Accent

I have maintained for years that I have always had no accent, but come close to the generic American standard.  My mother had a bit of a NH accent, and my grandfather on the other side had a strong Canadian southern Maritimes accent (Yarmouth County, NS) that is very similar to a Maine/Mass north shore accent.  But I have none.

Well, I have none now.  But I just watched a video of myself on 12/14/69, when I was a junior in highschool, and can hear a slight NH accent on the broadened "a's." I must not have lost that until I went to college out of New England.

The things we know we don't always know.

Train Song

Freight Train, Freight Train,  Run so fast
Freight Train, Freight Train, Run so fast
Please don't tell them what train I'm on,
So they won't know which route I have gone

When I die just bury me deep
Down at the foot of old Chestnut Street
So I can hear old Number 9
As she goes rollin' by

Freight Train, freight train goin' so fast
Freight train, freight train gone at last
One of these days turn that train around
Go back to my hometown.

When I'm dead and in my grave
No more freight train will I crave
Put stones at my head and feet
Tell my friends I've gone to sleep

Freight Train, freight train run so fast
Freight train, freight train run so fast
Please don't tell them what train I'm on
So they won't know which route I have gone

India

Ben heads to India for 10 days starting today, as part of his church's seeing its ministries first hand.  He'll be making the video when he gets back.

May he travel safely.

Update:  Arrived safely India by 1pm.

Tribalism

In all my Tribes Collection a few years ago, I don't think I ever spoke to one of the most obvious sources of evidence: sports teams.

We root for a team or set of teams, usually on a geographic basis.  There is usually nothing inherently superior about those teams that is not easily explained by some factor that has no relation to us and our interests: a superior coach or player for a decade, an owner willing to spend more money. Yet we have an attachment that causes us to take our team's side in all disputes.  It was a terrible call. There was no bounty on opposing players. Our opponents play dirty.  The refs are homers.  We are certain that our John Smith is more deserving of going into the Hall of Fame than all the other John Smith's with similar careers*.  We believe UK just deserves our support for some reason, and are sure that its players are more solid citizens than those thugs over at Duke.  If we went to a school we root for it decades later, for no reason whatsoever.

(That this attitude can be combined with the belief that the management and coaching of our favorite team is unusually stupid and evil is not a contradiction.  It comes under the category of I can insult my brother, but you can't insult my brother.)

And some of us are not merely fans, by psycho fans, defaulting immediately to the belief Joe Pa got a raw deal, or screaming abuse at opposing players. (I've done that.  It's insane.)  There may be some excuse if we've got a friend or relative on the team, but in a world that seeks justice, we should accept the idea that our kid's team may have jerks and dirty players on it, and not take their side against some opposing kid who is playing cleanly.  There's a code in competitive sports that says you defend a teammate.  Well, loyalty is a virtue, and it's a good thing to teach.  But it's not the only virtue, and it can go bad quickly.  I think it was Seinfeld that used to reference "Rooting for laundry."  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Most reasonable people can indeed step back and say "Y'know, if I had been born twenty miles north I would be rooting for a different Carolina today.  Funny." We can even laugh wryly at ourselves about such things.  We get a little worried about people who actually can't be this objective, even after the season is over.  Such folks bring us the deaths at European soccer stadiums.

So, when I talk about our political tribalism, our rooting for our guy even when he's wrong, our gamesmanship that seems to have left the core ideas - as opposed to slogans and stereotypes - behind years ago, while our furious support goes on endlessly, remember that we are indeed capable of this.  I think I have acknowledged that conservatives do this a lot, only partially seeing it.  I think I have focused my criticism on liberals around the fact that they don't see it at all, and believe they are the one group above this.  But maybe that's just fandom.  Were I to face the truth fearlessly I might see it differently.

Take a moment to recognise that you are capable of this favoritism for illogical, accidental reasons, and that sports is your example.  (You non sports fans, try harder.  There's something.)

*I was going to use Dwight Evans and Darrell Evans for this, but looking at the numbers, Dewey really was better, so it weakens my point.  I say this with no pro-Red Sox bias whatsoever.

Sidebar

I have added hbd chick to my sidebar, which I should have done months ago.  If you want someone to keep you up-to-date in research on human biodiversity, social capital, human evolution, the effects of consanguinous marriage and the like, she's your go-to girl, er, chick.

Deer Crossing

I can almost understand this.  School crossing.  Pedestrian crossing.  Why wouldn't one's initial response be that "Deer Crossing" is much the same? And we all have a coupla dozen things tucked away in our knowledge base that we believe, but if we looked at suspiciously for a minute or two would toss out.  My eldest, who is a smart man, recently posted on Facebook that it had just occurred to him what UCLA stood for.  Sometimes we just don't look closely.

And yet...this seems a bridge too far.  If you are seeing these signs all the time, giving them your attention, and getting worked up enough to start writing letters to the newspaper and calling radio stations, shouldn't it be a basic point...

Aw, screw it. She's just stupid.  What do you think when you see the sign "Falling Rocks," or "High Winds?"  The state did that on purpose?  Too much precedent for her not to know.

Horse Race

I don't think I am especially good at the strategy aspects of politics, and I don't have a lot of interest.  The advancement of ideas is more my concern, and in that, a single presidential election may not loom so large.

Yet it occurs to me that Biden's rudeness may have an explanation.  The usual Republican explanation, that he is a rude and arrogant person by nature, may be true, of course.  But there may have been some calculation.  That it did not play well with independents is a distraction.  Observers may think that the last few weeks of an election are all about persuading those last few, but I think the politically experienced say it is all about turning out the base at this point.  Biden's rudeness was well-received among the partisans.  The message may have been "We're going to kick 'em in the balls.  We won't work with those bastards for one minute or entertain any of their evil ideas."  Chuck Schumer's recent tax comments support this interpretation.  The attack dogs are being sent out to let the rubes know who it is they can count on in a fight.

BTW, Biden threw Hillary under the bus, and her recent statements that "I confess, I am a rabbit" are startling.  She and Bill play to the main chance.  She could have destroyed Obama's campaign in 48 hours, but apparently decided it would destroy her own career as well and is taking one for the team.*

Don't get me wrong.  There are conservatives who think that way too.  I've listened to years of people complaining that if Bush/Dole/Bush/McCain/Romney would just be a real conservative and tell it like it is they would win in a landslide.  The meaning seems to be "I and my friends would then be genuinely excited about voting for 'em, not just reluctantly going along, and I'm sure that excitement would be shared by Americans in general, because they're just regular folk like us."  They want red meat.  Reading the Huffington Post, it seems pretty apparent there are liberals of similar mind.  They aren't so excited by Obama anymore.  They still reliably hate Republicans, but they aren't in love anymore and are convinced Obama's pretty much the same old, same old.  A percentage won't show up.  A little red meat might encourage them.  And undecided voters are weird and unpredictable anyway.  There're more votes in turning out the base.

