Links and Brief Comments

A blogger known to all of you has sent along a link to a Gawker article, Bill Gates Is Kind of a Dick. She notes that this may be true for other reasons, but this particular article does not provide evidence for the claim.  I suggest it provides evidence that Gates is interested in solving problems, rather than having the right ideals about them.

Gates' gods are not political, but technical. He worships efficiency and measurability, not ideals.

I have made many accusations about liberals over the years, and sometimes repent of them, having to go back and clarify that I am generalising about very public liberals, and highlighting - perhaps unfairly - certain aspects of their thought and motivation. Then I read something like this and wonder whether I was right the first time.

*****

My son sent along an excellent article Married To Depression. It all seems so easy from the outside, and so impossible from inside.

*****

In discovering Half Man Half Biscuit below, I struck a vein of links about Ambleside, which in turn put me in mind of Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which is set in that region.  It is a book with many flaws, most of which are irrelevant, because of its depth of imagination. It put me on a rabbit trail of The Morrigan, the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, and all manner of northern European folk tales and goddesses. (How I love Wikipedia trails. I have noted ruefully that it has made me obsolete, as folks used to call and ask my wife and I for information they couldn't put their hands on.) Yet just as an example, read this entry on Perchta. There isn't one definitive version of her.  If you slide over a few valleys in Europe, Perchta/Bertha/Holda changes as well.

This holds true for not only the characters, but the stories themselves.  We sometimes read a tale and are suddenly aware that it is partly familiar, and were told a different version of Red Riding Hood or The Green Ribbon when we were young. While it is true that the old tales have been polished and made hard by many retellings, it is also true that each teller adds and emphasizes, and these variants may be ephemeral.  We can't count on some element being important just because it is there.

So too with languages. We blithely refer to Old French, as if there was some standard dialect in 1200 that was pretty consistent and generally understood.  But as the type of cheese changes from valley to valley in France, so too did the language. There was never a moment in time when there was a single Proto-Indo-European that started splitting off into other tongues as people moved away from ground zero of the Urheimat. It was always rather fluid and variable.

We know this, of course, and it's rather obvious when you think of it.  Yet it is easy to forget, because we put stories, and goddesses, and languages into named categories, and store them that way.

*****

I read a Grantland article on the Red Sox by Charles S Pierce. I sent it along to son Ben, who reads far more about sports than I, with the comment It is puzzling to me.  I started out liking the article, but by the time I got to the end I was thoroughly irritated, thinking "what an arrogant prick this guy is."

But I can't tell why.  I have a partial answer, but it's not enough to cover, and the picture of him at the end confirmed it, but I was already irritated at that point.  The partial explanation is that his story of his personal history with the Red Sox has just been done too many times before. It's not only 400 writers, it's that every guy in New England my age has a story like this about Red Sox history and the 1960's.  His is better written than mine would be, or Mike King's or Jon Reckard's or whoever's, but it's not dramatically better.  Who cares, dude?  But that's really not enough to put me off this guy.  I read through the article again looking for clues, but I can't see much.

Ben had thoughts about this, and what I was sensing from afar, but I will let you have your own thoughts first.

Timing Is Everything in Humor

Dickens's Dictionary of the Thames

I am reading Dickens's Dictionary of The Thames: An Unconventional Handbook, 1887.

It seemed the sort of curiosity I would have fun with, and it has been.  I made two errors, however.  The first and most important is that this is by Charles Dickens, Jr.  I had thought 1887 was rather late in the day for the more famous father - he would in fact have been 75 had he lived that long - but paid no more attention. Secondly, there is also a Dickens's Dictionary of London of about the same time, and I thought I was ordering that.

The younger Dickens spends a great deal of energy discussing fishing and rowing clubs.  I thought this odd for an author of Bleak House. Architecture, villages, and inns I can understand, because one would rather have to mention them in any discussion of the river.  But discourses on catching "Dace, (The)," or three decades of who had won (and who had lost), the Championship of the Thames, both professional and amateur, seemed hard to reconcile.  It took me quite a while to catch on that this wasn't the same Dickens, but a son who had gone to Eton and studied business in Germany.

