New Comedian Charles Haycock

 New to me, anyway.

 

He has a whole channel, unsurprisingly 

English's Closest Relatives

 Test yourself how well you can read a familiar text in Scots, West Frisian, and Low German. Can You Understand English's Closest Relatives? The Lord's Prayer is often used for such examples, as readers are familiar with it. Heh. Used to be, anyway. I would add Old English 

 Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod. to becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum. and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele soþlice.

And Middle English to the quiz for comparison, 

 Oure fadir þat art in heuenes halwid be þi name; þi reume or kyngdom come to be. Be þi wille don in herþe as it is dounin heuene. yeue to us today oure eche dayes bred. And foryeue to us oure dettis þat is oure synnys as we foryeuen to oure dettouris şat is to men þat han synned in us. And lede us not into temptacion but delyuere us from euyl.

For Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Middle English both, it will help if you know that the "þ" is a thorn, "ð" is a eth, and both are pronounced "th," as in thee/thine. For Middle English, "u" is sometimes pronounced v, and "y" is sometimes pronounced hard g.

Three From Lyman Stone

 Are 3-Child Families a Luxury Good? Lyman really doesn't like the Survey of Consumer Finances as a Statistical Source.

Babies Are Not For Cowards  I noticed years ago that people with more optimism about the future had more children.  Apparently this is international

What Census Was Luke Talking About?  If you are a demographer and a Christian you look at different questions than the usual.

Recent links

 Smart People Love New Ideas, Even When They Are Bad.  Rob Henderson. Some people just like novelty too much.  "Sometimes the old solution has been around a long time because it works." 

Smart Therapist  Therapy works best when it is life coaching.

Pink-Washing Patriarchy I do not usually trend much to this topic, but this was interesting.

How Many People Live Paycheck to Paycheck?   One can find all kinds of big numbers for this and its companion that most people cannot afford at $400 or $1000 emergency bill. Guess what? 

Committed Leftists Are Not Just "Very Liberal"

Those Tradwives, eh?

 Fred felt neglected because Wilma spent so much time on TV

 

Education and Prejudice

 Does Education Make Us More Prejudiced? 

It depends. The story is usually that college makes young people more liberal, but it would be more accurate to say that it makes liberals more anti-conservative, and conservatives more anti-liberal.  The effect is stronger depending on the strength of belief. Moderates don't seem to move much at all.

Bible Study Analogies

I have described my dislike of many Bible study guides, especially their questions. "Where have you seen God at work in your life this week? What can you do to notice more of this?"  These are not gripping questions. Analogies and metaphors work better.  You will notice, BTW, that his is how Jesus taught, and he may have known a thing or two.

Psalms 3-7* were part of our sermon series and discussion this week. Our class study guide included the summary of those " Which of the five rooms are you in this season — the flight, the sleepless night, the watched morning, the bottom, the hunt?"

Hebrews comments on that. Our study summarises  "Your kingdom, Dallas Willard said, is the
range of your effective will — the kitchen, the desk, the hospital bed — and it was never meant to compete with God's, only to be joined to it."  It goes on to ask "Which kingdom is yours this month — the cubicle, the kitchen table, the hospital bed?"

Those are better questions. 

 

AI Uses

I am trying to clear space in one cupboard.  "Which will go bad first, fish sauce or oyster sauce?" Fish sauce even after opening will last 3-5 years.  Oyster sauce should be refrigerated after opening (oops) and will last 3-6 months.  

Thank you.

Thank This Engine of Advancement

 Humans Are Flourishing More Than Ever. Washington Post.

 Journalist Matt Ridley wrote that, in the two generations from 1955 to 2005, “the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer.”

The United States, in particular, has experienced strong growth. From 1970 to 2024, inflation-adjusted household income has increased from $59,000 to almost $84,000. Lower-income households have seen gains of roughly 35 percent during that same period, and educational opportunities have expanded.

Quite different from what one sees on social media these days.

Humans have a tendency to remember good times rather than bad, and thus idealise the past. I wonder why?  It seems to make us less happy in the present and more pessimistic about the future. Like the Ukrainian woman who remembered that there was always enough food under Stalin, not like when she was interviewed in the 1950s, we are quite certain life was better in the old days. The food was tastier, the girls were prettier, and kids knew how to apply themselves and understood the value of a dollar.

I often think of Garrison Keillor's line that we believe life was simpler then, because we were children, and out lives were looked after by others.  But it wasn't simpler for them.  In fact, it was harder. Why do we find this so impossible to believe? 

Who Knows Where the Time Goes

 

Why Evangelicalism is Winning

 Ross Douthat writing in the Free Press. I think he summarises very well, for me capturing both my admiration and suspicion for a brand of Christianity that I am forever half-in, half out of. One point he captures more accurately than I have before seen, is the defense against the accusation that evangelicalism is theocratic. That has always just plain rung false to me, yet the evidence critics bring forward for that idea has always had much truth in it. I have not countered the charge well. Douthat does.

 Evangelical political engagement is more likely to be defensive than controlling or incipiently theocratic.

Yes, this. Evangelicalism is not theocratic, but it is defensive, the great destroyer of all the other claimants to (theo)cracies that pretend to not be religions. As an overly-flexible, cliche-ridden faith, it knows another religion when it sees one, however many veils those may dance behind. The princess detects the pea under a dozen mattresses. Wokeness, politicised liberal Christianity, Country-Over-God, the Gospel of Nice, the Big Guy Upstairs, the Pale Galilean, All-Faiths-the-Same, the Inherited God, the Good Persons, Somber Churchiness, the God of Funerals - all of these are cut to earth by the Evangelicals more quickly than by other brands. Each of these small gods is bitter against the diagnostic X-Ray that is evangelicalism.

Cross-posted at Substack 

Recent Links

There are so many from The Free Press.  I think you should just check in on them without my prompting at this point. I put in two at the end.

Technology, Decentralization and Recentralization David Foster. Communication decentralised with the internet, but is now recentralising. Probably not good.

Two From Works in Progress  

What caused the end of the Bronze Age? The puzzle has never been the collapse. Collapse of civilizations happen all the time. That level of organisation is a fragile thing.  But why did nothing rise again for centuries? This is a good theory.

Mosquitos are a Choice  I do get suspicious when people say "If we only had the courage." 

I love N3's thinking, even when it is on subjects I care little about. Dinosaurs that evolved ultra-high intelligence. My first thought was "Yeah, compared to other dinosaurs.  Big Whoop." I am not a subscriber and don't have access to the rest of the story.  But even in a few sentences - yeah, that's a good point.

Max Spero of AI-detector Pangram - who awaits the threatened lawsuits eagerly, because he is certain he can hold his ground.

I think the work that we’re doing is really prosocial,” he said. “The future that I’m working toward is a world where people value humanity and we find an inherent value in words or content from humans, even if Claude could have said the same things better.

A follow up to that:  The Last Essay

Late Harvest

 These are always the last harvest of the season.

Not really a cash crop, more like cash transfer.  I suppose not much else grows on such marginal land by the side of the road.

Theo of Golden

Book club is discussing Theo of Golden tonight. I have read a few chapters and fear that my dominant conversational style will push out others who know more - even though the the others are predominantly university professors.* I may not go tonight. I do not think this will hasten or retard the Second Coming.

His name is Theo.  He arrives at Easter. The town is called Golden.  He is clearly a quiet elite who is encouraging to the common people. What I have read is charming. Got it? I think it is likely to be heartwarming, but because it appeals to many moderns it must have some ambiguity and complexity to it. I don't fault that, because that pretty much describes Tolkien and Lewis's heroic fiction, doesn't it?  And they are the foundation of so much of my emotional, cultural, spiritual, and moral outlook that I should hesitate to reject any echo of that...correct?

