Whaddya Gonna Do In a Little Canoe?

 Looking for another old camp song, circa 1959, I came across this one. I asked my wife if she had sung it at Girl Scout camp, and she assured me that her mother would never have allowed such a thing. It has a fun twist in the second verse.

Sold By Weight?

 From Stephen Hopkins, @ phil_lol_ogist on X

Someone at Trader Joe's never studied the Middle Ages

 

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.

Black Circle

My wife tells me that there is a new profile photo being adopted on Facebook, a black circle to protest the election of Donald Trump.

Tell me again who is seeking unity in the country? I have mentioned this here all the way back to the first Obama inauguration, where the overall positive sentiment for a president was noticeably higher at the beginning of a Democrat's term - Republicans and especially Independents giving him a chance - than for a Republican's - hatred and opposition from day one, back to 1960.  I did it by the Gallup numbers, which were telling. I also remember it (though imperfectly, when I compared it to the data).  I was there for a lot of it and was a sneering liberal, showing my superiority.  I know which is the divisive force in this country, and was proud to be part of it as a teenager.

It is just old, older than I am at this point, that liberals say their guys are uniters, when they haven't had to move an inch but their opponents have made the effort; but MSNBC back through Newsweek ask if the new Republican can be a uniter, then in the next breath declare he probably won't be, because of all the liberal ideas he won't pick up, the bastard. And don't even get me started on 2000.

Thanksgiving Blackjack

My games program, on which I play an infuriating version of contract bridge, is advertising Thanksgiving Blackjack this month.  This seems both historically bad and spiritually suspect.

I suppose if I could count cards, I would be tankful for that ability. I have a son who has the ability to find unfair advantages in gambling - which troubles his Romanian conscience not at all, Baptist schools or no - but these have always eluded me.  When I perfect time travel I will have a go at sports betting, if my wife allows.

How To Vote

James sends along directions for a new way of choosing who to vote for, from Mainer Sippican Cottage:  Count the Signs. 

Once upon a time, you could tell the political parties by simply observing the color of the text. Red team was always for things like annexing the Sudetenland, and blue team was for five year plans for the collective farms you’d be living in. There were also political garanimal clues. If there was an elephant label in their underwear, they wanted Mexicans to mow their lawns, but not vote. A donkey in their underoos wanted the Mexicans to vote, but not pester them in the Home Depot parking lot.

I did something similar myself in the previous election, wondering whether to vote for Stump Grinding.

This Nearly Was Mine

There were a lot of excellent versions of this.  Hard to choose.

I have stayed away from "South Pacific" because I believe the sentiment of "You Have To Be Carefully Taught" is exactly backwards. But that's a terrible reason to reject the other songs.

Hillary

We were all interested in what Hillary Clinton had to say today, weren't we?  Apparently she's in an unimaginably difficult situation. 

I keep looking in the rear-view mirror, hoping to see her there.

Vance on Rogan's Podcast

 “The entire modern Democrat party grew up in an era where there was consensus. They grew up in a high social trust era. A lot of them are trying to reimpose that social trust from the top, not recognizing that social trust came organically from the way American society worked. If you have people trying to reimpose it from the top, it degrades the very thing you're trying to create.” 

This does not sound like adventurous or alarming thinking in the podcast, blog, and substack world.  We have heard lots of people talk like this.  But it is a very unusual thing for a politician to offer.  All the presidents, VP's, and opposition candidates in my lifetime would understand the idea easily.  But I can't think of another who would bring it up as a topic for discussion.

Popular Vote

Wasn't there a movement for states to pledge they would give their electoral votes to whoever won the popular vote?  And weren't most of them blue, including California and New York? Should I amuse myself and research this?

Are we sure such short-sighted, in-the-moment partisan people should be governing us? I'm trying to keep things simple here.

Julurens

A new human cousin  The estimable John Hawks is discussing it, so I have immediate confidence it is a real something. What it is, though, is not yet known.  Julurens: A New Cousin for Denisovans and Neanderthals.

But many scientists don't subscribe to the idea that the fossil record of China should be understood through an Altai lens. A new article from Xiujie Wu and Christopher Bae presents a new look at some fossils of the later Middle Pleistocene. They focus on fossil samples from Xujiayao in north China and Xuchang in central China. These fossils, which date to between 220,000 and 100,000 years ago, contrast with the so-called “Dragon Man” skull from Harbin and other similar remains. Wu and Bae suggest that the Xujiayao and Xuchang fossils may be something different and call them the Julurens—a name that means “big heads”.

 

Feelin' Groovy

 My roommate in college used to affect an Upper East Side accent and recite this unmusically in the early 70s.  Hysterical, but...maybe you had to be there.

Phrase

 The Studies Show (sidebar) mentioned a phrase I love for bad research, in the sense of marginal results which disappear when the testing gets more rigorous: Noise-Mining.

Henderson

I am also on Rob Hederson's newsletter list, which includes some fascinating links.

 What You Can't Say

“I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.”  

People are surprisingly hesitant to reach out to old friends

Evidence from across the social sciences demonstrates that social relationships provide one of the most robust and reliable routes to well-being. For instance, individuals with strong and satisfactory relationships report the highest levels of happiness^1,2, and people who have someone to count on in times of need report higher life evaluations worldwide³. However...

Think You Know About Satanists? Maybe You Don't  

No one here but us agrarian reformers, as the communists used to say in Latin America

Rob reviewed The Dawn of Everything, which I originally liked the idea of but was talked out of it by people smarter than me.  Henderson didn't much like it either.

