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.