  But I am also prone to leaving that door unbolted (or even ajar) from the inside, leaving others at higher risk.

Wexford Carol

 

End of the Season

There will be ice and snow on the rail trail from here on in, and it will be tough for toddlers and strollers especially, so someone collected up the last lost items from that section and put them at one of the stops

Confucian Sentimentalism Vs Humean Sentimentalism

This is not a topic I am knowledgeable in. Twice today I read claims about the Confucian belief that sentimentalism leads to moral weakness and public disorder.  I can intuit a bit of what that means in terms of what else I know about Confucianism, but I am not up on this at all.  Googling the topic, the link that included a few perspectives quickly seemed a good place to start. A Summary of three papers from The Rutgers Workshop in Chinese Philosophy in 2018.

I will note that I have an immediate attraction to the concept, but would like some commentary.

Horse Domestication

A transcript of a podcast by Razib Khan on Horse Domestication . Topics covered:

horse history, horse evolution, horse adaptations, horse domestication stages, horse culture, horse warfare, horse economy, horse breeding, horse mythology, horse archaeology, horse genetics, horse impact

That one is free.  He's been doing a lot about horses in his subscriber posts as well. Please note that his transcripts can be hard to read because they are automatically generated, and therefore the common repetitions and place-holders like "you know" are not edited out.

But Then I Realized That Horses Are Just Men-Extenders.

War and Peace: Horse Power, Progress, and Prosperity

RFK Jr, Flouridation, and Dentistry in General

 The Studies Show Episode 56: Water Flouridation and Dentistry

Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just a big crank? Well, yes. But is he nevertheless correct in his specific claims about the harms of water fluoridation? It’s long been argued that it’s no longer necessary, and that it might have the scary adverse effect of lowering children’s IQs. In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart look at the evidence.

While they’re at it, Tom and Stuart ask whether there’s evidence for several other dentistry-related claims. Regular check-ups; flossing; fillings; fluoride toothpaste—is your dentist just bullshitting you about any or all of these?

[This podcast was recorded just before Donald Trump selected RFK Jr. as his candidate for US Health Secretary, but that makes the episode even more relevant].

Tom and Stuart come down on the side that says the scary claims for flouridation are probably all rubbish, but OTOH it probably doesn't do much good either.  Pre-1975 there were some poorly done studies that showed enough effect that the advantage of flouridation was probably real anyway.  Since then, better and better studies have shown less and less effect.  Now that everyone is using a flouride toothpaste, treating the water no longer matters.

They then spend the second half of the podcast talking about how little evidence there is for common dental practices.  At least some things do just as well if you leave them alone, and others require only minor treatment. Lastly, even those things which do require significant intervention may compromise the teeth so much that in the long run the advantage vanishes, even though the short-term advantage was real.  Like severe toothache, for example. 

For me, it was the realisation that the dentist I liked best in my life, a dear man of the old school, probably damaged my teeth more than all the others together, and maybe even more than my night bruxism, which I have usually pointed to as the main problem.

Fertility Crisis - Cat Among The Pigeons

Second in a Series .  The first post is Is It A Crisis?

In the evangelical crowd my children grew up in, even in their generation there is an unusual concentration of families that have more than two children.  The church we attend has several families with four or five children (not to mention plenty of twos and threes - we have a lot of children at our church), and as they in turn network together, it is likely that some of those children will grow up and be comfortable with a large family as well. These families have a strong tendency to homeschool as well. During recent medical difficulties, my wife and I covered some homeschool days for one of them, her five plus a sixth that she has taken under her wing because his family situation is unstable and he was not doing well in public school.

