The Sweet

My older Romanian son used to have a T-shirt that read "I'm Big In Europe." That seems to have been true of The Sweet, previously The Sweetshop, and later just Sweet. I vaguely recalled this song from the radio but dismissed it as bubblegum.  I can't recall knowing anyone who had any of their records or ever seeing a picture of them. It's all rather horrifying, isn't it?

 

Yet they somehow sold 35M albums worldwide. Somebody somewhere must have liked them a whole lot. Remember we all thought that Europe was much more sophisticated than us in those days.

καθαίρω

Kathairo, to purge or cleanse.

What if Purgatory is hard work but deeply satisfying?

What if it is painful hard work but even more deeply satisfying?

I know the medieval descriptions were all of fire and torment, but everyone, Christian or not, seemed to talk a lot about torment anyway, both in this life and the next. The best you could hope for, it seemed was to be forgotten and left alone. 

If there is work to be done in Heaven, designed for our pleasure in being useful, the boundary between them... well, it would just be my speculation over another's. 

Urban Graveyards, Isolated Populations

Something long believed by anthropologists and prehistorians is receiving support from ancient DNA data. Cities were population sinks, where people traveled or even moved to make money but died in higher numbers. They were places of cultural life but physical death. There was art, trade, wealth, and mixing of peoples, but also disease (both fatal and merely debilitating), less fertility, and crime. The provinces were culturally conservative, preserving the old ways and refusing to adopt the new religions and methods, having more children, eating better, and being exposed to fewer diseases.

We see that even now, even in technologically advanced societies. There is a difference in the last century in Western society because medical care is better.  We have antibiotics.  We know about quarantining, vaccination, germ theory, and sanitation. This changes the balance of rural versus urban health, as rural people have more contact with animals and urban people have more hospitals and clinics. But as we saw during the Industrial Revolution and then, the old rules of exposure to more chemicals, filth, and even just plain people still apply.  What that means for the future as medical care improves I don't know. But it gives us an idea of what conditions must have been like in Dickens' London and during the plagues, fires, and sieges. 

We now see that same pattern in ancient and prehistoric DNA. The cities left little genetic trace, while there was continuity in the remote areas. However, the beliefs and culture of the urban areas grew and spread, while those in the hinterlands gradually disappeared. It has been an odd trade-off for humans.

Archaeologists like to study cities.  Geneticists now study isolated populations. 

I mentioned that Razib had the Greek geneticist Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou on for an interview. His lab studies (among other things) isolated populations. On this podcast he talked about the Maniots and the Albanians, two groups with considerable continuity. Both are mountainous and inaccessible, and so mixed with other peoples very little.  There are such peoples all over the world, on islands, in mountainous areas, and deep in Amazonia. It is less common in the Mediterranean because trade, travel, and empires. But both groups have uniparental ancestries, both y-chromosome and mtDNA, that go back more centuries than their neighbors. Albania is only about 15% Slav and 15% Roman, the rest being ancient Balkan.  In the north the number is even higher. 

A very interesting tangent on Maniot ancestery:

"And this lineage we called the Marniot Modal Lineage because it hasn't been found outside Mani. Actually the only few instances where it has been found outside Marni these people have very large autosomal sectors, so they definitely descend their recent migrants from Mani. And by the way, just as a little parenthesis, in our study, we've found only a single example in the rest of the world. This is a real person in the world that has this deep Maniot modal lineage but doesn't have any autosomal heritage from Mani. And this person has now tested and is from an indigenous community in Latin America. And guess what? We did find that they do descend from Mani and we know the exact village and the exact clan. And it's going to be the subject of another paper because the journey of this person's ancestors is absolutely fascinating."(Italics mine.  Wild. I'm looking forward to learning what the story behind it is. It's the sort of impossibility found only in speculative fiction.)

Uniparental lineages sometimes have such oddities. There is a a rare but constant presence of a Chinese mtDNA line in Ashkenazi Jews - technically before there were Ashkenazi Jews. The joke is it explains the fondness for Chinese food among NY Jews.  I have an oddity myself, and am getting a new DNA sample done that focuses on my maternal lineage, because my U3 shouldn't be in Sweden. We'll see. 