Yeah, maybe not. Among my wife, my son, and my daughter-in-law I think they will have these things covered.  

*They are generous and affirming, which probably encourages me too much. But my career was largely explaining mental health law to lawyers who thought they could bully me; systems to other agencies; or practical mental health to OneSky psychologists, etc. Even when I'm wrong I can lay down a marker. But that strength is a weakness in book discussions, isn't it?

Color Revolution Updates

Grim has been covering the CIA/USAID (and possibly Soros network?) plots to foment a color revolution.

In America. 

This is commentary on the DataRepublican expose, including video of what has been said by both retired and active members of government about declaring our government illegitimate, giving reason to ignore constitutional protections. It is as chilling an account about the future of the Republic as I have read. These are people who very much know what they are doing, as they have done it before in other countries.

I don't usually link to an ongoing series.  In fact, I don't think I ever have.  

 Warning Shots

Warning Shots Confirmed 

Charming

 

This is exactly the sort of muscle control that I do not have. I am always impressed.

This is Oleg and Natalya Kiryushin, BTW 

Deer

What do you call a deer with two eyes?

Diir.

What do you call a deer with three eyes? 

Seymour

What do you call a deer with no eyes?

No idear 

New Blogger Content Policy

 It all sounds very fair and reasonable. 

I can already imagine how this policy could be abused. 

Organised Skepticism

This refers to #4 of  Robert K Merton and the Mertonian Norms. I am focusing here only on organised skepticism, which Jerry Z Muller brought up in an Unsupervised Learning podcast.  It is the idea that the academic disciplines, both science and humanities, rely not only on skepticism to move forward, but a whole structure of it.  One learns to think in terms of what the critics might say and begin to defend against it.  A thesis is defended against some who will be unsympathetic. Publishing will be reviewed by your opponents. In this way, one is supposed to do a lot of the intellectual discussing in one's own head before putting it out to the world as a further understanding of the truth. Muller believes this is being lost and in some fields has already vanished.

Evangelising For Theism

The topic is going to eventually be that CS Lewis's fiction evangelises for monotheism, and even for simple theism far more than he evangelises for Christianity in specific.  But I will wander about the meadow telling you how I got here first.

********* 

Where have my Jews gone? They made up a good percentage of my friends at work and before that in school, plus a smattering in town activities and businesses I went to. But I'm not at work, I don't go to town functions, and the volunteer work I do doesn't seem to attract them. A lot of my going out is for church-related functions. I am just noticing it now because of Jews coming back into my life: a recent high school reunion, my new friend Rivka on one of my zoom calls, and a childhood friend I tracked down. You don't know what you've got till it's gone...*

One of the reasons it's important is it's a way of mentally checking your work. For the twenty years of my blog it is an automatic exercise to think What are the women in my generation going to think of that idea?  Will they have a counter? What would a bright, decent Millennial make of that phrasing? I wonder what my grandfather would have thought? Does that sound insulting to people who chose that profession? Until recently, that included "Would Frank or David or Esther challenge that?" especially on religious questions. I keep a lot of religious groups in mind when I write, anticipating both what their intellectual and their emotional reaction might be. It goes by pretty quickly at this point.  It's well-worn territory.

It came to mind because I quoted CS Lewis to one friend and realised I had no idea what her familiarity with him is.  Two things I saw: Even though my motto is "The solution to everything is to read more CS Lewis," I had never given or even recommended one of his books to a Jewish friend; however, I would quote him to them or put quotes in an online context where I knew many Jews would be reading, because in isolation, there was nothing that would offend.  It would be a general spiritual understanding as applicable to Jews as to Christians.

That was a fun puzzle. Noticing such things and asking "Well, why do I do that?" is something I find fascinating, not frightening. I have learned that most others find it intimidating. I mentally ran through the list of the scores of books by Lewis. I remembered also the series on Pints With Jack of Lewis fans who were outside our usual boundaries: an Eastern Orthodox priest relating his fondness for Lewis's writing; a Benedictine monk; an atheist who had a whole site devoted to atheists who loved Lewis; a Jew who who likewise had a site of other Jewish fans of Jack; a Mormon, a Bahai, a spiritualist - which is ironic since Lewis had such cutting things to say about them, having dabbled in the occult himself as a young man.

I remembered also that the serious Humanist and Effective Altruist Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten wrote admiringly and knowledgeably about GK Chesterton, and detailed his intense examination of Lewis's case for Christianity and said "He almost convinced me." Lewis's popularity outside of Western Christian circles has been hiding in plain sight. Tolkien, we knew. Even though LOTR is deeply Catholic, that is disguised, almost subterranean. But Lewis seemed more overt. 

What follows took only a few minutes.  It is not something I have been mulling for weeks or months, nor is what follows. Yet once the lock has been picked, the contents of the room are easy to see.

*******

Here we go then. People outside of Christian circles have likely heard of Lewis in either of two ways: his fiction or his literary work. For the latter, it is mostly late collegiate or even graduate students who are most familiar with "An Introduction to Paradise Lost," "An Experiment in Criticism," Vol 5 of the Oxford History of English Literature,**  The Discarded Image, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem," and many others. His secular audience seldom sees that much of his advantage here is not only that he believes and understands the theology, but that he is Medieval and Renaissance in spirit himself, and thus a native of these lands, seeing no boundary between them. It is worth noting that he was one of, if not the authority on that period in his and his influence lasts even until now, while most of the others have vanished beneath the waves.

The general audience knows him more from his fiction, especially the Narnia Chronicles or their movies. The biggest specifically Christian hurdle is from The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe, the first and most famous of the series in which death and resurrection are central to the plot, and that alone may keep Jews or the generally unsympathetic from exploring further. In the rest of the series, the position of Aslan as the second person of the Trinity is more backgrounded. It is there in full color of orthodoxy, but it it is explanatory and descriptive, central to the full understanding but not the plot.  I learned this from the atheist guest on the podcast who noted that the stories are simply good stories in the Western Tradition, and he would skim the Jesus-ness to keep riding the story. (Which Lewis would consider a victory.) Last Battle owes a good deal to Daniel and other prophets, not just the Revelation to John.  It was the Israelites who were first informed that the whole of creation is coming to an end some day and reoriented their thinking around that. Everyone else on the planet remained in seasonal or circular time. The Jews made the cycles helical. Dawn Treader has acres of Christian symbolism in it, but even most Christians miss that. The Horse and His Boy owes much to Joseph in Egypt; The Magician's Nephew is a reworking of Adam and the Fall; The Silver Chair is the OT histories in mythic form. 

In the Ransom Trilogy it is the unfallen nature of Mars versus fallen Earth, the Silent Planet, followed by Perelandra's fall hanging in the balance. The last book is about the origins of good and evil power. It is deeply Christian, but not to the exclusion of Judaism. Similarly, Screwtape has some starkly Christian declarations, but contextualised to 20th C Anglican England.  It could be recast in Israel without much trouble.  The Great Divorce uses imagined Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory which are not central to Jewish theology, but the spiritual battles are all monotheistic: will you surrender to God or not? Till We Have Faces uses polytheistic, almost animist elements to tell its Christian lessons, and as in Tolkien, no Jesus appears.