It's difficult.  There are reasons why not a lot of people want this job. It is a rather distilled version of raising children in general, with the same frustrations.  Children are adorable. They say surprising things and you can watch them grow. But you don't get a lot of immediate reward.  You are trusting God or your own abilities quite a bit for eventual growth. Two of the main things you need are energy, which comes with youth, and patience, which comes with age. They are not adults and you cannot have a decent conversation with them for a long time. Erma Bombeck noted decades ago that as soon as you can have a decent conversation with them, they leave.  (Or used to in the old days.) The younger social workers with children used to admit that they found it a relief to come to work. When our children were very young I did a lot of solo child care after my night shift, which is perhaps worse for men because you can't go over to some woman's house with your kids, so are very much stuck. It is very nice to have the other adult come home.

There is something about child care that is very easy, but many people still don't want to do it.  Come to think of it, that is also true of working a night shift. This suggests that there is also something very hard, or at least unattractive about it. When things are both easy and hard, the weight of the other incentives changes as well.  Attractions and rewards that usually work for other things stop working.  Attractions and rewards that people overlook or care less about start becoming more important.

All this is prologue for a very controversial tweet, which I found offensive at first, because these women staying home with lots of children are some of my favorite people. Yet as I looked at it, I saw there was some truth in it, however overstated.

Yes, I think fertility does just come down to avoiding carceral* employment/the 4HL*. Every "weird" high fertility group we talk about is really a different strategy for not having a job. Amish, Hasidics, Afghans, the Indigent, the Rich, etc. All the same deal.

Most of the women I am referring to can be very easily pictured in competitive employment, and in fact many of them have excelled at it.  Yet there are an unusual percentage of them, now that I look at it, who have interesting and even dramatic talent, but might not thrive in typical jobs. 

If I am going to be that controversial, I may as well include Bill Burr here. (Language alert.)

*I don't know what he means by these: carceral and the 4HL

Sing We Now of Christmas

 

Is It A Crisis?

First in a series.  Let's have some broader than usual discussions. Both 30,000 ft assessments and on-the-ground woman-immediate perspectives.

We talk about the Fertility Crisis, but what if it's not? What if it's just one more adjustment in human history? The current trends are so widespread worldwide that our encouraging couples to have more children is likely to have an effect only at the margins. Those of you younger than me are going to be looking at major changes.

As I have mentioned, I have lunch with guys I went to summer studies with in 1970.  I have five children, two biological, four of the other five have two each. I am the only one with any grandchildren, two of the five biological. My other lunch-monthly partner has no children.  My men's pub night also has almost no grandchildren. When I am talking it is from a grandparent perspective; I have to work to see things from my children's or grandchildren's perspectives. The preservation of the world I grew up with or even of the nation or the species matters less to them, even in evangelical culture where it is still strong.

Cranberry mentioned some things that might make it easier for young women to have both children and the careers that they wanted, noting that the tradeoff is quite real. Demographers like Lyman Stone note that education and wanting to establish oneself before having children has cut the available childbearing years in half. Even those who want children will have fewer. If nothing ever went wrong biologically, emotionally, or financially for all the young couples, that will still likely be less than replacement as a cohort.

So we should do all those things, if they show any promise of helping. Designing narrower carseats or finding some other method of protecting little ones. (The dropoff in children accelerated when those became mandatory.) But European countries already make huge social and financial support efforts, and their numbers are dropping too. France and the Scandinavian countries kept their numbers up just below replacement for a while, but now those have dropped off too.  And those countries love babies and children. Everyone beams at them on the train. (Not that they talk, of course! That's for noisy Americans.)

The sad truth is that women design their lives for the praise and acceptance of other women more than for men, and women no longer socially admire and reward having children as much. It doesn't have to be the antipathy and disdain that a few women show that discourages women from putting in that kind of effort. It's knowing that the same amount of effort will get you more admired by other women. 

Side note: this is related to the "Do women dress for men or for other women" question, hotly debated over at Grim's years ago.  It is both, of course, but the point is that we immediately assume it is for men but when we stop to think of it, it's more about being admired or accepted by other women than we had first realised.  So too here. Any individual woman is far more influenced by what her husband thinks than querying her friends whether she should have children now.  The point is that the world of women and the status it bestows is much more important than we commonly credit.

