I spent maybe 20 years as a Marketing Director – said so on my business card, so it must be true! And while it was a minor part of my job, for reasons related to the particular niche we marketed to, I did learn some truths that are not simply Machiavelli for weak people:
You are responsible for how people understand you. We had a marketing director prior to my taking on the job who used say stuff like: I explained it. If they refuse to understand, that’s their problem, not mine.
Nope, nope, a thousand times nope. If you get into marketing, you MUST own the understanding people in your target market have of your company. If there’s a disconnect, that most certainly IS your problem!
Another profession for which this is true is teacher. You can cover the white board with notes, drone on in lectures, hand out assignments, give tests – and it is very much YOUR problem if the kiddos don’t understand.
Next, we get to something a little more potentially Eeeeevil: people are going to process what you say and what you show them with their reptilian brain FIRST, THEN, MAYBE, you can reason with them. In more common language, first impressions matter. Your unconscious reactions are emotional and, at best, pre-logical. At worst, you find yourself liking or hating something without any real or even potential thought having taken place.
And here’s the key most people miss: this has nothing to do with intelligence! Even the most rational people are still seeing you or your marketing materials and forming ideas about them before their intellects kick in. The eeeeevil part: good, in the sense of effective, mass marketing recognizes the need to appeal to the reptilian brain, and strives to simply avoid any involvement of the intellect whatsoever. You show pictures of attractive, happy people using your products – and try to stop right there. Because, really, Fords and not materially better than Chevies (or visa-versa, your pick); Coke is not materially better than Pepsi; the Yankees are not more despicable than the Red Sox (they’re both equally loathsome – oops! that was my inner lizard speaking!). And so on, ad infinitum.
Politics are absolutely in this camp: the efforts to get you to trust/not trust one or the other political party is relentless, generational – and utterly mindless. The ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance to the point where it is literally unimaginable has been cultivated in us marks for a couple centuries now. (Archbishop Dolan, having finally awakened to the possibility Democrats were merely using Catholics and having a very hard time with this realization, says his Grandmother used to whisper: “We Catholics don’t trust those Republicans.” By his grandmother’s time, this had already been going on for generations.)
On a less evil basis, a marketing person has to work hard to make sure he doesn’t trigger any unconscious negative reactions in his target market, so that they can have a rational discussion. This truth is also widely applicable, from dating to apologetics.
Finally, of the transcendentals – the good, the true, and the beautiful – marketing is concerned first and primarily with the beautiful. The reptilian brain can, sometimes, sense the beautiful, or, rather, does not react negatively to the beautiful. Beauty both sooths, in a sense, our inner lizard, and quickly engages the intellect and the heart. Weirdly enough, when selling our highly niche analytic software, sometime an effective technique was to simply show a prospect a list of accounting reports – yes, accountants find nice tidy reports beautiful, and their inner lizards move quickly from there to the ‘one of us’ reaction. Since I can show them accounting reports and talk their language about them, I’m instantly one of the boys. You’d think they’d want to know if those reports are ‘right’, but that comes later, and the battle is all but won if we get to that point.
In summary, if you are trying to teach or convince anyone, you are responsible for how they understand you. First impressions matter. Lead with the beautiful.
Here I talk about a story John Taylor Gatto tells about a little lesson he learned in 3rd grade, back in the 1930s. Not sure if my high school kids would get it. Here’s another approach:
Kid’s drawing, borrowed from an NPR article. My tax dollars at work.
You all are taking drawing, and this is a very good thing, but maybe not for the reasons you think. When you ask a little kid to draw Mommy, what the little kid does is draw a circle for the face, add a couple little circles for eyes, a red curve for smiling lips, and some squiggles for hair.
The kid is happy and satisfied. Mommy sees the drawing, is informed that it’s her, and is also happy.
So it is a picture of mommy. But what did the little kid actually draw? The mommy in front of him? Or rather, his idea of his mommy?
All of you, taking drawing lessons now, and no longer little kids, would not draw mommy this. No, you’ve learned not to simply draw your idea of your mom, but rather to look carefully at you mom (or whatever you are drawing).
Rather than simply drawing something you ‘know’ inside, you want to look at the world outside and try to draw what’s actually there.
It’s a lot more work than just drawing what you think. You have to be prepared to study and absorb the lines, shading, and colors of real physical objects, and then work hard and practice to render those elements into a beautiful drawing.