I thought I would spend time on his philosophical works, in which his Christian belief is not directly present, except by intuition, but I think I will leave those alone. The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and even The Pilgrim's Regress make the case for monotheism and specifically Judaism long before Christianity is even mentioned. This reflects his own long conversion, from teenage atheism to indeterminate theism by 1929, to monotheism in 1930 and only at the end of 1931 “When we [Warnie and Jack] set out [by motorcycle to the Whipsnade Zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”  But however widely applicable they could be, they are mostly read only by Christians these days. One would think that Mere Christianity would be more overt, but here again he is very methodical, pointing out to the reader at the end of a chapter that we have only dismantled materialism thus far, and said nothing about any religion...then we have only established a somethingism here...then we have eliminated dualism and weakened polytheism...and well along in the text before we are left with a God of some definite Personality, not a life-force or a repeated cycle... It is Jewish long before it is Christian.

Most Western Jews are already used to living in a world where their POV is an influence but not a controlling one.  They seem to navigate around that and understand the culture anyway.  Lewis, for all his Christ-specific theology, can travel on the road with them much longer than Shakespeare, Voltaire, and nearly every 19th and 20th C intellectual.

I never saw it. 

Enjoy. Reading more CS Lewis is the solution to everything.

I will cross post this on Substack 

 

*  I went on medication for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the 1980s, yet did not notice that one of the things that stopped was my automatic imagining of spoonerisms (which fortunately, I did not say aloud).  Only when I stopped the medication a few years later did I notice I was again reflexively thinking "keys and parrots" for "peas and carrots" or looking at the Market Basket sign and thinking Barket Masket. Every damn time.

** This took twenty years.  He referred to it by pronouncing its initials, OHEL. 

Quiet Time

Evangelicals have something of a rule about scheduling a Quiet Time every day. In the discussion, they often will point to the many times that Jesus went to a quiet place to pray. Yet notice that these do not say the prayer time was quiet, only that the place was quiet, which I am assuming means free from distraction. Being both God and Man, distraction was a possibility, and he provided a demonstration of how to minimise that.  What are the few times we get to listen in on Jesus's time with God?  Gethsemane, certainly. Even though it is a quiet place, it doesn't seem like a quiet time to me.  Luke, the physician, records that his sweat became like drops of blood. That doesn't sound like doing breath work, centering, or resting in God at all.

Jesus invited a couple of his disciples to come up on the mountain with him and the sky exploded with ancient prophets. They did not respond by murmuring how peaceful it all was. Maybe time with God is supposed to be dramatic, not near-somnolent. Heaven sounds pretty noisy as well, what little we are told about it. It is described as being like a wedding reception, which is not usually anyone's idea of a rest. I find I have to go outside and away from everyone at those, frankly.

What about that still, small voice talking to Elijah? I think it pays to look at the context in 1 King 19. 

 

For debate: trying to "get quiet" in a place rather than going to a quiet place to meet God is actually an evasion of God.  

Release the hounds. 

Household Tasks

Grim sees a category error in the debate about husbands and wives and household chores. It is not a fun national discussion, because it assumes that Anna and Bob's arrangement is up for criticism by Carol and/or Daniel.

When we became Christians in the 1970s (according to our accounting then - my theology is different now) it was a shocking idea for this Congregationalist who went to an Ivy-wannabee college that I was supposed to have spiritual headship over my wife and and automatically be in charge of the household. Even more surprising were the frequent directions of what that entailed and how I should do it.

But somewhere in the first year it occurred to me: if I am the head of my household, why do these other guys keep telling me what to do? It was a liberating thought. Fifty years later, we have the tasks divided in a fairly traditional arrangement. But not entirely, and it suits us. You wanna make something of it, Mac?

 

Margaret Ball

I was in a Zoom bookclub with author Margaret Ball until she left for medical reasons a few months ago.  Her husband Steve Zoraster still attends. His patents and publications should give an idea where is thinking is. Her interests were more varied, as one can see from her books and articles.

She long preceded me in the book club, but I think I shared the space with her for almost three years. She was quite clever and funny, generous to the ideas of others, and clearly both smarter and more disciplined that I. She died this past week in Austin, TX

Doesn't she just look like someone who is a linguist, a mathematician, and a sci-fi/historical/ and pseudonymous romance (to pay the rent, she said) author?

 

Coventry

 Looking at "Coventry Carol," for Advent I wondered what exactly it was.  I knew of the phrase sent to Coventry but discerned that must be later for some historical reaction to an already existing place. This part I had right. But I guessed that "coventry" as a word, and thus a place-name, must be related to covenant, convent, coven, and the like. 

Wrongo! This is dismissed as a "folk etymology," one of the worst insults that can be bestowed on a guess.

 city in Warwickshire, mid-13c., an alteration of Old English Couentre (1043), probably literally "Cofa's tree," from Old English masc. personal name Cofa (genitive Cofan) + tree (n.). If this is correct, the name might refer to a boundary marker or a public assembly place. The explanation that it was named for a convent founded there 11c. likely would be folk etymology.

My wife knew that being sent to Coventry meant to be excluded and not spoken to or listened to, which I had only vaguely understood.  Looking it up, it was used by military officers to socially sanction others who had committed dishonourable acts that did not rise to the level of courts martial. 

Three-Digit Plate

 My (Great-)Aunt Sal had a three-digit plate because she had registered her first car in the 1930's. 673. She had a Creme-and-Cocoa Chevy and then VW Bugs when I knew her, finishing with a Superbeetle. I should have paid attention and tried to snap for it when she died in 1983.

 

Trisagion

I will be singing with the choir for advent again, so it is back to warmups to get my range and what's left of my technique back. I find this wonderful, moving up a half step with each repetition until I can't hit the highest note, then dropping down an octave and climbing again. It is a worship song rather than an exercise. I have to pay attention to mouth shape, remembering the "r's" and "e's" especially. There is breath and throat control for the slurred notes, to keep them smooth and not choppy. The intervals are varied.

It's a beautiful piece, based on a standard Orthodox liturgical hymn. There are older more authentic version that are also good to learn.

 

55th Reunion

Best reunion I have been to, and it did not begin auspiciously. There were many fewer than at the 50th - no surprise - and just a lot of brief conversation and moving on. Pleasant but shallow, I suppose. But over the first two hours all forty of us had a chance to touch base with just about all of the others, everyone having a longer conversation with a few. In the last hour it narrowed to about 20, all around one table with some side conversations and switching places when people went to get another drink or had a longer goodbye.  But no one was far from the center, and more of the conversation was addressed to the whole group, a few lines here and there. People waited for each other, listened to each other, told stories. It ended softly, slowly. 

Mongoose Vs Cobra

The Slo-Mo is fun

 

Salt and Pepper

I am no longer shocked that prepared supermarket foods have too much pepper and salt, nor that cheaper restaurants lean on those ingredients.  They are cheap, flavorful, and cover a multitude of sins.  I'd rather have a try at those supposed culinary sins they are covering myself, but it must be working or it wouldn't keep happening - and maybe getting worse.

We went to an expensive restaurant on Friday, and my tenderloin and potato based dish had way too much pepper. This seems to be happening everywhere these days. Do the majority of people like that much? Does it spur people to buy more drinks, as the salt does? Has everyone forgotten how to cook food? 

In contrast, we went to a coastal seafood place tonight and I had fried scallops, discerning no pepper. There was likely some salt in the batter, but it didn't taste salty. It was just simple and very good. It is the sort of place with an overhead chalkboard menu where you order at the counter and pick it up when they call your number. It was busy on a Monday night in October.