Tyler Cowan: One way to reduce inequality is to work harder. It creates a 20% difference in lifetime earnings.  That's not everything, but it ain't nuthin', neither. He recommends doing it early, frontloading the intense work, to increase the benefits of networking later on.

Can Therapy Cure Criminal Impulses?  Answer:  If it does, it's not very much.  There is a difficulty in studying this because of measurement of apples vs. oranges.

How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics  One of my threads today discussed the demographics of the college educated versus the non college-educated.  (bsking wanted to know about the "college non-educated," as a person who had a degree in musical theater described himself. Touche.) 

Related:  IQ and Leadership:  Can you be "too smart?" Henderson notes what we have said here often about general intelligence and its advantage in many domains, but points to the ability of the intelligent to relate to those they are leading as of at least equal importance.  He does not mention my other main point which I grow weary of making, that practical advantages of intelligent are not the same thing as character - things like discretion, temperament, honesty, generosity. Sigh.

Replication Crisis

Mid century 20th psychology is about the psychology of cool ideas. Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo ended up in every Psych 101 textbook, even after the evidence for their famous studies started to erode (and eventually collapsed). That's why social psychology especially is having a replication crisis - because they did a lot of poorly designed experiments to try and illustrate various points that people thought were true because they hoped were true. After WWII people were fascinated by the question of what would cause otherwise decent people to do evil things.  It was an era that believed more and more that environment could make you do anything, so "experiments" were designed not to study that - certainly not to research that, but to illustrate those ideas. 

If that sounds like something that is more artistic expression than it is science, well, yeah. Exactly. People in those fields who wanted to do actual science existed, and a much greater percentage exists now. But no one did New Yorker articles on them, no one talked about them in college bull sessions, no one referenced them from lecterns (and pulpits!) to make their own favored points. We still see it with such nonsense as such as priming, which is a follow on from the Hidden Persuaders school of belief who is worried that "they" can make you do just about anything. One of my favorite rants i, mentioned just a few posts ago, is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relatively, that we think in different ways because we grew up with a different language. It just sounds like it would be cool if it were true.

I wish I could track down the quote but have come up empty.  Maybe I thought of it myself and attributed to some senior psychologist complaining about the banal state of experimentation these days.*"You can't just put the horses out on the track and let them run anymore," meaning you could no longer think up creative experiments with far-reaching implications as much. Well, but that's the point. Are these horses representative of horses in general? Is this race a good measurement of horse abilities in general or only of particular types of horses? Does the horse behavior come naturally out of what horses are or is it imposed by trainers and jockeys? Is it different if there's a crowd? These are the things we actually want to know if we are scientists. Though admittedly it IS much more fun to watch a horse race and maybe even put down a bet on it.   

Consider Margaret Mead's Coming of Age In Samoa, described as "a proponent of broadening sexual conventions." Well fine.  Just do that on your own time without calling it science, wouldja? Or the top thinkers in psychology and sociology from their earliest decades, the Freuds, Jungs, Skinners, Webers and Durkheims  Remember my discussion of Art from Goethe's Three Questions, one of my most-visited posts in 20 years.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed that Three Questions be asked about any work of art. They must be answered in order.

1. What was the artist trying to do?

2. How well did he do it?

3. Was it worth the doing?

We wanted them to do science. They wanted to put ideas they thought were true forward, and tried to squeeze that into the form dominant and the time. Everyone considered science-y things as the most intellectual. Not necessarily rel science, though that was nice, too. They were artists masquerading as scientists. It doesn't make them wrong.  But for things like replication and advancement of knowledge rather than theorising, it doesn't cut the mustard.

Science fiction is very cool. In many ways it's more fun than actual science. And it often can tell us something about human behavior or technical possibilities. But ultimately, it's literature, not science, even if it is greatly influenced by real science, as with Isaac Asimov.

*Because it would be really cool if some senior psychologist agreed with me, you know?

Conservative Columnists in the NYT about a Second Trump Term

Via Althouse, who reads the mainstream media so you don't have to. She used one of her monthly "shares" for this one.

A Second Trump Term?  I have liked David French very much in the past, and respected that he doesn't just follow the party line, but thinks for himself.  But he couldn't find anything about MAGA that he respected?  He sees that "deep into MAGA" people have deteriorated in character? What does that mean?  How many is he talking about?

When I catch myself saying such things about others, on any topic, I have immediate recognition that I have friends who could immediately say to me "David, what have your beliefs done to your character over the years?  How dare you speak?"

They're not wrong, even when they're wrong.

Needless to say, I liked what Stephens and Douhat said much better.

Sid Caesar

 Lunch at a Mediterranean place with my old St Paul's guys, all Math or Chemistry in 1970.  My friend Ted has been digging through old Sid Caesar shows.  Worth a look.

This would have seemed very old and even comically so to me in 1970. But that date, still green in memory, is over 75% of the way back to this show. I shall wear my trousers rolled.

Soul Anchor

 Leslie speaker, great tenor sax, off-rhythm ending, what's not to like?

Palladium

I have a lot of reading to pass along to you over the next few posts

 Palladium Magazine is interesting. "Governance Futurism." Currently on the front page (see anything you like?)