Of particular interest was an entry on Cups, Cocktails, andGrogs, which I recommend for your amusement.  The two repeated ingredients added to alcohol in any form are sugar and lemon-peel. It takes an odd sort of person to recommend taking great care about exactly how the lemon-peel is to be strained and poured, and specifying that an Old Toby sort of brown earthenware jug ("a bowl is an abomination") is recommended, while breezing by the actual types of alcohol as rather interchangeable: half a glass of gin, whisky, or brandy, or a glass of sherry or claret.

Reading about the locks has me harking back to thoughts of taking a vacation on a canal boat someday, even though I have considered and rejected the idea before. Trying to edit that post of a year ago, I erased it, however.

Half Man Half Biscuit

A Libertarian Case For Government

Mark S Weiner over at Cato Unbound makes that case in The Paradox of Modern Individualism.  His thought seems to be that only the state can restrain the clan, and clan government in all its forms - drug cartels, mafia - is worse.  He sees us in danger of reverting to clan government. Arnold Kling has a response Human Nature Vs Libertarian Ideals, and other responses are expected in the next few days.

Kling's response goes into larger issues than I was considering, but parts of it were along similar lines.  BTW, he references America 3.0, a book by contributors over at Chicago Boyz (sidebar), where commenter David Foster also posts.

It's a fascinating original article, and I do always pay especial attention to contrarians from within a philosophy.  The libertarian speaking in favor of government does seem at first to be like an atheist who thinks we should support religious schools or a white supremacist who supported Obama.  (I have run across both in print, BTW.)  One has to give them credit for at least rethinking their own premises.  It is rather like the rabbinic principal of pilpul: perhaps the opposite is also true.

I think Weiner fails to make his case. I liked Kling's response better. Weiner identifies three types of clans, and shows how clan-government can be worse for individual liberty than state power.  But all his negatives are drawn from the first two. I don't predict the future very well, but I don't see America, or any western nation, in much danger of becoming like Lebanon or the Philippines, let alone Somalia or Afghanistan. Europe retains a good deal of tribalism (and the Anglospheric colonies have made new tribes on somewhat different bases), but hasn't been clannish in that sense for a thousand years, except on the periphery. We can rest easy there, I think.  Weiner's third type of clan seems to involve a lot of vague handwaving - racial identity groups, multinational corporations. Those are incantations of what we fear in the world, but I don't see that they hold up as clans.  IBM has a half-million employees, but less than 1% of them have a clan-like loyalty to Big Blue.  People leave Walmart to work for Target - or San Jose State, or the Dept of Defense, or whatever - every day without a second thought.  As for racial identity groups, solid African-American support for the Democratic Party hasn't translated into a reduction of black-on-black crime or an increase in mutual support groups.  Hispanics from different Latin American countries don't have a lot of solidarity outside of the staffs of the advocacy groups. I don't know much about the growing Middle-Eastern population in America, but I'm betting there aren't a lot of Pakistani-Turkish barbeques on Wednesday nights.  I suggest Weiner's third category of clans, the only one which looked like it might have some bearing on us, doesn't exist.

That some government is actually better than anarchy is something that even libertarians subscribe to.  Rumors to the contrary come mainly from opponents setting up strawmen.  One occasionally encounters an anarcho-syndicalist or something, but I don't think they've been elected to any Boards of Selectmen lately.

Us And Them

Jerry Z Muller's Us And Them from Foreign Affairs in 2008. Bear in mind that the magazine published a roundtable of authors disagreeing with Muller a few months later. He holds his own, though.

...a survey would show that whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality, by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in other words -- where the domestic ethnic balance of power is protected by strict citizenship laws -- in Europe the "separatist project" has not so much vanished as triumphed. Far from having been superannuated in 1945, in many respects ethnonationalism was at its apogee in the years immediately after World War II. European stability during the Cold War era was in fact due partly to the widespread fulfillment of the ethnonationalist project. And since the end of the Cold War, ethnonationalism has continued to reshape European borders.

And

One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since World War II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism but because of its success, which removed some of the greatest sources of conflict both within and between countries. The fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration in European history.

This is, of course, quite different from how Europe pictures itself these days. The standard belief is that a pan-European consciousness is growing, and nationalism fading, except in retrograde parties which hate outsiders. That the ability of the EU to come together may actually be founded on its individual components first becoming separate is not such a popular idea just now.

It was very much the American idea at first, of disparate colonies coming together.  And certainly, an American identity has been established.  As federalism disappears (or so I hear), American unity may fragment as well.  Union may require separateness.

Note that since WWII, and accelerating after the breakup of the USSR, much of nation building has involved people returning ethnic groups, mostly Germans, back to their countries of "origin," even had they lived there for generations. This was often not expulsion but volunteering, e.g. Germans and many Hungarians leaving Romania; Germans moving west from Poland and Poles West from Belarus;

(HT: Byzantine Calvinist)

Head

I have absolutely no recollection of the Monkees' movie Head. Much darker, nihilistic, and ambiguous than anything I ever associated with them. 



As Nesmith points out, they were pariahs among the serious at that point, and had no credibility. Well yeah. They were more closely associated with things like this. What a protest song, eh?

African Distance Runners

"Running is in my blood," the essay in The Atlantic opens.  I guess Tolo Debele would subscribe strongly to genetic theories for running excellence, then.  Little Town of Champions. Though the East African distance runners do not all come from one country, they do come from the East African Rift 

The map shows how an occasional Eritrean or Sudanese gets in there with the Ethiopian and Kenyan runners.

Beatles In USSR

Sponge-Headed Scienceman sent along this PBS documentary about How The Beatles Rocked The Kremlin, crediting them with creating a great deal of the cultural pressure which ultimately brought the Iron Curtain to collapse.




Quite reminiscent of the idea behind the underground Czech rock group The Plastic People of the Universe,  hated by the communist authorities.  They were the foundation for Tom Stoppard's play "Rock and Roll."

I agree with the concept, but feel the documentary overstates the case.  The Beatles were a metonym for an entire rebellious youth culture, not the force itself.

Bluffing Through Ukraine

Retriever sends this brilliant article from The Spectator on Ten Handy Phrases For Bluffing Your Way Through the Ukraine Crisis.

The Father of Jules Bastien-Lepage

San Fransiscan Nights

Terrible song.  This is the type of faux love that taught hate.  But gee, it was cool, because the Animals were known to be edgy, rough, rowdy boys from Newcastle, and the love in San Fransisco was so great that it softened even them.  Truly, truly, it was the hope of mankind.




Okay, even at the time I recognised that there was something amazingly stupid about this.

To their credit, the Animals' bass player discovered Jimi Hendrix, suggested burning his guitar as a bit, introduced him to Eric Clapton, and paid for his first record. So there's that.  We think "how fortunate we are that he got in there and saw the talent before Hendrix died."

Except, Jimi would still have had talent, he probably would have carved out some niche anyway, and might not have overdosed on barbiturates.  There might be reunion tours even now. If we don't see close connections otherwise, we assume that the past would have occurred much as it did, rather like a solid object that can have pieces moved without affecting the whole.

Ukraine

Population of Russia: 140 million
Population of EU: 500 million
GDP of Russia: 2.5 Tril
GDP of EU: 16 Tril.  And you could get the Norwegians on board if you really wanted to as well.
Plus, if Ukraine is seriously interested in independence from Russia, their 44 million and 300 billion should be sold out for the cause, right?

Why is everyone looking to the US to put slightly-less-corrupt Ukrainians in charge?

We feel bad for some Ukrainians who would like to be our pals, and we are still haunted by the memory that the USSR was once a serious rival. But Russia is just a 3rd world country with nukes and a mean streak now.  Not very different from Pakistan, really.

Fairy Tales

(There's going to be some HBD stuff below.)