Sponge-Headed Scienceman has had it with garlic being added to everything, and I am beginning to come around to that idea, after years of saying Gimme More. But first, back off on the salt and pepper.  I have started to mention it, especially at fancier places which might have more reason to fear negative word-of-mouth. There are salt and pepper on the table for a reason, I thought. 

The Land of Milk and Cookies

I had a pastor who years ago used that phrase in a sermon, along the lines of "and then we will all go to live in the land of milk and cookies."  I thought it was charming, capturing the spirit of joy, calm, and abundance that the biblical phrase milk and honey intended, but in a modern context.  I mentioned it to a co-worker who was one of Those Christians who launched into a correction that this was not actually something that should have been in a sermon, because the honey part of the phrase represents something-or-other about Messianic prophecy which shouldn't be left out because then you are missing the whole point...

Well, no. Keep it simple.  Honey refers to foraging.  Milk refers to agriculture, possibly settled but more commonly nomadic. The Israelites moved between these economies, and at varying times God was quite clear where they should be.  No, Cain, do not bring me an offering of broccoli. Yes, Nehemiah, it is time to rebuild a city. The Land of Milk and Honey covers the territory.  Everything is here.  The foraging is good, the cows are contented, be at peace.

Noticing

Steve Sailer's book Noticing is built around his decades-long observation that there are things you are not supposed to notice, and simply noticing them out loud gets you in trouble.  There is a reason no one was noticing and it wasn't an accident.

So I have long noticed but only occasionally mentioned how often people - meaning especially my age, especially women, and ones I know/knew - show how kind and good they are by how often they mention that they hate Trump. The oftenness provides ample evidence that they don't actually criticise both sides, and leads to wondering why they have to say essentially the same thing so often.

The other side spreads it around to a somewhat larger circle of "stupid things liberals do," with a variety of targets.  

Yogi Berra supposedly said "You can see a lot just by looking." 

Links from 2015

From October and November.  It now looks as if all 11,702 posts of mine have been visited 150-200 times this October, including some to dead links. 

 Boomer Youth Culture a simple theory on how it developed that I still like.

Community Versus Communism  I was refining the idea at this point.  As I read, I sometimes thought "That's how I still say that now," while at other times I thought "I hit upon a better way to say that." Good comment from T99.

Bamfield's John Vanden Music from The Bills with great harmonies. Bamfield is a tiny community on Vancouver Island, facing the Pacific.

Star Wars Villains  The Assistant Village Idiot explains to you why it's morally inconsistent and confusing.

Two extended posts about College Protests that are still green

One Thought  Starting with an analogy I still like.

Life Is Hard  Good responses, closing with a highly complimentary spam comment I left up.

Porcupine

A woman was running back up the road from her truck, looking concerned at the small animal that was wandering and looking disoriented in the road. It was a young porcupine.

A warm-hearted woman. What could possibly go wrong. 

Traffic

My overall traffic has suddenly gone up 100x, with this last week up 3x, all of my posts from May 2025 visited two hundred times each two days ago, and a similar weirdness for Oct 4-9 targeting other months in the last ten years.

They come from phones in South America and Southern Asia, but except for one American Osteopathy site, the majority come from the vast category of "other."  

Whatever it is, something automated is looking for something here, and I doubt that's good. 

Controlling The Weather

Conclusive Evidence Found of Jew Controlling the Weather - Babylon Bee

Winchester Cathedral

 

New Education Model! Using AI!

 So you know it must work, right? Except Boy, Was I Wrong About Alpha School by Wess Trabelsi at AI ∩ K12.  This is someone who wants the tech revolution in education to work.  He is sympathetic.  

But he has also seen other promising results blow up before, and calls 'em as he sees 'em.

I have long since learned not to be surprised when new educational marvels look like they work, because the news that there is selection bias and results that don't scale is just around the corner. Deception.  Some of it may be salvageable, but it doesn't look likely.

Debates

Scott Alexander at ACX has a new post, challenging Steven Pinker to a debate about AI. Alexander thinks the AI dangers are real - and I don't mean the water and the electricity - while Pinker thinks they are oversold. Alexander points out that Pinker has consistently underestimated how intelligent AI is going to be, so he should just admit he is wrong, wrong, wrong about all of it. There is something about the tone which makes me uncomfortable.  His reasoning is all in a row, though it is his usual obsessive self. (Note, Alexander always faults himself for the length of such posts, as if that were the extent of the problem. To me that is a clue of how he is missing the point.)

Alexander was arguing with Tyler Cowen last year about USAID in much the same tone. I am at a bit of a loss, approving of his general approach in both discussions, yet finding the final product somewhat beside the point. It is fair to hold someone accountable about what they previously wrote, but this somehow has an air of the childish "But you said...but you said...but you SAID..." I quoted GK Chesterton about arguing with a madman, as Alexander has that autistic style I am so familiar with. 

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity*, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. 

But my strongest impression was how much I glimpsed my own reflection in his posts. A few specific topics I have covered in detail (ahem) and at length (ahem) sprang immediately to mind. 

* I remembered this as "charity," which is interesting.  I may like that better, and if I ever get to speak with Gilbert I will mention it. 

Undermentioned

There are people making points I would myself, but doing it better than I would have. Yet I do notice few people want to touch on the possibility that this is what happens when minority and immigrant cultures are trying to compete socially in elite white situations. Perhaps those who already feel entitled are more likely to enter those cultures, less afraid of it.  One of the accused has returned to Dubai, for example. 

"Hidden" Messages

My mother remarried in August 1966, just before I entered 8th grade. We went to the beach with his family sometime that summer, with the girl who was going to become my step-sister, who was getting ready to leave for Colby Junior College.  This song came on my transistor radio and their voices dropped.  "You know what this is really about, right?" said Beth.  My mother murmured, "it sounds like they are talking about having too much to drink last night without saying it." My sister nodded wisely.  They were clearly hoping that I didn't catch this terrible reference. 

That was my first clue that my new sister was some kind of a dingbat.  It was clearly a drug reference, not alcohol.  You could tell that from the garage-band El Cheapo psychedelic sound if nothing else. (Rock autoharp was a little surprising.) Heck, I even made sure my nine-year old brother didn't miss stuff like that.  You wouldn't want to be humiliated in fifth grade of a suburban school for missing a drug reference.  You might never recover your status. It was one more moment of thinking I was just going to be alone in the world until I had a family of my own. Eighteen months later I played "What Condition My Condition Was In" in my own garage band,* and none of the mothers overhearing us had the least bit of objection. Went right over their heads.

Of course, I married a girl who also didn't get the reference, or more exactly, never considered that there might be a naughty reference of any kind. She memorised lyrics without listening to them.  Her sorority sisters explained a few things to her so I didn't have to. But that's another story.

 *We weren't even a garage band.  None of our parents would let us use their garage. We thought we had a garage at Jimmy Labonte's house once, but when we got there his father was doing Pinewood Derby stuff with his younger brothers.

Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs

 The review convinced me that Lee, the topic, is fascinating, but the book isn't. Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs at Astral Codex Ten, part of ACX's yearly series. Lee was the determined genius who rescued Singapore, taking it from Third-World hellhole to economic powerhouse.

There’s an irony in that while Japan lost World War 2 pretty badly on the field, their actual stated goals in the war were to free Asia from western colonialism, and those goals they achieved amazingly well. They may have lost by direct force, but Lee and others like him didn’t forget how weak and disorganized and cowardly the British ruled in defeat. Western empires ruled Asia more through their aura of invincibility than through their technological advantage, and once that was lost their days were numbered and they knew it. The fall of Singapore was the single greatest military defeat the British ever had in terms of soldiers lost; it was also the battle that struck the deathblow to their Empire. 

But also

Something like half the book is Lee listing every world leader he ever talked to as PM. This is another part that mostly gets kind of dull (especially if you don’t follow the details, although this case is much easier to track than the internal politics chapters since you’ll probably recognize the characters’ names, or at least their countries). They’re all described as “tough” and “vigorous”, occasionally as “warm”, and usually with some other positive descriptors. This is probably a mix of sincere respect and diplomatic language for most of them.

Except Jimmy Carter. Lee spends an entire chapter making fun of Jimmy Carter for being shallow, undermined, weak-willed and inauthentic. And then takes an aside in the next chapter, when he’s complimenting Reagan, to mention how smart it was of the American people to replace Jimmy Carter with this guy. If you ever want to see someone who’s not a giant swimming rabbit attacking Jimmy Carter, this is the book for you 

Nolan Sisters

British.  Never heard of them before. This was their first TV appearance, but they were big in Europe in the 70s.  A friend described them as "terminally cute," which is true. As they got older, they got just a little more frisky, more like Marie Osmond than ABBA or Olivia Newton-John, but in that range.

The algorithm just sends you things, and there are lots of YouTube videos about their later tragic lives (three died of cancer; their agents ripped them off) and how beloved they were in Europe, especially England and Ireland. Perhaps it is the green dresses, but that's a very Irish-looking group of sisters.

Public Perception

Bethany again looks for the research, finds there is very little research, and so does some research.

Do People Ever Change Their Minds About Controversial Cases? 

This is why polling can be valuable: people’s perception of what others think does not necessarily match what others actually do think, and it definitely doesn’t always catch when people change what they think. 

Data Republican is a national treasure, and it looks like she does this full time.  Bethany, OTOH, has a day job, a husband and child, and lots of medical appointments or she would be DataCatholic/~Feminist/~Libertarian*, which doesn't really roll off the tongue and sell subscriptions. 

We think we know what the general public thinks, but it is often only what "my people" think, or "those stupid other mass culture people" think, or what I overheard today, saw a poll on today, or was assured by reliable opinionards is true. There is almost nothing that we have more than a slender portion of the data, but even with that low bar, gauging public opinion might be near the bottom of the list. This leads to the puzzle of whose opinion we do actually know pretty well. Perhaps I should write about that general question.

Public perception does change, but is tough to suss out, because there are so many temporary and interactive factors that influence point-in-time opinion guesses discernment. 

*I don't know who has what symbols and semiotics in place, but "~" means approximately. 

Kids These Days

 Kids These Days Part II by Paul Bloom.  Part I is linked there. He goes directly after the smartphones-are-the-problem issue, but expands to trying to explain anything about development.

 Turkheimer’s skepticism is about explaining individual differences, but population trends also emerge from many interacting causes. When trying to understand an increase in depression among a certain population at a certain time, we should take seriously a similar skepticism about theories that say it’s caused by this—and even about more subtle theories that say it’s caused by this and that and this other thing. When it comes to the claim that smartphones are to blame, this skepticism should be reinforced by the failure to find robust evidence in its favor.

Kids these days can't even shoe a damn horse. 

Johnny Most

Everyone around the league hated him. I grew up with him.  I thought that's the way basketball announcers were supposed to sound. 

Pound the Table

 There is an old lawyer's joke that works well for just about any dispute:

If the facts are with you, pound the facts into the table.

If the authorities (professors, officials, regulations) are with you, pound the authorities into the table.

If neither the facts nor the authorities are with you, pound the table.

This comes up in hereditarian disputes all the time. The hereditarians pound the facts, the environmentalists pound the authorities...

Who pounds the table? That should tell you something. 

Ever Green

 

Chart-topper in 1909

I don't think they called it barbershop quartet singing until much later, but this kind of four-part harmony was big for many years. The soloist was more prominent at this point, while a full blend became the standard later. I have a dimly remembered fact I will confirm before going forward...

Yes, the barbershop sound was all-male at first. But women sing as well as men if not better and there was resentment that they could not join, so they formed their own groups, called the Sweet Adelines. Great name, BTW.  They tended to be more choral than quartet. Eventually there was enough pressure that the SPEBSQSA (checks notes, yes, that's it) admit women that they did so, but an all-male movement started up almost immediately after.  The claim was that the all-male sound was distinctive and worth preserving.

They were right. It's not the same. For choirs, Soprano-Alto-Tenor-Bass or Soprano-Alto-Baritone is standard, and it is just different from all-male or all-female.  It is not accidental that the most precise arrangers mixed both sexes for voices voices.  There is something more universal about that.  But for homier, more intimate harmonies in performance, those community groups tend to be all-female or all-male. Three or four sisters dressed alike, four neighborhood guys on the corner trying to make it big, all the Oak Ridge/Byrds/Temptations with qualitatively different sounds than the Supremes or Vandellas.  When the voices were mixed, it was a female lead with Pips behind her, or a famous male with interchangeable female backups. Call it whatever you like and complain about it if you have nothing better to do, but the sound is different. I like them all, but don't consider them interchangeable. 

I had a friend who went to Mount Holyoke who claimed that there was nothing more breathtaking than spending all week hearing nothing but female voices and then having a male chorus come in to perform on the weekend. Similarly, USO performances always brought in females.

Effective Altruism

Data Republican believes EA should be banned from AI safety, policy-making, and governance.  That's a pretty extreme position, but she makes a solid case for both the mild and extreme versions.

Fundamentally, EA is a maximizing philosophy: it always tries to price future value. And extinction is the “negative infinity” number in the ledger. Once you are determining outcome by probabilities, just having even a tiny chance of extinction dominates every other calculation.

One such scenario that many conservatives might find sympathetic is: do you do gain-of-function research for a 70% chance that you will prevent the next swine flu, or is the 1% risk that the virus escapes containment in Wuhan and kills 10 million people acceptable? Many of us, having lived through COVID-19, would put our foot down on allowing any kind of gain-of-function research again within our lifetimes. That’s one scenario where conservatives can potentially reason their way to the same answer as EAs.

EAs run that same logic in every calculation. What this means, inside their heads: an extinction level event scenario is the greatest threat vector. 

Scott Alexander, like others, is obsessed with AI, alignment, and its effects. He is very much a supporter of Effective Altruism in general, though not slavishly so. Still, I imagine he would object to such a blanket disallowing of EA from the discussion (or at least, from the decision-making). There are so many discussions and counter discussions over at Astral Codex Ten that I won't even attempt to choose for you. As his commenters are also quite brilliant - I consider it one of the few sites to compete with this one for average IQ - you can either dabble or go hard against them, trying to steelman your own arguments. This would be the major leagues. And yet...

I have felt uncomfortable with Effective Altruism since I first heard of it, though it took me a while to articulate why. Frankly, it probably took reading others who had thought about it more rigorously to be able to articulate it.  One of the consequences of becoming lazier, and thus less intelligent, is not being able to provide some of the service I was designed for. I have excuses. Not good excuses, but at least some things I can say out loud with some earnestness. 

The best arguments against EA are in Data Republican's essay. Pricing future value is a great example. It makes entire sense, but somehow leads to insane conclusions. If a future life is worth the same as a life now, then the sheer volume of future humans and their needs with forever dwarf what is good for us. More interestingly, perhaps, is how that completely devalues our ancestors. There is the (bogus in reality but worth valuing as a myth) Native American belief in Seven Generations, that we owe something to the three generations before us and the three after us. GK Chesterton wrote similarly that tradition is the only way of giving a vote to the dead. CS Lewis, describing the Tao in The Abolition of Man shows that the wise in every tradition teach that we owe something to both our heritage and our posterity. But EA very quickly reveals that it owes nothing to heritage and everything to posterity.  The dead have made their contribution and their suffering is now a sunk cost. 