The Genius Who Launched the First Space Program - Sergei Korolev

It's Time to Build the Exoplanet Telescope

Palladium 15:  State Religion

When the Mismanagerial Class Destroys Great Companies

The AI Arms Race Isn't Inevitable 

The Limits to Growth Are Interplanetary 

The Past and Future of Military Drones

The Academic Culture of Fraud

Palladium Issue 14: Great Cities

The Fastest Path to African Prosperity

The City Makes the Civilization

Why Russia Doesn't Want to Liberalize

America and Europe are Equally Poor

As Caste Vanishes, Only Genes Remain

Palladium Issue 13:  Global Empire

Curtis Yarvin, Mencius Moldbug

Are any of you readers of his substack, Gray Mirror? Or of his previous blog Unqualified Reservations, under his pseudonym? Descriptions like Neo-monarchist and Neocameralist awaken interest, and being described as one of the founders of the Dark Enlightenment make me well-disposed to him.

Not sure even I can follow him down many of his favorite roads, however.  Maybe I just need to get used to these ideas.  I spent an hour browsing around in his writing tonight.

Bride

For some reason a guy my age who refers to his wife as "my bride" just rubs me the wrong way.  Is it just because it is a phrase that is out of fashion now, or is there something else in this that I'm not picking up?

Anthro Links

I am a subscriber to Anthropology.net. Some links are behind a paywall, others are free.  I get half-a-dozen short articles per week. Here are a few of the best.

"The Scythians were a prominent Iron Age people of the Eurasian Steppe, and their distinctive funerary practices were well-documented in ancient texts. Greek historian Herodotus described their customs, though often portraying them as barbaric. Recent archaeological evidence, however, provides insight that goes beyond these ancient descriptions." 

Underwater caves. "Despite Sicily’s proximity to mainland Italy, the migration of early human groups to the island posed significant challenges. The narrow stretch of water separating Sicily from Italy might seem a minor barrier today, but it represented a substantial obstacle for early human populations. Scholars have debated whether early humans arrived by sea or over a possible land bridge, and what pathways they may have taken to reach the island."

 "Our results suggest that between the Yayoi and Kofun periods, the majority of immigrants to the Japanese Archipelago originated primarily from the Korean Peninsula.” 

The heat from fire made starchy foods more digestible, and extra amylase genes likely offered a survival advantage.

There had been a lot of evidence of population collapse in Scandinavia over 5,000 y/a, and recently there has been evidence that it was plague brought by the Indo-Europeans, rather than their extreme violence, that did in the mostly Pitted-Ware Scandis of the day.  I think it looks like first one and then the other, myself, and I suspect that is the more common view. The full article is behind the paywall, but you should at least know that the evidence for all this is increasing.

Ancient Aurochs as ancestors of modern cattle.  Who doesn't want to know about aurochs, eh? There weren't that many lineages early on in the domestication 10,000 y/a, which is unsurprisingly attributed to the fact that they were large, and wild. Catching one was a project.

Tollense Valley Warfare

Findings suggest that the ancient battle at Tollense marked the beginning of large-scale, organized warfare in Europe.  One hypothesis involves control over a vital trade route. The Tollense River was once crossed by a causeway, built 500 years before the battle, which may have been part of a major trade network. At the moment, that sounds as good as any other theory.

The study above highlights the role of archers in ancient warfare, which has often been underestimated. That's a skull that the arrowhead is piercing up there, so it was um, vitally important, quite literally to at least one person there.

Cursive Myths

The importance of cursive to the development of children seems to spawn myth after myth.  This week a woman assured me that it taught children to have more continuity of thought, and that this was research, not an hypothesis. How one would measure that seems an interesting research design.

It's just one of those zombie ideas that people want to be true, like the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity.  It just won't die. As I don't share the idea myself, I have little insight into the motives for it. For some it may simply be that they were good at it.  Others think it looks better, and attempting beauty is good for us. It was important in our grandparents' education, so traditionalists think it must thus be obviously superior to whatever-the-hell-they-teach-kids-now. There is a particular attraction to ideas that it is neurologically important, or that it builds character. Again, how on earth would we eliminate selection bias in measuring that? 

I was forever given extra penmanship practice in grades school, sometimes being kept in from recess. It was considered important that I learn to hold the implement loosely at the proper angle, rather than squeezing the pencil until my fingers ached. This was presented to me as an approach that not only made the letters look better, but would train me to be more "relaxed."  Well, I did have a dozen symptoms of anxiety, yes, from pica to bruxism and beyond, but I never experienced holding a small wooden rod loosely and trying to do something intentional with it as having any positive effect.

Football Hooligans

 

(Post)Modern Medievalist Reimagining an Ancient Myth

I had the single thought of Lewis as a 60s writer, or perhaps a mid 1900s writer.  The Ransom Trilogy is sci-fi, a new genre at the time, however much Lewis inserted his medieval "Discarded Image" into it. Camus, Brecht, Kafka, In Till We Have Faces you have to bring yourself to the text and interact with it or you just aren't going to understand its unusual features. A woman veiling herself permanently and humans coinhering with shifting goddesses seems more like Kafka's Metamorphose, or something out of Brecht or Camus. It is turning into Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Reenacting the actions of gods and goddesses, which is unusual in modernist literature, yet has the same mythic quality as say, some of Vonnegut or Borges. The Owl Service by Alan Garner has 20th C people reenacting a pagan Welsh myth, rather helpless to change it, rather like Stoppard's hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unable to escape their fate because they are stuck in script of "Hamlet" no matter what they do, illustrated immediately by the coin flip never changing no matter how many times it is repeated. 

