Fairness and Heritability

This was linked at Instapundit, but it's up AVI's alley and a subject we sometimes discuss.

The reason why kids from rich families do well isn’t that mom and dad buy their way through life.  The reason, rather, is that rich families have genes that cause financial success, and pass these genes on to their kids.  (Casual consumers of this literature often get confused by the fact that the effect of IQ is far too small to explain the intergenerational income correlation.  The key thing to remember is that there is a lot more to genetics and success than IQ)....

Stage 1 was defensive: “Sure, life’s not fair.  The children of the rich do better.  But the unfairness is pretty small, and almost vanishes after two generations.”  Stage 3, in contrast, is offensive: “Life is fair.  The children of the rich do better because talent breeds talent, and under capitalism, the cream rises to the top.” 

I'm not at all convinced that social networks aren't more important than almost anything else -- if you went to Harvard, you got to know a lot of people who are going to end up on top of leading businesses or government agencies, and thus you will more readily get a job from them. Still, heritability of intelligence isn't the whole story: whole sets of virtues seem to be heritable as well. You still have to do the work of training them and inculcating them in yourself to bring them from potential to actual, but the potential is there for some when it really doesn't seem to be for others.

What, if anything, should be done about that? 

Palm Sunday

Today begins Holy Week, and occasions one of my favorite Bible stories. 

Our solar,/lunar/hebdomadalian holiday

I thought I'd figured out the schedule for Easter a while back: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This complicated formula draws together the solar cycle (equiox), the lunar cycle (full moon), and the weekly cycle (Sunday). But imagine my surprise when this month's full moon turned out to be today (April 12). Why isn't Easter tomorrow? Instead, tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and Easter is not until April 20.

The mystery turns on the Western Christian Church's ancient practice of calculating the vernal equinox according to a formula that doesn't quite line up with the astronomically observed full moon or equinox. This year the archaic formula, which requires us to divide the year by 19 and look up the remainder in a chart, yields a liturgical Paschal Full Moon on April 13, which is Sunday (tomorrow). When the post-equinox full moon lands on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated on the following Sunday.

The accepted view seems to be that the seven-day week, which depends on neither the solar nor the lunar cycle, has its roots in Genesis: the seven days of creation. Romans used an 8-day week for many centuries B.C. and A.D., but switched to the Jewish 7-day week with Constantine's converstion to Christianity. Later Europeans continued the Roman custom of naming the days of the week after the five classically visible planets plus the sun and the moon (though the Romans had added an eighth day with a name that had something to do with markets). In English, the modern names of the seven days of the week are rooted in the Norse gods for Tuesday through Friday, to the Roman god Saturn for Saturday, and to the Teutonic words for sun and moon for Sunday and Monday. In Romance languages, the days of the week are rooted in the Latin names for "Lord" for Sunday, moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, Mercury for Wednesday, Jupiter for Thursday, Venus for Friday, and sabbath for Saturday.

Look, Sergeant Pepper…

Hank Jr. Getting It

I admire a man who has kept up his relationship with the ground this way.

Lazarus Saturday

One more week until Pascha, Holy Week.

I'll include the whole passage from John below the fold, but Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a prelude to the Passover, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and it is this miracle that prompts some Jews to decide to kill Jesus. An odd juxtaposition: A resurrection causes some to decide to kill Jesus, which leads to both His resurrection and ours. God indeed causes all things to work together for good.

It is in this passage that we get the shortest verse, "Jesus wept," as he mourns for his friend, and also the passage where Jesus declares "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." And then he asks, "Do you believe this?" 

Isn't it strange that Jesus should weep for the death of a friend when he knows he will raise that friend from the dead? I think human death is always a tragedy; it is the result of the disease of sin and it is something to mourn. We are so allergic to any negative emotions in America that we now have "celebrations of life" at funerals. There is nothing wrong with that; I have friends and family who have had those and I always participate appropriately. That is what they wanted. But, sometimes it is good to weep and to weep openly in public as Jesus did. It is good to acknowledge the tragedy. It is no denial of the resurrection to grieve the death of the beloved.

Passover

I’m not aware of there being any Jews in the audience of this blog, but if there are, happy Passover. 

Easter is still quite a ways off this year, depending upon whether your church follows the Gregorian or the Julian calendar. 

Unintended Consequences

I hadn't heard of this series until this morning, although it's 18 episodes long already. It's from Reason magazine, and is very instructive.

...but we learned our lesson and it never happ... oh.

Alas Colorado

One of the more beautiful states, Colorado, but so was California. 