My wife had this edition of the Junior Classics, and there was a slightly later one in my childhood home as well.  Someone did some brilliant marketing on this, because from 1912 onward a lot of homes had these, enough so that even the original set isn't worth all that much. (Your old family Bible is unlikely to fetch much of a price outside the family, either. Too many of 'em.)

I glanced at them from time to time, but had never read them.  I made an effort this month, mostly from guilt, and made it through the first two volumes. I doubt I will go further. We are sending them on to son #2 some day. In addition to the guilt, similar topics have emerged repeatedly over the last weeks, and my mind has been taken up with the whole rich stew of ancient tales and how they affect us.  First, my granddaughters' obsession with "Frozen*," the new Disney animation roughly based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen;" a discussion of Bruno Bettelheim's pariah status in the autism community, which reminded me of The Uses of Enchantment, the one good thing he ever did; a post about Lightsabers and Cinder-maids by expecting mom Julia over at her blog The Whole Sky; a rereading of Lewis's and Tolkien's  thoughts on the subject two months ago; pondering St Dymphna earlier this month; a Bible study on Daniel (and dreams); and, and, and...

Heck, I don't know where these running topics come from.  I have mild OCD, stuff comes in and won't go away.

I doubt I have anything that is absolutely new.  But I have some things that may be worth bringing up again.

The folktales of Northern Europe are different. They just are. Girls and women are more interesting and more prominent. Please note: all characters in myths and fairy tales are two-dimensional at most. Usually they are only one-dimensional: the handsome prince, the beautiful princess, the wicked enchantress, the sad king. Complaining that some female character of a northern tale is only two-dimensional is a modern fascination that shows a complete misunderstanding of the genre.  Two is the maximum. Let this sink in.  Yes, sometimes the unpromising third son, by cleverness, is rewarded with the beautiful princess and half the kingdom, and that is infuriating to modern sensibilities. Yet sometimes it is the young woman who is the central figure, who is rewarded in the end with a one-dimensional Handsome Prince. Don't complain.  She gets two dimensions and he gets only one, and this doesn't occur very often outside the Hajnal Line. (See also, Barbie and Ken.  Complain about her figure, and shallowness, her clothing, and bad influence all you want, but don't forget: Ken is an accessory. That doesn't happen in other parts of the world.)

Robert Bly, a Jungian poet wrote at length (though not depth) about men, but noted important details about the women-stories in what he regarded as universal myths.  But being essentially a Norwegian  DFL-party liberal from Minnesota (Cf: Garrison Keillor), his idea of "universal"meant "we can find occasional examples among Southern Europeans, fewer still in the Middle-East, and obscure references everywhere else, but mostly, Scandinavians, Teutons, and maybekindasorta Celts." He notes in passing the mother who passes on to her daughter a white linen cloth with three drops of blood pricked from her finger before she dies and the importance of this in her rising to womanhood. Whoa-ho! Observe the deep-rooted gender-role issues, there, eh? Menstruation! Sacrifice! Childbirth! My stars, what ignoramuses those largely-male storytellers must have been, eh?

Except that outside of northern Europe, girl and women issues don't even get that. They get one dimension. Related: one tribe stands out among the Semitic groups as even noticing that women are not, essentially, one rank above cattle. Guess. (Hint: they wrote they whole Bible.) The Christians grow out of this exceptional group, exceptional themselves for the heresy of more status for women even by that standard. When they finally penetrate to the lands which inexplicably already have some idea of female intelligence and worth, in contrast to oh, everyone else in the world, women are taught to read, allowed to own property, and rule in limited spheres.  Centuries later, it is this group that supplies feminists with new troops every generation.   Those who have followed all the discussions at hbd chick  about forbidding cousin marriage will not be surprised to  Jewish women, now at the forefront of Western feminism, could ironically only express it in the lands of the NW European gentiles.They were part of Step 1 of feminist development, millennia ago; they had some part in a few other steps. But they essentially came back into the picture mostly in America.

Yes, yes, I'm wandering all over the map here.  There's no good structure to this. Take-away point: in this set of folk tales, the princesses are often clever; the protagonist might be a female who has to go out into the world to make her fortune; women own property and give orders.  Not always, but sometimes.

