French Carol

 

The harmonies get more complex as it goes

Sanctuary States

The American Conservative has a recent article How to Break the Sanctuary States. Eigenrobot at X extracted a key section

That is why I recommend the president order the Department of State to cease issuing student visas to all foreigners who seek to matriculate at universities and schools located in sanctuary jurisdictions. Foreign students overwhelmingly attend universities in sanctuary zones, and they bring billions of dollars to pay tuition and living expenses ($40 billion a year nationally).  

This steady stream of foreign students represents the Achilles’ heel of California, New York and Massachusetts—all three states representing major redoubts for non-cooperation with ICE. California alone has over 237,000 foreign students, and almost all of them pay the full tuition costs at the state’s overpriced universities.

Therefore, Trump should instruct his consular corps at U.S. embassies and consulates to cease issuing visas to all students seeking to enroll in universities in all 13 sanctuary states. The outrage will roar from China to India to Mexico. The visa pause should continue until ICE certifies the return to full cooperation of all state and local authorities on all deportation matters.

I have a natural conservatism that is suspicious of serious disruption, because it has unforeseen effects. This is somewhat balanced by a natural libertarianism that says "Lets worry about the foreseen effects first. Full speed ahead." 

This would include medical schools, and I have a fair number of Indian and Eastern European practioners up here. They tend to have children more than the Chinese, American, and Western European doctors do.  Boston is a sanctuary city and I think all of Massachusetts is a sanctuary state. New Hampshire is not a sanctuary state, but I don't know about Hanover and Lebanon.  Looking it up, there are no sanctuary cities in NH at the moment and the legislature passed a bill outlawing them, so the supply line from Dartmouth-Hitchcock and Geisel remains intact. And Massachusetts? "The Princess Bride" said it best, as it did many things. "If I make him better, Humperdinck suffers?"

Am I that petty?  Yeah, probably. And it would only be temporary, until they figured out which side their bread was buttered on.

Which come to think of it, for smart people they aren't very good at down there.

Reaching Your Full Potential

Linus* once stated "There is no greater burden than a high potential." I felt that deeply when I read it in the 60s. I am more ambivalent about it now.  There are greater burdens.  I suppose that one is common enough among the children of the chattering classes that it deserves at least a mention.

The adversity being blamed in that conversation was ADHD. Yes, that can interfere with you reaching your full potential. So can being blind. So can being 2SD too short if you are male. So can chronic alopecia, or schizophrenia, or being born in Tajikstan, or a hundred other things.  Hardly any of us reach our full potential. 

And...potential for what?  Wealth? Beauty? Education? Strength?

We should be more concerned that we don't reach our full potential for Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude; Faith, Hope, and Charity.

False Measurement of Adversity

The trend toward adversity points for college admissions is another way to increase the advantage of upper-middle-class white kids rather than reduce it, exactly as subbing in interviews for standardised tests did a generation ago. Those kids speak the dialect of the college admissions office staff at a completely natural level. They can write a better adversity essay, hitting all the right notes, better than kids who have faced actual adversity, who sometimes slip up on that.  My elder son from the Romanian orphanage, who was sent into the fields to herd sheep and goats at age six so his father could have cigars and palinca, and was later dropped off at Casa de Copii, the mouth of hell that you saw 60-Minutes specials on, only charmed a small religious college in South Carolina with his bio, and they seemed to forget it the day he arrived. Probably just as well. We kept him out of Special Ed and ESL in high school and he gradually figured it out. 

He didn't write an essay.  He told them the story, sometimes laughing, when he went down to see them. 

If you are trying to uncover a Black kid from inner-city Baltimore who is a diamond in the rough, an essay may not be your best bet. That will give you six middle-class kids from Bethesda and three second-generation Nigerians. A standardised test sorted by ZIP code will do better.

Political Betting

Listening to Ryan Glasspiegel today talking about why he bet on Harris late in the campaign. He reasoned that it was looking like a tossup, both sides would cheat if they could, but the swing states had Democratic governors and it's always easier to cheat for more votes in cities. That is not terrible reasoning, but illustrates that large realities can overwhelm even accurate subtleties. Hugh Hewitt's If It's Not Close They Can't Cheat is bout 20 years old, I think.

He seems to have made it back betting Trump for the popular vote, which was 4-1 against even the day before. 

I would put my money on the nose of a pony before I put it on a political race.

Christmas Music

I have been a person who waited until the very end to cut and put up the Christmas tree. It echoed not my own childhood (though we were late-ish until my mother remarried), but my mother's and grandmother's Swedish traditions, where the tree was decorated by the adults Christmas Eve and the children saw it for the first time in the morning. This makes more sense when you are using real candles and the tree is only up for a week. Which even we didn't do, but my grandmother remembered. You can read about it in my Aunt Jennie's book The Golden Name Day, recently reissued with terrible illustrations, and notable for the fact that such details as houses burning down or girls' hair catching fire for Luciadag* were studiously unmentioned.

We had a friend who was a stickler (a good Episcopalian at the time) for only having Advent music before Christmas and Carols only sung after midnight Christmas Eve. She has gotten over that, but when we were Lutherans we trended in that direction somewhat. But I quickly settled for grousing about Winter Songs and Santa Songs mixed into the religious holiday, sometimes smuggled.

So let's give thanks to the Lord above,'cause Santa Claus is coming tonight. 

It got a little silly.  Tracy and I would sing Christmas Carols in July or October, but shut down after Hallowe'en until Thanksgiving Night. Then we would go full bore until Epiphany, when everyone else was buying Valentine's candy.

A young friend, sort of a stepson, posted this on Facebook yesterday.  He is a musician, and he's got a solid point here.

People don't sing "We gather Together" in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, do they?  Not even the ones who know all the verses by heart.

*Tell your side of the story if you want, bsking.

O Holy Night

I won't be doing them every day, as I do when I start in Advent.  This year will be more irregular. This is the warmup.

When I sang this in children's choir in 1964, I started my solo "Truly, he taught..." two measures early, choked it down after a syllable. That's good training for not panicking onstage. Mistakes happen. Never let 'em see you sweat.

Skilled Immigration

I'm not sure how much of this I agree with, but I would have agreed with a lot less of it before I read it. So in the interests of passing along a good persuader, I give you Aporia's Increasing Skilled Immigration Would Be a Mistake.

 

When asked, 71% of Trump supporters want to increase high-skilled immigration to the United States. This isn’t a priority for most of Trump’s coalition, but one wealthy and disproportionately influential faction has consistently and publicly advocated for increasing high-skilled immigration, to the point that Trump himself has endorsed giving green cards to all foreign students. This faction is the libertarian-adjacent tech-right, whose support for Trump is motivated by concerns about regulations, freedom of speech and averting California-style political dysfunction in the rest of the country. They are making a fatal mistake.

I didn't remove the links for this post, but I didn't read them myself.

Dr Arlene Unfiltered

'These rabbits who claim to have the second sight—I've known one or two in my time. But it's not usually advisable to take much notice of them. For one thing, many are just plain mischievous. A weak rabbit who can't hope to get far by fighting sometimes tries to make himself important by other means and prophecy is a favorite. The curious thing is that when he turns out to be wrong, his friends seldom seem to notice, as long as he puts on a good act and keeps talking.' The Threarah, Watership Down, as quoted by Captain Holly.*

I think of this quote whenever someone makes a prediction that goes badly wrong, but seems to still have an audience.  We can all point to religious groups where this has happened. Sometimes the "prophet" has enough honor that he goes away and so does the movement.  Yet it is surprising how many double down.

Over at Grim's Hall Texan99 put up a post from Hot Air that included video predictions of an obvious Kamala victory in condescending tones by semi-prominent Democrats who have media channels. I feel like I have met both of these prophets many times before. They seriously annoy me.  Yet after these shamefully wrong predictions, they have soldiered on in at least some venues.  Dr. Arlene, a former political science professor and current political analyst, has memory-holed this particular video but gone on to rapidly put up more explaining how this terrible vote came about.  I watched two, and they are even more condescending and irritating.