It’s worth it, I hope. Some of you already draw fairly well, and all of you are already better than when you started a few short weeks ago. If you just stop at your idea of mommy or a horse or whatever, you’re stuck in your own head. The real world is unable to get through.
Now let’s look at an expression in English: to draw a conclusion. I propose that drawing a conclusion is very much like drawing your mommy. It’s easy, and childish, to simply reach a conclusion based on what’s already in your own head. Such conclusions might be satisfying to you; maybe even make your mommy happy – but they’re lazy and immature. You can do better. It is the business of this school to help you do better.
It’s a lot of work to try to understand an argument from outside your own head. You have to listen, puzzle it out, ask questions, think some more, maybe run a few ideas past your friends and family to see how others think. It might take a long time; sometimes, you may never reach a very firm conclusion at all! But the process of trying to understand, of exercising your mind, is how you grow outside your own head.
Here’s the big question: how do those ideas inside your own head, the ones we all tend to use to answer almost every question we face, get there in the first place? Magic? A miracle? Or something else? How do you know these ideas are true?
And here’s the hard lesson:
There are many reasons to lie to children, the Jesuit said, and these seem to be good reasons to older men. Some truth you will know by divine intuition, he told us, but for the rest you must learn what tests to apply. Even then be cautious. It is not hard to fool human intelligence.
John Taylor Gatto
Some people lie; many more people, for many different reasons, repeat lies without consciously lying themselves. And you – young people who naturally trust your friends and teachers – are the target of a LOT of lies.
The world is full of peoples who do not love you, but certainly want to use you for their own purposes. They know how to tell a lie such that children, whose defenses have not yet fully developed, are likely to absorb it without even being aware of having come to believe. The easiest way: get other children to parrot the lies, and then level criticism at anyone who dares say anything against it. You don’t believe X? Then you’re a hater, a bigot, a Nazi! And worse!
Nobody wants to be called names by their friends! So we take the easy way out, and just follow along. Pretty soon, we’re the ones calling our friends and family foul names – names we’re unlikely to even understand! We’re the ones parroting ideas we don’t understand. This is not an accident. A lot of evil intelligence has been devoted to convincing kids they believe things that they don’t even understand. Then those kids grow up to be adults who have never learned how to really work at thinking, and parrot the lie to yet more children.
This is the source of a lot of the misery in the modern world: lies told to children, who grow up into mobs willing to shout down, insult, and ostracize any who dare disagree. All over ideas they don’t really understand.
It is critically important for you, our beloved students, to learn how to examine ideas on your own. We are going to teach you how. Do not just accept what you are told, even from me! I will do my best not to tell lies, but even I – especially I! – am easy to fool!
One of the bitterly funnier moment I’ve had in my life was when a long-time friend who had just recently become a Chicago judge told me in all seriousness that what the world needed was more lawsuits.
Hammer, meet nail.
He seemed to seriously (and arrogantly) think that society’s problems would get solved if only people submitted them to the adjudication of right-thinking people such as himself. No other options existed in his mind, as far as I could tell, such as a personal commitment among citizens to resolve their differences peacefully, or suck it up and take minor injustices for the team. No acknowledgement that, if the court system is what’s holding your polity together, that polity is already dead.
Or, checking in on Scripture:
Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison.
Matthew 5:25
Attempting to solve more and more issues in court is not a road to social improvement, but rather a sign of an already dead society – the twitchings of a culture’s corpse.
—
The function of laws. We have long had the notion of the law-abiding citizen. That’s a person who understands that laws need to be obeyed, especially when there is no one there to enforce them. The laws work, when they work, because of a consensus of the law abiding. In a such a culture, responsibility and enforcement are ultimately personal, not a function of the enforcement arm of a legal system.
Much more important, law abiding citizens can only exist within a strong culture. Personal relationships and obligations, personal honor and virtue, must be highly valued by a large enough group such that those who do not value them are forced by social pressure to conform.
A law-abiding society is the only kind of society in which people can have any real freedom.
The alternative is the police state. A police state is here defied as a situation where laws matter only to the extent to which they are enforced.
We tend to think of totalitarian dictatorships when police state is mentioned, with official thugs lurking everywhere, but I will here contend that insofar as an individual’s relationship to the law depends merely on enforcement, police ‘states’ are ubiquitous.