When there is a strong founder effect it comes from a severe reduction in population. This might mean a small population migrating to a new area, or it might mean disease, famine, or warfare. Clan-based societies often exhibit these effects, and both of these groups are still clan-based, though this diminished in the 1900s.  Many of the clans have founder stories, of a shipwreck from Sicily or a small migration from Cyprus. The DNA reveals that the clan stories that people told about themselves were not true. But the kinship networks turned out to be remarkably accurate. 

So for example, a clan might claim a founder from 600 years ago with the particular story attached about where he came from. Testing the people who claim that clan descent in the various villages revealed that they are indeed all related and descended from someone in the 15th century. But there's no indication that that founder came from anywhere outside the province. This seems to accord with how human beings look at themselves, and that we need a story and we pick - or make up - a story that we like, and stick to it. But we actually are pretty good at keeping track of who our important relatives are even when the official records are lost. Clan identification is pretty accurate, despite everything else we lie about. Heck, I went to college at 18 and tried to reinvent myself.  Mostly burying some things and highlighting others, but some outright lies.  I'm not throwing any stones here. 

Some origin stories turn out to be amazingly true, even across centuries. We love those, and start to believe that most of them are based on a kernel of truth, but that's not quite what is showing out. Still, it's remarkable that it happens at all - rumors of a previous people who lived on the land who came from across the sea, or stories of long migrations from the East. BTW according to Davranoglou, the least-accurate origin stories in the Balkans come from the Serbs. Everyone is angry at the DNA researchers for exploding their myths, but the Serbs are sending death threats. 

Someone must have done the Scottish clans. I don't know the results. Mine were Wallaces, which was likely a favorite name to steal if you had to get out of town fast and start somewhere else, so I'm not confident of written records.  DNA may mislead, but it doesn't lie, though. 

250th

For the Bicentennial, I moved from Colonial Williamsburg to Sudbury, MA, Zip Code 01776, just south of Lexington and Concord. Frying pan. Fire. 

It's calmer this time. It's not following me everywhere.

Bad Things Come In Threes

So the old superstition goes.  Personally, I don't relax a bit after the third one.  

Shakespeare said it better.:  Claudius, in "Hamlet." When sorrows come they come not single spies, But as battalions.

Survey Suspicion

I never fill out surveys from medical practices asking me how they did.  I know that's part of how their economy works, but having been subject to them when I worked in a hospital, I concluded that they ask the wrong questions. They are geared to find out what box-checking the little guys did, not evaluate how well the whole system is working.  "Were you greeted when you came in?" rather than "How did the telephone tree work out for you?"

It may not be that way anymore.  My information is 10-20 years old now.  What's the word on the street for how surveys are used now? 

Take The A-Train

It was written for Duke Ellington and became his signature piece. But lots of other jazz musicians took a swing at it and I read that many consider Brubeck's version the best.

 

And Another One Bites The Dust

 James and his wife now have a substack.  I have one also, but never write anything on it. 

Is It A Premature Peace?

I do not pretend to know diplomacy and strategy, whether short or long term.  

I am seeing foreign opponents of Iran's IRG, and Hamas/Hezbollah claiming that Iran is not defeated enough and giving up enough.  I have been worried all along that we would have our usual shockingly complete opening victory but then pissing it away. It's an oversimplified and likely shallow view, I know.  Yet I worry still. Americans win and then get tired and move on to other things, and Trump has been quintessentially American in that way on other issues.

On the brighter side, I am also reading that despite the expenditure of weapons, our war with Iran has been a major setback for China's interest in Taiwan, leveraging India, controlling the polar regions, and influencing Latin America.  It has been a boon for them in terms of Russia, but at Russia's expense more than ours.  Africa a wash. I wish I knew more than bumper stickers about all this.

The Palestinian Substitute Child

I have a dislike for people explaining the behavior of women without children as somehow tied to that. I grant that instincts are powerful in all of us and there may be something to it, but it's too pat, too one-size-fits-all for my taste. Thus I was not initially sympathetic to Daniel Klein's explanation of the British left's intellectually impossible attachment to the Palestinian cause and almost stopped reading after a few paragraphs. Britain and the Palestinian Word-Symbol. But I stuck with it and some pieces did seem to fit. 