I have no way of measuring this, so I'm just blathering, really.  If Obama takes the same prepare-to-be-boarded attitude tonight it gives a little support to my theory, but if he stresses that he's the one who plays well with others (hinting that it's those other guys who won't) it neither supports nor undermines my theory. Going on the attack could be evidence infavor, but so could triangulating and sending the VP out as pit bull.

For Democrats, this was 2008:


In 2012?  Meh.


(Tangent: I was never much of a Joni Mitchell fan, but this is simply great poetry, and the best version of the song.  I knew the oversweet Judi Collins and Clannad versions, but go to Youtube and see. They're all oversweet versions.  I don't generally like her style, I don't like that tuning, I really don't like her politics, which are "One Side Forever," but dammit, Joni absolutely gets it right, far more right than even brilliant artists here.)

*She must believe she will not be airbrushed from next spring's May Day photographs.

Wodehouse Prize

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is awarded every year in the UK for comic literature.  This sounded like a treasure chest for my Amazon wish-list, but clicking through the descriptions, black comedy and tragicomedy - not even "quirky," which would be the lite versions of those - seem to dominate.  A Fraction of The Whole looks like it might be just plain funny, but apparently we don't do that so much anymore. 

I don't doubt I would like many of these at least somewhat.  Terry Pratchett has always seemed to me to be a cross between Xanth and Hitchhiker's Guide and not so appealing years later, but I have liked bits that I have had described to me.  The others listed - except maybe that Ukrainian Tractors thing - seem too drenched in irony, or nuance, or something.  Yet, seeing that even I don't like the humorous styles I used to love, it may be the age.  Some other generation may have to reclaim simple humor.

Does anyone know anything about the others?

Or you could just comment about book-humor in general.

Nobel Prize

The European Union wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Strange. Though the institutions are separate (so far as I know), they are both so thoroughly part of the mental furniture of the European liberal that the award seems self-congratulatory.

Derek Jeter and 4,000 hits

Pete Rose does some arithmetic, and he's right, but I still want to take any opportunity to kick him. Yes, Jeter will not pass him for hits - won't even make it to 4,000 - but how did this question come up?  Is Pete Rose the bride at every wedding or something?  Jeter's response is the correct one.

Second, that particular record and the overall value of Pete Rose are overrated.  Not valueless - it's a significant accomplishment.  It's just not top shelf.

Plus he's just always been a jerk.

Cato's Rating of Governors

The Cato Institute has a white paper, rating the governors on fiscal responsibility.  Summary here. 

There are some interesting entries.  It is not surprising, given that it's Cato, that Republicans score better than Democrats on this.  But don't jump to conclusions, because Cato has never been hesitant to go where the numbers lead. This highest-ranking Democrat is NH's John Lynch, tied for fifth with Bobby Jindal. That's ahead of Rick Perry in Texas, for those of you scoring at home.  Not only that, but Deval Patrick of Massachusetts is also well ahead of Perry, garnering one of the few "B's" the Dems earned.  I am surprised, but I tip my hat.

The five "F's" all go to Democrats, but 3 Republicans plus (ahem) Independent Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island got a "D." The scores range from 16 to 69, with Republicans averaging 57 and Democrats 43.

We Are Doomed

I liked a great deal of John Derbyshire's book. He hails from a branch of conservatism that has had to sit in the corridor much of the last decade, more paleocon than neocon. Derb himself might say metrocon, a word he coined that never caught on, as he relates in this book.

He is quite serious in his belief that We Are Doomed,  in the sense that we are past the point of no return in more than one area in America, and the West in general.  Though pessimistic, he is not despairing, and has tips on how we are to buck ourselves up in the partial, though inevitable collapse he sees coming - a collapse that is as much cultural as financial.

But this isn't a review, but an occasion to spin off and discuss a part of the book I not only disagree with, but think that Derb has lost the objectivity he insists on in others.  He was once a Christian believer of some mild C of E sort, but has no definitively decided he is not.  I am certainly likely to look at such reasoning with heightened suspiciousness, though even I have acknowledged some folk who have taken that path remain somewhat reasonable.  I tend toward the Thomist idea that perfect reason must lead to God, however - my bias that causes me to be extra hard on that line of thought.

The first red flag went up when he asserted that all religions have creation and world-ending myths, that they are rather easily knocked down by science, and thus the Christian story should be held in similar regard.  This is simply not factually true.  Some religions - notably some of the Native American tribal beliefs - have creation myths that are important to the whole picture.  But even a moment's thought will reveal that the mythologies we know most about - Roman, Greek, Norse - make scant mention of such things.  Extra points if you remembered Yggdrasil, but even that has only occasional mention and is not the ultimate beginning - just beginningish.  The Eastern religions are quite cyclic and repeating, as most religions are.  Beginning, middle, and end are more western ideas.  They are not entirely absent in the East, but it is mostly westerners who are fascinated by them.

In fact, many of the supposed creation stories only seem to have come into prominence once Christians started asking "How do you chaps think the world got started, then?  And where's it all going?"  I don't want to oversell this.  There are religions with solid creation ideas, and most of the major ones have at least something we can point to, especially around the Mediterranean.  But they don't figure in the literature much beyond their first few mentions - Hesiod, for example. 

Small point, Mr. Derbyshire, but one with large implications.  As I posted recently, any two things can look similar if you squint hard enough.  Selection bias and confirmation bias are powerful. Beginning, middle, end is not exclusively western, but it is dominantly so.

Which brings me to my more basic point: we all tend to adopt the beliefs of those we hang out with.  As an evolutionary strategy, this is the safe choice.  The tribe may need the occasional person to think outside the box, and will carry the genes for that, but it tends to be a risky survival strategy. While acknowledging that some scientists remain (or become) Christians, he notes that these are far fewer than in the population at large.  The biologists and neuroscientists in particular have low percentages of believers, and he feels they should be the most reliable evaluators of human thought. 

Except that a strongly related group, medical doctors, including the neurologists, hold confessional beliefs at rates similar to the general population.  Derb doesn't hang out with this group, so he believes what the academic biologists hint to him is the norm: unbelief.  I don't mean to be harsh on him as any worse than the rest of us, all huddling together with the like-minded and believing what is socially comfortable, but neither is it any better.  Not in the least.  Therefore, one shouldn't make a big deal out of claiming your group is somehow different when writing a book.

In a pure argument, I think Mr. Derbyshire would take the point and agree with it at least partly.  But that would be a purely theoretical agreement.  From his tone in writing, it is clear that for all his doubt about consciousness and solidity and untrustworthiness of thought, he thinks this (un)belief is really true.  They really are the experts, and I'm with them.