These ideas came up as I discussed the state of local schools with people who have had children in them or had friends who have had children in them, or otherwise had experiences in them. It has gotten to the point, according to these folks, where it takes literal physical assault of a teacher to call down any disciplinary action on a student – and even that might not be enough. Teachers tend to get whatever percentage of the students who are interested in learning into the front few rows, and simply let chaos reign in the back rows and try to teach over it. Admin and teachers are at war – the idea that admin would take steps against the students for the teacher’s sake is laughable. The schools rules are ignored until they are enforced. Exhausted teachers have little interest in enforcing them. Any teacher who does enforce the rules is instantly an outsider, more likely to draw the ire of admin than its support.
The students in this environment divide themselves or are divided into feral tribes. In the No Rules tribes, attempts to flaunt whatever norms do exist drive behaviors. Who can wear the most scandalous prom dress? Who can utter the most filthy profanity? Who can defy the teachers most obviously? Such behaviors increase the standing of students in their tribe.
Is this all true? I don’t know, but the people telling me this are not the kind of people given to melodramatic exaggeration. I therefore assume so.
But even if reality is not quite that bad, anything like such a situation illustrates not so much the Law of the Jungle as an at least nascent police state. In the jungle, you win or you lose, there is no appeal. In a police state, you get away with whatever you can – until you can’t. In the jungle, no one is there to stop you if you try to burn it all down, while it is likely someone would try to stop you from burning the school down.
And here is the crux of the matter: what happens to the fine young arsonist in this latter case? Since all violations of the laws have been ignored so far in his young life, what does he expect to have happen? Will it be ‘fair’ in his eyes? We can easily imagine a modern principal simply letting him go due to assumed mitigating factors – and we can just as easily imagine the child (if old enough) thrown into jail. The reader can insert the variables that might influence such different outcomes.
Similarly, a student holding views unpopular with his teachers can become the target of abuse. The teachers’ vendettas become, in effect, the law – and there is nowhere within the school system for such a student to turn.
While it may seem fun, after a fashion, for young hooligans to do whatever they think they want, eventually, all boundaries have been pushed too far, and something must be done. The school system is an organism, and as such wants to live. It is a police state in which there is no real freedom and no escape – and our children are being raised in it.
Homemade mushroom garlic Alfredo sauce over homemade noodles and bits of roasted chicken, with homemade ciabatta and salad and a nice California Pinot Grigio, OR
Nice cuts of pork and beef that had been walking about on your own property not too long before?
For the last post of June, and the beginning of the new semi-official post every once in a while policy, let’s talk wealth. Not willing to devote the time needed to find the articles among the 1500+ posts here on this blog, but I have long pointed out that the one thing without which the current insanity could not function is sheer, massive, overflowing wealth. Plenty. Stuff.
Public domain. Darn birds! Nice illustration of medieval technology: the heavy wheeled plow pulled by a haltered team of horses, which would require a lot of high-tech blacksmithing – e.g., horseshoes and iron plow blades. Pigs in the woods, a church in the background – and a road, which is required to get that ‘surplus’ food into nearby towns, to keep the 5%-20% of the population that wasn’t farming alive.
Being shot at without effect is not the only thing that focuses the mind wonderfully – the real threat of starvation and death seems to have a similar effect. We can get all technical about how time preferences are honed to a dangerous point in farmers, especially farmers in areas with a strongly defined growing season, such that European, Chinese, and Japanese cultures, for example, all traditionally value the willingness to delay gratification. The farmer knows with painful certainty that eating the seed corn or the breeding stock is near certainly a fatal move, even if it isn’t immediately fatal right now. A certain sanity, of the horse sense variety, was enforced by Reality.
Being a single mom, non-widow division, for example, was not looked down upon because – or just because – the woman likely had had a moment or two of moral failing. Rather, the careful social structure, built in the face of a frequently fragile prosperity, simply had few places for single moms. Put in brutal economic terms, there wasn’t enough consistent excess capacity to keep very many single moms and their kids alive. A Heloise, orphan daughter raised by a rich uncle, didn’t die as a result of conceiving Abelard’s baby outside of marriage. But she was now unmarriageable – who, among her social class, would want her, given her history? So the child is given up, Abelard is castrated, and Heloise consigned to a convent – and that’s a GOOD outcome, available only to the rich! A poorer woman would have abandoned her child, been forced into something like prostitution, and would be looking at a life expectancy in low single digit years.
