Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Cousin Marriage

The Case for Banning Cousin Marriage.  Do you want to raise your group's IQ? Ban cousin marriage.  There's five points in a generation right there. At the lower end, it can be the difference between living independently versus always having to have supports (including informal). And as group/national IQ is likely more important to your quality of life than your individual score, you should get your tribal elders convinced of this post haste.

Autism and Invention

An article that is already a bit dated from 2021, but sums things up nicely. This is one of Simon Baron Cohen's favorite topics, and you can find it in several forms across the internet. Is There a Link Between Autism and the Capacity for Invention? 

We can infer the existence of the Systemizing Mechanism in the modern human brain because 75,000 years ago, we see the first jewelry. If I make a hole in each shell, and thread a string through each hole, then the shells will form a necklace. And 71,000 years ago, we see the first bow and arrow. Again, the same "if-and-then" algorithm: If I attach an arrow to a stretch fiber, and release the tension in the fiber, then the arrow will fly.

and 

We went to the Dutch city of Eindhoven, where one-third of jobs are in IT and which is home to the Eindhoven University of Technology, much like MIT, and where the Philips Factory has been for over 100 years. We found autism rates were twice as high in Eindhoven compared to two other Dutch cities, Utrecht and Haarlem, matched for demographics. This is again consistent with a genetic link between autism in the child, and a talent in pattern-seeking among their parents.
There are an enormous number of anecdotes about Tesla, Edison, Musk, Gates, or Newton.  It is less common in females, but there is evidence that Emily Dickinson had autism. The best explanation I have heard for the gender difference is that women have an array of heritable social skills and/or the societal reinforcement nearly everywhere that they show more social skill, that disguises some of the Asperger's symptoms. 

My people. Not that we can't be extra frustrating in some ways, but I understand that thinking and humor quite naturally.

Monday, February 17, 2025

Christmas 2010

An odd way of doing nostalgia, even for me.

Three carols sung at Greenbelt in England (usually Northamptonshire).  They like to do "Beer and Hymns" there. You can hear the beer in these hymns.

Joy To The World

Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Shouldn't it be 'ark the 'erald Angels Sing in England?

Once In Royal David's City

At the planning for the department Christmas party that year, in mock outrage: "We are not going to have three divorced women singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus!"

The Wyman Christmas Letters are still fun, even years later.


More Recent Links, As Promised.

Are We Headed Towards Idiocracy, by my favorite demographer Lyman Stone.  More mythbusting, as he has good evidence that our dysgenic worries are misplaced. 

 Sweden Open to Sending Peacekeepers to Ukraine, and they aren't the only ones in Europe.   DeepNewz The EU is divided, but I like that they are increasingly accepting some responsibility.

Related: Zelensky signs agreement mediated by UAE about return of POWs.  I had not realised that the UAE was taking such a forward role in such matters.  I am liking DeepNewz, especially for international, better all the time.

Canada is in worse shape than I thought, especially WRT immigration. (Aporia magazine.) Much of this was only vaguely know to me.

Last Boys at the Beginning of History via Rob Henderson


UN Aid to Hamas

 United Nations relief went to the leaders and not the citizens, according to the Jerusalem Post. The Israelis presented recorded evidence to the US, but Biden insisted all 250 trucks of aid go anyway.

I don't have a lot of confidence that anything will much work in Gaza.  But why on earth do we think that Trump is going to do any worse? 

Kenneth P. Green

A senior fellow at Canada's Fraser Institute, Green holds. PhD in Environmental Science and has published widely. His name was passed along at book club.  Recent articles include

Canada must build 840 Solar Power Stations or 16 Nuclear Plants to Meet Ottawa's 2050 Emission-reduction target.  

Canada should match or eclipse Trump's red-tape cutting plan.

Canada should heed Germany's destructive climate policies. 

I think I like this guy.

Environmentalist Contradiction

Stian Westlake at the Works in Progress newsletter had a 2023 piece Degrowth and the Monkey's Paw. He is a statistician by trade, and those folks often notice things, if you take my meaning.  He starts by noticing that the degrowth that was so earnestly desired by environmentalists has in fact been occurring in Britain for a few years now and wonders why no one seems to be happy about it, despite all the articles about how much better the acceptance of such an economy is going to usher in an era of people placing emphasis on more important things, like happiness.

It's Cowslip's Warren all over again, that rabbits will be happier if they learn to accept their fate.  Hmm.  You go first, let me know how that works out. Further into the article, Westlake touches on a longstanding complaint of mine:  many environmentalists don't seem to care as much about realities as they do appearances.

The backbone of these groups is largely comfortably-off people who have no desperate need for economic growth, and who sincerely believe they are protecting nature and the environment. For many people, “the environment” is less about ppm of atmospheric carbon and more about the view when they walk their dog; this is after all, a venerable environmental tradition stretching back to William Morris and beyond. They are pursuing what they see as a just environmental cause, and they don’t mind if it reduces growth—it just so happens that this particular flavour of environmentalism increases rather than reduces carbon emissions. (Italics mine)

In America, they want things to look like summer camp when they were young. They have a religious attitude to some aspects of nature, like forest cathedrals, or the sacrificial offering of recycling despite its lack of evidence for good effect. They interpret the destructiveness of nature in terms of the earth or Gaia being angry at us and punishing us. I recommend that those of you who are virgins not hang around any volcanoes. You never know.  

The oppose new housing of nearly all sorts in NIMBY fashion and then shudder at the unattractiveness of homeless camps; they approve of immigration but don't like shopping at Wal-Mart or downtown, where the immigrants are.

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Last Night When We Were Young

 


2010 Posts, Linguistics

Some of these still look interesting.