It is more modern, or especially postmodern, to retell (or reinscribe as the more postmodern term is) a myth paying attention to the motivations of the gods and goddesses. Ancient writers would give only the barest description - "Venus was jealous" and let the story unfold in ways that would leave the audience wondering "but why then did she not simply banish/kill/make the mortal ugly?" It was not unknown in the past. We see behind the characters' emotional curtains a bit in "The Trojan Women," and Paradise Lost pays significant attention to motives of divine, diabolical, or mythic characters. But it is rare. It is much more common to focus on a villain's or minor character's* POV in our day than it had been before. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was subtitled "A Modern Prometheus" and initiated the popularity of the idea, but it has become even common now.  Garner's Grendel, ** or the entire premise of "Wicked."

We want to force Lewis, and probably Tolkien, into a mold of nonmodern writers, forcing themselves back into older forms, or a mold of ancient or medieval writers updating them themselves for the present, but not really see them as 20th century writers.Yet their characters are seldom simply evil or good. They are mixed, with good motives barely surviving but not fully extinguished, and even the heroes bent or needing redemption in some way. Even before he was a Christian, Lewis had wanted to tell the story of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of the jealous sisters. He even shows the improvement of Redival, the less-mentioned sister because she turns outward to care for others, her husband and children.But Orual judges her by other criteria than caring, and still finds her wanting. These are perspectives that would have been impossible for writers in most of history. 

Crystal Downing of the Wade Center calls Lewis the first postmodernist writer.  Jack would likely point to GK Chesterton and Owen Barfield as his influences that all artists and thinkers are products of their eras - including especially our own, which is the one most frequently neglected.  We view a subject through every prism on the table; but not the mirror on the wall directly across from us.

So that's it. Don't limit Lewis's categories, or Tolkien's.  They contain many eras.

*The New Testament way be the first work to focus consistently on the actions of minor or low-status persons as having importance.

**I was in a student-written production based loosely on Grendel, and got to beg for mercy but be killed anyway on stage.  Never die out in the open in the theater.  Find some way to land behind a sofa or rock, because otherwise you will have to lie absolutely still until the scene ends. "Grendel" was notable for its cast of seven male students with a rather bawdy female director, leading to a series of cast parties that were unrivalled, about once a month, last for a year. Drunken actors can get rather graphic in charades. I missed the enactment of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," but apparently it took the entire three minutes even though everyone knew the answer immediately.

HIV Vaccine

 Jean-Michel Connard on X: "In my lifetime HIV will have gone from a death sentence, to a chronic condition, to a vaccine-preventable illness. We do incredible things when we apply ourselves."

Great Divorce Episode

A friend mentioned this section at the end of The Great Divorce.  It seemed so unfamiliar to me that I wondered whether it was really in the text, but he assured me it was.  Even attentive readers can only see what the are looking for, or at least, understand, perhaps.

AND SUDDENLY all was changed. I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women. Then vertigo and terror seized me and, clutching at my Teacher, I said, "Is that the truth? Then is all that I have been seeing in this country false? These conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts- were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago?"

"Or might ye not as well say, anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things? But ye'd do better to say neither. Ye saw the choices a bit more clearly than ye could see them on earth: the lens was clearer. But it was still seen through the lens. Do not ask of a vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give."

Leaf Bags

 I don't think I have bought a leaf bag in eight years.  There is always a better one at the dump.

Proxy Wars

Having just mentioned them WRT Ukraine, noticing that the Middle East seems to be awash in groups sponsoring wars in which people other than them will die to achieve their ends, and reflecting on the centrality of proxy wars to the Cold War it occurred to me why they often go wrong. The people you are arming and sponsoring have different goals than you do. Everyone knows that in theory, but larger or richer nations keep thinking they can choose their battles and influence their "buddies" far more than is actually the case. You can pretty much count on it.  "Okay, stop now." No, we want to win this territory back. "Keep fighting." No, we've got 2/3 of what we wanted and the subgroup we hate most over there has dropped out anyway. "Invade the mountains." You first. It reminded me of something, I couldn't tell what...

The game activates at about the 2:40 mark.

Not A Marriage

David Foster over at Chicago Boyz passes on the observation by Bill Ackman that an election is not like a marriage, however much we might feel that electing someone has the same exclusivity and persistence in out lives. We do not have a universe of choices, so that we may indulge ourselves and focus on whether we like the person, respect them, or believe we could have a beer or a cup of tea with them.  We have two choices, at most three in an American election.

Crazy

It is actually a Willie Nelson song, written early when he was mostly a drunk DJ trying to sell songs. Patsy Cline's husband talked her into picking it up to record. Linda Ronstadt released it well over a decade later, when it had dropped out of popularity after being a standard in country music in the 60s.

Ronstadt was remarkably good at noticing songs like that, ones that should be brought back for a second or third independent life. As she could sing many styles, she covered many artists.

Proxy Wars

Those of you looking at the war in Ukraine as a proxy war for the Americans, and see tit-for-tat relationships to the Iran-Israel war will be interested in Steve Hsu's analysis of the last month's current events over at Manifold. Seeking Truth From Facts. He pays particular attention to the upgrade in Iranian missiles as changing the whole dynamic. He goes on to talk about Europe's economic and technological decline and how it seems past the point of no return compared to America and China.

Post-Liberalism

James links to an article in First Things that describes the modern twist that has been put in the definition of fascism.