Of course there were exceptions. But the number of exceptions could not stand in the face of the number of cautionary tales. Not so, in the modern world. Outside of war zones and targeted political actions (insofar as those two things are distinguishable in practice), it’s been half a century since any very large number of people have starved anywhere in the world. Cultures don’t change that fast, but in America, where we reached the nobody needs to starve level of food production a century or more ago, not only is mere survival all but guaranteed no matter how little one contributes to the upkeep and passing on of the culture, but the sorts of behaviors that would have placed you under dire threat of starvation are enshrined and protected. It’s unheard of to criticize an unwed mother or caddish Don Juan; the feces-enriched camps of the homeless are welcomed and protected in most major cities.
I’ve written all this before. The basic lack of any time preferences that favor long-term survival is a feature, not a bug, of modern culture. You be you, after all, and right now! If you are an obnoxious, mindless blight on society, so what? What is that compared to the Sacred You? We are so insulated from the consequences of real failure that many people who would have straved or died of exposure not that long ago can live quite comfortably within a complete fantasy world contained in their own heads…
… but they are far from the only people fully insulated from their own bad decisions. See here. The time preferences of the very rich run, perhaps, somewhat longer than your homeless person or gender studies grad, but not very much longer, and not for more than a generation or two. Typically, the grandchildren of the very rich are spending the fumes of the family fortune. It takes three generations, in other words, for Reality to catch up with the fantasy worlds of the very rich.
Aaaand – then there’s us. Let’s say you, a member of the middle class as traditionally understood, make a mistake, and wrap your $40K automobile around a tree. You escape serious injury, but now – oh, the horror! – need to deal with the insurance companies and shopping for a new car – oh, bother!
That’s not insulated from reality? In a dozen little ways, even we who choose to work and save and spend time with our loved ones are thus insulated. I’m reminded of the term ‘grillers’ – people who don’t want to hear about the problems in the world, they just want to grill. So long as they can grill, everything is OK enough. Well? How long can that attitude – and I admit I’ve not been far from it most of my life – survive?
As of right now, a preference for reality in the Aristotelian/Thomistic sense of an objective world accessible to the mind through the senses, a world within which we live but that doesn’t care what we think, with rules we can’t will away, is just that – a preference. There are few if any short-term costs to simply living in our own fantasy worlds. The gods of the copy book headings are on vacation, and will remain so for as long as the general level of Stuff/Wealth/Plenty remains anywhere near as absurdly high as it is now, AND Our Self-Appointed Betters decide to keep using some of that wealth on bread and circuses. Already, Sri Lanka and Ecuador have sunk into chaos, with real famine rearing its head (but caused by war/political acts, not weather or blight as in the old days). Other states are sure to follow.
The world can only play act for so long.
Which, frankly, is too bad. I’m very fond of indoor plumbing, electricity delivered right to your wall outlets, and gas stove cooking at the turn of a nob. I hope we can work this all out without destroying all the wonderful infrastructure our ancestors built over the last 250 years. I hope and pray that the gods of the copybook heading are not loosed, but especially that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will remember His promise of mercy. Wealth in itself isn’t evil, but we’re seeing that, like power in any form, it is easily used for evil. I’d like to see the miracle where the evil is destroyed without the destruction of all the wealth. But Thy Will be Done.
—
Too funny to omit: Looking for a picture to illustrate the realities of pre-modern agriculture, and came across this gem, explaining the history and science of the picture of a medieval couple harvesting grain. A tidy summary of the modern view, even if a hopelessly useless description of medieval farm economy:
Farming was the most popular occupation of the Medieval Ages as it was an essential element to survival. A local lord or master would grant portions of his land to commoners and serfs and in exchange the people would till, cultivate and maintain the property to produce crops. What was grown was eventually sold at local markets at which the peasants were allowed to keep a share. Most revenue went to the local lord however through taxes and levies. In the society of the Middle Ages, a man’s status was based on how much land and livestock he owned. As both of these elements were critical for revenue, a private farmer who owned his own land could become quite rich. Crops were varied and depended greatly on how fertile the plot of farmed land was.
Yep – not starving, always a “popular occupation.” I can just see the youngsters, at Career Day at their medieval high school, talking to the guy at the Careers in Peasant Farming booth, and thinking: “farming sounds OK. I was thinking about that crusader gig – sounds sweet! – except I need to go ask the guy at the Squires and Baggage Train booth how it is that so few of them ever come back home. Monk and priest – nice stable careers, but I want a family, and that’s only an option for the Lay Investiture rich boys. The dude at the Blacksmithing booth made it sound like getting an apprenticeship is a trick – you got to know the right people. Scholars? No money or respect. Besides, all my friends are going into serfdom – it a popular occupation. I guess peasant farmer it is. Hope mom and dad are OK with me going vo-tech.”