Persistently tracked to their origins, all the frothy debates surrounding Palestine devolve on this point. Why the woundedness? Why the empathetic overdrive in a single direction? The Palestine word-symbol represents collective humanity - humanity as Christ-like victim of the Jews’ unbearably disturbing presence: the mental presence of Jewish ideas that draw humanity away from innocence and instinct and animal-nature, and into the burdensome world of responsibility, moral choice and honesty before our Creator.

St. Greta makes an appearance.  When he gets to the men who are as deeply enamored with that cause he locates a separate instinct there, also plausible.  He may have overshot and told a just-so story in both cases, but I think it is worth a look. 

 

US Men's National Team

I get it that you almost have to do something flag-related for the World Cup and the 250th, but I'm not sure they got quite the look they wanted for the Stadium Home jerseys. This is major star Christian Pulisic, BTW

 At first glance I thought of gondoliers.  Put a straw boater with a long ribbon on that and give him a pole.

Christian Choice

The Atlantic does sometimes have fits of evenhandedness, but they are are a generally reliable Clinton-Gore liberal source. Thus, when they are writing about matters of faith, it is nearly always from a "what's a good liberal to do" POV. They are fine with hatred of conservatives, but say it nicely. Use your words, Trevor. No rage, please, that's not us.  It's okay to write about why other leftists are enraged and how you understand it, and how the real problem is conservatives complaining about liberal rage, but with practice you will learn that sneering and sarcasm are much more effective in persuading the people we care about.

So it's no surprise what American Christians Have A Choice is about. Peter Wehner is not a terrible guy or a milquetoast Christian. He thinks Trump is terrible but went third-party rather than vote for Hillary.  (I don't know what he did last time.) But notice how the Atlantic picks and chooses what they will publish of his.  He is useful to them because of what he publishes in other places, giving them street cred.  These are subtle games in publishing, done by professionals who know how to place ideas artfully, like museum curators.  If you are interested in the whole article rather than just this intro, the Atlantic is using this one as a Facebook ad at present, so you can click through from there. Maybe. I did, anyone. 

But the subheading gives it away: The faithful can still repair the damage they have wrought. I don't know what Wehner wrote under previous administrations.  He might well have written about what damage the faithful had wrought then as well.  But the Atlantic didn't. Carter and Mondale were not a crisis for American Christians, Reagan was.  Bill Clinton was somehow never a spiritual crisis for the Church.  After all, when he was caught in sin he got Tony Campolo to meet with him and declare what a changed man he was. And then he went multiple times to Epstein Island, and Epstein was a big Hillary contributor. But no crisis.

Bush 43 was a crisis to them, but not UCC Obama and his bigoted hate-filled pastor. Nor was Obama's Kwisatz Haderach persona, both Christian and Muslim (and Hindu - remember the Urdu poetry? But pointedly not Jewish.  Never Jewish), socialist and capitalist, elite and common man, traditionalist and radical...you get the idea. Biden's Catholic past troubled by no actual Catholicism was not a crisis, not even for Catholics, apparently.  McCain was only a spiritual problem while he was running against Obama, which was a crisis for evangelicals, remember? To refresh your memory, it was only a crisis in the other direction, as evangelicals wondered whether he was even worth the candle. 

So I don't object to Trump being considered a Christian crisis, I really don't. Even when I defend him I worry that he might be William Jennings Bryan or something. Yet I resent that nothing from the left on the national stage is considered a spiritual crisis in legacy media.  Look at the list of current prominent liberals and ask how they are not a crisis for Christians? The liberals do have some who are not a crisis. Fully granted. But so what? I'm not even counting Graham Platner's behavior, because he is not making his Christian calling and moral standing an issue beyond I'm just a regular Joe who thinks billionaires are evil an issue.  Oh wait, I take that back.  He also hates Jews.  That used to count for something. I am not even counting the corruption against "Thous shalt not steal*" nor lying against False Witness. I am only looking at the Rings of Power who are gathering lesser powers unto them and wondering why the Atlantic Christians only care about the dwarven rings, and not the Elvish or Mortal Men rings. 

*"Thou shall not kidnap" is almost a better translation, and is at least a serious undertone in that commandment.

Closer to the Heart

My brother and BS King's husband were discussing Rush's current tour this afternoon. I knew them mostly by name, because I dropped out of listenig to popular music after graduating in 1975.  At first they sounded just not my sort of music, but afterlistening to a few I decided there is a lot of Steeleye Span in them.

 Were any of you fans?

When Did Modern English End?

 Colin Gurrie's actual framing was When Will Modern English End, but as he places it between 1900 and 1950 I changed it. We will have to find a new name for what we are speaking now, and I regret to say that Postmodern English does in fact describe what we have become.  There is no longer a single center or even two competing centers for English now, there are many Englishes. Pluricentrality is the term Gurrie uses. The other divisions of English have been because of historical events, the Norman Conquest and Caxton's printing press, and such are found for the first half of the 1900s as well. There were two world wars , which put English speakers in much greater contact with not only English in other countries, but the dialects within their own countries. There was a steady increase in oral communication at a distance: radio, telephone, movies, TV. This increased the colloquiality of English (and all languages, but they can make their own division decisions), the decreasing distance between written and spoken language. 

Elite Gatekeepers

Dan Williams at Conspicuous Cognition wrote Let's Not Bring Back the Gatekeepers over half a year ago, but I missed it.

 Put simply: Once established institutions lost the privilege to control the public conversation, they acquired an obligation to participate within it, which, so far, they have mostly failed to do.

It's a pretty good understanding of anti-elite sentiment from someone who only partly shares it. 

Clearing Out the Stragglers

People behave differently when they believe a task is nearly completed. We give one final push, one final try to get everything over the finish line. If it looks like its all over but the mopping up, we might relax a bit and make sure all is correct, no sloppiness, everything tied up in a bow.  But if we believe it might all slip away if we don't capitalise on this chance, we get a little crazy. We take risks, we pare everything down to essentials.  Get all the kids to high ground, even if some knees are skinned and tears shed in the process. Push through blizzard that last half hour, even when visibility is ridiculously bad.

If we are tired and have invested a lot of effort on this try we could even get a lot crazy. We play rough, snap at the others, refuse to listen. This where the idea that we will not rise to the occasion, we will revert to the level of our training comes from. We will be temporarily braver, but our independent judgment will be more random. 

This is part of the ongoing discussion about gun control. You will see statistics posted that Europe - by which they mean Western Europe - has far fewer gun deaths than the US, and also has stricter gun laws and less gun ownership. It is hoped that you will conclude without questioning that the latter has caused the former. In Europe, it didn't, it was the reverse. Violent crime had already diminished over the centuries, as Steven Pinker documents in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Access to "firearms," including bows and crossbows had been steadily restricted to property owners.  This reversed some as gradually less property was required for permission in the 17-1800s, but firing anything in an urban area was likely to be trouble. Only a Lord could do so. After the English Civil War there was real movement to keep the poor from having many weapons. Insurrection was seen as a problem, but so was poaching on the squire's land.

Notice the cultural distinction between hunting for food and hunting for sport, even way back when. You will see this again. 

Violent crime continued to go down, but in the 20s and 30s, because of the Bolshevik Revolution and the wide circulation of firearms after WWI, Europe got quite spooked about the poor owning guns, even though there was no crime increase generally. There were, however, separatist movements everywhere. Governments did not want them to have guns. 

After WWII Europeans moved to more clearly defined ethnic concentrations.  Germans went back to Germany, Slavs went home, minorities staked out concentrated areas. Jews were mostly gone. So within borders, violence went down even further. People told themselves they were sick of war, and guns, and violence - and that was not untrue.  Yet it obscured the fact that groups had huddled together more. Separatists wanted their own boundaries as well. There was a fondness for symbolic solutions, as there usually is. The UN would finally rid us of war.  Though mass shootings were rarer than in the 20s and 30s, each one shook a nation that now had better communication. The urge to clear out the stragglers by making guns ever-harder to acquire happened in nation after nation. 