I don't usually follow Hot Air.  It is often correct and the reporting is pretty good, but they are in that niche of being unnecessarily inflammatory.  The headline for the story talks about the "Lamestream Media," for example. But they very clearly point out the bias of the legacy media on the weekend before the election.  It's not in their op-eds, it's in their news text, and David Strom gives specific examples, exact quotes, and contrasts it to how Trump is usually quoted, with phrases or half-sentences yanked out and frog-marched onto the front page unwillingly, made to confess to things they did not actually say - because Trump didn't exactly say them either.

I don't recommend sending these to liberal friends.  They will get irritated and stop hearing.  But if you choose to take that risk, point out that this is exactly how MSNBC, the Washington Post, or even the AP appear to us. Watching things like this is our normal everyday experience when we are in a place where this is all that is on offer. All of us tend to not see and not hear what we dislike.  It takes some effort.  It takes thinking "If I were going to answer that claim in some sort of refereed or mediated situation, what would I say? What would be my strongest points, what would easily be dismissed as mere name-calling or cliche?"  It is called steelmanning an argument, a clever twist on strawman. 

You have to want it. It doesn't happen naturally when you are harvesting meme-farms for cleverly vicious things that will impress the people in your group. The humor there is usually not actually funny, just mean in the way a particular audience likes. They eat it up and tell you how wonderful you are, and your place in the category is reinforced again. 

*Ross Douhat has called Watership Down the greatest political novel of the late 20th C.

********

(Unnecessary rant, that happened because I got overheated.)

Here is where I get especially upset, and I have seen a lot of it post election. How can you say such things about people who have shown you nothing but affection? "Oh, I didn't mean you, AVI.  I wasn't thinking of you at all when I posted that.  But surely you must know that there are lots of people like that out there." 

No, I don't know that.  I've met some and have upbraided some on my own side. But there actually aren't a lot of Christian Nationalists out there.  There are lots of articles "well, 60% of Republicans say they support A, which is darn close to saying B, and what they really mean but don't say out loud is H, as in 'Heil Hitler.' I've seen them online myself." They are almost but not quite bogeymen. They are few. You are overinterpreting Gadsden Flags or purely defensive expressions of 2A rights as threatened attacks. If they don't want illegal aliens you refuse to hear that because you won't use the word, considering it an attack on all immigrants.

Nationalism

We have had discussions here about nationalism versus internationalism throughout the whole nineteen years. Not once have any of us resorted to the speaker's trick of starting with "Webster's defines..." I have used that idea on the topic of racism, which has at least three distinct definitions that are treated as "oh, it's all the same thing" in political conversation these days.

The link in Point 4 in the post below this one has something similar in its discussion of nationalism versus globalization. It's a good reminder that nationalism has at least three distinct meanings, which are not interchangeable though are often treated as such by those who fear it. They regard all expressions of nationalism to essentially be the first definition.  The other two matter.

1. Devotion, especially as excessive or undiscriminating devotion, to the interests of culture of a particular nation-state.  

2. The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals.  

3. The belief that a particular cultural or ethnic group constitutes a distinct people deserving of political self-determination.   

Tariffs

David Foster over at Chicago Boyz has a discussion of tariffs with both some standard reminders and some less-common arguments.

From Point 2: 

Imagine Massachusetts enacting a tariff on oranges to protect an industry of heated orange groves and Florida a tariff to support air-conditioned cranberry bogs. State politicians could trumpet creating a new industry, but OJ would be $25 a glass in Boston and cranberry sauce would be $10 a scoop in Miami. Tariffs amount to a “beggar thyself” policy. The Constitution’s framers recognized this and crafted the Commerce Clause to forbid restriction of trade by states. The same principle applies to trade between nations. (WSJ)

Trade based on relative efficiency of production, as for the orange/cranberry example, is a classic example of the advantages of trade.  But a high proportion of trade today is not of this nature: it is simply labor arbitrage, based on differentials in wages.  The primary reason why products made in China have been so much lower cost than those made in the US is because Chinese people would work for lower wages than US people. There was nothing inherent in Chinese geography or climate, or Chinese skill sets, that made assembly of iPhone more efficient in China than in Iowa.