I've made the point often and don't need to hammer it.  Beliefs have their fashions, and these are often more powerful movers of opinion that logic.  The song from South Pacific is dead wrong about racial prejudice:  you don't have to be carefully taught.  It's the prejudice that is natural, attested in all literatures as far back as we can trace.  Racial prejudice went away in our society largely because it became unfashionable, not because there were lengthy logical debates and persuasions about it.  The James Micheners of the world had a belief and sold it. There's a cart-and-horse question here, because they received the idea from parts of their culture as well, but you take my point. A single artist is seldom powerful, but in the aggregate, artists change the culture.  In this case, they made racial prejudice unfashionable.  Hard to argue with that, but it still isn't reasoning.

It may be the best we poor humans can do, however.

In my own lifetime the same thing has happened with acceptance of homosexuality.  Movies and theater, more than books and music, has had a great deal to do with this.  But those media have not engaged us in debate or intellectual consideration of the topic (though they sometimes pretend to portray this), they have simply convinced us that it is unfashionable to disapprove of homosexuality and immoral to forbid it in any context.  Credit or blame whoever you want on this, but the culture as a whole went along. 

One important addition: we all belong to several groups, and it will often happen that we feel conflicted about who we will ultimately side with.  It is an interesting general problem, but I am much more interested in how it plays out when one of the belief-sets is Christianity, or what the individual believes is the Christian norm. People get converted to conservatism or liberalism - or conspiracy theories or parenting styles or socialism - along with their Christianity, and many don't separate these out very well.  Again, it is a hard thing to go against the group one looks to for mates and jobs and companionship. 

Sometimes the choices can be revealing.  Sometimes you can sense that a person has not rejected the faith as taught, but has, without realising it, put their church membership second to some other group.  I have been most aware of this when watching how wealthier parents choose to have their children raised. Depending on the prevailing culture, that may be aspirational parents sending their children to religious schools though they are only somewhat religious, or might be previously religious parents who start thinking that getting children into the "best" schools is their real allegiance.

Empty Suit

Sponge-Headed Scienceman (or perhaps his wife) sent this along.

It's A Dog's Life

My son sent this link to the one episode of this 1979 sitcom (get it?  Sit - com?  I slay me.) Screenwriter/announcer Ken Levine gives a little background at the link.  This is so awful, the comments were focused on how long you could last before you couldn't take anymore.

I went five minutes and could easily have gone more if I weren't in a hurry.  I grew up on stupid TV sitcoms.  I can watch them all day - and did.  It's really hard to get below my threshold.

Rich People

Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.  Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.  "Rich Boy" F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have a little experience with the very rich.  Most of us do have some chance associations based on where we have lived or worked or gone to school, the families we come from, or the hobbies we have.  I don't know that mine is much more extensive than any of yours.  We rub shoulders with the wealthy.  More rarely, with the uberrich - I can't say I know much about them.

Similarly, most of us have occasional contact with the moderately wealthy - people who don't necessarily see themselves as all that rich - because they are in contact with people much richer - but by all objective measures are among the most prosperous folks in the country and certainly, the world.  We talk about the 1%, but in world terms, we are all among the 5%, and historically, the 1%.  Few people think of themselves as rich.

I am uncertain how much I agree with the quote above.  Putting aside Fitzgerald's personal reasons for a love-hate relationship with the rich, treating the quote as a generic observation by some anonymous writer, it seems partly true at first glance.  I have certainly known folks who have that air of entitlement, of deserving the choicest portions because they can pay for them, even if they never disparage others or make claims of superiority.  We go to church in a wealthy community, where rather expensive cars, homes, or vacations are considered everyday by some.  It is troubling at times to be brought up short, noticing that this person has a rather skewed idea of what is normal, I think, and not a lot of obvious gratitude that they should be so lucky as to have their abilities match their time and place so well.

Yet they aren't all like that, and I wonder if we do not simply notice such things more among the wealthy. A (female) coworker of indisputable kindness remarked years ago how tragic the death of a young woman was: "She was so pretty and personable."  I remember thinking it would be equally tragic if she weren't pretty.  We hear similar words about intelligent people being struck down by some illness or misfortune, as if this somehow makes it worse.  Perhaps we mean it that way, though we know we shouldn't, but I think a more likely explanation is that we notice it.  Thus with even mildly irritating characteristics among the rich.

OTOH, it is certainly true that exposing people to more temptations means a percentage of them with succumb.  The rich with an inflated sense of desert may not do any worse than we would in their shoes, but the point is they aren't in our shoes.  They have that temptation and we don't.  It would thus be surprising if the wealthy - collectively, not individually - weren't slightly worse than average on this measure, because they have been exposed to temptations the average person hasn't.

I sense, I feel, I smell, that the rich are different in their attitudes, and not in a good way.  But selective bias and confirmation bias are likely to be so strong in me that I mistrust it.  Perhaps I am projecting my own weaknesses on others, but I have to suspect that much of the current class envy, class-warfare rhetoric of our era plays on the same biases.  People think they know what the rich are like and how they think..But they may not.

Train Song

The Pips.  does Gary Trudeau think he could do even a bad imitation of this?

Homophonic Influence

Boston opened its NBA preseason losing to a Turkish team.  They have been surprisingly popular in that country for years, even before they had Semih Erden.  You can come up with a dozen theories, but I have always leaned to the linguistic one.  The team name sounds a lot like Seljuks. 

There's a comic bit in there, I suppose.

The Vision of the Anointed*

The key to liberalism is the belief that if we would just improve services, all the children would be above average.

Keillor's use of this idea has an added meaning that makes it richer, I think, and not an example of the above.  It is not only that everyone favors their own children just a bit and sees even the average child as something better.  The opposite value is in play as well: don't be too full of yourself, don't put on airs.  You're not some genius, you're just above average.  When both ideas exist in tension, I don't think it's such a bad thing.

*Title stolen from Thomas Sowell.

Old Lefty

I work with a social worker about my age who comes from the old school.  A lot of those things we believed in the 70's have not fully dislodged, just been given an updated spin.  Thursday it was the idea that the military operates on the same principle as gangs, fostering camaraderie and group rules, substitute family... and he delights in making it be "gangs" every time he announces this, not accepting my hints that all groups, clans, tribes, and associations also work from the same basic principles.  Plus, he always goes on to mention that the military "targets the most vulnerable members of our society" for membership.  He doesn't say it meanly, just patiently explaining it to all of us who might not have grasped the deep truths he is explaining to us.

Today, when I mentioned that in 1990's Romania people were kept in hospital for long periods of time, mostly because not much real medical help could be given and families needed a break from care, so the hospital waited a polite amount of time before sending them home.  It also gave the patient some attention and a feeling of being treated well.  My colleague thought this was an excellent example of how our Western intrusion had not been entirely positive: Oh, I know it's been economically better but they've lost something that was valuable. His thinking was that families took care of each other more under the old regime, and we disrupted their adaptive patterns.

