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.

Spam Names

I go to my spam folder to make sure no really mail has ended up there, and always marvel at the random names that are attached: Delilah Oaxaca. Giuseppe Pavlov, Amaziah Banks.  And that's not even counting the African names.

Further evidence that they are trying to snare people who have no clue, not those who will catch on after they've wasted a few emails. 

John Rae's Tomb

 This is the Hudson Bay explorer John Rae's tomb at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney

 Looks like his admirers gave him about at fine a sendoff as one can get.

The Street With Eight Names

The main shopping street in Stromness, second-largest town in Orkney, is called Victoria Street on GPS but has a strange history. It was not always continuous, but was a series of alleyways along the wharves, with houses, warehouses, and shops interrupting it. It is now about the width of a walkway at an outlet mall. 

 

It is a mile long, wonderfully charming for shopping, and if you expand that picture, you will get a bit more of Scots humor.

It is called the Street with Eight Names.  I could only find six on the day I was there: John, Victoria, Dundas, Alfred, South End, and Ness. 

King Arthur's Name

I don't think this is Bernard's best writing, but he does cram a lot of information about the real Arthur (and the denial of the real Arthur) into a small space. Again, he is coming from an historical linguist's perspective, which has often been shorted in the historical discussion. Even though he hedges with his "perhaps's" and "possibly's," the rather sudden emergence of boys named Arthur right after the most probable real Arthur of history suggests that people then did not regard him as legendary, but a real leader worthy of emulation and remembrance. The Origin of King Arthur's Name.

COOL MICROBES

Science news stories pop up from time to time telling us that microbes have been discovered that digest plastic or extract rare metals.  Yet somehow, we never hear about these again.  Are they all fool's gold, false alarms, mountains out of molehills?

No, we don't get to follow up on them because of where they fall in the regulatory chain. Works in Progress: The 1970s Law Holding Back Biotechnology. 

Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin therefore took these PET-eating enzymes and used computational tools to make an improved variant, called FAST-PETase. This enzyme is 98 percent identical to the natural version but digests PET plastics in less than 24 hours. The next step could be to place FAST-PETase back into living cells and release them onto landfills. But even putting the gene back into its original host, I. sakaiensis, triggers TSCA, ensuring that the reconstituted organism can’t be used. 

If you know more about this than I do, feel free.  Sometimes Works in Progress leaves out important points. 

Political Ads

Here in NH, the ads against both Pappas and Sununu for Senate are unfair and manipulative.  My method of spotting who is fighting fair to discern who is closest to the truth is breaking down this year. I have the inertia of liking Sununu a lot because he can do simple math and has been honorable, while disliking Pappas, who is a lightweight.  But that's the past, and the negative ads this time around don't have much between them.

AI and Homework

Another graph that doesn't quite means what it looks like.  The students who regularly used AI might be different than those who do the work more on their own. Put simply, they might not be as smart to begin with.

Appropriateness of a Gift

At Skara Brae there was a small wet, depressed area in the interior. Water collects there and people had thrown coins into it. There seems to be an internal sense that we have that when you go to an old place or a sacred place that some gift must be given. No one makes us do this, we just do. It is a gift to the ancestors or spirits of a place. It may be a propitiation, but I think it is just an instinct that seems appropriate to many of us.   Even saying it brings luck or grants a wish, as with a fountain is not all that different. I've never had the least interest in the custom, but in that setting and reading about ancestor worship and nature spirits all week I suddenly got it for the first time. I still didn't leave a coin,  but I had a nice conversation about it with some young men.

Orkney Scotch

 

If you look at the middle of the top section, you will see that it includes a scotch that is about 128 proof.  I am told that any strength over 90 has the alcohol interfering in the taste, but I only know what read in the papers. I have no expertise here. I liked the Deer Sound just fine and stuck with that.

I had a quick one at The Bothy, the pub on the back side of the hotel, and watched a man put a single drop of Grand Marnier into his single malt. It sounds like a good idea, but I don't keep that liqueur on hand, so I can't report on that for you.

Weather, Ocean, Wind

We debated whether to go out and back on the ferry at all, because it was raining and visibility was poor. But we did want to see a seastack, the Old Man of Hoy, so we hopped aboard. Everything cleared in ten minutes, which is typically quick for Orkney. It was 50-60 degrees 24/7 with occasional rain while we were there, always windy. The sea changed color twice more during our 1 hour trip.

This is Ward Hill. I wish I could capture the mood of this more dramatically, but it is my sons who are the photographers. We saw the seastack at a distance only. 

 

Southern Rock Early On

 I shrugged at the time, but came to like them in retrospect

 

Assistant Village Idiot Illustration

The point of being the Assistant Village Idiot is to learn to not make things overly complicated. I'm still working on that. 