Collective Feminine Wisdom

When I hear about people not supporting Kamala because she's "a" woman, as was said about them not supporting Hillary because she is "a" woman, with the often explicit statement that if she were not a woman, she would be running away with this election, I note that this smuggles in the idea that because female wisdom is untapped, that the first female president will somehow inherit all of it, and all this neglected wisdom of the generations will be available to her in a way it is not to males.

Men have made a mess of things, why not give a woman a try?! is an equivalent statement to Any woman will know things that are not available to men.  

Really?  How so?

Revisiting Planet Narnia

Michael Ward's hypothesis that the Seven Chronicles of Narnia each have an atmosphere and plot reflecting the Seven Astrological Influences of the Middle Ages remains controversial, as I learned (again) at the conference. People who know more than I do express strong opinions, and I am hesitant to make definitive statements either way.  I have both supported the theory and been opposed to it at different times.  It helps to listen to Ward himself defend it, as here.

 

Yet people I have some respect for reject it as "completely bogus," as well. 

I such situations I have a trick which has served me well.  I look at who is fighting fair. People can show poor judgement, little tact, or tone that is too familiar or too formal and I can work around that. Theoretically, I can get past poor logic as well and supply somewhat better arguments than the person has made themselves, but this is more unusual. Poor logic usually results from fighting unfairly, though the offender does not often notice, let alone concede that. Unacknowledged self-interest has a dishonesty at its core. Overliteral readings or declining to reverse the situation ("How would you feel, if...) might result from Aspergery symptoms and have some innocence as an excuse, but that is still a pathology, not a variant of logic. Everyone must eventually come to a point of asking Am I being fair? Which often involves a second opinion.

Tangent: These are not beyond autists, but it sometimes takes extra work, even a lot of extra work. The story of the boy who learned to connect via Disney movies - he is not the only one - illustrates it, [Ed. Section removed.  See comments.] They absorb the socialising at one remove. Try to make a coherent distinction between that and reading fiction or watching more "realistic" movies. Readers and watchers pick up cues from a lot of places.

Back in line: So applying that standard, I think those who dislike the theory are misinterpreting what is claimed.  They argue against a cartoonish version of the hypothesis, that Lewis made out some sort of spread sheet that said Venus:  must get copper in there, sex and fertility; Moon, Lunar:  lunacy, silver, I have a picture in my head of a man striking a chair with a sword.  Let's make it a silver chair. Let's make him insane, or considered so, or unpredictable in some way. Jupiter:  It would be cool if someone said "By Jove," and there should be wine and feasting.  

Instead, they contrast this to Lewis liking the planetary influences, but these just flowing naturally out of him when he thought of Saturn or Sol. A particular Greek philosophical thinker occurs to him.  A quote flows out from him. They hate the idea that this was planned, somehow, as if that invalidates it and makes it artificial. I think they are in fact arguing in favor of Ward's idea with this. Lewis frequently quotes inexactly, suggesting he is doing it from memory and not bothering to look it up exactly. (Not only in Narnia.  Everywhere.) He thinks it would be fun to do a fairy story with a Jovial air. The very idea sets off a lifetime of literary and mythological reactions.  Some are rejected: Yes, an eagle is part of that picture, but I'm not seeing it drop in anywhere.  I'm not going to force it.  No need.  A jovial air will take care of itself. Lewis is in fact influenced the way the medievals believed all events and people are. Not controlled by the stars, but nudged, even pushed a bit at times.

I don't think we are influenced that way myself, I think it is all poetry capturing a variety of atmospheres in compressed form.  Yet I don't reject it because the cartoonish version is scientific bosh, I accept it as metaphor.

Ah well, I just wanted it said.  Lewis started with LWW and I can't tell whether Jupiter was along before page one. But elements of that planet show up quickly, and by the end he has thought of pictures and outlines of a few more. No need to redo Jupiter - war suggests Mars. Even then there does not need to be a plan to force all seven into exactly seven books. The idea must have occurred to him early on, but to those who create things, as I have in a small way, one sees at once that you cannot force things or it all falls apart. You try things on, you hope they work.  Sometimes they don't. In The Horse and His Boy the influence of Mercury is present but much less strong.  There is swiftness, dividing and combining, yes, but Castor and Pollux, who are associated with Mercury show up with the many twinning elements.  Cor and Corin, Aslan harrying them from both sides. The tale, and its structure, grew in the telling. 

Flavors and feelings are part of music all the time, and they often run true.  They are in one sense imposed, but it is more correct to regard them as experienced. This is widely accepted, and a painter restricting himself to a particular palette for a single work is as well.  Somehow, folks just don't like it for Lewis and Narnia - perhaps like it less for children's literature in general.

Tyler Interviews MP Tom Tugendhat.

Quite the resume, as you can see at the transcript. Cowen likes to warm up both the guest and the audience with unexpected questions.

COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?

TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.

Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.

But Tugendhat gets into much more serious stuff, including upgrades to the UK nuclear arsenal, what ten years in the military (mostly Afghanistan) taught him, and why it's version of representative democracy works.

I won’t tell you any secrets, but I suppose the one secret that I can tell you that some people just won’t believe me is: Conspiracies are unbelievably difficult, and I just don’t believe in them anymore. I believe in cock-up. I believe there’s huge numbers of mistakes that happen, and people are constantly misjudging things. That, I believe in, and that leads to very, very unpredictable outcomes in some circumstances. But the conspiracies, I’m afraid, I don’t believe in them.