The [manufacture and sale] restrictions are real enough but as Complete Colorado reported last month, the law's definition effectively covers "almost every centerfire semiautomatic handgun" bigger than a .22. In fact, "There is only one centerfire semiautomatic handgun model that does not fall within the bill’s definitions. That unique item is the Benelli B-80, a collector’s item last manufactured in 1990."...

Up next: House Bill 1312 and its obliteration of 1st Amendment protections and parental rights. HB 1312 says, "It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful to, with specific intent to discriminate, publish materials that deadname or misgender an individual.” The law applies to everything from flyers to blogs to newspapers, and if it becomes law, I could find myself in hot water for referring to a dude in a dress as "he."

Going even further, according to Ari Armstrong:

Part of the bill pertains to child custody. Existing statutes define “coercive control” as “a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, including assaults or other abuse, that is used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual.” The bill adds deadnaming and misgendering someone as types of “coercive control,” and it directs courts to consider deadnaming and misgendering when deciding matters of child custody.

So, as to the latter, a mother could lose custody of her child for the offense of calling her child by the name that she, the mother, bestowed upon her child at birth. 

The state should be forbidden from interfering inside families. I realize that some families are awful. It's still a good rule because governments are reliably awful. 

The firearm regulation is quite terrible, although as I understand it the law does not actually ban any guns, it just complicates the process for buying them (and imposes fees). That's still an unconstitutional set of infringements that I hope will be struck down by the courts, as they ought to be. It's still not as bad as, say, Maryland's law.

As I've written before, we've reached the point that literally the only real right the left believes in is the right to abortion. Everything else is subject to restrictions, and as severe a set of restrictions as they want that day.

Foreign Responses to the Tariffs

From Canada

From Ireland

From the Heard and McDonald Islands

Harley-Davidson CEO Out

Great job. Now bring back the Dyna. 

UPDATE: A friend from the Iraq days sends:

If you do, bring back the Dyna. 

Why Not Make It Worse?

The heavy rains we've had over the last week have finally allowed fire crews to finish containing the big wildfires that were near to me. Even the massive Table Rock fire is now fully contained. 

However, we still have millions upon millions of downed trees from Helene; and while the rains have wet the earth, the wood will continue to dry for years. It would be helpful if we could remove some of that fuel before the next round of fires.

The Trump administration decided to help with that -- it's been surprising how much more the Federal government has been wanting to help since the new administration came in. Enter the usual suspects:

C'mon guys. I love the forest as much as anyone, but these trees are already dead. Let's get as many as we can before they burn up the world. There's no way we'd get them all up anyway, but potentially we could reduce the fire hazard at least a little bit.

Why didn't we think of that?

Failing Houston schools are trying something new, or rather, something old-fashioned. The teacher stands in front of the class and teaches lessons. After an hour or so there's a short quiz, which lets the teacher split the class roughly in half. The half who are struggling the hardest get more hands-on teaching, while the half who are picking it up faster have a chance to work more on their own. Kids who disrupt class get a time out in a separate room, where they continue to be taught by a ZOOM link under adult supervision.

Sylva’s Confederate Monument Restored

Sylva’s town council is not happy about it, either. The county owns the thing, though, not the town. 

I imagine it will be defaced a half dozen times during the upcoming Pride Month celebrations, which Sylva does take seriously. Or once, really well. 

Two on Free Speech

This Spiked piece on the threat to free speech in the UK (h/t Hot Air) begins with "Lucy Connolly’s tweet was despicable, but it shouldn’t have landed her in prison." Back when we were running the think tank, I had a whole series on Free Speech that was part of the permanent sidebar collection. One of the articles was about why you had to defend deplorable cases. The reasons are that (a) it will always be the meanest sort of people who are the first to offend, because they don't care about people's feelings, so (b) it will always be here that you have to defend the principle. 

If you lose the principle, you've already lost the fight and you've lost the liberty. Now we're just arguing about whether the content was sufficiently bad to merit punishment. 

On the subject of the content, there was also the small matter of a hideous crime that provoked strong emotions. 

One speech criminal who has summoned up significantly less sympathy is Lucy Connolly, the Northampton childminder who was sentenced to two years and seven months for inciting racial hatred, over a vile, hateful missive she posted in the wake of the Southport stabbings. Seemingly in response to rumours swirling online that those three girls, slain at a Taylor Swift dance class, had been killed by an asylum seeker, Connolly took to X and said: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’

Liberal governance fancies itself as committed to "humane" governance, meaning a government that creates the conditions for living a full human life. It would be humane to give people a little space for things like that. Strong emotions can make fools out of most of us. On the principle of the thing, however, it's better that she be allowed to say it -- both because of the core human liberty, and because it gets it out there that this kind of thing provokes a lot of anger that could be dangerous. The UK has a habit of trying to cover these things up instead of addressing them. That's causing a lot more harm than some babysitter fuming online. 