THATCHER
I happened to see your consolidated
statement yesterday, Charles.
Could I not suggest to you that it
is unwise for you to continue this
philanthropic enterprise -
(sneeringly)
this Enquirer - that is costing
you one million dollars a year?
KANE
You're right. We did lose a million
dollars last year.
Thatcher thinks maybe the point has registered.
KANE
We expect to lost a million next
year, too. You know, Mr. Thatcher -
(starts tapping
quietly)
at the rate of a million a year -
we'll have to close this place in
sixty years.
Citizen Kane, discussing the financial losses in his media empire.
In 537, under the Emperor Justinian I, the Hagia Sophia was completed after 5 years of work. Notre Dame du Paris was completed in 1260, after 97 years under construction. Two gigantic churches, each pushing the envelope of the construction techniques of their times. One took 5 years to build, the other almost a century. While I’m sure other factors were at play, the most obvious reason for this difference in construction time is that Hagia Sophia was built with the resources of an Empire under the direction of one man, while Notre Dame was not. Further, if Justinian had wanted another Hagia Sophia or 10, he had merely to say so, and within a few years, he would have had them. The 6th century Byzantine empire had the resources to do it. Unfortunately, we get to see what happens when Notre Dame gets destroyed, but had it been destroyed in 1261, at best it would have taken a couple of decades to rebuild, based on the construction timelines typical of Gothic cathedrals. And funding would have been a real issue.
There are costs, and then there are costs. For a subsistence farmer, having wasted effort over a day or two is likely to have real costs, measured in terms of reduced food supply for him and his family. For middle class 21st century Americans, having to replace a $40K car carelessly destroyed is generally an annoyance – chagrin, insurance, shopping, such a pain! To a billionaire, its a shame if one of his pet companies loses millions. To Justinian, a billion-dollar construction project is just one among several, and all in a day’s work.
John D. Rockefeller is said to have become the modern world’s first billionaire in 1916. Excluding heads of state, Forbes says that there are about 2,700 billionaires in the world. Forbes’ list is generated from public sources and reasonable guesses. Maybe there are 3,000 billionaire-level fortunes, once you add in the heads of state/royal family types? Your guess is as good as mine.
Now add in the wiley old coots with ‘only’ 500 million or so – are they materially less rich and influential than some punk tech billionaire? Now you’re up to – WAG, of course – 10,000 super-rich people? 100,000? Who knows? Why not use $100M as the floor? It’s all guesswork at this point.
These thoughts were generated by viewing Jon Del Arroz’s latest little video. Netflix has been hemorrhaging cash for a while now, and just recently announced that it laid off a bunch of people. While I agree with Del Arroz that these are good things, I doubt it means even as much as the million dollars a year loss did to William Randolph Hearst Charles Foster Kane. What Kane fails to mention: if he’s making as little as 2% a year on the remainder of his money, he can keep on losing a million a year forever. (Really, if he’s making anything at all, say 1%, his loses will be sustainable for centuries.)
One other consideration: while the man on the back of a horse has only a small fraction of the strength of the horse, as long as he keeps reins in hand, he’s effectively as strong as the horse and himself combined. There are some limitations that need skill to work around, but a skilled horseman and his horse act as one – and that one is the horseman. In the same way, a billionaire who has large interests in companies may control them without having their assets show up on his Forbes wealth calculations. A skillful billionaire can even manipulate things such that others agree to lose money – as long as the cost of the losses doesn’t exceed the financial and personal costs of crossing the billionaire.
In this context, keep in mind that the hands at the reins of almost all giant corporations are not playing with their own money. The CEO or Chairman is likely a millionaire or even a billionaire, but his fortune is likely worth a tiny fraction of the corporate money he manages, and only partially tied to the fortunes of the company. Let’s say a billionaire with 10% ownership of the company wants something to happen – say, he’s in favor of the diversity programming over at Netflix. Now you, as a member of the board or CEO, have got to ask yourself: how long will I have a job if I defy the billionaire? It’s not my money, after all. Sure, theoretically, I’m beholden to the shareholders – but that billionaire is the largest shareholder! