This is part of a Twitter interview with RFK Jr's vice-presidential running mate Nicole Shanahan. Her description of the different ways the Democratic Party sabotaged their campaign is rather shocking, at least to me.
Elitist Philosophy
Here is a study of to what degree belonging to a wealthy family correlates with your likelihood of being cited in key academic journals. This is studied in two ways: whether you come from a family that has risen in wealth over recent generations or not ("intergenerational persistence"), and whether you were able to rise to the same rank within the profession as your mentor professor ("rank-rank correlation"). Those who went to Ivy League schools are much more likely, for example, to attain full professorships than those who went to state schools. In some fields, if you didn't go to one of the top schools (and thus probably come from a wealthier background) you really have little chance of ever obtaining tenure.
Unsurprisingly, it depends on your field, with harder sciences tending to cite papers from academics or give them good jobs regardless of whether they are also from the rich.
There are some surprising lessons, though.
Philosophy is far and away the worst on both measures. If your terminal degree didn't come from one of those top schools, you probably will never have tenure; there's too much competition from those who did, and too few jobs in the field to exhaust the supply of Ivy Leaguers who want to teach. Likewise, the major philosophers as measured by citation form a sort of club, one that is sensitive to social class.
Note that mathematics is not too far away. To some degree, this may reflect that the wealthy are more likely to choose a pure knowledge field rather than one that will improve their station in life -- mathematics you'd think would be a field like microbiology where hard, demonstrable results mattered most. But maybe you don't usually study pure math (or philosophy) if your family is struggling. You'd go into engineering of some sort if you were good at math and needed social mobility.
I'm also surprised to see that Experimental Psychology falls where it does. I'm guessing that's a product of the replication crisis that is often tied to that field in particular: the ease of relative nobodies to get cited if they at least studied under somebody known suggests that the field is open to new ideas and ready to publish them. Since this study covers 2000-2013, when the crisis was in full effect, being positioned on that side of the graph may not always be an unalloyed good even if it's also a measure of relative equality of opportunity.
Heron on the Tuck
A Great Blue Heron joined us for tonight’s walk by the Tuckasegee River.
They’re frequently seen on the Tuck.
Undermining the Ground of Rebellion
This morning I was watching a short part of this video from a rally involving bikers in favor of Trump. Just below four minutes in, this guy plugs his new song: "It's about faith, family, and freedom."
Now that surprised me because I know that guy and his band from way back in 2003 when they were new. The band is called the Moonshine Bandits, and their first album is the only one I have ever heard, because the fusion of hip-hop and country -- new back then and novel -- didn't prove to be interesting enough to me to continue with over time. That debut album was not about "faith" or "family," although it was about freedom in the sense of rebellion. Here's the new song if you want to hear it. Apparently the pressure against faith, freedom, and family has come to alarm the rebels and called them back to a defense of the flag.
The case isn't unique, though. I remember that a couple of years ago Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels had died at age 83. "Barger is less well known for his more recent life, but if you followed him more recently you'd have found that in his older years he became a devout Christian and helped to publish a series of charming children's books." Faith and family, again, as well as freedom.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that this mode of rebellion is ironically grounded in the culture against which it rebels. To be a Hells Angel is to be rooted in a universe that has both Hell and angels. Trying to sweep away their metaphysical world -- to imagine there's no heaven -- undermines even the rebel's view: indeed, it suggests that mode of rebellion is perhaps a safety valve of the culture, a way of making a home within itself for its outlaws, rather than an attempt to supplant or replace it.
Or possibly it is the dynamic at play in Sir Walter Scott's "Harold the Dauntless," which has this most excellent opening passage:
List to the valorous deeds that were doneBy Harold the Dauntless, Count Witikind's son!Count Witikind came of a regal strain,And roved with his Norsemen the land and the main.Woe to the realms which he coasted! for thereWas shedding of blood and rending of hair,Rape of maiden and slaughter of priest,Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast:When he hoisted his standard black,Before him was battle, behind him wrack,And he burned the churches, that heathen Dane,To light his band to their barks again.