That this is exactly backward - that the hospitals were not adopting some modern Western idea but were perpetuating an older socialist one - did not occur to him.  That I wasn't speaking about elders in the least went unnoticed.  That in all societies, care for elder relatives declines as life expectancy increases - went missing.  That no Romanian would endorse his opinion as being anything other than insane he is unaware of.  Only his previous narrative remains - that there were good things in the old Soviet system that we blindly ignore now because of our simplistic, uninformed narrative.

Similarity

Any two things can be made to look similar if you squint hard enough.

By The Numbers

The season is over, the numbers are now final, and I like to poke around at them.  I did not watch an entire at-bat of a Sox game this season.  I do listen to sports radio, but they were continually convinced that communication problems were the core of Red Sox troubles, so I switched stations among the three available a lot.  The Red Sox had getting people out problems, full stop.

I did hear things along the way.  I heard that Daniel Bard wanted to be a starter (they make 3-4 times as much, I understand) and it didn't work.  It is always easy to say in retrospect that we should have gone north when it is clear that south didn't work, but I claim to have seen a problem with their method from the start.  He was essentially a rookie as a starter, and the place for rookies is in spot starts and long relief.  But the Red Sox thought they were contenders, and they needed Bard to be a middle of the rotation player, so they shoved him in there.  If you knew you weren't a contender and were developing players and seeing who could pitch for a year, Bard's 5.68 ERA is not that terrible and worth fighting through.  Now they've apparently ruined his head and he can't get guys out in AAA.

Similarly, they needed Buchholz or Lester (and now Lackey) to be top-of-the-rotation guys and that looks bleak. Adding in Doubront, Boston now has four fully capable 3rd - 5th starters, and could have had five.  They are fine if you just see them for what they are.  ERA 4.50 - 5.00, 200 innings for a .500 ball club.  Sort that out for one more year and contend again in 2014.  What's your problem?  You need a #1 and a #2 starter, at least one of whom can eat innings, and you actually have the flexibility to trade 2 of those current guys, because you have another spot-starter long relief guy available (see below).  Heck, with Barnes, Webster, and De La Rosa looking almost ready, you have lots of halfway-decent pitchers you can trade.  All depth, no top.

For relief pitchers, Tazawa is 26, had an ERA of 1.43 in 44 IP.  How is he not your closer, or at least your set-up guy?  Problem solved.   Atchison if he's healthy and Hill both deserve the same number of innings or more. ERA's under 2.  Ride that wave.  Breslow has 63 IP - a good number - at 2.70 ERA. 

Then there are four players right about the same age who have limited strengths, but would be fine in designated roles.  Miller is 6-7 and gets the first batter out all the time. He is still good on the second batter and maybe the third. Mortensen is not only a very good pitcher on 2 or more days' rest, he can go more than two innings if need be. Long relief.  Melancon and Carpenter both did well late.  They round out your bullpen.

GM's like to play around, bringing in this, that, getting a guy for cheap, etc.  I hope no one on the Red Sox puts any energy into thinking about that.  Top starters.  Eat innings.  Pay money.  Do that.  The rest is in place, with a decent number of developing players on the way.

Hurling

The All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Final was recently completed.  This gives me a chance to reprise a 2006 post on attending a hurling match in Dublin, Games Mad.  It does seem I am the only one who likes it so much.

The language of sporting events in other English-speaking countries is always a bit unnerving, but always entertaining.  I am guessing that describing Walter Walsh as a debutant has a different meaning in Ireland than America.  A rookie, we would say.  And "Galway's Cyril Donnellan was shown the red card and sent off after swinging his hurley at opponent J. J. Delaney and hitting him upon the head" does suggest why the sport remains popular, doesn't it?

The crowds of 80,000 are only for the major matches, apparently.  The one we attended had less than ten, including the four of us.  Very odd.

Runs Scored, Runs Against Revisited

Everyone finally got on the bandwagon to marvel at scrappy Baltimore, that lovable overachieving bunch winning games with Pluck despite their poor run differential.  Except that's no longer true.  That was true in May and June only.  It was partly the case in April, July, and August, but not so you'd notice.

In September they've had a run differential over 50, and have picked up 10 more games over .500 in the W-L rankings.  That's not can-do spirit, that's just beating the cookies out of people.

Baltimore manager of yore Earl Weaver used to say that "chemistry" in baseball was simple: GP + 3R = W.  Good pitching plus 3-run homers equals wins.

Train Song

All-Fenway Team

The all-time All- Fenway Park Red Sox team was announced this week.  It favors players in living memory of baby boomers or younger unless an earlier player was so ridiculously overqualified that we have to take the time to educate the younger generation about them, because they simply cannot be left off.  Jimmy Foxx.  Lefty Grove.  Smokey Joe Wood. Dom Dimaggio.  And of course, Ted Williams.

I get that.  I even agree with it, because otherwise you start to get arguments for people who had two good seasons and were just sort of useful for a few others.  I might think Mel Parnell should be on there, but even I don't want to get into discussing Pete Runnels, Ellis Kinder, Walt Dropo.  Nobody cares.

Plus, I loved Reggie Smith and Trot Nixon, so it's great to see them remembered.  I don't know if Nixon, especially, really was the 2nd best RF in Fenway history, but I'm not minded to quibble.  You can make an argument for it.

I have only one problem with this.  Tris Speaker.  Yes, he only had four years at Fenway and most of his stats were amassed for Cleveland.  But those four years included the inaugural year of the ballpark, which should count for something, and those four years were quite something.

Post 3800 - The Preservation Of...

James's post about the collection of church taxes in Germany led me down interesting paths.  Summary:  C of E - what we would call the Episcopal or Anglican church here in North America, has been The great vessel of Western Civilisation these past three or four centuries.  Yet it has not been an especially good bearer of Christianity.  It has been one among many.  It has had its moments and his shining stars, to be sure.  But even terrible churches have produced Christians of stunning brightness, so that is not in and of itself evidence of spiritual strength.

Christians since the Roman Empire have believed that surrounding culture is important for the preservation of the faith, though there has always been a solid minority which has held it is irrelevant.  I think the former idea is closer to the truth but fear the day that the latter opinion is no longer firmly, even fanatically espoused among us.

I will hold all posts for a few days.  I would like my readers, a diverse and - really - quite brilliant bunch, to give their thoughts on this large issue.  Some of you have your own sites, and I encourage you to link to same in the comments.  But this is the sort of overview question that changes slowly in our lives, but has large effects down the road.

Sperm Donor

Retriever sends along the most interesting stuff, and I don't always remember to politely give her credit.  This one is about a rare genetic condition that a sperm donor has passed along to 5 of 43 children he has "fathered" - and I use the term loosely.