 

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, MD out camping on holiday

"Watson, what do you see?"

"A thousand bright stars Holmes, more than I ever remember seeing."

"What do you conclude from that?"

Watson pauses doubtfully. "That we are but a small part of the universe.  It goes on at infinite distance while we on this small sphere are barely noticeable. It is humbling to think that all our wars, governments, literature and accomplishments have no meaning around any of those stars. Why? What do you conclude?"

"That someone has taken our tent." 

Tourists

A woman asking her husband at St. Magnus Cathedral (built in 1137)

"Do you know how old this is?" 

"About 5000 years ago...

Uh, maybe it was only 1000." 

 

Up the street at a restaurant, an expensively-dressed couple. He mentions Cambridge rather loudly.

"You have to have fish, because you have been on a long journey."

"But don't you think it has to do with the type of fish? You've said that one should have fish for the digestion after a journey, but I find that's only for Mediterranean fish." 

"That could be, they swim differently." 

 

 

The Bravest Man We Ever Knew

 Just up, by Madeleine Kearns at The Free Press: The Bravest Man We Ever Knew. Stunning.

Dovie described his body as “a straitjacket” even in the best of times, yet somehow amid the prison of his circumstances, he relished whatever simple pleasures broke through: a glass of iced tea or Kentucky bourbon, a butterfly landing close enough for him to take a picture. He would frequently text us photos he’d taken while out on strolls. “Exquisite weather today,” he’d say. “I got almost 12 hours of sleep in,” he once texted, after a long stretch of disrupted nights from pain: “Wonderfully rejuvenating.” He adored the many children in his life and would break into huge smiles when sharing videos and pictures of his nieces. His attitude was often like that of the Jewish writer Etty Hillesum, who, from the confines of her Nazi-occupied Dutch ghetto, once wrote: “The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. I believe in God and I believe in man, and I say so without embarrassment.” 

My Weight Loss Story

Even on Substack, that supposed last bastion of intellectualism, there is a genre of weight struggle reporting that is pure anecdote with forays into generalisations they believe are helpful scientific information.  These are always by women, but men figure prominently in the comments right out of the gate, telling their weight-loss story. If anything, the men are even more declarative that their experience is generalisable, implying you are just a shirker who doesn't really want to lose weight if you don't do as they did. I think there is plenty of room for everyone to cram their pre-existing sexual stereotypes into this data. You are all entirely correct, even when you contradict each other.

It may do some good for bonding and networking.  There is exchange of medical advice which is usually better than nothing but overlooks a great deal.

This one finds she loses weight every time she goes to Europe, which is of course absolute proof that European eating habits and patterns of exercise are better than ours. It must be the cheese.  Or the town centers. Or their laid back attitudes. Or less processing and more grocer's markets. Or the medical care!  They pay less attention/more attention to everyday complaints, which is the key. The very quickly, all the people who have never had any problem with weight and attribute that to their superior discipline and character (wo)mansplain that to everyone.

I learned long ago - as far back as 2025 - that actual research and evidence are unrecognised, and you are chided for not seeing that these people are just trying to help by sharing their personal experience. They sound exactly like the teachers who insisted that I could have better penmanship or better artistic presentation of my 6th-grade projects if I only cared. Or music/art/gym teachers, same, ignoring neurology. Just try this one weird trick. 

Tomb of the Eagles

There was a special showing of The Tomb of the Eagles as part of the Orkney Archaeology Conference we were attending.  We had to walk out on farm roads between the barley fields ripe for harvest, which was fun in itself.  It is on the southern coast of South Ronaldsay, looking across at the Scottish mainland. My wife went inside to see the chambered cairn.  It is good to have guides, because much of what they point out is not complicated, and you see it instantly when they put your attention on it.  The entrance to the cairn faces the water and is up on a hill. The natural features were enhanced to make it look more impressive when viewed from the sea. A good thing to notice, that they were not trying to hide this important place from enemies but displaying it to them as a sign of power and control over the area. The tombs of ancestors were an implied claim to the territory in perpetuity. 

Yet from other angles it presents differently, and the current thinking is that it was used for different purposes by different groups, possibly not even related. From the opposite side it looks like the far end of a ritual center where bones of the ancestors were brought. Even the name seems to come from a thousand years later, as the presumed totem animal eagles only arrive at a much later date.  There is also a Tomb of the Otters that may be contemporaneous. 

They were digging some test trenches off to the side, and the two archaeologists, plus a third one being quoted, agreed with some discussion that in the top picture, the upper find showed possible evidence of human enhancement, the other one showed no such signs, and the trench in the bottom photo showed definite signs of human enhancement of the natural features.  They even very nicely pointed out and explained why they thought so. I nodded thoughtfully.

 

This is your cue to nod thoughtfully as well, even stroking your chin if you choose.