The poem's story is that Witikind grows old and converts from the heathen path to the Christian one, causing his son to disown him as cowardly; but then, over the course of six cantos, Harold in turn becomes mature enough to see the wisdom of it. What seemed right to Sonny Barger in 1969 and the Moonshine bandits in 2003 may have faded with age, and the spiritual promises seem brighter as the physical eye dims.
Or, perhaps, it is not that: even in 1980 when they were assembling a documentary involving a lawyer for the Angels, he and his lawyerly companions noted their conservative ethics.
There was Hells Angels Forever on YouTube, and at 29 minutes in, there was my father.He is seated with Herman Graber at a conference table in their office: soft, heavy men in wide ties and long sideburns. Herman explains to the camera not to be fooled by the swastikas and Nazi regalia, that the Angels are patriots, enthusiastic supporters of the Vietnam War, what you might in fact call right-wingers. He pauses, blinks, concerned that he might have gone too far. “But not fascists, no, I’m not saying they’re fascists.”My father cuts in. “Perhaps best suited to the most conservative wing of the Republican party — the Goldwater wing.”
It is and always has been an interesting dynamic. I noticed it too growing up in the South in the '70s and early '80s, when the most ardent Confederate flag displayers and Outlaw Country listeners were also firm patriots who loved Ronald Reagan. Charlie Daniels went from long hair to distrusting Gorbachev in a few years' time.
RFK
I don't listen to podcasts, but I did read in the paper that Joe Rogan got into some trouble with Trump over positive comments about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
What he actually said was this:
“That’s politics. They do it on the left. They do it on the right. They gaslight you, they manipulate you. They promote narratives,” Rogan said on the podcast.“The only one who’s not doing that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I am a fan [of RFK Jr]. He’s the only one that makes sense to me. He doesn’t attack people. He attacks actions and ideas. He’s much more reasonable and intelligent.”
That's very similar to my own thoughts on RFK. I've listened to him talk about several problems he thinks we need to address, and what I notice is that about half the time he is thoughtful, intelligent, and sincerely trying to solve the problem. (Sadly the other half of the time it's brain worms and dead bear cubs, but he's a Kennedy.)
It's also clear that he is enamored of his father's America, and his father's Democratic Party, which is doubtless why the current Democratic leadership had such a convulsive allergic reaction to him. They cannot praise JFK, hardly more than they can praise Jefferson or Jackson, because of his 'imperialism' and certainty that the American nation was a positive influence on the world, and capable of internal reform even in matters of race if only we would appeal to its inherent decency. RFK is a genuine patriot of the old America, and that's not welcome right now among Democrats.
RFK now says he's thinking of dropping out and endorsing Trump to prevent a Harris presidency -- perhaps due to the communism that JFK was himself so committed to opposing -- and Trump has signaled that he'd be open to brining RFK into his administration. (Also Elon Musk.)
I don't know if a restoration of mid-century solutions and ideas about what America is like and how it should proceed can actually improve things at this point. America was already committed to the managerial/administrative state by Kennedy's time, and dismantling all that should be the chief business of any attempt at reforming the United States.
Still, it is nice to hear someone talk through problems, identify causal factors, and then propose solutions that might actually work. It certainly couldn't hurt to have someone like that around to talk things through with while trying to figure out the way. (Ditto for Musk.)
The Principle of Reproductive Freedom
In the comments to yesterday's post, I mentioned the reframing of the abortion debate with the term "reproductive freedom." It's distinct from both pro-life and pro-choice because it eliminates any mention of the child.
Abortion for Harris/Walz doesn't consider the existence of the child at all. They frame it as purely an issue of reproductive freedom, one into which the child and the child's life does not rightly come as any sort of consideration. It's a more unrestricted liberty for them than the first amendment's, which Walz says doesn't apply to people who are spreading 'hate speech or misinformation,' certainly more than the second's, and based on Ms. Harris' prosecutorial days, more than the fourth, fifth, sixth, or eighth. It's the only genuinely unrestricted Constitutional liberty in their opinion; I notice it's also the one the Constitution doesn't protect or mention at all.
Today Reason makes note of the striking contrast between a party which is espousing a pro-family agenda, and one that is featuring vasectomy and abortion vans outside its convention hall. (The schedules for those vans filled up well before the convention began, too.)