An example from an earlier generation is handcrafts. Those are still admired by women, even in the younger generations. Women will brag that a friend sews wonderfully, and mean the compliment sincerely, not condescendingly. So also with needlepoint and the like. But quilting is more art than practicality now. The type of status is different, and in some women, quite absent. My wife's knitting group is envious that she has two granddaughters interested in knitting. But they aren't very interested anymore. There's softball, basketball, and volleyball, which draws far more praise for those girls.

To me life is about learning to give, even pour yourself out for others. While having a spouse and children is certainly not the only way to get there, it is the most direct, and more reliable than the other choices.  Tet plenty of my college friends have no children and do not see that as a lack in their lives. Fertility crisis?  What's that?  Why is it important?  You can have a great life other ways.

Analogy For Prehistoric False Starts

I sometimes find it hard to get my head around previous populations, both prehistoric and historic, existing and leaving behind bones, tools, buildings, and landscape modifications but not being connected to us in any way.  This is becoming a more common caution as we see the genetic discontinuity, tool-making discontinuity, religious and cultural discontinuity.  It used to be that there were eras, that came in succession There would be Gravettian and then Solutrean and then Magdalenian, and we saw those as development, with perhaps some warlike people coming in and taking over, but still something essentially like Middle Eastern and European histories, with an essential continuity of people and gradual changes.

The shockingly different history of European arrival in the new world somehow eluded us. We still discussed that in terms of European nations holding sway over this region or that. The almost complete population replacement seemed like a one-off, of unimportant peoples being removed. 

Yet we now know that complete replacement happened a lot in history and prehistory, including in the New World before "we" got here. In Britain people will get romantic about "our ancestors" building Stonehenge.  Um, no.  Their ancestors eliminated the people who build Stonehenge. Of the Stonehengers, some distant relatives from the Continent mixed with the invaders beforehand, so that there are oddities like Cheddar Man having a relative still living nearby when they did the DNA a few years ago. But he wasn't a descendant, not by a long shot. The modern schoolmaster shared some even more distant ancestors with Cheddar Man. 

Peoples go along for hundreds or even thousands of years with some continuity, trading, exchanging daughters. Oh, a whole tribe gets wiped out here and there, but most tribes mix, move about, expand and contract. Then some tribe wipes everyone out, unless they keep the women, and all those previous peoples have no further influence on mankind. Razib took the analogy of the Roanoke Colony, a real people but only a blip on the historic record.  There have been rumors and suggestions of them having some cultural or genetic contribution to the Redbones or fully native tribes, but nothing substantial even if true.

Yet I think the analogy of modern travel fits better. I went to Romania through Hungary several times.  In Romania I had an effect - we took children home, primarily; but I was part of physical medical care, I did teaching.  In Hungary I just went through.  I had no effect. I didn't kill anyone or save anyone or impregnate anyone.  I didn't have a job, I didn't build anything or destroy anything. I left no trace. If I had gotten hit by a bus and died there, about all that could be concluded was "Gee, this guy came from really far away.  I wonder why?"

Smarter Than Me

My wife is smarter than I am now.  It pains me to admit that.

A comparison:

It was a long journey for me to go from liberal - which I considered part of my identity - to something in the conservative/libertarian range.  The issues fell one by one, perhaps beginning (pre 1980) with discovering that pro-life people were actually not monsters and even much nicer, and ending (post 1990) with gun control, where the 2A people just had the better arguments at every turn, darn it. Slowly, slowly, the treasured general liberalism slipped from my grasp.

To the title topic. Over a longer course, and reaching the tipping point this week, I have to admit that my wife is smarter than I am. I say that lightly, even playfully, yet I am talking about a real conclusion. Smarter is a word that always has a context, so that each of us might be smarter in this domain or that, but as a general statement it has to be one's whole life at present. In the 1980's it was she who reluctantly admitted "You really are smarter than me," and while I attempted to be a gracious winner and always find points of praise I have clutched this concession to my bosom ever since. She has always had domains where she exceeded me, but mine were (ahem) more important. 

Our vocabularies are similar, hers slightly better. She has distanced me ever-further in inspired word-puzzling.  Wordle came into our lives and she gets it in two much more often than I do. Her spatial intelligence is better (engineer's daughter) despite my improvement over the years. I am much better arithmetically - but here's the key to what I'm talking about: we don't use that so much these days. The hundreds of memorised numbers I made my living with no longer need to be called up. We rarely have to compute something. To try to hide my ego behind the claim the well I could if I needed too is rather hollow. Smarter includes context. 

She has always been better at natural history, the birds, wildflowers, fungi, and animals of the world. Well, biology major and school librarian I consoled myself. Yet when I took specialties of my own such as constellations and trees, and put in effort over years, when she took those up she passed me in a month. She intuits what identifying information is important. I never had as much use for it as she did, but now I have greater need of it. Context.

I have been good with names and faces.  She is spectacular. My remote memory is unusually good - but few other than myself use that. Despite kicking herself frequently for something she has forgotten, her recent memory is better than mine.  I ruefully say that Google replaced me and my network of like-minded friends who relied on each other's specialties to always be able to quickly know things.  It used to be a humblebrag, that I could converse off the top of my head about Negro League baseball, colonial America, CS Lewis and the Inklings, Indo-Europeans and a hundred other subjects. There was a day when that was useful. But, as Aragorn said "That day is not today." Humorously, I can sing all the verses of the Superchicken theme, which hardly anyone can do, but everyone can pull it up on their device when I get stuck on a section.

I still talk better than her, and though many will deny it, listen better.  Although maybe it's just me she doesn't hear. 

This week was brutal.  The PC started acting very badly, and we decided to switch to an iMac. Migrating the data was not working, likely because the hardware was too damaged.  I had some things to try.  She had more things. She also understood the manuals, online videos, and Apple support more quickly than I did. She is adjusting to the Mac differences much more quickly than I am.

Irritations from 2009

I get irritated about a lot of things, don't I?  Seldom angry, perpetually irritated.

The Truth Is Veiled. A prominent elderly psychiatrist is puzzled year after year about the attitude of religious people to suffering . Mostly because he never asks them.

A General Note on a Type of Blog Commenter.  Peace Out

Guarantee A relative guaranteed that the boy would commit suicide that night if we released him.  I was relieved.

Good Advice in the Supermarket Parking Lot

 

O Little Town of Bethlehem

I promised myself I would not get dragged into doing choir this Christmas, but the director brought me the tale of woe that the already-distressed bass section had lost yet another gent for medical reasons. So with no rehearsal until that morning I am going to attempt to fill in the bottom this Sunday at the 9 AM traditional service.  It's a beautiful piece.

Fertility Crisis

I will not be posting until I get the new computer (Apple this time) but a comment by Cranberry under Birth Dearth has me thinking, and I may do a short series of posts on the topic when I am up and running again.

China Overview

One of the participants in book club passed along an article in Law & Liberty by David Goldman ("Spengler") on the origins of Chinese governance. 

China’s unique geographic conditions required from antiquity a centralized tax system to fund infrastructure and a centralized bureaucracy to administer it. It never persuaded the peoples it absorbed into the Chinese empire to speak a common language or to confess the same religion. Ethnicity has no role in Chinese statehood.

The book club member, who lives in Silicon Valley and whose wife is from China, says he agrees with about half of the article.  He didn't say which half.

Stroke

My desktop has had some sort of stroke and is only gradually learning to talk again. Of course we let the Dell support lapse about three months ago...

2009 - Lighter Fare

Selfish and Profligate. The US uses an embarrassingly large percentage of American flags, and Europeans similarly cut other countries out of the market on European flags. And that's not all.  There is an embarrassingly long list of things that developed nations use more of.  Learn what you can do about it.

Flannelgraphs 

Worcester Lunch Car Diners.  And we learn that there is still one in Worcester.

Terry at Wheat Among Tares discovers something worrisome about her Post 666