A very fun interview.

Barcode Placement

Sometimes it matters

Till We Have Faces - Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Postmodern?

Update:  Back from the conference.  There wasn't much that intersected with this question, and I think I will write about what was stressed first.  I am still sorting it out. 

 

I have a post started on the above topic. Yet I figured I had better go to the conference this weekend first, so I don't have to retract everything next week.

I am otherwise devoid of inspiration at present.  Preoccupied with house guests and medical concerns, my own and others'.

Programmed Meat Machines

Steve Hsu has fun with - but answers quite seriously - whether we are just meat machines programmed by evolution to believe we have free will or similarly, to be religious. The first part of the interview is about education, especially in a Chinese-American context, the rigor of physics and mathematics versus other disciplines, and the censorship of many voices, not just conservative ones, by wokesters in the academy.

There is a transcript to the interview for those who prefer that.

Missed Covid Lifesaver

 Via Insty.

Plasma Therapy Could Have Saved Thousands. from Johns Hopkins. At the highest level, admittedly something that could have happened only in hindsight, over a million could have been saved.

Convalescent plasma is a therapy derived from the blood of individuals who have recovered from an infectious disease, rich in antibodies against the pathogen responsible for their illness. This plasma is transfused into patients still fighting the infection, with the goal of leveraging the immune response of the recovered person to help accelerate their recovery.

Well, now we know.  If you get a serious virus, they may be after you to donate. I hope mine would be acceptable after the babesiosis I had in 2023.

The Secret to Long Life

It seems every time I listen to The Studies Show that I want to post something on it, without giving away too much information and infringing on their product. This week they talk about Blue Zones, where entire areas have an unusual percentage of people living to be 100. The short version is that they don't exist, none of them, and in fact some have lower life expectancies. So the directions to eat walnuts, eat more fish (or less fish), drink only water, drink mostly wine, eat frequently with your extended family, or find meditative alone time are mostly just made up ideas that people like and think will work, and get a contract with Netflix to make a documentary about it.

They speak very highly of a paper by Saul Newman which discovers patterns highly suggestive of clerical error and pension fraud. "The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian (110+) records."

His recommendation for long life? Don't have a birth certificate, don't have a death certificate, and you can be any age you like.

New Epitaph

"Speaking of digressions..."

The Knowledge

Reposted from 2016.  All the disaster in WNC made me think of it, though that isn't quite the same situation. 

*********

I forgot to mention how much I liked Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World From Scratch. It's an instruction manual of how to leap over centuries of dark ages in the event of some apocalyptic collapse of civilization.  It bypasses the usual survivalist and sci-fi dystopias of riots in the street and starvation in the first few months, picking up in some more stable period of small societies of less than 10,000 trying to get on with building a civilisation.

For example, simply knowing germ theory, how to make a good anesthetic from nitrous oxide and ether, and allowing dissection of corpses for training, you can get up to the equivalent of 1900 in medicine very quickly.  Dartnell adds in how to quickly get to x-rays and weak antibiotics and voila! We're pretty much at 1950 already.

Other things will be harder.  Stored petroleum has a shelf life, and we've already accessed the easy oil out of the ground.  We'll be able to scavenge metals from abandoned cities, but mining the easy stuff has already been done. We'll have to go to charcoal or ethanol-based fuels, so Dartnell gives directions how that works.  There are chapters on how to make glass, four-field rotation farming (that helps us skip centuries of trial-and-error), paper and ink, wind and water energy, clothing, and chemistry.  Lots of fun, though toward the end I skipped the second halves of some chapters, as the details weren't so interesting as the overall concepts.  The details would be plenty interesting to people who actually needed them, I imagine.

It's pure sport for someone like me.  I'm not likely to survive any apocalypse long, so it's all just the intriguing imagination game.  Still, I'd like my descendants and younger friends to be among those who survive and prosper if worst comes to worst, so I'm showing it around and started circulating a copy in the family.

Old Folkie

Also from 2009. I look the same but fifteen years older now. Good comments. 

"Notre Dame, My Mother"

From 2009.  Even more pertinent today. Copithorne in the comments.

*******

Lacy Dodd has a thoughtful article over at First Things about Notre Dame's intention to bestow an honorary degree on President Obama. Ms. Dodd has some right to be heard. She was unmarried and got pregnant while a senior at Notre Dame ten years ago. She gave birth to and kept the child. There were disappointments:

My boyfriend was a different story. He was also a Notre Dame senior. When I told him that he was to be a father, he tried to pressure me into having an abortion. Like so many women in similar circumstances, I found out the kind of man the father of my child was at precisely the moment I needed him most. “All that talk about abortion is just dining-room talk,” he said. “When it’s really you in the situation, it’s different. I will drive you to Chicago and pay for a good doctor.”

I tried telling him this was not an option. He said he was pro-choice. I responded by informing him that my choice was life. And I learned, as so many pregnant women have before and since, that life is the one choice that pro-choicers won’t support.

That accusation is a bit broad, of course. There are prochoice people who rejoice in a woman's decision to carry to term. Yet where I work, I am struck by the number of women who shake their heads disapprovingly at decisions to carry to term if there is any reason not to. If your boyfriend isn't going to be supportive, if you have a crummy job, if you have a really good job, if you are less than 20, if you are over 40, if you aren't in perfect health - any one of these is considered not only a sufficient, but a necessary reason to abort. There are often narrowed eyes and real spite if there is any indication that some religious person "got to them," and "guilted them into going through with it." This absent any evidence that the religious person in question did so - it is assumed.