The most-likely origin of the use of the word wicked to mean "very."

The long trail of shifts in meaning for the word silly from "blessed" to well, "silly" as we use it now. With music by Maddy Prior and June Tabor

Onomastics, the study of naming, has always been a favorite of mine. 

American Dialects starting with Hans Kurath during the Depression and including Rick Aschmann's full North American dialect map.

 

Friday, February 14, 2025

The Dershow

Ann Althouse mentioned that Alan Dershowitz has a new podcast and quoted something from it.  It doesn't look new, but it looks interesting.  I'll listen to a few this week and get back to you.

The Frog and Peach

 


Recent Links - More to Come Soon

Hiding the Ball (via Rob Henderson)

Stereotype Accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in Social Psychology.  Lee Jussim via Rob, see also Razib interviewing him a few years ago

Another Guarranteed Income Experiment.  via Aporia

Stonehenge  Okay, not all that recent.  I just ran across it recently and liked it.  

Review of "The Science of Human Intelligence" Cambridge University.  via Aporia. Not only a review but a summary. All the mythbusting you could want, plus some that society in general clearly doesn't want. It does not shy away from sexual and race differences

Grand Strategy In The 20th C

Sarah Paine of the Naval War College, a three part series that totals six hourts of podcast.  Transcripts Available. Lots of things I did not know especially about India and Pakistan and how they fit into all the balance/counterbalance moves by the Great Powers. Mao v Krushchev, Nehru v. LBJ i Part 1

Nov/Dec 2010 Links That Still Fit in 2025

From Sponge-Headed Scienceman:  L L Bean We Hardly Knew Ye.

Cost - Part I I start talking about Mental Health, but it broadens to government spending in general.

Cost Part II

Cost Part III

Comment In Full I had forgotten about Ymar

Theoden's Answer

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Human Groups and Species

We are currently in a period of finding more bones, with more ability to understand them - their DNA in particular, but also their isotope analysis, which tells us about diet and movement. There are different approaches to naming and categorising them.  Some like to name something as soon as they determine it is sufficiently different from what we have seen before.  More recently, archaeologists are holding their fire, as new finds rescramble everything anyway. Think of the brontosaurus, which was considered a relative of the apatosaurus, then synonymous with apatosaurus, then distinct from it.  Is it a diplodocus? Are they both diplodocus?  Isn't this particular skull really a brachiosaur? Aren't we wasting a lot of energy on this?

Did the Renaissance really happen or is it just seamlessly part of the High Middle Ages? If a literate society documents a non-literate one, is the latter still prehistoric?

Impressionism gave way to Expressionism, except in theatrical design, where things took different names. But wait! Is there really any clear distinction anyway? 

Is postmodernism a reaction against modernism, or a continuation of it?

Is rheology physics, chemistry, or biology? Sometimes...it depends on the context...why do you want to know? What's your real question?

My line for these matters has been "We make categories in order to break them."  We cannot learn things without categorising them.  But we can't describe reality with breaking categories.

This is what is happening with prehistoric remains now.  We call things Denisovan even though it is so varied that it's going to have to be redescribed a dozen times. Or Homo naledi, Homo floresiensis, Homo erectus beforehand.  They are all going to be something else soon enough.

Because we have to call it something, so that we know it's not Neanderthal or Modern human, or African.


Monday, February 10, 2025

Romanian Jokes

I struggled to convert this joke to Romanian and to learn to inflect it properly to tell it in 2000. A copy resurfaced and I print it here.  The translation hints: "Is your mother at home, Yes; can I speak to her? No, she's busy.  To get the full import, this was before cell phones, the little boy (baie mic) is speaking softly, and the last syllables of occupata are emphasised crisply.

(Pe telefon)

Mama ta e acasa?

(Baie mic, sopteste) Da

Pot sa ei vorbesc?

Nu.  Ea este occupata

Tata ta e acasa?

Da.

Pot sa lui vorbesc?

Nu. El este occupata.

Frata ta e acasa?

Da.

Pot sa lui vorbesc?

Nu. El este occupata.

Sora ta e acasa?

Da.

Pot sa ei vorbesc?

Nu. Ea este occupata.

Este oricine e acasa?

Da.  Politsist

Pot sa lui vorbec?

Nu. El este occupata

Este oricine e acasa?

Da.  Pompier.

Pot sa lui vorbesc?

Nu. El este occupata.

De ce sind tot occupata? (Why is everyone)

(Foarta sopteste very softly) Ma caute!     (They are looking for me!)


I found that the dumb and dumber sort of joke translates well into other cultures. Why are you buying some nails but throwing half of them back? The heads are on the wrong ends. You fool, those are for the other side of the house!  Or, Did you mark the spot where we caught all the fish? Ya look, right there in the middle of the boat. You are so stupid.  What if we get a different boat tomorrow? Or We've been lost two whole days.  What should we do?  I don't know.  Fire three more shots in the air? I can't. I am all out of arrows.


Garage Bands

The Seeds

Lyrically primitive - it rhymes and scans and expresses one idea, then a moderately contradictory one, both with cliches.

Musically primitive - lots of fuzz tone to jazz up some pretty simple and cliched riffs.

Haircuts, check.  Stupid costumes, check.

Garage band at its finest.  I loved it for what it was.



The Penny

So Trump and Musk are getting rid of the penny. It's about time. I swear I can recall Bill Bradley on Merv Griffin advocating for this even before he was Senator; maybe even as early as 1973. It was already a good idea then. Given inflation, the nickel would now be a worse deal than that, and a dime would just break even for efficiency.  Get rid of them both. No one uses coin 50-cent or dollar pieces anyway, leaving only the quarter as a useful coin.

Pennies rip up your pants pockets.  I hate 'em. And they just don't fit conceptually with a world with a quantum internet waiting in the wings.

Sunday, February 09, 2025

Pre-Super Bowl

I have a mild dislike for both teams. In my walks around the neighborhood I have asked the other old guys if they care about either team, because sometimes you do hear someone say "Yeah I have a nephew who works for the Eagles," or some such. There was none of that today.  In one conversation, I did allow that sometimes when some team is an underdog, or is staging a comeback late in the game, I will root for them. That guy said "I like to see them almost come back and think they are going to win, then have it snatched away from them," to which I said "You are an even more miserable sonofabitch than I am. But I kind of like that."

Saquon Barkley has had the sad misfortune of playing for the NYGiants his whole career but is now finally playing for a good team and has been spectacular.  I'm rooting for him, and I don't think if they are ahead late in the game I will be happy if he fumbles and the Eagles cough up Super Bowl LIX. Go Saquon. Jason Travis Kelce has won me many games in my keeper league, but AJ Brown has overcome a lot to be here. So call me ungrateful, but Go AJ. Go Eagles, sorta.

Adoption

Church was cancelled because of snow this morning, so a previous service from last April was played. The sermon topic was "Adoption," and I remember being deeply moved by it. I was deeply moved again, and I can see from behind that I start crying about halfway through it, which I had forgotten until I saw this again.

Snow Service . Scroll down and click the 10:30am service on the right.  The first thirty minutes is the worship band rehearsing and warming up.  The sermon proper starts at about 50 minutes of the video (20 minutes into the service) and goes about 35 minutes more.  The service closes a few minutes later.  I am in the front right pew, the bald guy drumming softly on them during the songs. I usually rise in sprightly fashion to sing, but this time I remain seated even after others start leaving.  Again, I had forgotten until I saw it again. 

Welcome to my world.  This comes very near my heart of hearts.

Gethsemane Lutheran Church

It was the church my grandmother was baptised in, and my mother, and then me, then my two oldest sons. My grandmother's family, the Lindquists in 1881 and the Nordstroms a few years later were among the founders of the church, and two of the twelve stained glass windows years after bear testament to the family donation. I did not grow up in the church. When my mother returned to Manchester in 1959 we started going to a Congregational church even though we lived next door to her Lutheran one. She never said why.  I have guesses. Services were still in Swedish until about 1950 and it was still very much an ethnic church, but I think her choice was more personal.

My wife and I went there for the first 10 years of our marriage starting in 1976. We were puzzled why God would lead us to a congregation of old Swedish ladies in hats, half of whom succeeded in dragging their husbands every week. Nursery through highschool, there were eight children in the Sunday School. They appointed us superintendents, because they had known my mother and grandmother - and great grandmother in some cases. Also we were young and everybody else was tired of the job. And also, I played the guitar. Still, we remain quite sure that we were led there directly.

I got used to liturgical worship there. (Tracy grew up Catholic and recognised the service as a close variation of what she was used to.) I still prefer it.  I hear clearly that others don't like it and why, but those issues don't bother me. If I had my way we would go up to the kneeler for communion every Sunday and have much more liturgy. But of course, I'm never going to have my way in worship and made my peace with it years ago.*

The church is closing May 18.  It was dying when we went there in 1976 and nearly died at least three times in the years since we left. I wrote the history for the 100th anniversary, which was appropriate as my grandmother had written the 75th and her uncle J.A. Lindquist had written the 50th. I still have a copy of it around here, and when I find it I will enter the text of it to this site.  Not because any of you will be that fascinated, but because the historical details are likely to be lost now, and at least they can be absorbed into the ocean that is AI.  I will note that from about 1950 to 1972 the church chewed up and spit out a different pastor every three years, most of whom left parish ministry thereafter. An ugly record.  When interviewing older members for the history, one said about my Aunt Selma Nordstrom that "some years I think she was the only Christian left in that place."

Who knows what will happen then?  My friend Dennis Sasseville, who literally wrote the book on Moxie, tells me that nearly all online sources say that it was created in 1876, but this was a year pulled out of thin air by the marketing people around 1900.  1884 or 1885 is more likely. (Still ahead of Coke in 1886, though.) Whether online sources will ever have the year right is anyone's guess. But it our job to chronicle and release it to the four winds. That's what I do for my ancestors here.

*For this reason I get irritated at those who feel they should be entitled to what they want for worship at their church.  I think it's good training to not get what you want in that instance.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

 


Saturday, February 08, 2025

Override

Update: bsking is telling me that the NIH cuts are going to be bad for cancer research at her hospital, Dana Farber. As things become clearer, I may ask her to write up some specifics.

Via Mark Tapscott, who has been known to be overenthusiastic prematurely or incautiously: Override, over at "EKO Loves You." (You will not understand the following if you have not read a good chunk of the essay.)

Well, this is exactly what opponents of government waste, which used to include Democrats, have said was the problem.  Labyrinthine funding systems and disappearing accountability. Potemkin villages of good deeds fronting for little valuable for the actual poor. 

Their traditional defenses—slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests—proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.

Those who think that these decades of interlocking sinecures have had less and less to do with real solutions and more and more to do with feathering nests will be exhilarated by the article. I am tempted to join them, even while harboring the worry that even with 90% accuracy, that means 10% inflicting suffering. I try to read the article with the eyes of my liberal friends, who read of this disruption in horror. "These are not terrible, manipulative, and useless programs!  These are good things that are being destroyed! They might be somewhat wasteful and overgrown, yes.  They might need reform, even serious reform in some cases. But these programs feed people. They shelter people.  They protect the rights of the voiceless, the oppressed, the downtrodden. How dare you think of yourselves as heroic for this robbing the poor?"