There is also comparative suffering among species, leading to calculations that the horrible suffering of three chickens or thirty-two shrimp are equivalent to the suffering of one human. The actual numbers are immaterial.  Thirty or three-hundred chickens would be the same. The principle of comparing it to any human suffering is something new in the world. It may be a logically consistent and defensible philosophical and moral position.

But it is not a human position, despite being favored by "humanists." It gives away the game, recognising that humanists are in fact subhumanists, valuing some bare minimum of the species as fungible with any other human.  Dismiss it as a mere prejudice on my part if you will, but the idea of perpetuating humans who are only biologically and not culturally related to me is not just disquieting, it's silly.  

Humanists are actually Subhumanists.  I should probably think about that and post on it.  Yet now that I have said that, I recall that CS Lewis already covered that in the last debate section of Out of the Silent Planet. 

Common Criticisms

Rob Kurzban on discussion of evolutionary psychologists:

Critics assert that evolutionary psychologists are wrong in believing behavior is genetically determined, that every aspect of the organism is an adaptation, and that discovering what is informs what [should] be. Evolutionary psychologists reply that they never made any of these claims, and document places where they claim precisely the reverse. The critics then reply that evolutionary psychologists are wrong in believing behavior is genetically determined, that every aspect of the organism is an adaptation, and that discovering what is informs what should be.

Death Used to Be the Term Limit

 Longevity Threatens Democracy, by Lyman Stone 

Key points in this post: 

Death has historically been the main exit mechanism for unelected rulers, including natural death, but this exit route is vanishing thanks to rising lifespans. 

All else equal, longer lives mechanically produce longer tenures in power. 

Political power compounds over a career, so longer careers mean more concentrated power. 

Older electorates carry a larger cognitive-impairment burden and are further from the experiences a vote is supposed to be able to think about when making electoral decisions. 

As a result, political elites face weaker accountability from less attentive electorates, have longer careers over which to accumulate power, and upon reaching the top are likely to have longer tenures since mortality rates are falling. 

Things You Don't See At The Time

Which is why I'm not a boxing judge.

When you are a fan, looking mostly at the punches and probably rooting for one guy over another, you miss things.  Watching and listening now, I hear the referee telling Tyson to let go, but it is Bruno who is holding Mike on the back of the head rather continually. Yet at the time I would have only noticed that Bruno had a lot of ineffectual punches that count in scoring but do not damage, plus a few that really rock Tyson. Tyson, OTOH, misses a lot but hits more generally solid shots. By rounds 3 and 4 this pattern is almost embarrassingly consistent. That really looks like a home ref at this point. "Last warning. Last warning." he says to Bruno but I haven't heard many warnings since round 2.

Tyson was never a smart man, but was a smart fighter, perhaps by training to channel his amazing instincts into the right avenues. This gradually tips toward the winner, but ends quickly, which is often the case in boxing. As with an economy, a war, or any other collapse. Slowly, slowly, then all at once.

 Did Tyson and Ali ever discuss boxing? I would love to watch that.

Caspar the Friendly Ghost

 I said to myself I couldn't remember the second verse. This turned out not to be a big problem.

 The tune is reminiscent of "Frosty the Snowman" in places.

Grand Am

There has been long suspicion that the variant use of "am" in Black English is a minstrel show fabrication that was never actually used.  "Brother Jones am a fine preacher," or "The corn harvest am a little late this year."

Scholars of AAVE have typically assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in transcriptions of ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the transcribers. 

John McWhorter uncovers enough believable, non-critical and nonsatiric reports of the usage to declare it was not only used in Southern Black dialect in the 1800s, but that it came from nonstandard dialects in England in the late 1700s, which were still in occasional use up until the early 1900s. The 20-min podcast am here.

You Already Know Joseph Henrich

Anthropology Has a Truth Problem Len Gutkin at the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Henrich's critique of his own discipline. J Henrich is the author of The WEIRDest People in the World , famous in the social sciences.  I have mentioned him here before.

Henrich spends some time rebutting the supposed consensus rejecting the existence of a biological sex binary — actually, a significant faction of biological anthropologists consider the question “settled the other way,” a fact which the AAA ignores — but his real interest is in the moral reasoning that permits Rouse and those who agree with her to assume that a technical claim about biology entails a series of political and social prejudices against both gay and trans people. (In her interview with the Chronicle, Rouse expressed incredulity that Kwame Anthony Appiah, who, she noted, is gay, could consider the AAA’s position on biological sex problematic.) Henrich summarizes this extremely weird logic: “If it turns out that natural selection only favors two kinds of gametes, we would have to oppress gay and/or trans people. What?” 

Biblical Censuses

 The Biblical Censuses are Correct Demographic Records, by Lyman Stone

What went wrong was people trying to fix them because they thought they knew better long after the Book of Numbers was composed.  This was fun.

Indexes or Indices?

 We are having a discussion.  Mine is the minority opinion - against librarians. 

In Praise of Obsessive Men

 In Praise of Obsessive Men, by Rosemary Hopcroft at Aporia.  It is a good summary of one side of this discussion about autism. As it is the side I lean to more, I pass it along.  

In short, there is evidence that men are more likely than women to obsessively focus on their chosen area to the exclusion of all else, and this often leads to extraordinary achievement. While the achievements often only benefit the achiever himself, in cognitively demanding areas like science they frequently have tremendous public benefits. Thus, it is likely that extraordinary achievements with the greatest public benefit come disproportionately from obsessive, high IQ men. They deserve our gratitude. 

However there are things worth mentioning that come from another side of the discussion. It is generally agreed that women are in general more attentive to social norms and better at social tasks. This, plus conscientiousness are the prime suspects why they do better at schools as they are designed in most places. I suspect we will find exactly what brain structures are affected by genes being turned on or off by hormones as early as conception, but that is a matter for another day.  For the moment, I stipulate that this is so. Women would thereby have more backup social systems, so that even if they have autism, it is less impairing, and less noticeable. This would explain why it is less often diagnosed.

Secondly, the overlap of symptoms with OCD or Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder makes diagnosis and research less reliable.  I think this is going to be wide open for the next twenty years, as genomic data becomes more available. When we say that something is polygenic, that is even more complicated than we think at first. If there is a variant which makes one 1% more obsessive, it is likely upstream or downstream of variants which make one 0.5% or 2% more obsessive, plus a bunch that are so similar that they also weigh in at about 1%. Each of those is surrounded by nearby SNPs that are similar to others in the population that have a tiny effect or magnifying effect, but most likely no effect at all, yet are along for the ride.  And our target gene is just along for the ride on some other trait near it on the chromosome which is also being selected for. It's all going to be ranges and percentages combined with a hundred other ranges or percentages elsewhere. Some of those are going to be autism, some OCD, some simply anxiety, not to mention a hundred other God-only-knows selection events. 

Funny thing.  The odds for things in genetics are going to turn out looking a lot like the odds for things in real life.  What a concept. Because all these conditions are Mendelian only in their extreme and more destructive versions, it is likely that many are going to be rather obsessed, somewhat obsessed, mildly obsessed, and this will be lessened by women who are more likely to say to themselves "This is just too much.  It costs too much socially" and back off. 