Ms. Dodd concludes:

I’d like to ask this of Fr. John Jenkins, the Notre Dame president: Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama—the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk?

RIP Luis Tiant

 Luis Tiant, Red Sox Hall of Famer, dies at 83. If you are an old baseball fan, you will be seeing lots of stories on him this week. My favorite was the thickness of his accent getting him past the censors on TV before they had time to react. "I hay boolcheet for stuff today, but use aw mye dick* to geh by." While sitting in the locker room naked except for a cigar. The part referred to was reportedly impressive.

*Equivalent Cuban Spanish slang, I am told.

The Last Word on Moral Philosophy

The Last Word on Moral Philosophy, over at Grim's begins with Marcus Aurelius's quote "Waste no more time debating what is a good man. Be one."

In his situation, one at least has the comfort of knowing I am exactly where God wants me to be, and doing at least approximately what I should be doing.  Whether I do it well or ill, with good grace or bad, is still unknown.  But I at least have that.

Community and Government Cooperation Misinformation

 From Thomas Doubting, over at Grim's, comes this link about who is doing what in Western NC.

Austin Texas Representative Gerald Daugherty

"The last Republican in Austin" retired in 2020 and did not seek reelection.  Remember his wonderful ad from 2016?  A lot of people on this blog can relate to this guy.

Hive Mind and Neanderthals

We have discussed here before how IQ (which Steve Hsu wisely calls a colloquial term) is a good group tendency measure, but no better than a moderate predictor of individual success. If you compare a hundred people with IQ 100 and a hundred people with IQ 110, the latter group will have less crime, more years of education, higher incomes, more stable relationships and better overall health.  But in both groups of 100 there will be a lot of variation.  The book for this is Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, by Garett Jones. He embraces the seeming contradiction rather than avoiding it. He stresses the greater patience and cooperativeness of those with higher IQ, even though those are more modest, have a greater cultural impact than the usual cognitive measures we associated with g-factor intelligence.  Even though his ideas for raising national IQ do not look that promising to me, I'm likingthe book for other reasons.

Into this mix comes some interesting support. Over the last few decades we have revamped our thinking about Neanderthals, that they were more intelligent than we had credited, created art and used tools more variously, and contributed some to our ancestry. I said here last year that perhaps we supplanted them because we were just meaner.

Neanderthals had larger brains, so were unlikely to be less intelligent.  Their tool-making is more individualistic, suggesting that each tool-maker was more creative.  What would cause that?  Necessity. If you lived in larger groups, which in turns had contact with other larger groups, sharing genetic material (usually by exchanging daughters), then everyone didn't have to reinvent the wheel* themselves.  The group knowledge is a repository of memory.  Neanderthals were more likely to have autism-associated genes than our African ancestors. They lived in smaller, more densely related bands.

(Diagram from Razib Khan's substack)

In fact, Neanderthals are often not much related to other bands a hundred miles away, even over centuries.

So they may have each been smarter, more creative, but were less social, and less likely to have lots of shared memory, shared culture.  Homo sapiens were smarter as a whole, and thus exploited environments more fully.

And if it came to a fight, one side had a lot more people than the other.

I have been a loud voice favoring the view that genetic changes have created the cultural ones.  I am apparently wrong about that. David Reich's group has shown that genetic changes seem to lag behind the cultural ones. Not so very long, but noticeably. Once a practice has begun, such as relying more on milk products, genes for lactase persistence begin to be selected for. When you think of the math alone, this makes sense, and we will use lactose as our example. Waiting around for a single chance mutation, and then hoping that this one individual with that advantage reproduces is a bit chancy.  But if the cultural habit of using milk products for food, even if poorly digested and causing intestinal problems, becomes widespread in an area, then any number of small advantages will be called out. A mutation has a better chance.  I had never thought of it that way. The genes for lactase persistence actually show up a few thousand years later than the dairy use. But once they existed, they rapidly made their holders healthier and longer-lived.

*Almost literally

Missing Family Members on TV

When I first wrote this in 2009 it was less known, but now is recognised as a standard TV trope. I included a video this time, which I should have last time.

In the comments is the phrase "...kids, like jackals, sense weakness..." An excellent observation.

********

The stereotype is that 1950's television showed stereotypical two-parent, two-child families where nothing went wrong, and this was unhealthy for the attitudes of children growing up watching this. Leave It To Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet are cited as examples.

But more frequently, television killed off a parent somewhere and started the story later, with the bereft or even orphaned child adjusting to a new family situation. Rather creepily, Mommies got eliminated much more often than Daddies, though both parents getting the hook before the series started was also common.

Uncles taking care of nieces was big: Bachelor Father, Sky King, Family Affair. Dads left with the kids also seemed to be a big draw: My Three Sons, The Rifleman, Andy Griffith, Bonanza.

Circus Boy, My Little Margie, Danny Thomas, Gidget, Hank - there's dead parents everywhere. Or live parents nowhere might be a better way to put it. It's easy to see the sympathy draw, and perhaps the losing of a mother rates higher on the instant sympathy scale. Men taking care of kids also offered more opportunity for comedy. Still, it's weird how many moms they picked off here - maybe TV producers didn't like their wives or mothers or something. I can't think of any early single moms except for December Bride. Tough women left with the ranch out West came up though. It seems to be the reverse of the Dad-as-nurturer show - Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley winning against all odds.

