A Point of Commonality

I don't know if it's true, as Charles Barkley says, that every black parent in the South whips their children with willow switches. I do know it's true that my grandmother, who was Southern but quite white, certainly made use of them as she felt appropriate. I only received such a lesson from her once, and at the time I thought it was unfair because she was angry that we were playing ball near the street -- but we hadn't even gone into the street. I later discovered that my great-grandfather was killed by a car, walking across the street to get the mail from his mailbox. The woman driving the car that killed him never saw him, apparently.

I'm of the opinion that it did me no harm, even if the particular incident was in a sense unjust. My father, who was on the receiving end of far more whippings from her as a boy, is one of the best men I've ever known. He is generous, gentle, and -- far from being a 'child abuser,' as the overwrought discussion suggests of any parent raised as he was -- my sister would always try to arrange to be punished by him instead of my mother, because he was too scared of hurting her to paddle with any strength.

Ecclesiasticus gives advice on raising children that begins "Whoever loves his son will beat him frequently," and of course Proverbs 13:24 holds that "whoever spares the rod hates his son."

Certainly you shouldn't abuse children. But can we stop painting people like my grandmother as monsters, 'child abusers,' and the like? Is it too much to ask that we express our culture's desire to move away from spanking children in terms that don't require us to despise and hate so many who were doing what they thought was best, and had been taught was right, even by the wise of their communities and cultures?

'Your Dossier Is Fat With The Blood Of Kittens'

Apparently Sergeant Shlock and my dog have something in common.

He's a great dog, really. It's just that he's a country dog, and there's just no explaining to him the difference between squirrels and cats. Everybody's happy when you catch the squirrel!

"Can't tame woild rabbit"

...says the girl's father in Watership Down...explaining why she can't keep Hazel (whom she's rescued from her cat), so that he ends up being released at a critical point in the story. Adams put a lot of trouble into researching rabbits for his story, and now I see evidence of why he was right.

According to this story, the genetic code of domestic rabbits (who've been living with humans for 1400 years or so) is different from their wild cousins' in about a hundred places...some of those important for development of behavior.

"Selection during domestication might have focused on tameness and lack of fear," says Pat Heslop-Harrison of the University of Leicester in the UK. "As a farmer, you neither want the animal to hurt you, nor for the animal to die from stress." Keeping lookout and fleeing from potential predators uses up lots of an animal's energy, which humans would rather see turned into meat. Because rabbits were only domesticated relatively recently, the new sequences are not all present in all domestic rabbits. As a result, Andersson says escaped domestic rabbits could revert to wild-like forms over just a few generations - assuming they survived in the wild.

It's unsurprising when you know about the famous Russian fur fox experiment...which took under 50 years to breed the wild foxes into something far more doglike (down to the floppy ears the breeders weren't expecting...they were just looking for tameness). The wiki on domestication gives estimated dates for various creatures that live with us...at least some of that based on genetic evidence.

Aye or Die!

We gotcher veto, right here

Nothing says "You're on the unpopular side of an issue" like a legislative veto override.

How to reduce federal spending

Michelle Obama came up with it, and it's brilliant:  impose unpopular regulations on the programs funded with the federal spending until the public rejects their products or services, to the point where it becomes more cost-effective for the programs to decline the federal subsidies.  Bonus:  less regulation.

Here's another effective response to dumb, intrusive regulations.  The Bank Street Brewhouse in New Albany, Indiana, wanted to serve only beer to customers, and to encourage them to complete their meals by patronizing nearby street-food vendors.  Indiana liquor laws, however, permit a business to maintain a retail liquor license only if it operates a restaurant on the premises, defined as the ability to serve hot sandwiches, hot soup, coffee with milk, and soft drinks in a sanitary manner.  Thus was born the "Bank Street Brewhouse Indiana Statutory Compliance Restaurant Menu":

Our Famous Hotdog Sandwich
Microwaved to perfection, including both weenie
and bun, sans condiments.
$10.00

Chef Campbell's Soup of the Day
Served in a bowl.  Your choice of whichever can is
on top of the stack.
$10.00

Instant Coffee
Caffeinated only.  Available black, or black.
$5.00

Powdered Milk
With or without water.
$5.00

Sprecher Craft Soft Drinks
Different flavors . . . market pricing.