There is a further set of arguments which come from autists who declare that the supposedly scientific claims are weaker than advertised, which they often noticed because the internal experience of autists is ignored and dismissed in favor of that which is objectively measured. There is something to this, but that data is, well, polluted by a very high percentage of the self-diagnosed. When these are female, they borrow heavily from feminist perspectives that science/men/logic itself are antagonistic to women's wisdom. (Which is in turn complicated by women who are striving mightly to argue from an entirely objective and logical perspective. Sigh.)  I can only say that I take the point that the holes in the autism mainstream's position are real, but that does not prove that all opposition to it is correct.  

Destructive Bureaucracy

 David Foster put this up during my trip, but it got buried in my notes.  Sorry to be late.

The French Army in 1940 and the CDC in 2021, 

(And we know what happened to the French Army in 1940).  Mr Foster sees a parallel

I was reminded of this history in early 2022 by a sequence of posts at twitter. Joanna Masel, a theoretical biologist, says the CDC contacted her (following an NYT story) about an app she helped develop to notify people (anonymously) about possible covid-19 exposure. Her group put a very informal preprint on github nearly immediately, and a more formal one on medrxiv soon after. A CDC coauthor was added to shepherd it through MMWR, which is described as “CDC’s primary vehicle for scientific publication of timely, authoritative, and useful public health information and recommendations.”

The preproposal was rejected. Informal feedback was that they liked it but were so backlogged that a peer reviewed journal was likely faster. This initiated 6 months of clearance procedures needed for CDC coauthor to stay on paper.

What CDC staff spend a LOT of time on: rewriting manuscripts with meticulous attention to style guides. Eg, Methods must follow exactly the order they are used in Results, all interpretation must be in Discussion not in Results, etc. to a point truly unimaginable in my field. 

Thanking the Algorithm This Time

St Magnus Cathedral

We expect the attractive balance of the Renaissance and even slavish symmetry post Sir Christopher Wren* in our architecture and are surprised when it is repeatedly violated in earlier buildings. But they were as aware of it as much as we are, they just put it farther down their priority list. If you needed an alcove to put in a special chapel, you just put in an alcove on that side. If someone needed another alcove later they natural gravitated to the matching spot on the other side, but if they never needed one, that was no problem. They wouldn't move an altar a foot to the side, but if it needed to go to the 2/3 mark, that was pretty too. St Magnus in Kirkwall has got a few sections where they moved a wall in a foot or out a foot because of practical considerations. It's still solidly symmetrical, though

 

There's that ubiquitous red sandstone again, that they built everything from. It's a soft stone, so when they started using it for gravestones, families found that the were becoming weathered and unreadable.  Richer people started sending for more durable stone, even when the bones were interred indoors. Sometimes people would put up a wooden marker in anticipation of greater wealth later. I found this Memento Mori fascinating. It is much like a sign for a shop.

The sandstone stills shows signs of being painted over during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Whatever illustrations the Catholics had were now forbidden, to be replaced by plaques commemorating human beings or groups of them, which the Reformers considered Less Idolatrous. 

You get things like memorials to the war dead, which includes their family identifiers, including this one I found humorous. 

Much better than pictures of Biblical stories. Sure.
 

A note on Saints and local gods: Learning two unrelated eras side-by-side can suggest associations you might not otherwise have had. When Orkney was Catholic, the center of its authority was in Rome, a place where few people had ever been. Being able to have your own bishop gave you a chance to send someone you knew to represent you among the great and the wise. The idea was echoed at royal courts as power consolidated and kingdoms grew larger. Having an earl who was married to one of the king's relatives gave you an avenue to be heard. This would have been even stronger before general literacy, but even now, we want someone of our own to advocate for us. God gave other tribes pictures, but to the Jews He gave the captions, rather forcing them to focus on words, which traveled better and were more universal. Yet we iz who we iz, and the Jews got idolatrous about the words themselves, and Christians gladly and self-righteously followed.  It's a step toward abstraction, but it's not foolproof. Jews had Kabbalah, pre-Christians had runes, and Christians dabbled in grammarye, leading to Baptists putting Bibles on secondary altars with a single light shining down on it. For all of them we must say "Not thus, but thank you for your assistance." Asking a saint to pray for you is not that different. When we destroy one idol we secretly build another.

Where was I? St Olaf, who is big in Norwegian thinking and thus in early Orkney, was a pagan convert to Christianity.  His statue in the Kirkwall cathedral has interesting symbolism. And there's that stonework again.

If you look at the serpent he is crushing, it has a human head. The face is in fact his own, representing the death of his old self, or perhaps the constant need to keep killing it.

The scratching is a mason's mark showing which person cut the stones in this section.  There is an identical mark from a very close time in the Cathedral of Durham in the north of England.

Neolithic Legos

As you can see from the second photo, the sandstone of Orkney looks like it could practically be split with few hands and put into place for building in a few minutes."Neolithic Legos," one of our guides called it. The first picture is of a rock structure thousands of years old, the last picture about a hundred, but you can see the second stories are remarkably like the old brochs. The first stories are as well, underneath the stucco-like coating and pebbling to create an extra barrier. It's stacked stones underneath, in nearly every building. Fences and outbuildings do not look like much of a change from Skara Brae or the Broch of Gurness. St Magnus Cathedral is built of much larger pieces of red sandstone, finished more finely, but it's the same thing as well.

Why would they change?  It's right there, it's easy, and it works. One downside is if you use it for standing stones it attracts lightning, which can also split it pretty quickly. The stone circles of Orkney have not held up as well as Stonehenge and Avebury for that reason. Still, 5,000 years is a good innings for any built structure, wouldn't you say?

Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast

This WSJ article is making the rounds, so most of you might have seen it, but I wanted to make sure it got noticed. Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast. The aging of the mainstream denominations, especially the leadership has been pointed out more and more frequently over the last twenty years.

This hasn’t always been the view of the Catholic Church. Mr. Thomas and his fellow activists are drawn to the imagery of the crusades. Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095 to a crowd that responded with cries of “Deus vult” or “God wills it.” That phrase is popular among nativists on social media. Which pope is the greater authority on the gospels, Urban or Leo? I don’t know. But a glance at Christian history shows that the current consensus among church leaders hasn’t always been so. Taking the long view, it is by no means a settled position among Christians that nationalism and militarism are “contrary to the gospel,” as Bishop Hudson-Wilkin put it 

I think bringing in Urban II is a bit of an overshoot, but point taken. There are ideas in church leadership which are treated as obvious but would not even be recognised in other eras of the faith. I always hesitate to begin an argument with "One would think..." because it carries a great danger of subjectivity, but one would think that the leader of an eternal church would ask him/herself whether his opinion owes more to his narrow slice of time than it should. I learned decades ago from CS Lewis that while it is true that all eras have their own biases and cannot be entirely objective, this is nowhere more true than among the moderns who insist this. The thing they preach loudest they seem to think themselves exempt from. He called it Chronocentrism and Chronological Snobbery, giving credit to Owen Barfield for alerting him to the illogic of it.

 Boomer Christians are alarmed and bewildered by a return to the faith of centuries past. They forget that the political priorities of their generation emerged from a very unusual historical moment. Their confident worldview was a gift from a different era. And it will, I fear, die with them.

Have some humility.

 

Welsh Men's Chorus

Just to keep the A capella going. I swear the whole country can sing.  

 

Amazing Marvin Gaye

Strong and solid.  I didn't know this version existed

 

The Ness of Brodgar

Orkney is one of the few places where any knobbed balls have been found in situ. None of the theories of what they were used for has been very persuasive, but they have been found many places in northern Scotland. One was found at the Ness of Brodgar in 2013, and a new one at this summer's dig. This Ness was a community structure between the major standing stones sites, containing houses, cooking areas, and workshops. It was only discovered in 2003 and usual, accidentally by a farmer plowing his field. Though it doesn't make for good tourist photographs, it is much more extensive than the stone circles themselves and tells us more about how the people lived.