Because what if they are flawed but essentially good uses of government, with just a few stinkers and out-of-control petty tyrants making the others look bad? What if we are throwing out literal babies? I see why it hurts these friends so badly to even contemplate this. What if these reforms are just...wrong? Teenage code wizards running amok with no sense of what they are destroying. Brilliant career public servants watching all they have carefully and lovingly built, giving their lives for the efforts of justice and relieving poverty.  How can this be a good thing? 

Some of them are brilliant.  Some of them do care about solving problems. They don't tend to be concentrated in the advocacy sectors.  Your local schools may have some knuckleheaded ideas and useless programs, but a lot of them really do want to transfer knowledge to the next generation. Yet lots of advocacy is getting transferred in schools as well. At the Federal level, what is the DOE providing besides advocacy and biased research? But when it is being taken apart the accusation is that the critics are "against education." That's just a lie. Why are you against diversity? I am against a lot of things that masquerade as diversity but are just crayon boxes. Same for equity and inclusion.  The prettier a program's title is, the more suspicious I get.  I can tell you already that I am likely to be against the Peace and Justice Act of 2033. Especially if it is named after a child.

"Trump and Vance are asking us to trust them but of course we don't trust them.  They have shown they are evil over and over again. They lie." Do tell. Compared to...?

I hear your sadness and your outrage. I do understand your feelings on the matter. In fact, how is it that I understand your feelings so well? Um, welcome to our world. We don't trust people who cover up that the president was dementing. We don't trust people who try to "re-explain" that their candidate started her political career as a mistress. (Yes, really. Willie Brown was 60 and still technically married.  She was 29.  He appointed her to political positions. What do we call that in any other situation?  Pin that on a Republican female and how often do you think you would have heard about it?) But she was qualified. Probably not, but it Doesn't Matter Anyway.  Not even if she was the best person for the job. 60. Married. 29. Sex. Appointed = mistress. It was a long time ago and she has done other things since then. Doesn't matter.  That's what "started a career" means: a long time ago. But she did those jobs well. Says who? She looked tough on crime by offering horrible plea bargains to black men, take-it-or-leave it.)

Christianity Today carries anecdotes* about people who will suffer because of USAID being shut down. I am sure those individual cases are true. But it's he old sad kitties and puppies argument. Christianity Today was also funded $1.8 M yearly by USAID.  Line item. There may be more through other channels. Politico same, more cash. What do you expect them to say? 90% of USAID money goes to the DC area. Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, tried to get rid of it.

You asked us to trust you all these years. We were uncomfortable but went along, tried to limit the cost, worried that you might be right and not wanting to be seen as Simon Legree. We didn't trust you, but we respected playing by the rules. You insulted us and called us evil, and that seems to be the main tactic now as well.

*Whenever I see argument from sad anecdote, I smell a rat.  (One of many examples over the years.) If they had facts and real numbers, they would rely on those instead.

Friday, February 07, 2025

Fun Analogy

 


The Passage of Time

Today would have been my mother's 95th birthday.  I know people who are 95 or thereabouts and it seems odd, as Mum died 25 years ago, which seems like forever. The thought of her being alive like them seems fantastical. She never met our boys adopted from Romania, though we were in the process of approval during her last months and she knew about it. She never met Kyle, Son #5, either, as he was from my wife's side of the family. 

I heard long ago not to criticise your parents until your own children have grown, which I used to take as a caution not to be too critical until you have seen the same problems yourself. Yet over time it has had the opposite effect.  I said for years that I gave my parents about the same grades when I was in my 50s in my 20s, but for different, and I hoped more accurate reasons.  But my estimations of mother, father, and stepfather have all gone down since then. Not hugely, but enough to notice. 

Well, if they could see me their estimation of me might have gone down also, eh?

Thursday, February 06, 2025

Cowen Interviews Douthat

Good Interviewers interviewing other Good Interviewers is becoming my favorite type of podcast. This one is Tyler Cowen interviewing Ross Douthat on Why Religion Makes More Sense Than You Think. 

For Ross Douthat, phenomena like UFO sightings and the simulation hypothesis don’t challenge religious belief—they demonstrate how difficult it is to escape religious questions entirely. His new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious makes the case for religious faith in an age of apparent disenchantment.

I would add the religious-appearing psychedelic experiences, the similarities and differences of meditation and near-death experiences across various cultures, and how kinds of polytheism and demiurgic beliefs might be compatible with monotheism, all of which are covered here. Cowen is not a believer and is relentless in his questioning - and in particular, returning to the question. But Douthat is also very comfortable casting his net wide and then gathering back in and even does it to Tyler a couple of times when he has gone down a side trail. 

I kept sensing a strong familiarity with CS Lewis behind some of Ross's arguments, and the Tolkien and L'Engle references reinforced that. He gets more specific about that deeper in.  A very satisfying listen on the way out to a Tolkien discussion in Western MA last night. 

The Tolkien discussion focused on The Two Towers, BTW, and last night was Aragorn and leadership. Most of it was introductory, I thought, but two things stood out. Aragorn has a priestly role that shows up quite vividly in places, such as his last words to Boromir, but he can change to other leadership aspects in a flash: deliberative, commanding, exhorting, ceremonial. When you see how quickly Tolkien switches from one to another you see what fine writing it is. I am especially looking forward to the discussion of Frodo and suffering.

There was also the rather obligatory repetition of how the book is so much better than the movie, which I agree with but am tired of - yet this was different.  The speaker pointed out how all the nuanced and spiritually deeper sections he was quoting for this lesson were left out of the movie. Even Peter Jackson can't put everything in, but noticing how often, even how reliably, the deeper meanings were excluded did cause me to wonder whether Jackson did not in fact even particularly notice them in his desire to get other things right - the atmospheres, for example.

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Stars on the Flag

Have graphic designers started fooling around with adding stars to the flag, depending on Greenland, 1-13 for Canada, Lord knows what else?

51= 9x3 with 8x3

52= 6x4 with 7x4, or 7x4 with 8x3

53= 8x4 with 7x3

54= 9x6 (maybe we should aim for that)

....


And also, Archie Bunker, in the episode in which he thought he was dying. "To my son-in-law, Meathead Stivic, I leave my original 48-star American flag leaving out Alaska and Hawaii."

Legal Weed II

This seems like confirmation from another country (for now)  Contribution of cannabis to schizophrenia. Please note that "cannabis use disorder" is more than "cannabis use," and a diagnosis of schizophrenia is more than "psychotic symptoms."

Monday, February 03, 2025

The Five Stages of Western Fertility

By Arcotherium at Aporia, The Five Stages of Western Fertility. It is a very good summary.

1. The Western European Marriage Pattern - I have mentioned this often, usually in reference to the Hajnal Line, which notes persistent cultural differences, especially economic, to this day. It is usually considered to be in place by 1450 or so, but some historians have detected evidence of it as far back at the late 700s. It is characterised by later marriage, greater input from the marrying couple rather than simply being told by parents who their mate would be, and not all females marrying. 90% of females marrying sounds like a lot to us now, but compared to the 100% norm nearly everywhere else, it is a noticeable difference. Notably, widows who could inherit land, guild memberships, or titles no longer always chose to remarry.

2. First Demographic Transition. After the population collapses cause by the Great Plague(s), wages increased and agricultural yields were sufficient, so that infant mortality decreased and family size grew to 8, 9 or even 10 children per woman, now considered the societal maximum. Married couples started limiting later births, which had not been done before. Colonisation kept the need for children afloat, or at least created a situation where large family size was not as economically as risky.  The decrease in fertility rate occurred first in France in the late 1700s, not until the late 1800s in England, and 1900 in Germany.

3. The Baby Boom. Yes, this was not merely a bunch of horny, war-traumatised couples wanting to revert to the quiet normalcy of previous decades after WWII. Total Fertility Rate had dropped below replacement level by 1930, and the Baby Boom started then, caused by the relative wage increase and status for young men. Much that we think we know about this phenomenon turns out not to be true, and I recommend looking at the numbers and graphs for this era. I am still adjusting to this over the last coupole of years, having my favorite theories upended.

4. Second Demographic Transition - 

Within a span of six years, the United States (1973), France (1975), Germany (1970), Britain (1973), and the Nordics (1969) all went from being poised for a never-ending population explosion, of the sort that gave Paul Ehrlich nightmares, to our current path of population aging and demographic decline.

The article credits (or blames) Second-Wave Feminism and the Sexual Revolution, but considers those downstream of A) Unilateral and No-Fault Divorce, B) Affirmative Action, and C) Moral Delegitimization of Marriage. His arguments are interesting there, at least for those of us who lived through this and thought slightly different (or wildly different) things were happening. Because...weren't Contraception and abortion (and bsking would add, reliable paternity testing) the causes? 

The reason is simple: family planning is not a difficult problem. Even without the most common premodern solutions of abortion and infanticide (which were taken off the table by Christianity), Western countries were able to reduce fertility to well below replacement in the interwar period using the same techniques that have been available since people first figured out where babies come from. Even if these techniques are unreliable and inconvenient at an individual level, they are more than sufficient at the population level.

 5. Recent Collapse - Starting around 2012.

This stage is characterised by a fall from slightly below replacement-level to far below replacement-level fertility, driven by the young and the low-IQ. The proximate cause is smartphones and the internet leading to less unprotected sex, plus rising age at marriage hitting biological walls.

Darlin' Be Home Soon


 

       My wife always wished I would sing this for her more often. She was right, I was wrong.

Sunday, February 02, 2025

David Hogg

 I would think this was a joke, but apparently it isn't. A great example of the DNC trying to appeal more intensely to the voters they already have rather than try to win anyone new. A recipe for increased anger, I predict.

Level 3 Asteroid

Well, this is not entirely comforting.

Level 3 Asteroid has 1.7% chance of December 22, 2032 Earth Impact

Well Merry Christmas to you, too.

Dwarkesh and Tyler

It is always a joy when two people from my sidebar come in contact. This is Dwarkesh Patel interviewing Tyler Cowen . They are both good interviewers, very smart, joyfully arguing with each other at rapid pace as to how transformative AI will be.  They are both funny. Cowen is always persuasive. His view is that AI will be transformative, but not explosively and quickly, but at a steady additional 0.5%/year to other technological improvements.  So in 30-40 years.

Dwarkesh Patel

...So why would the cost disease mechanism still work here?

Tyler Cowen
 
Cost disease is more general than that. Let's say you have a bunch of factors of production, say five of them. Now, all of a sudden, we get a lot more intelligence, which has already been happening, to be clear, right? Well, that just means the other constraints in your system become a lot more binding,
that the marginal importance of those goes up and the marginal value of more and more IQ or intelligence goes down. So that also is self-limiting on growth. And the cost disease, just one particular instantiation of that more general problem that we illustrate quartets and the like.
 
Dwarkesh Patel
 
If you were talking to a farmer in 2000 BC and you told them that growth rates were 10x, 100x, you'd have 2% economic growth after the Industrial Revolution, and then he started talking about bottlenecks, what do you say to him in retrospect?
 