Yet the principle of reproductive freedom doesn't have any enemies. The most devout Catholic agrees that no one should be forced into pregnancy; the Church opposes rape and teaches how to track ovulation cycles as a way of achieving that freedom.* This method may not be foolproof, but it is aligned with the principle that it's perfectly fine to want to be in control of one's reproduction or lack thereof. There is no group in America that opposes the principle being advocated.
What does concern some people is that business about the life of the child. That there is a living human being who is killed by an abortion is incontestably true as a matter of fact. That this killing is morally significant and shouldn't be excluded from the discussion of how to exercise this right of reproductive freedom is apparently controversial; but it's surely a reasonable position that killing a living human being is morally significant, and therefore deserves consideration in constructing any relevant ethical position.
We are a long way from the 1990s, when abortion advocates appended a desire that abortion be rare to their desire that it should be safe and legal. We are at the point at which the debate threatens to slide past a recognition that there is any issue at all about the necessary killing here, pitting a principle that everyone accepts against... well, nothing. On this formulation there is really nothing to oppose the right, because even the strongest pro-life advocate doesn't reject the principle being asserted; they were only concerned about the life. If the life is no longer a consideration, there's really nothing to discuss.
* The Church also teaches men reproductive freedom via chastity until marriage, which is in fact the most effective way for men to assert it. The principle of reproductive freedom doesn't extend to men on the left, as they have no parallel capacity to engender a child and then reject it in the way that abortion allows.
A Message from Harley-Davidson
Still, a start.
Lunatic
That is what one of the NYT's top opinion authors is telling their readers about the new plan for price controls. Bret Stephens, in a conversation with Gail Collins:
The best thing that can be said about her promise to go after price “gouging” is that she knows it has no hope of passing and that she understands that every serious economist on the planet will warn her that the consequences of price controls would be shortages, hoarding and, soon enough, black markets. In fact, my only hope for Harris is that her agenda is for campaign purposes only and that she’ll become a normal Democrat once in office....I just think that a vote needs to be earned, and so far Harris — unlike Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden — has done absolutely nothing to earn mine. She hasn’t won a primary. She hasn’t had a major legislative achievement of her own. She hasn’t had a distinguished vice presidency. Instead of moving to the center with her veep pick, she moved further to the left with Tim Walz. Her signature economic proposal isn’t liberal; it’s lunatic.
Emphasis added.
Long-time blogger Vodkapundit thinks the point of the proposal isn't to win with it, but to introduce the idea of a socialist takeover of the economy so that it won't seem so wild and strange later. That's possible, but the Times is not doing much to pad the idea here -- and as we saw last week, the other big establishment newspaper is heatedly against it.
The DNC is this week. We'll see how that goes.
McCoy
Most people have heard of Tom Mix, the cowboy movie star of the generation before John Wayne. You might not have heard of Tim McCoy, who did really cowboy in Wyoming before he was a star. He fled Jesuit school and hopped a train west, not knowing where he was going.
It’s a great story. He cowboyed for eight years, including for the “Outlaw Train” that was reputed to steal and brand strays; met some of the remaining legends from the real Old West, including of the Hole in the Wall Gang; recruited cavalry for Teddy Roosevelt; and finally became a movie star.
Almonds are much Bigger than you Expect
These things are the size of peaches, to which they are closely related. My wife and son planted some raw almonds and now we have a tree.
The apples are doing well this year too. Not just ours; the other night at the concert I picked an apple off a nearby feral tree for my wife. She said it was delicious.
Riding the Rain
Last night my wife and I rode over to a mountain town and heard a local band singing the old songs, then we rode back on the very edge of a severe thunderstorm. We made it home so close to the edge that while my wife got into the garage dry, I was soaked because I parked less than a minute after her.
Tonight we just got caught in it.
Sometimes you get rainbows out of these thunderstorms near dusk. That one last night was a visible double.
The Conservative Case for Sauron
Conservative political thought can have limits, as when Aragon offered a revolutionary return of the king. It also seems to draw pretenders.