A funny thing about experts.  We had international experts, even the decades-long chief archaeologists on some sites.  Because of this story I will not mention any names, though anyone determined could narrow it down to a few persons pretty quickly if they chose. In explaining about the Ness, our guide had a mind-numbing amount of detail at his fingertips and ability to offhandedly point things out that would only be noticed by people who had spent a lot of time at this.  Occasionally there would be another archaeologist in the group and they would talk shop in a manner that was almost incomprehensible. Sometimes they would double back and explain something to the rest of us, sometimes not. In summing up before the Q&A our guide mentioned that there was now some assurance that the very top layer before the site was abandoned not only had some artefacts from the Beaker People, but good evidence that they had used an inhabited the site.

I fancy there were murmurs of appreciation of this, but it may have been only me.  This is the moment of transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.  The Bell Beaker culture was the group that almost fully replaced the previous culture - the one that had actually built Stonehenge, Avebury, Newgrange, and the stone rings around us but were overwhelmed throughout Europe by the Indo-Europeans, the Yamnaya, the wildly violent Steppe tribes who were our ancestors. In most places the male lineages were completely replaced.  Orkney and eastern Scandinavia were two of the few places where that replacement occurred differently or not at all. That's another story, but the short version is that the incoming paternal lines did not replace the Orkney natives, while both groups of females persisted. As this occurred at the far end of their spread, where horses and carts were not the advantage on islands they had been previously, the resident males could mostly hold off the invaders. 

"Ah, this is the part I'm most interested in," I blurted, barely raising my hand to be called on. "The Beaker usually brought the practice of burial in mounds with them, but mound graves were already in place here.  Were they brought at an earlier date by a variation of these people from the Steppes? Are they influenced by Kurgans or completely unrelated?"

"What are kurgans?"

It was as if a mathematicians had said "Who is this Fourier chap you keep talking about?' or an astronomer had said "What do you mean, moons of Neptune?" I was almost too embarrassed to continue, suddenly worried that it was I who had been inhabiting some obscure backwater and thinking it important.  I was able to explain that they were the burial mounds of the Steppe people. He said briefly and generally that the Steppe people had been the Indo-Europeans and "come into" Europe, a rather mild description for complete replacement.  He didn't comment on the any relationship between the two types of mound, and I just dropped it.

All I can think is that the field is so specialised that the experts do not need or desire to keep up with the larger movements in their own area of study. It seems rather like economics, where Nobel winners sometimes seem to have no better grasp on larger issues than other educated people.

So I'm going to say, no, no relation, because if there were he would have been all over it, as obsessed as he was by Orkney information. 

Skaill House

Skaill House was already the seat of earls and bishops of Orkney (Some Graham and Watts Lairds, mostly) with some small archaeological importance when Skara Brae was discovered on its lands after a storm two centuries ago. The tumulus had been noticed, with the idea that "Someone should dig that up and see what's there someday," which describes half of Orkney. 

If you are interested in American East Coast domestic history, the displays start in the era of Williamsburg, VA and end at Newport, RI. You can see it and it just jumps out at you.  But because its earls and bishops in the UK, a lot of the enthusiasm by the presenters is about noble alliances and visits by the Queen Mum. If we weren't such a good match for Williamsburg and Newport here, it might not have interested us as much. Quite the cottage, though.  If you are there at Skara Brae anyway, it's a definite plus.

This is the place to mention that Orkney was a wonderful and valuable trip for us, but we have no need for a second visit. Maybe if I had to go into the witness protection program or something. 

Orkney has both outsized importance and is neglected

In Scotland, no one pays much attention to Orkney. It has only 22,000 people across the whole chain of islands.  It has almost 200,000 sheep, 100,000 cattle, and I didn't look up how many fish, but really, it's islands in the North Atlantic. It has several local brands of beer and scotch, including some specialty beers from bere, an ancient form of barley which is also used to make a very authentic bannock or other tourist bread. Though other parts of Scotland have different authenticities, you will notice that this does not differentiate it much from the Shetlands, the Western Isles, the Highlands, or Scotland in general. Scotch, not many people, sheep, necessary for tourists, otherwise rather a drain on resources. Orkney needs lots of ferries and small airports, and there is only so far you can cut back the safety regulations on those things.

OTOH, Orkney has outsized importance to Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Age archaeologists, Viking historians, and WWII buffs. Standing stone in concentration are always a big deal. St Magnus and his cathedral are a big deal. Scapa Flow is a big deal. 

When you think about it, most places in the world are like this, of immense importance to some groups and no importance to others. The archaeology tourists always tut-tut about the farmers who are uncooperative with digs, not recognising their value. But really, why should they be?  They have crops, they have livestock, they have harvests and hard work. This is a potentially important Mesolithic site for the entire North Atlantic!  SO WHAT?  They're dead and gone. Go away and stop bothering the sheep. 

Rural New England farming. Historically important, but who cares? If it can't pay its own way with tourists...

Prairie family Bibles. Folk arts of the Ozarks. Almost everything with an historical designation that gets money or is untaxed means that we all pay for it.  It is a tradeoff scheme played by politicians. It is a sign of immense wealth when a country can do this. But it's got billions of dollars of mineral resources under it! So what, it's a park now, and sacred to Gaia, so you can't touch it. Why can't you have a park over here instead?  It's different. You are just an ignorant person who does not understand. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

Does Georgism Work?

I had never heard of it, but recognised the name once the history was given. This is a land value tax arrangement that seems to work well in theory.  It looks like it would "work" in terms of raising revenue in a fairer way than we do now, which is always the first question. But I have not considered how the system might be gamed - always the second question.  As I am apparently late to the party on this, it is likely that wiser others have thought about this, so I won't shoot from the hip. Does Georgism Work? Five Year Later. There are enormously cool graphics.

The focus is on legislation whereby states allow communities to institute LVT's. This seems both clever and cautious.  It puts the idea out there, where it hasn't been on the radar, doesn't make anyone do anything, and removes a barrier that communities trying to get the idea off the ground would undoubtedly have in selling the idea: How are we ever going to get the state to approve this? Discouragement and loss on inertia ensues.

Under this arrangement, city property pays more, rural pays less, suburbs in between depending on density. But in the city, this is an example from one place, in this case Spokane

From another section of the essay, there is this. 

In Part 1, Is Land A Big Deal?, I ran the “land isn’t a big deal” theory against several testable hypotheses. Among the findings was the fact that sky-high urban real estate prices were primarily driven by land appreciation, and that land was a large and steadily increasing share of bank loans.4 The article’s centerpiece was an original estimate of the total land value of the United States, which was much larger than many had expected. Although this estimate fell short of what a “single tax” would require, it was still large enough to convince many that LVT had been unfairly dismissed as a serious policy proposal. 

Followed shortly thereafter by this

 South Korea has the highest land value-to-GDP ratio in the entire OECD, in excess of 500%. To put that in perspective, the figures from my own estimates of the USA’s total land values—which surpassed many readers’ expectations—were a mere 200% of GDP. My first instinct was that Korean land values must reflect a temporary, anomalous bubble and would soon revert. However, long-run land value-to-GDP ratios over the last 50+ years have ranged from 400%, and current values aren’t even the all-time peak, which clocks in at around 600%. Prime land is just that valuable and scarce in South Korea.