H/t AEI.

The prisoner's lament

King Richard I of England (the Lion-Hearted) composed this song at the end of the 12th century, while imprisoned by the Duke of Austria during the Third Crusade.  He wrote it in his first language, an Old French dialect, with another version in a related Romance dialect that still maintains a precarious existence in Provençe and the Catalan areas of Spain.  Richard's enemies claimed he didn't even know English, but he probably did, though it's true that he exhibited almost no attachment to the country that revered him, preferring instead to live in France.

No prisoner can tell his tale well without expressing his pain,
But to console himself he can write a song. 

I've many friends, but all their gifts are poor;
They'd be ashamed to know how for two winters I've been held for ransom.

My men-at-arms and barons know full well:
The English, Normans, Poitevins, Gascons. 

I would not abandon the poorest companion in prison,
And I don't say this merely to reproach, but still, I am a prisoner.

Richard did finally win his release, through the help of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, despite the connivances to the contrary by his brother John and King Phillip II of France, the son (by a later wife) of Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII.

Friday Night AMV

Learning to fly.
I was a pilot once, I wish I'd had one of these. At least I can still enjoy listening to Tom.

Fun with Venn

From AEI:

Stormy weather

Over the last hour my internet (wifi) connection got wonkier than usual, and we noticed that we kept losing the satellite TV as we tried to watch the news over lunch.  It may an effect of the second and more powerful wave of this week's predicted solar storm, which apparently arrived at midday today.

Building a self

Steven Pinker, via Maggie's Farm, on "What's Wrong with Harvard":

I submit that if “building a self” is the goal of a university education, you’re going to be reading anguished articles about how the universities are failing at it for a long, long time.

I think we can be more specific. It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.

On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.

I believe (and believe I can persuade you) that the more deeply a society cultivates this knowledge and mindset, the more it will flourish. The conviction that they are teachable gets me out of bed in the morning. Laying the foundations in just four years is a formidable challenge. If on top of all this, students want to build a self, they can do it on their own time.

A New Day

That's when it happened. Someone said, "I can't believe it will be nine years this week since 9/11". And one by one we began to remember where we were, what we were doing, how it felt. It was this generation's "Where were you when they shot JFK?" moment and for a brief shining moment the shared memory pulled us back from the brink and made us one again.

But like everything that seems impossibly perfect, that moment wasn't meant to last.

In retrospect, 9/11 divides my life more clearly and cleanly than when I married or when my child was born. Before, I was committed to a life that was organized around the pursuit of knowledge. After, I was a man of war. I remember the day well, unlike the other momentous days: the hours spent watching the towers fall I recall far better than the hours in the delivery room, helping with a difficult birth. Though it was a dry wedding due to it being Sunday in rural Georgia, I barely remember my wedding day at all.

I don't object. I have the sense that I was sent, to live in this hour and place for a reason I'm not given to wholly understand. So be it.

Sounds like we are going to war again, against a foe not so very terrible. I think we can take them. The hard part won't be defeating them, or breaking their armies; the armies of the region are fragile, structurally, when on defense. The hard part will be not beating them until we've developed something better, and organic to the region, to step in and take our enemy's place.

Because it's organic, we can't make it happen faster than it naturally happens. That means we can't win this war by pushing too fast. We can break and destroy the enemy as fast as we wish, but we must be patient, to let the enemy develop its own opposition so we can nurture it. This is war as gardening.

Why doesn't that bother me? Shouldn't we rush to destroy the enemy and restore peace as fast as possible, especially given the brutality of the foe?