From a link at Point 4: 

Since Clinton implemented NAFTA, and the US-China Trade Agreement of 2000, 12 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared, replaced with a combination of health care, education, leisure & hospitality and warehouse jobs.  According to the US Census Bureau, the manufacturing jobs lost pay an average annual salary of $61K and change.  The weighted average of the jobs that replaced them is $43K plus a bit.  The average household size in the US is 3.13 people.  This means that over 37 million people – about 11% of the US population – has been whacked from the middle class to paycheck-to-paycheck level.  No wonder young people are coming to believe capitalism doesn’t work, and there is increasing concern for the ’wealth gap’.

Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand

 They had a few of these from their Hamburg days, including "Sie Liebt Dich"

Twins Reared Apart

There was a fascinating case of South Korean twins reared apart after one was lost at the market when they were two years old and after foster care, was later adopted to the US. The researchers noted consistent similarities in personality, mental health profile and the pattern of cognitive abilities. They showed similar high conscientiousness and low neuroticism, high verbal comprehension and working memory. 

What did Psypost report first after telling the charming story of how they got reunited? That they "expressed" different values WRT stereotypical cultural differences in individualism and vertical collectivism. What did Psypost highlight in the headline? The "striking"16-point difference in IQ, rather than the usual average of 7 points. 

However...

The researchers suggested that this discrepancy might be partially explained by US’s history of concussions...

Um, yeah.  You have to get to paragraph eleven for that.  Old friend Gringo over at Maggie's Farm picked up on the same thing right away. They were pretty much the same on everything except what they said out loud about communitarianism, each being conventional according to culture - which would be something of a similarity; and the one with lots of concussions had intelligence in the same pattern, just less of it. 

Even I grant that getting bapped on the head frequently is a significant environmental effect.  Another is near starvation before age six. Or eating lead. Not much else. 

Always remember that South Korean students outperform Americans because they are so regimented and are worked so hard, but Finnish students are better than Americans because they are so laid back and allowed to pursue interests without pressure. Got that? Couldn't possibly be genetic, so it has to be "whatever else you got in the environment."

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

We have read this book aloud at Christmas every year since the 1980s, and my wife invariably chokes up at about the same time Imogene does, so we always give her that chapter. I directed it in 1991 or so. I am quite suspicious of movies that originally had Christian themes being made into movies. They either remove the offending religious parts, as in "A Wrinkle in Time" or overegg the pudding by becoming preachy, pounding the theme to the center of the earth.

The new movie that is out does neither.  It remains fully Christian but does so lightly. The changes from the book and play are minor and understandable.  Some are even improvements, such as the brief epilogue of Beth now directing the play, followed by what happened to the Herdmans later. 

Highly recommended.

Drop-Kick

 I remember this. A rather perfect moment.

I hadn't realised it was almost twenty years ago now. I had heard about Flutie early, as my brother played for Lincoln Sudbury, a nearly adjoining town to Natick, though they didn't overlap. New England seldom has any high-ranking college programs beyond Boston College, so we heard about him a bit in the eighties as well, even in far-distant New Hampshire.

Christmas Goose

Maybe not.  No one in a hundred mile radius raises them for sale. The deliveries from Tennessee, Iowa, Oregon, and South Dakota are wicked expensive, $15-20/lb uncooked delivered. I am betting this is mostly related to the amount of work compared to other poultry, but suspect that all the non-GMO, organic, and nightly concerts by Yo Yo Ma add to the price as well. As an aside, this is part of why Amish farmers don't bother to go for organic certifications and the like.  People see the word Amish and figure "close enough."

There have been a half-dozen places in NH that have made a go of it over the last 20 years, but all have dropped goose from their product line or gone out of business altogether. It must be a tough gig.

Three Little Pigs

OK, it's the Guardian

But it's still funny.