Caveat emptor, as in all else.  Emphasising some characteristics, one could list me as an A-1 possible donor, whose genetics one would love to pass on to future generations.  Looked at from another perspective, one could list me as a "Red Flag - Approach With Caution" donor.  How my children have turned out would tilt the balance in favor of the former, and yet...

I am not sure why people are going in this direction to begin with.  It seems like an inauspicious start for a child, to have a donor father.  It would make me feel as if I were a bit of software.  Note that I say this as one whose father was out of the picture from age six on.

The Undecided Voter

My brother sent along this demographic research firm's discoveries about the undecided voter. He points out one difficulty - that small differences are given equal play in the narrative with larger ones.

I would add that the Undecideds are not a single population, as the wording here would suggest.  They are likely two or more separate style of folk who have some overlap.  Also, the indecision of voters that is more key to politicians are those who are undecided whether they are going to bother to vote, not who they are going to vote for.  The latter exist, but don't offer as much payback.  Of that group, the only ones you can get any sort of intellectual handle on are those who are moving from one political or social persuasion to another.

Gangnam Style

This is the current record-holder for most views on youtube. In the time that I watched it, clicked around to some related videos for a few minutes, and composed this post it added 3 million hits.

South Korean. PSY. In addition to this one at 235 million, there are others to this music with 86 million, 47 million, 18 million and lesser hits. As American culture fades and the Third World slowly becomes first, they are going to take our culture and reinvent it.

We aren't going to like it. Think how the Europeans have looked at us. That's our future.





There's an even bigger phenomenon - in numbers at least - called Girls' Generation, sort of a Koren Spice Girls thing, clearly aimed at the 12-16 y/o crowd. I think there used to be groups like this in Japan as well - groups of 10 dancer-singers.  Same switching back and forth between their own language and English; importing American iconography and styles - in this case even importing black people for effect.

I'm planning some serious posts. I think I'm ruining the mood here.

Dental Floss

Inmates at a NY jail are suing because they don't get to have dental floss. The jail's position is that floss can be used as a weapon.

In case you are quick on the bandwagon that the jail is being ridiculous here, we have had suicide attempts with dental floss at our hospital, and no longer allow patients to have it unless supervised.

Gospel People

The long intro is what we hurry away from on Youtube, but it's part of the genre. Whether you think it's a southern thing, a black expression, a quartet standard, or a revival form, it's still just not optional. You have to take the extra minute or two to adjust your mind to the slowness and the build.

It's probably good for you, believer or not.

Train Song

I grew up on the Kingston Trio version, but rapidly grew tired of the oversweet, drain every tear covers by PP&M, the Journeymen, Brothers Four, etc.  I thought that was all that was out there, and I was just throwing this into the collection for sake of completeness.

When I listened to the different versions I found I liked Roseanne Cash's lush and heavily backed interpretation and Hedy West's arrestingly simple one.  I eventually chose this one, even though it's a bit uncomfortable and stretches the song's meaning.  There's something compelling about it.  And it's got great trains.

Had It

My wife was quite upset this morning, and talking about "fasting" from the news - interesting phrase, that.  She has been listening to the reporting about whether Romney's "47%" comment was accurate, and how the fact-checking has gone, etc.  But it has not been the content of the discussion that has upset her.  Good points on both sides, there. It is the sneering, condescending, openly-siding-with-Obama's-interests tone that has infuriated her.

We have been comfortable enough with Romney, though not especial fans.  We seldom put up signs in our yard anyway.  But we're getting a Romney/Ryan sign.

These reporters don't hear it.  They really have no idea how much they telegraph what they believe is the proper view for you to take.  And a lot of Americans remain heavily influenced by these tones, while congratulating themselves that they are actually responding to content.  The media is not always intentionally trying to manipulate them.  Some are.  But this is part of our social wiring, to speak and respond in certain ways in order to get our way; forms of bullying and wheedling.  Fish. Lure. Automatic unless you fight against it. But those who insist it's not happening will never fight against it.

Conservatives use these tones without realising it as well - I have heard them from Christians, I regret to report - but not on the news.

Christian Culture

The perennial disagreement about whether a sympathetic surrounding culture is better for the spreading of the Gospel or whether culture is largely irrelevant has suddenly shown up in three unrelated discussions in my life.  Odd, that.  I don't seek that one out, particularly.  Yet I think it is worth some comment.

I note that whichever side is being put forward with vigor tends strongly to accuse its opposition of being absolutist.  Those who say that cultural support is largely irrelevant, because all is the work of the Holy Spirit, seem quite certain that the rest of Christianity is just chockablock full of folks who insist that political power is necessary for the spread of the Gospel.

I have never met or read any Christian who maintains it is absolutely necessary.  None.  Who are these opponents they rail against?  Similarly, those who advocate that creating cultural support for Christian living is a good thing and means we should vote for people who will by-golly do that seem to also claim that those Other Christians who don't get on board care nothing for our supportive American culture and are willing to just let everything go to hell.  (There's a subtler liberal version of this, but for this discussion it's simpler to just stick with the unsubtle conservative version.)

Yeah, I don't know any of those, either.

Everyone knows that the work of thoughtful believers and the work of the Holy Spirit are not easy to separate even in theory, let alone in real time.  All that remains is to examine ourselves for which way we lean and see if our actions do indeed accord with our theology on the matter.

Some points of interest: CS Lewis notes that England maintained Christian forms for over a century past identifiable markers that it had largely ceased to believe central Christian doctrines.  In Dickens's A Christmas Carol, there is only one fleeting mention of Christ, and that not even by name. Some Christian virtues are applauded, particularly generosity, but the whole charming tale revolves around very English pagan spirits convincing Scrooge not to be miserly.  Ebenezer's redemption seems to be that he is generous to one employee's family and becomes jolly, full of bonhommy (French word meaning "bonhommy.")

And for ever afterwards, it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well - as well as any man has ever kept it.

Well, there you are then. What more does Christ ask of us, eh? Lewis traces this back further, to Sir Walter Scott and others.

It was not merely that literary figures were playing with such secularised faiths, but that their works were so entirely acceptable and popular.  The culture embraced this, swallowed it, without noticing their religion had been drained of its most important meanings.  It marks a culture Christian more in name than practice.  And yet - Christian virtues were not abandoned, many are still not abandoned, even unto the present day.

It is widely claimed that the Church grows under persecution, its members particularly strong and productive.  The earliest Church is given as an example, but I don't think the evidence is strong.  The Church grew greatly at first in each new place it was introduced - from 0% to a few percent right off the bat. If we move from those numbers to the percentage who were Christian just before the persecutions ended in the early 4th C and compute backward, we see that the Church in the Roman Empire grew at about 1% a year.  The miracle of compound interest and all that.  But not much of an advert for persecution being a strategy.  It might be good for us personally, but there's no evidence it's good for numbers.