As city people moved to suburbs, and rural people moved to cities, hunting for food became less and less common. Only the very poor in isolated areas had to do it, and it became more unfashionable, something that only older, uneducated people did.  The rich who shot wildfowl for sport became unfashionable for opposite reasons, and their shooting estates were resented. 

Thus the only people to want guns were the toffs, the ignorant poor, and the violent separatists. Criminals went to other weapons, mostly knives, from Norway to Italy.  Time to clear out the stragglers, and if we get a little crazy getting over that final hump, so be it. Okay, a lot crazy.  We're so close, mate. 

Yet notice that "crime" in the usual sense was almost none of the problem. That was the excuse. Changing the culture, punishing the unfashionable, hoping to contain the separatists were the real motives. OTOH Americans became rich more quickly, and upward-mobility fashionableness in the US and Canada was accelerated. 

In North America hunting for food versus sport was much less clear. More people hunted for food they needed, and even now hunt for food that they use. As a result, more of the population had parents or grandparents who hunted and remain sympathetic to the idea even if they don't hunt themselves. (Poor people still fished for dinner in the 1960s and still enjoy it even now. Trapping and harvesting are less common in all regions.)  But there are cultural parallels in the growing unfashionableness - either the wealthy with private preserves (there is a large one even in NH) or the less-educated rural folk. You don't want to be like them, ooh, ick. An argument still made frequently is that it is "gun culture" that is the problem in America. But gun culture has very low crime rates. Drug culture, territory culture, and revenge culture have high crime rates. 

Guys love to talk about gear, whatever gear they are using: tools, camping, fishing, woodworking, and guns are no exception.  Gun guys love talking about guns. To those overhearing who have convinced themselves that gun culture is what is responsible for school shootings, it seems frightening. My brother has repeatedly said after any shooting "I don't even want to live in a society where someone would want to have that many guns." When the incident is arson, or a bombing, or someone driving a van into a crowd he finds some other way to blame right-wingers.  But the main danger you have from gun guys, like any gear guys, is that they are going to bore you to tears if you don't share the interest. However, they more often vote the wrong way and just don't get it that it is their culture that is killing children...

So it's time to clear out the stragglers.  The proposed legislation we see over and over is directed at firearms that sound more dangerous, not ones that are. It is for making it hard for you to get bad things, because those are what make you a bad person.  If we can just get guns themselves to be hated as much as they should be those Others will become safer, less violent, and America will become a City of a Hill. Like, um, London. Or Paris. Or Belfast. 

 

Believing the Worst

 I continue to be troubled by the polling Grim revealed in A Britina looks at Texas Manhood. It's not good polling, as the "reader's context" inserts, but the fact that Platner's  numbers improved, especially among 18-29 y/o's after they had been told of his sexual scandals is concerning.  I commented twice at Grim's, where the tentative thinking is that Democrats are thrashing around trying to find their own Trump in order to attract some of that masculine energy. It could be. 

As it keeps coming back into my brain these last few days, I have another possible explanation. The more criticism of him comes out, and the worse it is, the more some people will conclude "they must must be so worried about him that they are making stuff up.  That's how the system works, dude." They are anti-Bayesian, in a way: the more evidence comes forward, the less they believe it.  If the Trumpists hate him so much, the more they must be just be exaggerating the meaning of a stupid tattoo he got as a kid, and trying to portray regular arguments with his ex-wife and his girlfriends as something dangerous. He's just a regular guy like me, and they fear that.  

We saw that from the other side.  I can recall telling people in 2016 "There's plenty to complain about with Trump that's true.  Why do they feel compelled to make stuff up?" His opponents kept escalating, many of them believing the claims, with a reasoning "His followers are insane!  They support him even when we have revealed that he poisoned the entire Commonwealth of Virginia!  I mean, what does it take?" But his supporters weren't entirely innocent in that.  They very quickly moved to disbelieving all of it reflexively. Foxhole friends are what all candidates want.  Anyone can believe you when you're innocent.  Only the true believers will stick with you when you are clearly guilty.  We are seeing that with Karmelo Anthony now.

Maybe I just expected better from the people of Maine. The evidence against Platner is solid and abundant, but the more it adds up, the more people are convinced that Susan Collins, of all people, is a dangerous Trumpist, and every true Mainer has to rally 'round her opponent.