Tyler Cowen
 
He and I would agree, I hope, I think, I would tell him, hey, it's going to take a long time. And he'd say, hmm, I don't see it happening yet. I think it's going to take a long time. And we'd shake hands and walk off into the sunset. And then I'd eat some of his rice or wheat or whatever, and that would be awesome.

 Dwarkesh is only 24, BTW.

Tyler Cowen - the #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans by Dwarkesh Patel

Why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth

Read on Substack

Saturday, February 01, 2025

Rats In DC

This may be a great study that we should all be paying attention to. I haven't read it. But the jokes just write themselves, don't they?

Climate Change Drives 390% Increase in Washington DC Rat Population

Altered Brain Activity In Schizophrenia

I promised you some Alan Green research a few posts ago. This isn't about addiction and isn't exactly hot off the presses, but I think you can fit it in conceptually to the marijuana research and it is a summary for laypeople, not the technical research. Altered Brain Activity in Schizophrenia May Exaggerate Self-Focus.

Traditionally, the disturbed thoughts, perceptions and emotions characteristic of schizophrenia are considered caused by disconnections among the brain regions that control these different functions. The study found that schizophrenia also triggers excessive connectivity between the so-called default brain regions involved in self-reflection. (Italics mine.)

...In the schizophrenia patients, the default system was both hyperactive and hyperconnected during rest, remaining so as they performed the memory tasks. Patients were less able than healthy control subjects to suppress this network activity of during the task.

Fertility Crisis - A New Take

Demographer Lyman Stone again.

"The most important fact to understand about fertility declines is that marital fertility rates have not changed much in decades. Married people make babies just like they always have. There just aren't as many of them anymore."

"But the one category of marital duration where fertility HAS fallen is at <9 months. People are WAY less likely to marry BECAUSE they are pregnant than they used to be."

Statistician Cremieux Recueil concurs 

"Compositionally, the decline has more to do with a shift to lower marriage rates than with fertility falling among the married and unmarried." Very nice graph since 1980 there.

I continue to be surprised whenever I think of this. We have grown used to the bare statistic that everyone is having fewer babies, and I have reflected on my impression of how everyone used to have larger families. That is slightly true but mostly because contraceptive availability increased in my generation, so the large families I remembered were my peers, conceived in the 1950s. When I reflected on the families I knew then, then compared them to the number of children that each of them had in the 70s- early 90s, the contraction was already apparent. (There is selection bias across the generations on that, I know.  But still...)

I noticed, I guess not shockingly, that all the Jewish families (about 20 in my circle) had exactly two children. With intermarriage, I don't know how that shook out. Orthodox families have always had more children, but I didn't know any. Still don't.

The first part of the graph seems explainable. Few unwed people had children in the 60s, and it only gradually increased but it did increase steadily. Then it leveled off, then declined, and always much less than married people. I recall reading long ago that that women tended to marry before the second pregnancy instead of the first now, whenever "now" was. Couples deciding this was going to be more permanent for the children's sake, people finding better spouses by some metric.  I don't know how that fits definitionally into these numbers, as they straddle categories.

Still, it's going to take me a while to fully absorb this. Also, with the steeper, more recent decline in the last few years, is this still the driver? Has the marriage difference run its course and a new factor taken over? And what about all the other stories about family formation and housing, and the sudden decline when car seats became mandatory because you couldn't fit three in the back? Is there anything to them?


Red Roses For a Blue Lady

 Did I ever send red roses? Tracy is very big on tulips.


The chronology seems rather quick at the end, doesn't it?  Argue, make up, buy orchid, get married, all in about a week. Poetic license, I suppose, skipping to the end.

Food For Children

We had a bread distributor in Mass that used to gives us loads of stuff - a whole box truck's worth every week. One branch of that closed and we had to take a smaller portion at a more local warehouse.  Then the whole company closed and we had to scramble, picking up almost-expired donations at Fantini, Whole Foods, and then Pepperidge Farms. It was a lot less than we used to get going down to Andover MA.

Someone hooked us up with another local distributor we should have noticed years ago, and yesterday we went over for the first time to learn their procedures and see what they've got. I will be doing most of the pickup so I learned how to get into the warehouse - they recommended I just break in and showed me how - and what stacks I could touch. We are likely back to a full box truck again! Of course, this means higher risk of injury for me as everything is taller and heavier, but you're only young once, right? More food for Manchester's poor, and I still don't have to argue with any of the other volunteers who are jerks, as I would if I was still going to the distribution on Saturday mornings. The customers are mostly fine.

Legal Weed

The Atlantic has a piece by Jonathan Caulkins "Legal Weed Didn't Deliver On Its Promises.*" Most of the piece is for subscribers, but you can find the full text here. I had been hearing for years that marijuana had steadily grown stronger, but I never paid much attention. 

Back in the '90s, the average daily pot user was consuming roughly 32 milligrams of THC a week. Today, it's more than 2,000 milligrams of THC a week.

That is not purely about marijuana potency.  Comparative measurement is difficult, because 70s marijuana was often half seeds and stems. Domestic strains were weak, so smugglers from Colombia and other foreign sources could adulterate their product without much worry or competition.  What else were you gonna do? So simple quantity was up, pipe by pipe, joint by joint. And as near as we can tell, that product was about 4% THC, which held until the early 90s, but current Colorado dispensary is about 19%. Lastly, before legalisation more of the tokers were weekend users. Daily use has increased year over year.

The numbers are shocking, and yet this is what happens when frequency, potency, and quantity all rise in tandem. For some consumers, high potency itself encourages more frequent use by delivering a stronger effect.

Medical science can’t yet clarify the effects of long-term use of 300-plus milligrams of THC a day, because this consumption pattern is new. Most controlled studies work with short-term exposure to smaller doses, often in the 20-to-50 milligram range, and observational studies that followed users for years were examining a drug—low-strength, infrequently used cannabis—that barely exists anymore.

The effect of drugs and alcohol on schizophrenia became the central focus of Dr. Alan Green up at Geisel Medical School.  I knew him slightly and attended several of his presentations before I semi-retired in 2017.  (Dartmouth provided our medical staff for decades.  Good training for them.) I wanted to see if he had anything new in the research on stronger marijuana, but alas, he died a few days after I completely retired in 2020. I never knew.  It shows how quickly we can drop out of being in the know, doesn't it? I must post something of his soon.

For our purposes here, Green established pretty definitively that THC increased the likelihood of schizophrenia. Combining it with family data he saw an even stronger connection with close relatives, suggesting that adding THC on top of a genetic predisposition is a particularly dangerous combo. The estimate was that if you were male and did not use marijuana before age 27 you were probably out of the woods, 30 for females.  We would all look over the tops of our eyeglasses on that one, because who starts at 27, having never tried the stuff before? Alan recognised that and would acknowledge it gracefully, yet used it to illustrate the level of unknown risk people were taking when they were young.

I used to say that after those ages the general risk of harm was low.  I don't feel confident in saying that anymore.

I couldn't find anything from Dartmouth-Hitchcock on stronger marijuana and schizophrenia, but at 60x the previous average amount, I doubt that things are um, better. It could in fact be catastrophically worse, and at that number I would expect that.  However, I will not violate my own rule rejecting scientific claims that begin with "well it just stands to reason." I consider it likely but have no direct evidence.

*Also on the front page is "Is There Anything Trump Won't Blame on DEI?" by Jonathan Chait.  I didn't read it, silently countering in amusement Is there anything The Atlantic in general, and Jonathan Chait in specific, won't blame on Trump? Questions are fun when you turn them around. You can see a lot just by looking, as Yogi Berra probably didn't say.

Friday, January 31, 2025

Darwin Among The Machines

 A letter-to-the-editor by Samuel Butler in New Zealand in 1863.  I had not heard of it, but apparently it has become important in AI circles as the first prediction that AI would supersede us.

Wikipedia has a good summary, as this is the sort of thing it does best. I extract a bit from that, because it was the exact section I was looking for.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

The letter ends by urging that 

War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.

Well, that seems clear.  This thinking later went into Erewhon, a society where the machines had already been destroyed.

If it seems awfully quick that machines are suddenly passing us in so many ways, including intelligence, despite our million-year head start, it pays to remember that interlligence is very expensive to the body.  It takes an enormous amount of energy. The energy-demanding needs of AI is just the individual needs of billions of humans (and prehumans) writ collectively and large. Extra intelligence is always nice, but most organisms benefit far more from a little more ability to digest, or recover from disease. This is true even of humans.  We all could use more brainpower in our daily lives, but we might benefit more directly from patience, strength, resilience, dexterity or a hundred other abilities. If we falsely imagine the equations of energy needed, we think we would never want to give up any intelligence!* We need that, need it desperately.

Yet what if the real equation is "AVI, if you trade in one IQ point you get double the ability to keep your temper?" Hey, I'm in. If I didn't and my family later learned about it they might conclude I am a complete narcissist who doesn't love them very much. I have terrible fine-motor coordination. How much more could I get if I deducted a second point? It gets to be a game of Jenga, but I might play.

*Oops.  Forgot the asterisk. And yet we drink alcohol and take drugs and do things that risk concussions. For fun.

Babylonian Inflation

 From Matt Parlmer on X 


Apparently there were cuneiform spreadsheets

To which Lyman Stone points out that because there are so many cuneiform records for ancient Babylon, economists can calculate the rate of inflation for its version of the Consumer Price Index for a thousand years.
https://x.com/mattparlmer/status/1885049428853350594

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Beany and Cecil

I don't know if I liked it.  It was on and I watched it. That's what 9-year-old boys did on Saturday mornings in 1962 until our mothers kicked us out to play. Then we stayed out until she told us to come in. Rinse, repeat. 

No wait, it was more complicated than that.  WMUR, the ABC affiliate on Channel 9 was three blocks away and the cartoon show had a host, Ring-A-Ding the clown, with kids getting to be on TV marching in and waving to the camera, cheering on cue, and participating in games like identifying states on a map. Ring-A-Ding quickly learned not to call on me because I got them immediately which wasn't very good theater.  Just like at school. I resented it deeply.

I knew that my great uncle collected clown memorabilia, but I don't recall being told that he was the original clown on that show in the 50s. Nor that my great-grandmother and her five daughters lived four houses away in the 1910s. I figured my mother must have told me a dozen times but I didn't take it in. Except that is exactly the sort of thing I was fascinated by...


I didn't remember the whole song at the end, just some sea creature with an accent (I think it was supposed to be French) singing the last lines. "Put that treazhure map togezzer, a million dollaires in goldFeesh!" The joke was that Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent had spent the episode with a ripped treasure map that promised "$1,000,000 in gold..." He fights Dishonest John ("DJ you dirty guy!") and Billy the Squid and finally reaches Treasure Island with the aid of what I now see was a swordfish. The last scrap of the map is there, reading..."fish." Beany and Cecil was not laugh-out-loud stuff. Most cartoons weren't. Smiles. Chuckles.  Nobody laughed at Yogi and his pickinick basket jokes, or Fred Flintstone being impressed by guest appearances of Ann Margrock.  Warner Brothers might make you laugh, but mostly only when you repeated the lines yourself. There was a summer when we said "I'm gonna get my Wabbit Ewadicator" a thousand times.

I vaguely remembered that Beany and Cecil were based on a 1950s something.  YouTube reveals it was a puppet show.  I doubt I ever saw it.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

How Does She Know So Much...

...About Opera All of a Sudden? 

She doesn't.

(From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine)

China Law Blog

Recommended today by a Silicon Valley guy who does a lot of business with China and whose wife is Chinese.  He says they tend to be liberal in the recent history sense but are realistic.  China Law Blog

Miracle Whip

I know, I'm supposed to be talking about the firing of Inspectors General, or Trump's order about removing the transgendered from the military, or the sale of TikTok, or whatever*, but I have a matter of greater personal importance.  In Razib's excellent interview of Megan McArdle on American food culture, she mentioned that Miracle Whip, that despised cousin of mayonnaise tended to be favored in Middle America by those of Scandinavian or Eastern European heritage, and thus concentrated in the Midwest. It is sweeter and more vinegary, while Hellman's, Kraft, and Duke's are richer, creamier.  Kewpie, which I have never had, is supposed to be the anti-Miracle Whip, much lower in sugar and vinegar. I may try it.

The Scandinavians and Eastern Europeans favored sweeter and more vinegary dressings from their home cultures.  (Everything from Eastern Europe seems to be vinegary, frankly.) Therefore, when it came out during the Depression as a cheaper alternative - it was mayo mixed with cheaper ingredients - they took to it readily. I don't get how the chronology of this works, frankly.  The Swedes, Poles, etc who came to America were pretty much here by 1930, and most had come at least two generations before.  So these sweeter, more sour dressings from Europe must have been kept alive in the households, as there weren't many Danish or Polish restaurants to spread their popularity. That seems a stretch.

OTOH my Swedish Nanna preferred Miracle Whip, as did her daughter my mother, as do I. So the proof of the dressing is in the spreading, as they say in the Old Country. I have taken a lot of heat for this preference over the years. This has usually taken the benign form of my wife's family simply preferring it and making their tunafish that way. There are snobs, however, who struggle to take air at the mere mention of the stuff. 

Full disclosure: most of the complaints leveled against me comes from my PB & Miracle Whip sandwiches, which are quite lovely but highly disfavored among those who won't try them.  The moisture complements the sticky nut pastes, and jelly is too sweet. I have heard that some like to add banana slices.  I have no objection and those may be fine.  It's just that this leaves half a banana lying around to rot and my original version seems fine as is. I have no need to search farther afield.

*I think the strategy of so many controversies is to dilute the opposition to them.  Liberal groups get a lot of support from unrelated liberal activists who don't have anything of their own going at the moment and are content to wait their turn.  They lend their outraged voices to create a game of whack-a-mole, catching majorities who would allow an actual discussion flat-footed. Trump is whacking many mole-holes at once, whether a head is popping up at the moment or not.  Will it work? Moltke wrote that "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces," which is usually rendered more like "No plan survives first contact with the enemy," or Mike Tyson's "Everybody's got a plan until they get hit." We'll see.

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Collage

 My wife went to a Soul Care event for women of the church Saturday afternoon. After she was back I asked her what it was. "Was it like a retreat?  A workshop?"

"It was like a mini-retreat."

"Is that what they call retreats now?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

I looked at the white cardboard poking out of her bag, with pictures and text from magazines pasted to it. "It looks like a collage."

She smirked.  "It's called a Vision Board."

I'm just helping all of you keep up here.

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Inauguration Day

 Maybe we should play this at every inauguration.


Richie Havens did a folk version just before Obama was elected. Ambiguous who he means in that context, but in our context, it doesn't matter

There's a cheery bluegrass version.

There's a classroom instruments version. 

Marching band  

Reggae

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

You Can't Argue With A Shudder

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

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

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

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

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

Pipedream

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



Time Travel Joke

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

Captain: "Who's Adolph Hitler?"

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Piranesi

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

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

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

Highly recommended. Short but full.

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Belichick Politics

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

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Obama 2004 Convention Speech

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



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

Monday, January 13, 2025

Dignity

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

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

Fractures, Divides, Realignments

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

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

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

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

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over "native" Americans isn't because of an innate American IQ deficit, a lazy and wrong explanation. A key part of it comes down to the c-word, culture. Tough questions demand tough answers and if we're really serious about fixing the problem we have to confront the truth. Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 90s and likely longer.  That doesn't start in college. It starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympian champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Corey from Boy Meets World or Zack and Slater over Screech and Saved by the Bell or Stefan over Steve Urkel and Family Matters will not produce the best engineers. Fact.
I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity.  And their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates.
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends, more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers, more weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons, more books, less TV, more creating, less "chillin'." More extracurriculars, less hanging out at the mall, Most normal American parents look skeptically at those kind of parents.
More normal American kids view such the kinds of kids with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve. Now close your eyes and visualize which families you knew in the 90s or even now who raised their kids according to one model versus the other. be brutally honest.
Normalcy doesn't cut it in a hyper competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we'll have our asses handed to us by China. This can be our Sputnik moment. We've awakened from slumber before and we can do it again. Trump's election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America.
But only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy, excellence over mediocrity, nerdiness over conformity, hard work over laziness. That's the work we have cut out for us rather than wallowing in victimhood and just wishing or legislating alternative hiring practices into existence. I'm confident we can do it.

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

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

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

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

Sunday, January 12, 2025

True Patriots

 


Breadhenge

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

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

But I liked Breadhenge best.


Saturday, January 11, 2025

Sea Shanties

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


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


Friday, January 10, 2025

Hornpipe

 Vigorous, eh?



Vision

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

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

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

Fetterman

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

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

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

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

When Liars Try to Tell the Truth

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

Some examples...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consequences of lying.