Meanwhile in Germany...

German journalist sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme poking fun at the Interior Minister's lack of commitment to free speech

Now we don't expect the Germans to be as committed to the principle of freedom of anything as the British once were. This is an egregious violation, however. Apparently in Germany public figures can sue individuals for defamation for saying things about them in public, such as on Twitter. Defamation is supposed to mean, however, that you said something that wasn't true. The very act of filing the suit to suppress the speech proves the journalist's case; yet the court sided with the powerful against the citizenry, as so often, and threatened the journalist with prison for daring to suggest this obviously true and proven thing. 

A TDS Specialist

 

In the Spirit of the Previous Post

 

Rev 21:8

One of my country Baptist friends posted this dire verse  on Facebook. Of course he cited the King James Version: my maternal grandfather, also a country Baptist, explained when I was young that it was the only true and completely accurate Word of God. 

What grabbed my attention was the word, “sorcerers.” What is sorcery exactly? What did they understand it to mean?

So I went to the Sacra Vulgata, and found out that in Latin the word is veneficus. Now we think of sorcerers as being like wizards, and wizards as being old men; so at first I thought the etymology might be shared with venerable. 

But I looked it up and it’s not! It shares the etymology for venomous. The Latin was for a maker of poisons and drugs. 

That reminded me of something that we just saw in the Anabasis. So I looked it up, and sure enough in the original Greek the word is pharmakois. 

This I take to be the meaning of the words, which are necessarily ambiguous, since {pharmakon}, "a drug," also means "poison." Did Cheirisophus conceivably die of fever brought on by some poisonous draught? or did he take poison whilst suffering from fever? or did he die under treatment?

That's true: the word that is the root of "pharmacy" or "pharmaceutical" can mean either "drug" or "poison." And so it is often the case even with true drugs, where the right dosage is efficacious and the wrong one is fatal.

Thus, the sorcerers who are headed to the Lake of Fire are poisoners and makes of false drugs that kill instead — one thinks of dealers of drugs laced with fentanyl, but also of pushers of hard drugs generally. Makers of false medicines. That’s what the word means. 

UPDATE: After I went to bed last night, another thought about this occurred to me. The passage seems on first glance to refer to something from fantasy stories, which in the mind of the modern is the sort of thing that puts the Bible into the genre of fantasy stories. That's how they prefer to think of it anyway, and "sorcerer" at first seems like evidence for that preferred proposition.

Once you understand that they're talking about drug dealers and pushers and makers of false medicines, however, you realize that this is a real and pressing problem that you read about every day in the newspaper. The Bible is suddenly speaking to very real problems that bedevil contemporary society.

Of course, since this is the Revelation of St. John the Divine, you still have the Beast and the Dragon and various other mystic imagery. It only moves the needle a little on that point; but it does move it.

Minus the accent . . . .

. . . . this is pretty much my peninsula.

Musk the Anarchist

Highlighted from a 2021 NYT article today by a book review in the NYT today on the importance of America's early anarchists to freedom of speech. The Times would like you to know that vandalism of Tesla dealerships is a crucial form of free speech, by the way.

Elon Musk, who hoisted a chain saw at the latest Conservative Political Action Conference convocation, saying he hoped to wield it against the federal bureaucracy. The brutality in the message was hard to miss, and yet Musk seemed taken aback when aggressive rejoinders came from the other side, in the form of attacks on Tesla dealerships across the land, one of them by a man who said defacing cars was a form of “free speech.” Absolutely not, said Musk. “Damaging the property of others, a.k.a. vandalism, is not free speech!” A few days later, Donald Trump went further, declaring the vandalism to be nothing less than an act of terrorism.

The antigovernment agitators of a century ago had a useful name for expressive threats of this kind: propaganda of the deed, a phrase whose most vocal proponent in early-20th-century America was the Italian immigrant Luigi Galleani. The provocations could be peaceful, but often enough they included “acts of spectacular violence,” as Willrich writes, meant to “seize the attention of the working people and inspire them to revolution.”

That's clearly not the view of Free Speech that Musk endorses. 

Well, there are often serious differences even between members of the same overarching philosophy. 

I did order the book they were reviewing, however, which I think sounds much better and more interesting than their review of it. Amazon has it for a lot less than the $35 the Times claims it would cost. I just finished the last book I was reading and could use another.