Nor do the modern examples of Russian Pentecostals and Romanian Baptists offer much evidence.  The Church survived in those countries, but not everywhere.  When the walls came down, there were whole regions in Russia with no evangelical believers anywhere, and not many even of the Orthodox Church, with its solid historical roots.  There is no cultural support for Christianity in Japan, and there are no Christians.  There is cultural support in South Korea and there are lots of Christians.  China had an underground Church that seemed to have grown greatly.  But they've also got well over a billion people there and everything grew greatly.

Sometimes when governments get rid of the Christians they are just gone.  Sometimes God chooses to do something miraculous instead.  Mostly, it's a mixture of the two.  I don't see that the Scriptures promise one thing or the other. In some places we are told that the governments and powers are rather irrelevant.  But God also addresses groups - cities, tribes, nations - as often as he addresses individuals, or more.

Weight Loss

My wife wondered if I might put this Sparkpeople article on weight loss up:  What Quick-Fix Weight Loss Solutions Have You Fallen For?  It's got overlap with a few of our topics here, so I thought it might please.  The author has a weight-loss team, Slowest Loser, that highlights his views on long-term maintenance. 

Mostly, I've never done anything, just slowly gotten fatter.  I did do something called the Rotation Diet years ago a few times, which seemed to sorta work, but i never stuck with it.  Recently I've done dieting because I have to, and had several sources, including bsking, mention the Gary Taubes method with at least mild approval, so that's what I do, in simplest form.  I greatly reduced concentrated sugars, which were never much of an issue anyway, and grains, which were an enormous problem.  I don't worry much about fats, but these went down when the french fries, butter, and pizza went away.  I eats more nuts and cheese, and more raw vegetables sort of in self-defense.  I keep them lying around so that bread/rice/corn/donut/potatopuff cravings do not overwhelm me.

It seems to work some.  His point about optimism, even false optimism, driving both diets and progress seems mostly true: if we assessed the odds correctly, no one would diet, start a business, get married, etc.

Advice

In college I worked briefly at a better restaurant in Williamsburg.  Most of the waiters were black men in white jackets who at been working the Inn or the Lodge or one of the colonial restaurants for decades.  They were quite skilled at quiet service of rich white men, and knew how to play of their egos to get bigger tips.  The younger black men found this demeaning, wouldn't do it, and made less money.

I can see both sides of this conflict pretty easily.  But one old waiter, Ben, tipped me over to his side by the force of his argument.  Not that he ever spoke to me directly, of course.  He hated white people and wouldn't give me the time of day.  But the other white college busboy and I were at least allowed to listen in.  Ben attempted to explain his reasons, but the younger black men did not merely disagree with the ideas and reject them, they simply wouldn't listen.  They just walked away, leaving the old men shaking their heads.  "If you cain't be told, you cain't be taught," Ben would say.  I didn't follow the meaning of that immediately.  It took some thinking through.  It may not really have sunk in until later that year, long after I had left the place.

Sometimes you just have to be told:  yes is yes, seven is seven, green is green.  If you can't deal with that, then ultimately, you can't be taught very much.  It takes both courage and humility to be told.

Perhaps it appealed to me because I am neither very courageous nor humble, but I at least have the sense to admire those traits and wish I had them.  If you cain't be told, you cain't be taught.

Spammers

I had spam comments on every single one of my ABBA posts over the last four years today.  Usually, the big spam attractors are Daywalkers and Black Vocalization Style. Two atypical posts for me but ones I like.

I can't figure what word in the text is attracting the spam.

600 Aubergines

Those recipe online features that recompute ingredient amounts? You may want to be alert about those.

3 chilies, 6 cloves garlic, 2 stalks lemongrass... check, check, check.

600 aubergines, quartered lengthwise, then halved? These people really like eggplant. And not very spicy eggplant.

This is why estimating is a useful mathematical skill.

Spinning Plates

Bethany over at Bad Data, Bad put up an xkcd cartoon which made me immediately think, "Yeah, that's like the guy who has too many plates spinning" when I realised that the image might be entirely unfamiliar to her.  And most other people.

This used to be a frequent entertainment, children, this spinning plates or other novelty acts which involved a high degree of skillful manipulation of everyday objects for absolutely no reason whatsoever.



No, actually I don't know why we were so fascinated. No video games, perhaps, to distract us from higher pursuits.

It gets better.  No, really.  Consider the Baronton Sisters.



Or Marvyn Roy

New Theory

New to me, anyway.

I think people who read about events rather than participate in them are prone to wanting them regulated and controlled.  If you read (or watch or hear about) any industry or activity, what will be reported will be what is going wrong.  So you will just naturally want to make some kind of rule or set up some kind of consequence about that, so you can have done with it and move on.  Kids singing in the halls?  Thai immigrants being snubbed? Hot dogs too long for the buns?

More seriously, when NPR or the NYT, or even more conservative outlets like (I've heard) Fox News or WSJ, run a front page story about an industry, it's because someone cheated, or lost money, or broke laws, or fired a lot of people, or poisoned the wells or something.  If that's what you read, that's what you will think the world is, and you will want to fix it in similar ways each time:  make a rule so that Bernie Madoff or Google or the State of Indiana can't do that anymore.

The attitude comes from sampling current events without depth.  Seeking information in a certain way or receiving it in a certain way - via front page, or news hour, or other "selected bursts," may make one tend rather automatically to favor government intervention.  The medium is the message.

This Train

Zero Point

On the Dinocrat site, via Maggie's

One of my favorite deceptions to point out WRT graphs. As we are talking about millions of people and long-term trends, this drop in participation may indeed be alarming. It is a four-point drop in how many of us are gainfully employed, after all. But the zero-point of this graph is 63.5, and the hundred-point is 67.5, exactly the size of the change, not 0-100 percent. Visually, it tells us that nearly everyone worked twelve years ago and now, no one does.

Naughty, naughty.

Why do the Muppets endure?

50 years later, why do the Muppets endure?  It's quite simple... they rock.

Suspicion

Of every hundred facts upon which to reason, ninety-nine depend on authority...
For example, few of us have followed the reasoning on which even ten percent of the truths we believe are based. We accept them on authority from the experts and are wise to do so; for though we are thereby sometimes deceived, yet we would have to live like savages if we did not. C.S.Lewis "Why I Am Not A Pacifist" 1940.

I am told that there are still Logical Positivists out there, who believe if a thing cannot be measured, it cannot be discussed intelligently.  That formulation is much better than the "if you can't prove it, I don't believe it" that it grew out of.  In the early part of the 20th C it was a popular philosophy, especially among those in the hard sciences, and I suspect that is where it may still hang on.  It has strengths.  It does promote a certain clarity in argument and reasoning.

My objection to it is not so much that I don't believe it, but that I suspect its adherents do not.  They are like all of us, not only believing a thousand things we have never quantified and subjected to hard thinking, but a hundred things which we would continue to believe even if we had.  Not all things admit of easy measurement, fewer still admit of proof even in theory, but we often have to believe some thing to cross the street, do laundry, sing a song.  My suspicion is that the Logical Positivism is sometimes convenient, to get one off the hook having to think about something.  I am hinting at religious questions here, but there are many other things in the mix: some questions are too painful, but most are simply too inconvenient to reexamine.  So we go on believing what we did before. 

Similarly, there is a belief gaining traction from neurological research which is based on older ideas questioning Free Will - that our reasoning is only approximately correct, useful rather than reliable.  (Philosopher Eddy Nahmias challenges that, as I previously linked.) It may be a true idea.  Our reasoning, pace Thomas Aquinas, may not only not be divine, but merely cleverly animal. It may be good enough to get us by, no more.  Yet I suspect that the proponents of the idea don't believe that particular bit of reasoning is only approximate.  They believe it is true.  Lewis wrote frequently of the self-refuting aspect of that strict naturalism.  It saws off the branch it is sitting on, for if our thoughts are not reliable, neither is that thought reliable.

That is usually waved off with a smile that yes, technically, it is an inconsistency, but what can one expect with such flawed reasoning as ours?  So it may be.  But I would be much more sympathetic to the idea if it were not only trotted out at convenient times, rather than when it is inconvenient specifically to the Approximate Believer.

Accusations of bad faith are not the most powerful of arguments, I admit, and that is what I have done here.  Nonetheless I do not rescind it.  I think it is what is happening, whether it is possible to measure or possible to rigidly prove or not.  My painfully inexact animal cleverness encounters it too often to ignore, if that suits you better.

New Manager

The Red Sox need a Dick Williams - not someone who can keep a bunch of high-priced stars all happy with each other, but someone who can figure out who can play this game and who can't. If the Red Sox buy three top-flight players, that will not get them over the top. They need to also find another five doubles, twenty points of batting average, or 20 extra innings pitched in every slot.

If a new manager could evaluate only pitchers or position players, I would prefer pitchers at this point. We need someone who sees clearly. Boston, Oakland, Montreal, Williams identified the players in the high minors who should come up and many later became stars.

I don't know who does that now, but that's who we need. 

German Pagan All-Natural Origins.

Earlier related posts: Natural Vs. Artificial and Natural.

There's a lot of fun stuff here and it is link-heavy.  You could browse for hours.  I had known about Wandervogel, though I had forgotten the name, but I had never heard of Lebensreform, literally "life-reform," until I did this research. It gives better evidence for my point than anything I had thought of on my own.  Even I didn't think the connection to German paganism was that strong. I found more here, at the Children of the Sun.

I’d like to just flesh out that German pagan background to the all-natural movement. But I will first note the other side - first, that there was a British and American strain of this thinking which was only incidentally German.  Only insofar as people read Kant, Schopenhauer, and Fichte in general was that strain a Teutonic movement,  for the intelligentsia of the day also read other Europeans and Americans who were more direct influences

Second, the line from Rousseau, Emerson, Tolstoy, and Thoreau through the Fellowship of the New Life and the Fabian Society looks at first much more direct in influencing the modern pacifist, simple-living, vegetarian culture and exaltation of Nature.  Third, there were American utopian back-to-the-landers who had nothing German about them – Shakers, Brook Farm, Oneida - I don’t know how we measure who is more influential than whom, but it’s at least there and deserves mention.

I also note some things which are definitely German but don’t seem to be especially influential in pagan roots.  I have said before that the Germans were only a partially converted country to begin with, and I still think that’s true, but that doesn’t imply that everything in their culture is suspect thereby.

So fourth - you can trace those German philosophers, especially Fichte, and their fascination with will as having provided a foundation for German nationalism and ultimately, Nazism, but not necessarily pagan revival and natural living.  That came later, when their descendants decided that, as their superiority could not rest on their Christian culture, shared by others in Europe, it must reside in some previous underlying advantage – genetic, cultural, or both. Strong and adventurous gods and heroes naturally suggested themselves as causes.  That everyone else in the world also had traditional gods and heroes who were strong and adventurous was somehow not noticed.  Perhaps because they felt very deeply – there’s the romanticism and sentimentality piece – that they were strong and quite special, that was enough.  Human beings are like that, not just Germans.

Fifth, German religious groups coming to America also provided more than their share of utopian back-to-the-landers – Amish, New Harmony, Mennonites, Moravians, Hutterites – who settled in the Midwest because that was the next “open” spot in European settlement.  Yet even if these groups carried the traces of paganism in their cultures that all Christians do, it would be hard to level much accusation against them for strong influence in that direction.  Genesis and much of the OT carries the theme that living in cities causes spiritual decline while the rural life improves character – from Cain to Daniel it shows up, and is echoed in the NT with John the Baptist. The idea that things in general are deteriorating and can only be fixed by getting out into the country is recurrent in western thought.  It’s one of our panaceas. Rousseau wasn’t the first.

Thus I don’t think it accidental that Seventh Day Adventists had a lot of that healthy eating idea right from the start and grew in midwestern soil.  It was in the air; Graham and Kellogg might not have been so prosperous in other regions.  In New England that energy went into the mind-body-spirit split of the Christian Scientists, not natural versus artificial. 

Was that enough qualifiers?  It's a terrible thing to see many sides of an issue.

All those qualifiers in place, here is that introduction to the Wandervogel movement. (Same link)

There’s simple living and harmony with nature; there’s nudism (then called naturism); natural foods and strong tendencies toward vegetarianism; natural medicines, with an emphasis on remarkable powers of the body to heal it self or be healed with fairly simple regimens such as clean water, exercise, or herbals found locally; hiking and camping and getting out of the unhealthy cities; conservation of wilderness and even some proto-Gaia Worship, though under other names; they read Hesse, and Nietzsche; they eschewed the commercial music scene and favored performers from The People – many of whom went on to become commercially successful, certainly.  There is, in fact, just about everything you need philosophically to leave “the rat race” in northeastern cities and start an herb farm in Vermont   or a commune in Tennessee.  There's a hippie museum there if you ever get the urge.  

 

When you click together the pieces that the Nature Boys were largely German, and in specific Gypsy Boots’ parents were Wandervogel,* there’s some founder effect in hippie culture, far more than from old Pietist Christian groups.Grace Slick, Brian Wilson, and Donovan headed for Southern California, not Pennsylvania Dutch country.

It may seem strange that such a movement would penetrate Christian circles at all, but there were important points of contact: the early movement was connected to scouting in both England and America and retained that even in dark eras. The adventurous visit other areas, and when they did, would share trails, shelters, and equipment.  More important, however, was that the older Christian groups tended to do the type of farming that the hippies were moving into: small farms and local crafts rather than agribiz. Mother Earth News found itself rubbing up against such folks from earliest days, even though it was initially quite hostile to religion.  The hippies settled on being against organised religion, which was just enough stretch to accommodate everyone.  Many of the Christian groups were bent on removing themselves from The World – varying degrees of paranoia here – which the freaks could identify with, though they had different reasons.  Both were ultimately defining themselves as counterculture.

The early Jesus people were more a hippie movement than a church movement as well – They had not merely a preference but an actual disdain for the mainstream and institutional churches – which had like opinions about them.  It is ironic that mainstream denominational hierarchies have lots of folks tending toward these ideas now.  Ironic, that is, until one recognises that these were semi-hippies who were never able to make the break.  They like the overlapping fashionableness that the Church should withdraw from the world and stand against the corporate, consumerist culture of America.  It preserved their counterculture bonfides in both directions.  Two birds with one stone. Wankers.

That the Jesus Movement led more directly to independent churches that are now more conservative seems another irony, but it's not.  It’s not just that homeschooling and back-to-the-land, overlaps with that 70’s secular culture.  It’s that this particular Romantic Vision is flexible and can be called into service for various causes.  The plaid shirt, voluntary poverty, wood-chopping, vegetable growing guy fits into a lot of small slots in this culture.  Hard to peg those guys - and their lovely granola wives.

Finally, some people that Dubbahdee referred to who come much earlier in this whole Vitalism, life force, Natural Cure Movement.  Germans Benedict Lust and John Scheel (naturopathy), their predecessor Sebastian Kneipp and their follower, exercise guru Bernarr McFadden.  An excellent history of 19th C natural cures here.

*The movement spread quickly among Central European Jews, and the purification and germanisation of the movement was a rationale for the Hitler Youth.  It does give evidence that whatever the later connection, Wandervogel was not inevitably an expression of Aryan superiority.  How Jews got by that “Teutonic roots” part I don’t know, but I imagine that as with all broad movements, there were different emphases in different areas, and we all usually ignore a problem or two for the sake of larger agreements.

Voice Vote

Lot's of discussion over at Grim's about the three tries at a voice vote at the DNC.  It sounded even to me all three times.  However, as there were two items voted on at once, we don't know what the breakout would be.

There is much speculation how this will play among the electorate, that the Democrats "voted against God." Which they sorta did, but not really.  There are lots of possible explanations behind both the aye and nay votes, but they didn't get to say those, just the single syllable.  However, if it's an unfair question, I certainly didn't ask them to answer it.  They did that to themselves.

I am more curious how it will play to loyal Democrats, who watched non-democracy play out in front of them when the chair called it a two-thirds vote and motion carried when it clearly wasn't.  Certainly the losers must have had at least a momentary twinge, wondering if they were in some sort of corrupt organisation where their opinion didn't count and their betters made choices for them. But I would hope even the winners would pause and realise that they won unfairly, by cheating.  In both cases, I hope for the scales to fall from some eyes: "these people aren't...aren't honest, honey.  We have to get out of here."

I wonder who in the national media will press the issue of a clear 50-50 split among the delegates and the dishonest response to that.

Nah. Lost my head there for a moment.

City Of New Orleans

Goodman wrote it, BTW.

Core Europe

The new post at Bad Data, Bad! reminded me of the site "Strange Maps," which eventually got subsumed under bigthink.com.  The earlier posts tend to be more fun, I have found.  #22, Core Europe, has always been a favorite of mine.  It's certainly what many Americans think is really Europe, rather than a hanger-on; apparently many Europeans think so too.

Yet I wonder...did they really mean to include so many Italians?  I mean, there's the Renaissance and everything, but are we still giving them credit for that?

As infuriating as this map may be to many people, the CIA World Factbook, Eurovision contests, and most modern lists put the number of European countries around 50, including Azerbaijan, for pete's sake. When I write or say the word "Europe," there is no one who immediately has a picture of Cyprus come to mind.  They're not Asian, I suppose.  Have to put 'em somewhere.

Natural Vs. Artificial

I speculated a few weeks back that the idea of natural things being better because they were made directly by God, while artificial things were inferior because they were touched by sinful man, owed more to German paganism than to Christian thought, however common it has become in Christian circles.  Refresher:  I am referring to foods, medicines, tourist spots, and the like. There seems to be a subset of Christians who believe that natural is closer to what God wants. They sometimes add in that corporate entities are more from the culture of materialism (and hence less holy), while natural things bring us closer to the simpler lifestyle God points us to.

My hunch was based on these strands of knowledge:

The Nature Boys of the 40's - 60's, who built many of the first California health food stores and were influential in counterculture, alternative medicine, and especially H-A hippie culture, were themselves descended from the early 20th C German youth movements.  While these movements were characterised by hiking, camping, healthy living, and self-reliance, this was closely tied to ideas of German superiority and return to Teutonic ideals.  They read Hesse and Nietzsche, listened to Wagner, and stressed personal will.  Many were quite specific in their return to German pagan roots. (The relation of this to later Nazi developments are not inevitable, but pretty clear.)

The American versions of this all-natural approach came from the Midwest, especially upper Midwest, which were largely German, Dutch, and Scandinavian settled.

The earliest naturopathic, homeopathic, and related alt-medicine practices came a century before that from other Germanic sources, from a philosophical ferment which focused on life-force, and gods from nature.  Though of course, that last is hardly unusual, as most cultures drew their gods and goddesses from what we would today generally call "nature."

I also had a vague idea that the Puritan strain of reading from the Book of Nature as well as the Bible, and the relation of that both to earlier Germanic outlook and later Unitarian beliefs, seemed to suggest a continuity from those Teutonic thoughts to modern nature-emphasisers and Gaian thinking.  Even then I thought it was tenuous, but something might be made of it.

My hunch prover to be more correct than not, but I got some things wrong.  For example, I thought I would get to ruin the song "The Happy Wanderer" for you, as it seemed clearly tied to the late 19th C Wandervogel movement of strong young Germans hiking, breathing fresh air, eating vegetables, and enduring hardships. And where that led.  German evangelicals* were especially big on this, which was one of their reasons for supporting Hitler in his first few years.  We have always fallen for movements that get the teenagers to be polite and get focused, I'm afraid. They got off than bandwagon, but a lot of the damage had already been done.

But the song has only the most distant connections to such things, having been written in 1954.  I'm not going to hold hiking in general against the Germans.  The craze had always been British and American as well, and now everyone is getting into the act.

In my research on the song, however, I came across this, which illustrates that the Germans are still not quite like us.  They were not known as stern and emotionless until the mid-20th C.  They were regarded as hopeless oversentimental romantics (see Literature, German, 18th-19th C) who might burst into tears at old songs or go off and believe anything.  Perhaps that gives us a better understanding of why they went insane.
Details to follow.

*Evangelical had somewhat different meaning in that culture, as it primarily meant Lutherans and Calvinist groups.