Super-intact families were used more for comic effect in unusual situations: The Munsters, The Addams Family, The Flintstones, The Jetsons. Still are: The Simpsons, Family Guy. The Real McCoys and The Beverly Hillbillies both had multigenerational weirdness going, with missing relatives seemingly no problem. Maybe that was an Appalachian stereotype thing.

 

 

Universe

 Never look a gift universe in the mouth. GKChesterton, personal correspondence

How To Help

There is a fair overlap between this site and Grim's Hall already, but for those of you who don't visit there, he is currently overloaded as a first responder in the mountains of the west Carolinas. He can occasionally get internet and get a message out, and Starlink is reportedly solving that problem soon. He favors on-the-ground solutions, as do many of us here, and has suggestions how you might help if you've a mind to.

Sleepwalk

 

Is this driving away music or driving home music?

Boston TV

Reposted from 2009

My mother discouraged us from watching this show, as it might be too scary. Such were the times.



But we watched Boomtown all three hours every Saturday. If you were sick and stayed home from church on Sunday, you learned that Rex Trailer was on three hours then, too - and played hymns on his guitar.

My brother and I tried the rope tricks. That is, I made him stand across the room with one of Mummy's cigarettes in his mouth and I would flip a hunk of rope and knock it out. I can't imagine I never missed, but I don't recall any accidents.

I don't know all of the words to "Hoofbeats" or "Boomtown," I'm afraid, though I could get part of them down.

Ten Rats

In the context of discussing the very poor evidence in favor of the toxoplasma idea - that contact with cats increases human risk of diseases such as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder - Tom Chivers of The Studies Shows said categorically "I'm not going to pay any attention to any study involving only ten rats."  This seems sound. The cat ladies are safe after all.

There is a wonderful site on X justsaysinmice, that appends the proper qualifier IN MICE to news reports of study after study.  Great fun. 

"Exercise in pregnancy protects children from obesity, study finds."   IN MICE

"A new study shows that high-fat diets are linked to anxiety and depression" IN MICE

Should Books Be Banned From School Libraries?

 A good answer from Quora.

There was also one people were oohing and ahhing over on FB locally, of a librarian  patiently explaining that books found there way into age-inappropriate sections because the publishers are trying to expand their markets, people. What do you expect? She was irritated.  To that I say "That's why we hire librarians."

Of course there are books on the margin, which could perhaps benefit the occasional eight-grader but is generally inappropriate for middle school and belongs in the high school, or the high school section of the public library. Having those discussions is appropriate. But there are people on both sides of this who are crusaders, who want to make sure there is nothing in the high school that discusses LGBT students in any way, versus those who want to make sure that the poor fourth-grader trans boy has books that make him feel supported and affirmed. (And how dare your forbid it, because this book won an award! Those books always win awards.)

As a practical matter, most problems can be solved by factoring in age-appropriateness. Political/social questions need to be treated as a different animal, because the personalities are often more important than the content.

Guys and Stuff

 I was walking in the neighborhood.  Sullivan is sitting on his porch.

"So, do you like Corvettes?"

"Not particularly."

He motions me over to show me the 2024 that his friend just bought and describes its features to me. He goes on to talk about Shelby, '61 Impalas, GTOs, an '87 Harley, and various muscle cars that old guys here in the park own.

Guys and gear. Guns, boats, camping, knives, fishing...GEAR.

Till We Have Voices

Still thinking much about Till We Have Faces in preparation for the conference on the 11th.

When the main character chooses to veil herself because of her ugliness, and the god who weds her beautiful sister hides his appearance as well, you can expect that all mention of faces should be noted, even when the faces are not theirs. But when faces are hidden, voices take on greater importance.  Orual finds that her voice is attractive.  A suppliant prince even flirts with her in the dim light. The God of the Mountain, the Shadowbrute, is revealed to have a voice of great beauty and majesty. The shouts of crowds or the murmurs of them in the distance express a great deal. 

I noticed it from two poignant, connected passages, and was able to double back and see the subtle reference to voices, or natural sounds that seemed like voices, throughout the book. I hope to notice more on further readings.

I never heard weeping like that before, not from a child, nor a man wounded on the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spear to reach her. (Orual, speaking of Psyche) Pt 1 Ch. XV

But the situation reverses, or seems to, in the end.

The woman held out her hands to Psyche, and I saw that her left arm dripped with blood. Then came her voice, and what a voice it was! So deep, yet so woman-like, so full of passion, it would have moved you even if it spoke happy or careless things.  But now (who could resist it?) it would have broken a heart of iron.

'Oh Psyche,' it wailed. 'Oh, my own child,my only love. Come back. Come back. Back to the old world where we were happy together. Come back to Maia.'

Psyche bit her lip till the blood came and wept bitterly. (Orual, in Pt. 2 Ch IV)

If you notice similarities in this story of Orual to elements of Beauty and the Beast, it is because both are based on the Cupid and Psyche myth.  Orual would be one of the jealous sisters. 

Also, whenever you hear a bird sing in Lewis's fiction, pay attention.  The plot is about to move in a different direction.

Have You Seen Her Face?

This does not fit Till We Have Faces in the least, but has been running through my head the whole time while listening to a podcast about it.  Fortunately, not during the reading itself.

Though actually, it might fit for Psyche. Yes, that Psyche - the one in the Cupid myth. The Lewis book is told from the POV of one of the jealous sisters.