The Dystopian Imagination

 Theodore Dalrymple reviews the 20thC dystopias and their comparisons to reality 25 years ago in City Journal. I remembered the essay, though forgetting it was his. I mentally added a few other dystopias to the discussion, including That Hideous Strength. Rob Henderson linked to this, for which I am grateful.

 The totalitarian world Orwell describes in 1984 is thankfully today more a historical curiosity than a serious threat, except in an Islamist version. Yet, many of Orwell's ideas, like those of Huxley, remain pertinent, even though the threat of Stalinism has passed, for Orwell warned us about undesirable trends that arose from the condition of modernity as much as from Stalinism. His fears arose not just from his intuitive grasp of Stalinist states and his knowledge of communist conduct during the Spanish Civil War but from his experiences with the BBC's bureaucracy during World War II, where he witnessed firsthand the potential of the modern mass media to mislead and manipulate.

Immigration in Order to Keep Things the Same

I had not looked at it this way, but Arcotherium over at Aporia points out that countries sometimes use immigration to avoid change and dynamism rather than create it. Industries don't have to modernise practices and equipment if they can import cheaper labor and keep doing it the old-fashioned way.  He mentions American agriculture, but there are worldwide examples and more industries in the US that evade change with immigration. He calls it Mortmain Migration: Immigration as an agent of stasis. 

But often the industry changes anyway, and we have a host of new immigrants who do not have other useful schools to adapt to American live, having grown up elsewhere.

 Rather than a rational system designed to favor the national interest or any other goal, Western immigration systems are accreted over time by blindly following the local incentive gradients that special interest lobbying creates. For such lobbying to matter, the special interests must have power and influence—which are the province of incumbents, not challengers. And it is declining incumbents (who have long since conquered their niche and ceased to innovate) that focus most organizational attention and resources on lobbying. Hence we should not be surprised to find that much Western immigration is designed to preserve declining incumbents.

The Bills

 

I have always loved the harmony in this one.

King Ludd

Something different from Scott Alexander, who traces an obscure Romano-British Celtic god to...

To half the mythology you've ever heard of, from Lovecraft to Harry Potter  to the fictitious leader of the Luddites.  And a special guest appearance.

In 1929, an archaeologist digging at the Temple of Nodens had some questions about the etymology of the god’s name, and asked Oxford to send a linguist. Oxford dispatched a young philology professor with an encyclopedic knowledge of European mythology, who spotted a connection that had evaded previous scholars: Nodens appeared to be the same figure as the Irish god-hero Nuada of the Silver Arm. Nuada was king of the Tuatha de Danaan, a race of immortals who sailed from the north on ships that were clouds and made war against the then-inhabitants of Ireland, the Fir Bolg. He fought bravely, wielding his all-powerful Sword of Light, but in the climax of the battle, the Fir Bolg champion cut off his right arm. This caused some temporary trouble (the laws of the time prevented a one-armed man from being king), but his people were skilled at magic and metalworking, so they made him a new arm of silver, hence his epithet. He ruled for some number of centuries, a golden age of crafting and wonder-working, until the Tuatha de Danaan were invaded in turn (this was a theme; our source for these stories is a medieval manuscript called The Book Of Invasions). The new invaders banished Nuada’s people to the hills and forests, where they became the sidhe aka fae aka fairies. 

White Liberals Don't Like White People

Presumably they like other liberal white people, but not whites in general. This is unprecedented, does not occur among other groups, and increases as leftism increases. Cremieux has an amazing set of graphs on this one. The data is almost too clean. Sometime between 2012-2016, white leftists decide they don't like (do they hate?) other white people, with a corresponding rise in how much they like everyone else.  We can explain disliking that so many other white people voted for Trump, but deciding that Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have suddenly improved does not have a clear explanation. In what way do they think that black woman 2020 is an upgrade over black woman 2000? Without knowing their motives clearly, it seems that hating badwhites has become their overriding motive. 

I would be very curious what the numbers are for Jews, who seem to have had an increasing split over the last decades. I have said, oversimplifying, that for many Jews liberalism has become their real religion, and the last two decades have not contradicted that. I do very much wonder if October 7 has created a shift in either direction.

Wordsum

Wordsum is about the shortest IQ test you can find.  It is approximate, but it holds up, even under scrutiny. 

The Wordsum test is highly g-loaded and is a suitable proxy for intelligence, even if it would be nice to have a broader, more reliable, and less range-restricted test score.

Cremieux Recueil tests Wordsum to illustrate this indirectly.  It's good to know, but I noticed what he uncovered in the previous reckoning about the tetriles (I thought it was deciles) of Wordsum scores and political affiliation. It shows one of those things you are not supposed to notice.

2015 Links

Coming Down the Home Stretch

Team Colors 

Gandalf Quote  I had this on my work bulletin board for years.  It is a comfort when the lack of lasting effect is common to one's job.

The Church of Frederickism 

Community Vs Communism with a thoughtful comment by Texan99

The demographics of suicide, with disturbing comments by clinicians. As the numbers for males over 45 are still high, their explanations haven't aged well.

This was fun to recall 

 

The Man Who Lost His Wife - Again

I do admire the humor of the Scots.  I mentioned to the woman covering one of the gift shops at a prehistoric site that my wife seemed to be no longer in evidence in either the shop or the exhibit.

"Are you trying to find her, then, or are you hoping to leave her here?"

"Well, I've always left with her eventually, but sometimes it takes considerable effort." 

"Perhaps some sort of tracking device would be helpful." 

Bringing Something For the Festival

Standing stones in Orkney do not all come from the same quarry, and they are not erected identically, even in a single circle. They were probably not even all erected at the same time. The Ness of Brodgar, the ritual, working, and living area between the two main sites shows that there were repeated festivals, with cattle being dominant in what was slaughtered and eaten. So it looks like various groups from around the island all brought something to the party, and likely competed over this, because it seems to be Best Stuff. 

It looks like each group brought a honking big stone once in the lengthy building period, and that was probably competitive as well. Quite the potluck.

To accomplish something this difficult takes a lot of people a lot of time, and they have to be spared from other work, like food and shelter. We used to think that this always meant that the leadership was highly organised.  All over Britain evidence is emerging that sometimes it was the people, in non-hierarchical fashion, who were organised. It's hard to say, obviously, but some impressive structures were put up by groups with no evidence of slavery or even much hierarchy.

Neoracists

John McWhorter is a favorite liberal of many conservatives because of articles like this. It's an excerpt from his new book.

 Many will see me as traitorous in writing this as a black person. They will not understand that I see myself as serving my race by writing it. One of the grimmest tragedies of how this perversion of sociopolitics makes us think (or, not think) is that it will bar more than a few black readers from understanding that I am calling for them to be treated with true dignity. However, they and everyone else should also realize: I know quite well that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when written by a black person, and consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write it.

Cf 1984 

Recent Links

 The Aztecs were even worse than you thought. Maybe I should just stay up on cultural stuff by reading the Psmiths.

The majority black accent in NYC was exactly the same as whites in the early 1800s.  John McWhorter with fascinating stuff, as usual. 

David Foster brings back the memory of Lewis Vs Haldane immediately postwar. Not only here, but in all the summaries of Lewis's thought by any opponent (I exempt Elizabeth Anscombe), whether direct or indirect, there is a whiff of assuming he must be a bit dim because he was a Christian. For this reason alone, they often misunderstand him in favor of thinking he believes something that is their stereotype of Christians. 

Infiltrating Conservatism  I hear both things, that these groups are rising in influence and power, and that they are bogeymen that the left holds up as propaganda.

Just bury your trash I believe aluminum cans are worth recycling, and corrugated cardboard breaks even.  But that is only what I heard over a decade ago. This article looks at some other comparisons.

Different Songs

 The retro songs you hear in the supermarket are not the same songs that were popular at the time. When "Amie" came out in 1972 it was barely noticed, and even when it was rereleased in 1975 only charted at number 20.  You'd think we sang it all day.  "Bohemian Rhapsody" was strong in the UK, but barely made the Top Ten in the US until the 90's when "Wayne's World" made it popular.  "Don't Stop (Thinkin' About Tomorrow)' peaked at 32 on the charts, but anything by Fleetwood Mac seems to carry now. 

 

What did we sing that is missing now? Here's the Top 100 for 1972  I certainly remember the top two, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," and "Alone Again," but I don't recall hearing them for a long time. And farther down the list are things I recognise instantly but had forgotten existed.

Real Lindsay Vs Symbolic Lindsay

The online arguing about Lyndsay Clancy occurs because we are discussing two separate people.  Groups pick the wrong poster child all the time, and may even prefer poor choices because it separates the temporary fans from the True Believers.  Anyone can agree with you when you're right! To find out who your real supporters are, you have to see who is still there when you are dead wrong.  Those are the people who support what you symbolise for them, without regard to your desert. George Floyd and Michael Brown were terrible choices to rally behind. Who would choose Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden as the best hills to die on? 

I do have a little to say about Real Lyndsay. That she showed organisation and planning is not an argument against her being mentally ill.  Ted Kaczynski was well-organised.   James Hodgkinson was well-organised.  The later one's symptoms develop, the more adult skill and planning is in place. I have known many organised psychotic people. Legal definitions of insanity differ among states, and that is going to matter when it comes time to go to court. Knowing the difference between right and wrong can be key, but so can having control over one's actions, or interpreting events accurately.  There is some sense in all of those ways of looking at things. I had a patient who believed the neighbors were killing babies in their basement, but also believed it was not his job to avenge them, so he picketed them instead. I have also had a patient who believed her family was in danger from demons but the family didn't believe her, so she set the house on fire to force them to leave, with the added benefit that the demons were now powerless as well. That Lyndsay Clancy thought this was her last chance to "save" her children sounds believable to me. I don't have the evidence the jury did, but I would tend to accept an insanity defense.

What I don't accept is the idea that she was under such terrible pressure because of being postpartum and not getting enough support that this caused her mental illness and made her snap. Psychosis doesn't work like that. It is not environmental, it is biological. The only environmental situation which may be causal is a difficult pregnancy - which is in itself pretty biological. Lack of support has not been shown to increase the frequency. Pre-existing or some previous psychiatric conditions increase the risk, but only bipolar disorder and schizophrenia have been strongly shown to. Not even postpartum depression, anxiety, or drug abuse looks at present to be implicated. I have only seen about a dozen cases, and most of them had previous bipolar disorder. The symptoms can even start in pregnancy, before the birth. Looking it up, I read that symptoms can start months after delivery, but I had never seen nor heard of that.

I wouldn't go out on a limb and say that postpartum depression is completely unrelated, but it might be, and tying the two together is...well, we're about to see.

Symbolic Lyndsay Clancy is an entirely different person, just as Symbolic Trayvon Martin and Symbolic Luigi Mangione are. They look the same in photos, so you'd swear they were the same, but they may not even be related. SymLinds is built from a need for a poster child. As is usual, groups do not pick their best poster child, they may even prefer bad ones - or maybe once you step outside the bounds of what is observable reasonable and true, anything can happen.  Separate discussion, though an interesting one. SymLynds is assembled from the following ideas.

A woman's life is hard.

Motherhood is even harder.

Pregnancy and delivery are harder still, and have both hormonally and environmentally- influenced risks.

Other people do not fully understand how hard it is, especially men and women who have not had children. But even women who have had children can be dismissive and unsupportive.

Additionally, some women feel unsupported even when their support is good, but telling a woman that makes it worse. 

Some women develop Postpartum Depression. It is even worse than a typical stress response to a hard situation. It may not be much related to support at all, but it just feels like it should be, because it is very like a typical stress reaction, only stronger. 

Women can feel sad, inadequate, guilty, and isolated. Those with PPD feel these even more strongly.

People's responses to this can be very unhelpful: dismissive, falsely cheerful, withdrawing. 

Under such circumstances, people can overidentify with anyone whose situation seems similar. Once identification occurs, it is like baby ducks imprinting on a moving figure as mommy, or a prince under a spell falling in love with the first woman he sees. The actual facts of their situation have little to do with it, and this can happen very quickly. The figure imprinted on then becomes idealised, fed by the needs of the duck or the prince.

SymLynds is entirely a projection of the desires of her fans.  This is why no facts matter. 

Robert Reich and Poverty

Robert Reich posts something stupid

 

And Richard Fulmer, the Caveman Economist, corrects him. 

...Reich implies that the "right" people (that is, people like Reich) can design a better society. But complex societies aren’t sketched out on blueprints; they evolve from the interactions of millions of people with local knowledge that’s unavailable even to Mr. Reich. 

Reich resents no longer being in power. 

Papua New Guinea

 Why I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea over at Not not Talmud. This is not an expert come to explain PNG to us, but a guy who was just curious, did some research, and passes it along. The way life should be, I think.

I knew the PNG Highlands were isolated and discovered late, but not that isolated, and that late.

This all changed shortly after Australians found gold in New Guinea in 1926 and started mining the surrounding territory. Looking for more gold, an intrepid Australian named Mick Leahy decided to venture as far inland as he could — making progress up the never before penetrated mountains.

To cut the story very short, in 1930 Leahy accidentally stumbled into the eastern edge of the highlands, only to find that the highlands were not empty mountains, but rather lush green valleys with no malaria and with roughly a million people living in them.

Sweet Poison

The scripture lesson at St Magnus was about the wicked servant who was forgiven an enormous sum by his master, but refused to forgive a trifling sum for a fellow servant. The sermon was a very simple one about forgiveness, not much more than saying Remember, it is important that we do this.  There was the reminder that this is simply good for us, and good for the other person.

I find these sermons among the most powerful. With a reminder, I preach it to myself rather than being told.

Forgiveness always has an element of puzzle for me, because I find some forgiving quite easy and some inexplicably hard. Trespasses against that others hang on to I let go with a shrug, while small things that seem more shrug-worthy stay for  me forever. I have spent far too much time analysing the difference, hoping to find the key. But I have also learned that insight is seldom much of an aid to doing the right thing. It keeps promising to provide the answer and the escape, but when the time comes, we still cannot forgive. 