We are the children of Numenor... but who truly brings us back to Numenor and its values? Is it the directionless Stewards? The absent kings? Or will it be the One who served directly under Ar-Pharazôn himself in Numenor’s Golden Age? Character matters: record matters too, and Sauron has one.
One of each, as a matter of fact.
On Temptation
I believe most of you regularly read AVI's page, but I would like to direct your attention to this post in particular.
Progress!
We do now have a couple of economic proposals from the Harris campaign. The Washington Post was so upset about one of them that it attacked it in an editorial before she even gave the speech announcing it.
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat....If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.
Transparency and public criticism. That's nice to see in the papers for a change.
The other one is a help-first-time-housebuyers-with-free-money scheme, which is drawing a lesser degree of fire but still reminds people of the global financial crisis of 2007-8 that was fueled by the collapse of subprime mortgage securities. That likewise began with a government push to make the market work with people who really couldn't afford what they were buying.
They also included price controls, of course:
The rent caps are the “ugly” part of Harris’ plan, said Lanhee Chen, director of domestic policy studies at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and a past CNN opinion contributor who worked on campaigns for Republicans, including Utah Senator Mitt Romney.“What is effectively a federal rent-control measure … was a bad idea when President Biden proposed it a few weeks ago,” said Chen.
The pretty part? Repurposing public lands for housing. I wonder how well 'developing the national parks into cheap housing tracts' will poll?
UPDATE: The W. Post follows up its pre-speech editorial by a single author with a full-fledged editorial from its entire board condemning the Kamala plan as unserious "gimmicks."
More Scottish Geology
Around the time of "Snowball Earth," what is now Scotland was near the equator. As such, an outcropping of rocks from the Inner Hebrides may have the best surviving geological record of that period, after which animal life emerged.
Clues hidden in rocks about the freeze have been wiped out everywhere - except in the Garvellachs. Researchers hope the islands will tell us why Earth went into such an extreme icy state for so long and why it was necessary for complex life to emerge.
The relevant island is uninhabited except for researchers.
Range War
Let's say your ancestors put up a fence 75 years ago, and your neighbors never said anything about it in all that time. So you put up a 'No hunting/trespassing' sign on the fence, some hunter comes by and sees it, and complains about it because he has permission to hunt on your neighbor's land and he thinks your fence is in the wrong place. You and your neighbor get together and agree to survey the land and determine where the boundary really is, and move the fence if necessary.
Then your neighbor sends an armed man to threaten you with ten years in prison.
A South Dakota ranch couple is fighting federal indictments served to them by a U.S. Forest Service agent who allegedly showed up unannounced on their front steps — armed and in tactical gear. The agent was there to serve them with indictments in a modern-day range war between the ranchers and feds.“It’s is stressful, financially and mentally. It’s something nobody should have to go through,” rancher Charles Maude of Caputa, South Dakota, told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.He and his wife Heather, who is a Wyoming native, were served with separate federal grand jury indictments June 24, for alleged theft of government property. The government claims the fence put up by the ranchers is over a boundary with federal grasslands.The charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.
If it sounded to you like they had a good-faith agreement that shouldn't be occasion for indictments, it sounds that way too to some retired rangers the paper interviewed about it.
[T]he situation in South Dakota might have been one in which the old standard of a “common sense, reasonable interaction” would have been more effective — and not left the Forest Service looking bad, he said.
Brauneis said that in the wake of what happened in South Dakota, and similar incidents eroding the Forest Service’s relationship with the public, some soul-searching might be in order for the agency.
To illustrate how things used to work, he recalled an incident from his career... “I drove out to talk to the land owner who was an elderly lady. She invited me in and we had coffee. I explained what happened and she understood,” he said.
“We concluded that if we burned the slash on her property along with ours and planted trees the same as on forest that we were all good to go,” Brauneis said. “We shook hands and I left. Old-school community in a Christian culture.”
Another ranger they spoke to wasn't surprised, and said he would have expected the agency to send armored vehicles and a dozen agents to deliver the indictments. The culture of the agency has changed, he said.
Orcadian Stonehenge
A fingerprint of the Altar stone proves that it came from Scotland, not Wales as long thought.
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