Another difference, related and dear to the hearts of students of cultural (and genetic) history, is the recurring theme of being kind to strangers. Repeatedly, the hero or heroine succeeds in the northern tales because s/he shared a meal with a fox, or carried an old man across a stream, or did some other service to a woman who turned out to be some magical creature.  This seldom happens in the stories outside those realms.  One can see the cultural value growing, of loyalty not only to one's kin, but to nearby others. Not only that, but the evil blood-relative, whose claims must sometimes be denied, also turns up mostly in this region. hbd chick posted on it today, actually.

*My son and DIL are marveling how even Disney underestimated how popular this was going to be. I have seen only the musical numbers, and those with the the lyrics obscured by girls 6 and almost 3 leaping about and shouting them 2 beats behind the video. But it's good, and powerful, and it will rapidly obscure Brave, Tangled, The Princess and the Frog, etc. For girls (esp. with sisters) of the rising generation, this will be among the top few influential and shared cultural experiences. You can watch 2040 - worldwide - being built right now.

The Deep State

An interesting over at Chicago Boyz entitled The Deep State. The worries of Bill Moyers, though still frozen in liberal amber, are a significant part of the discussion.

The privacy and surveillance concerns have been topics for the conspiracy theorists.  Yet that is hardly necessary.  The number of people in federal government, plus the enormous number of hangers-on as lobbyists and contractors, now constitutes a group so large that they are a class interest unto themselves.  They don't have to have any ill motives or secret agendas to be dangerous.  They just have to be regular folks who have jobs and want to keep them, who have some understanding what is good for their "industry," and some power to protect themselves.  That in itself makes them a threat to other Americans.  That this much power attracts the super-ambitious and under-conscienced only makes it worse.

The right gets distracted by the similarity of such behavior to the State under dictatorships, which is true but unnecessary to notice.  Yet the left is worse, continuing to believe that the Real Problem is super-ambitious and under-conscienced people in business, a place those can actually do little harm.  It comes from deriving one's political beliefs from stories rather than knowledge.  We can easily envision rich businessmen doing evil things and not caring much about others - heck, the scriptwriters for the Muppets have been doing it for years. It is harder to write a simple morality tale about government empire-builders in shadowy places. We make up hero-stories about fighting baddies, and it is easier to write one script than the other in our feeble imaginations, so dependent on inherited themes.

It is a continuing belief of mine that this reliance on narrative explains most of our politics. Once one is an ideologue, intelligence is only used to play chess against oneself.

Bacon Hat

The Lehigh Valley Ironpigs, a Pittsburgh Pirates AAA affiliate, has a new logo on some of its merchandise: bacon.  I predict they will be selling a lot of hats this year. The T-shirt bacon strip is scratch-and-sniff. The piping down the side of the pants?  Bacon.

This is also a team that has all-black uniforms and Urinal Game Controllers at the ballpark. (Hands free!) Someone in the marketing department needs to get scooped up and brought to bigger things.

Appalachian Trail In Winter

Well, that has a rugged, outdoorsy, courageous sound to it, doesn't it? Especially in NH, though I'm sure Clingman's Dome is pretty brisk in February as well.

The reality, not so much. This was a wuss version of AT-NH.  I was curious what the AT looked like as it entered NH and went through Hanover, and what the first few miles out of town  were like. The Dartmouth Outing Club maintains the trail there, and historically only the Harvard Mountaineering Club rivals it for young men named Cameron or Bradford or Sumner who take to the strenuous life at every opportunity.  These days, young women named Alexis or Eun Hee may outnumber them, but still, I expected the AT to be treated with honor there. Yet there were no markers through town and across campus.

To confirm the fantasy, the map shows that the Appalachian Trail leaves town right next to the Food Co-Op and next meets a road 3+ miles later at the Montessori School. How Perfect.  I wondered if it were more parkland through this section - a commonly used cross-country trail, used not only by students but families. Perhaps there would be a little shelter where people gathered in the cold with a bit of fire and hot cocoa on weekends. The surrounding towns refer to this as Hanover! after all, and it is the AT. What could be more natural than students in North Face or other polartec, or professors with young sprouts and a yellow lab dashing about. I wondered whether a snowmobile, that noisy middle-american machine that nonetheless grooms trails marvelously, would be allowed.

This is the actual entrance to the trail, in the parking lot of the Co-Op. It took me a while to find it.


The Food Co-Op itself was as expected. The local foods section is all healthy bakery stuff this time of year, including a deceitful and tasteless oatmeal-raisin scone. Expensive coffees from impoverished countries. A dad admonished his son not to whine in a very standard, non-elite way, but added "Devon, use your words." Ah, yes. After clambering over the plow-pile, there was a meager track with bootprints, paw-prints, and unaccountably, skate-tracks. (I recalled no ponds on the map. A swamp, maybe?) It quickly led to a more recognisable trailhead.

Still, I was disappointed. It was clear that very few people came out here. No crosscountry, no snowmachine - how hard would it be to show a little respect to this important bit of history right under your noses, people?

A quarter-mile later, I came to the first green glass waterfall. Ski-doos can do remarkable things, but this would be a feat. There was no getting up the trail directly, but hands-and-knees, a little to the side, banging away at the crust and grasping branches, I got up over. I did feel a bit queasy about coming back this way. In my expectation of parkland and winter vacation family merriment on the trail, I had had hopes of hiking through and cadging a ride back, but that was dashed in the parking lot. I thought going in a mile or so and retracing, then driving around and seeing a bit of the Montessori side might be a better plan.

The second green glass waterfall was enough discouragement.Back I went. The scone was already sitting pretty heavy.

I had trouble find the trail on the other side as well. The Montessori School may have closed. I reluctantly determined that this was the entrance to the second leg.

It seems rather unwelcoming, doesn't it? Though this also, once I climbed over, had recognisable trail marking. The trick seems to be We won't show you the trail. But we'll let you know if you've found it pretty quickly. I only count my steps while hiking about 30% of the time now. Yet I must do it without even knowing. I walked in a ways, up a little rise and down into a valley. At the bottom, I calculated how far I thought I had gone and considered whether I should go back. I pondered. 1100 steps, maybe 1300, I thought. Though a number kept occurring to me: 1657. I counted on the way back, and the number of steps was 1670. I count without knowing. I also figured out the ice-skates, which were on this side of the trail as well. They were crampon tracks, which makes much more sense.

Back at the car, I came upon a hiker coming the other way. A woman about 30; blonde, slender, healthy, polartec, ski poles - and a yellow lab frisking about. So the stereotype is not dead yet.

I have learned to my chagrin in the last two years that my navigation is not as good as I imagined.  If they are going to make it hard on me to boot, I will have to limit myself to finding old highways. (Post on that coming.) Those who want to hear more AT adventures can go over to Dubbahdee's at Necat Draco, as he hiked the whole thing.  But he's a pastor now, and can't lie - okay, not as much - so the stories may not be as interesting as they would have been a year ago.

Voted Best Ever

This was voted the best religious joke ever over at Ship of Fools, I site I used to comment on but got tired of.

Christian Contemporary Worship

The introduction to special music this morning reminded me of nothing so much as the Troggs.




An earlier selection had the two female vocalists clapping in just that sort of way that put me in mind of The Archies*

Bet you don't have the Troggs and the Archies at your worship.  At first I thought that in 1968, no one would have called music from 1922 "contemporary," but the more I considered it, churches would indeed have called that contemporary.  Many churches would have called music from 1868 contemporary.

* Yes, I know that there were no Archies.  But they had a cartoon, and those girls clapped, though they preferred the tambourine.

Vitamins

From Maggie's an interesting article at Smithsonian about which vitamins actually have some positive effect. Vitamin D for most of us. Probiotics, but only when you are taking antibiotics.  Zinc, but only for a cold.  Niacin if you have heart disease, and maybe for some other things if you take it at prescription strength. Garlic for high blood pressure. 

Lots of things are absent here.