Perhaps it is because this is what works, and -- finally -- I believe that the rules of the world are not our fault. Things are as they are not because I wish it that way, but because that's how it is. We play the game that was put in front of us.

Could we refuse? Should we? Those are harder questions, really at the juncture of why someone might elect to be a Christian and not a Hindu or -- more radically -- a Buddhist. You have that choice. It is important to think about what is entailed in making that decision.

I am going to Jerusalem in December. The old tradition held that it is the center of the world. Perhaps it is the place for clarity.

We shall see.

Enid & Geraint

By custom and tradition of the Hall, today there are no posts except this poem.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Civilization v. Celebrity

Foul language warning, though nothing you won't expect if you know who Mike Tyson is.

I have never seen a celebrity called out like that before. Not just any celebrity, either, but a former heavyweight champion of the world who is a demonstrated violent felon.

This host has some guts.

More Richard Thompson

A version of a Child ballad, King Henry V's Conquest of France, making a little fast and loose with history:



A version of another Child ballad, the ubiquitous "Cruel Mother" ballad; this one fills out most of each verse with "Edinburgh; Stirling for aye; the Bonnie St. Johnstone lies fair upon Tay":

Super-Henge

Dragging earth-penetrating radar around Stonehenge has some interesting results.

More on Trash

Skip ahead a few minutes, and you can hear an Oxford scholar talking about a hundred-year old find of trash that includes, among other things, lost sayings attributed to Jesus in the early period.

In a hundred years of work, they've gotten through a very small percentage of the trash. Old copies of the Iliad, tempting fragments...

The author's top three finds:

#3: A copy of the Book of Revelations' passage with the Number of the Beast, the earliest known copy we have... which gives a different number.

#2: A non-Homeric version of the story of the Iliad in which the Greeks lose the Trojan war.

#1: Turns out one document that they found in the trash mounds over, and over, and over, and over... well, let's call it a "romance novel."

28 weeks later

The Ebola epidemic, as expected, is getting worse:  about 3,600 infected and 2,000 dead so far.  More ominous is the even more complete breakdown of a medical system that could only have been described a rudimentary even before 79 healthcare workers died of the disease.  Hysterical rage is setting in:

“A US federal air marshal has been quarantined after being attacked by a man with a syringe, suspected to be containing an Ebola-spreading substance, at the Lagos international airport,” read a report out of Nigeria in the International Business Times on Tuesday.

Today's outrage in education

A young piano prodigy's parents would prefer to leave her in public school in Washington, D.C., but then she'd have to give up the piano competitions she keeps traveling to--while maintaining stellar grades--in order to avoid exposing her parents to truancy charges.  So now she's home schooling, a solution that suits no one involved.

Retirement and satisfaction

Statistics about Americans' retirement planning have a tendency to be a bit alarming.  This AEI article by Andrew Biggs and Sylvester Schieber takes an interesting approach, which is to examine the effect of children on retirement savings.  Apparently there was some recent scare-mongering about a discrepancy between the savings of families with children and those without.  Biggs and Schieber note that families with children spend a lot while the kids are at home or in college, then cut way back.  They don't drop their standard of living, though, so much as keep consuming what they always did, not counting what the kids consumed.  Parents save, therefore, not to permit themselves to adopt the standard of living common among childless people with equal income, but to preserve roughly the same standard of living they were used to, which of course makes sense.

The childless Texan99 household always adopted a standard of living significantly below that of my colleagues, even those with children.  Apparently they weren't as fanatically focused on retirement as I was; many of them seemed terrified of the idea of retirement, to be truthful.  In any case, if we get along in our working years at about the level we'd like to preserve in our retirement years, we'll be able to save a lot more than most people think is ordinarily prudent for whatever income we have.  It's not about the income, anyway, it's about getting used to whatever standard of living the income permits.  People are remarkably flexible that way.  The big thing is to be uninterested in how other people live; even if their incomes are comparable, their circumstances often are not, depending on how large a family they choose to raise and how prudent they are about emergencies and the future.