I have read that we sometimes will not forgive because we don't want to let go of the person. Our resentment, however bitter, is our last tie with them, especially if they are dead or distant. Better to keep the large chunk in the bottom of the cup, a sweet poison that flavors everything that gets poured into it.  Is it in fact, sweet? Wouldn't it be bitter, an acquired taste like a strong liquor, that we learn to make sweet via our addiction? 

If we were to forgive and swallow it all, trusting God for the digestion, we would no longer be able to sip on it. 

I don't think it is the person so much as the chance for vindication that we will not fully swallow and just have done with.  When we resist giving up our resentment, we get to hang on to the fantasy that the offender will see the error of his ways, have the scales fall from his eyes, and apologise. What we resent is that they have likely forgotten about us and never think of us at all. There will be no similar situation in their own lives that causes them to understand how it feels; there will be no letter discovered by a relative that your parents were actually proud of you; there will be no chance meeting where it is revealed that you were right all along. Such things do happen! We give up much of our lives hoping for them.

The irony is that whether we forgive has no effect on whether the vindicating event happens. The letter could still come to light, the book that they read could still convict them. We want to keep it alive, even at the cost of bitterness, rather than let it fall into the abyss where no one remembers. It seems we cannot throw some things away, we can only swallow them and trust.

Orkney Farmer

Lots of the archaeological sites in Orkney are not merely newly excavated, once funding came through for one of hundreds of possible sites. They are new discovered.  I wondered why the Ness of Brodgar was unfamiliar to me, when I had known about the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar, which stand on either side of it, for so long. It was only discovered in 2003, when a farmer was plowing and a big smooth stone with grooves and notches in it was unearthed.  Geophysics revealed it might be a very big deal, and excavations were started the next year, finished in 2024.  Smaller excavations are going on now.

It is probably more important than the more famous standing stones that we've known about for centuries. Afarmer digging flagstones found the Tomb of the Eagles in 1958 and did some desultory and unprofessional excavation, but filled it back in.  More extensive excavation started in 1976 - after I had finished all my anthro courses. The little brochures keep telling you that such-and-such was only discovered in 1994, or first excavated in 2006.

The joke is ORKNEY FARMER PLOWS FIELD, FINDS NOTHING. ARCHAEOLOGISTS BAFFLED. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

John Donne 

It is a precursor to today's more universalist sentiments, that all mankind is One, but that is stretching where he was starting from. Poets do that, I guess, reaching a bit farther than they even know themselves sometimes. Donne was raised in the ordering of society and Great Chain of Being, closer to feudalism than to Unitarian Universalists. We each had our ordained place in society, and the pieces fit together, so that the loss of any piece was felt throughout the whole. It didn't quite mean they were equal, however. 

That came later, and Donne likely helped drive it. 

Oops, forgot the second part. People were increasingly seeing themselves as individuals rather than as a part of a whole by the 1600s, a trend that began as early as the 1200s and continues to this day. Donne was speaking against that, cautioning people that they were not thoroughly independent, but interdependent.  But his interdependence was more hierarchical than we would be comfortable with today.

Last Button

I wear a gray wool sport coat with elbow patches when I travel, because it has pockets and even when shabby looks respectable - plus it keeps out the chill and rain. I have gotten my money's worth. In Ireland I bought a wool vest to go with it, but don't have much opportunity to wear that and worry I won't get my money's worth.  I have decided to just wear it more often, and suddenly wondered "Is it also proper to leave the bottom button of a vest unbuttoned? I think so, but I don't know."

Then it occurred to me that I was taught to leave the bottom button of a suitcoat unbuttoned 65 years ago, and have long since forgotten who taught me that.  Is it even true?  Was that only the fashion around 1960 and I just never stopped? Search engines and AI are great for this kind of question. I am pleased to report that my instinct was right and the gentleman does leave the bottom button unbuttoned, both vest and coat.  

Last Seasons and Retirement

Athletes should have the choice without other people popping off and saying "he should go out in a high note , " or "he's ruining his legacy by playing when he is just a shell of himself."
Dude, it's his choice. He's earned it. If he wants to squeeze the last drop of talent out of himself because he just loves it, that's admirable. 

We don't say that about other fields. "He's a great restaurant owner, but he should retire. I want to remember him in his prime." "He's one of the great plumbers of all time.  He should be content with that and not spoil it."

I don't know why we even say it. Well, yes I do.  It's because a sports career is part of our lives, too, so we feel we should have some say over it. We don't.

Better Folk Songs

I asked Alexa to play "Wild Mountain Thyme," and she chose a version by the Chieftains, an Irish group. She went on to play "similar" music, and she is told to do. The next six songs were all Irish folk songs, not Scottish. If you ask for Scottish music, you get bagpipes, mostly marches. It is curious now that the Scots and the Irish play up their cultural similarity now - except in Northern Ireland. 

Scottish folk music has some rebellious tunes, about being oppressed by the English and fighting them. But the Irish simply have many more, in and amongst the songs about "The girl I left behind" and "Isn't Ireland a beautiful place." The Irish also have songs about being oppressed by the Scots and fighting them, right there at home. Such songs appeal to leftists, such as the Foggy Foggy Dew. Whether they are fighting the English or the Scots-Irish is conveniently flexible. 

The Irish have lots of these songs and get much more sympathy worldwide than the Northern Ireland Protestants.  

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.  

GK Chesterton "The Ballad of the White Horse"

If the Batistas had great songs in Cuba, they never made it to the US.  Pete Seeger and other folkies picked up Guantanamera and made it a Castro song masquerading as a peace song.

Seeger was especially good at transforming folk songs into political statements. All parties in Europe tried to do that, but the communists tended to be better at it, and in the Anglosphere it was no contest. I link to Tom Lehrer's Folk Song Army from time to time, which makes fun of the shallow but noisy support for peace and justice, but the left just had better political songs throughout the 60s, and more of them. Draft Sighing for peace is a good, reliable gig. 

English miners had Blackleg Miner, The Bells of Rhymney, and a dozen other songs. Mine owners don't write songs, I guess. Where would they play them?  At the local pub?

 

The Gasp

The Gasp by Michael Brown, about a very moving aftermath to 9/11, sorting through the debris of the Twin Towers, which included fragments of human remains. I had never heard this story, and it rather stunned me, though of course it all makes sense.

Surfeit of Creativity

With David Foster refreshing his Chicago Boyz post on That Hideous Strength over on Substack, I thought I would revive mine as well. Reposted from 2020. I suppose I should put this on my own Substack account as well. I'm not sure I want to get into cross-posting everything.

I suppose I should include the discussion of Jane Studdock and Sexism as well. 

********** 

Diana Glyer, author of Bandersnatch, was asked on the Babylon Bee podcast what she thought was up with That Hideous Strength, the third and last book of CS Lewis's "Ransom" trilogy. Both Glyer and the interviewers were clearly less fond of the book than they are of much else of Lewis's fiction. This is not uncommon. Readers will shrug off Till We Have Faces (which Lewis regarded as his best work) as something they just didn't quite get or warm up to, or will be displeased that Aslan is too obviously* allegorical in Narnia, but I think only THS provokes that much active dislike. Glyer, whose book I liked very much and found her quite informative during the interview, attributes the weakness to an excess of creativity.  She notes that there are too many plots, all running into each other. I count seven: Merlin and Albion/deep England; two separate Studdock adventures plus enough attention to their marriage to perhaps be stretched into a very different book of its own; the Oyarsa and planetary conflict; the national political conflict around the N.I.C.E; and the local one at the college. Most if not all of them could be worked into a book on its own.  Arthurian fantasy, science fiction, speculative political along the lines of Brave New World, something like an early genre romance...Yes, there is just too much going on here. It's out of control.  Because there are brilliant observations about each of these topics - I will never view Merlin quite the same way again, for example - Lewis fans, including me, treasure the book.  But Glyer is right.  It's not a good book in the sense of being well-written.  Novels are not expected to adhere to Aristotle's unities, but since those were recognised we do tend to expect a work to keep heading in the same direction without too much distraction.  Even Tolkien's LOTR has only three interwoven plots, Frodo's, Aragorn's and Gandalf's.

Once I noticed this, I saw that it is just everywhere in Lewis.  He just overflows with creativity, usually kept under enough control to be fascinating without being overwhelming. Tolkien disliked The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe from the first few pages, not because Aslan is too clearly allegorical - the lion does not show up until much later in the book - but because you can't have a Greek faun in a Northern adventure that includes endless winter and Fenris Ulf.  That the faun carries an anachronistic umbrella (though Hobbits have them also, Tollers, evidence for my observation about your own time periods) and had a shelf of books with a wink to modern humor bothered him right out of the gate. Tolkien has a point.  Throughout the Chronicles of Narnia Lewis has both Greek and Northern myths and monsters. Plus Father Christmas, and beast fable... Arabian, Celtic, and Roman mythologies.  The visits to many places and their marvelous tales was common in  both classical and medieval works, but The Voyage of the Dawn Treader alone has island after island, each of which might be an adult novella. Then, woven throughout, is the Biblical mythos, creeping in even though Narnia is not the same world as ours. All this in a series of short works for children, grades 5-12. There is just too much going on. Apollonius of Tyre, Ariosto, The Faerie Queen, and Don Quixote have varied adventures, yet they are internally similar.  Even The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, designed to be many stories, have less variety because of their interconnection.

There is just too much going on.

The first scenes of The Great Divorce could have themselves been made into a play by Sartre, Beckett, Artaud, or Camus, and Lewis is just getting started. He plays before us a series of scenes, each developed intellectually if not always dramatically. They strut and fret their few pages upon the stage and are no more, making way for another crucial debate ending in heaven or hell.  The Screwtape Letters does seem to be more tightly designed.  By following Pilgrim's Progress, Lewis's book about philosophies, The Pilgrim's Regress gets fenced in somewhat.  But Lewis's characters in that book are not simple concepts like Truth,  but large unwieldy concepts like Freudianism, Hegelianism, and Idealism. 

He covers most of apologetics in Mere Christianity, a short book. The Abolition of Man condenses the great trends of mid-century Western thought in a few pages and relates it back to an idea of a similarity of moral thought in all developed religions of human history. That it hangs together at all is remarkable. 

Unique Invitation and an Official Document

We had our mail held while we were traveling, and when I picked it up I found that I had a Unique Invitation from the Republican National Committee. It didn't seem to be handwritten, or even hand-addressed, though.  It looked suspiciously like a broadside mailing. They must have a different understanding of the word unique than I do. 

There was also an Official Document ("Do Not Destroy") that contained a poll because they wanted my opinion, such as whether I wanted the Democrats to keep forcing their woke agenda on the American people. Well gollee gee, I'd better let Trump know that I don't want that pretty darn quick, don't you think? The election is right around the corner, I don't want them to be uncertain down there what David Neat Wyman thinks.  Yes, they even found out my middle name, which shows how well they know me, right?

I Am Changing My Name to Chrysler

That liberals have better folk songs will come up again soon. I am going to have a stab at understanding why that is. I will probably be wrong.

Orkney and Norway

I had heard, and mentioned it here, that Orkney still felt some ties to Norway, which it was part of from about 1000-1500 AD. Perhaps because it had previously been little-known to me, I regarded it as mostly a nostalgic curiosity, not really serious. Isn't it quaint that Norway sends Prince Haakon and Princess Mette-Marit over every year to lay flowers on graves and have a state dinner? It seems rather like Greek-American or France-Quebec celebrations.

I was surprised at how strong the attachment still is.  For openers, there's this, the Orkney flag

 Which looks a lot like this, the Norwegian flag

Orkney celebrates Syttenede Mai, Norwegian Constitution Day, and St Lucy's day in December, one of the few places outside of Norway to do so. The cathedral in Kirkwall, though it is now Church of Scotland, was dedicated to St. Magnus in 1137 and still carries that name. 

Place names in Britain have a Scandinavian influence, stronger the further north one goes, but in Orkney it is overwhelming. Orkney itself comes from the Viking name for the place, Orkneyjar. The -ay suffix means "island," which Orkney has in abundance; -holm is "little island," and they've got plenty of those as well. -ness is a headland, sticking out into a bay; -bister means farm or dwelling place, and -by means settlement, all from Old Norse.  If you look at the map you'll see that pretty much covers the territory. The runic inscriptions are not always affectations for tourists - some of the stones in use for centuries still have them. It's all Norski names jumping out at you, everywhere you go.

Boys are still named Magnus, Thorfinn, and Erland; girls are named Thora, Freya, and Ingrid.  

Even thought the Orcadians drink scotch and have their own local brands, as everywhere in Scotland does, the names are Norse: Fara, Scapa, A.D. Rattray.  Even Deer Sound comes from the Deerness region, originally Old Norse Dyrnes, not from the British version. Highland Park scotch, alas, the gem of the islands and a cult favorite, does have an obviously English name. 

Return

I am back safely, having seen many rocks and having them explained to me. I also have seen many sheep, who need  little explanation. I have sent myself notes which will be turned into posts. For example "sweet poison" will be about finding it difficult to forgive, and "bully beef wrought iron" is about the Italian Chapel.  "Orkney Farmer" is tagged to go into this year's Christmas letter.

But it will take a while. 

Tourist Video

I figured I should do at least one.  I should be getting home again about now. We will only be on the Mainland and South Ronaldsay.  We may take a ferry out to see the Old Man of Hoy and the birds there.

 

Orkney Joining Norway

 The idea was if there was going to be an independent Scotland, Orkney might prefer to become part of Norway instead.  The did used to be part of it, and even spoke a Scandinavian dialect called Norn, which went extinct around 1700.  Orkney had a referendum a few years ago about rejoining Norway after 300 years.

They thought it would be a more efficient government, and no one south of Aberdeen seems to pay them much attention anyway.  Plus, they want the ferries to run again.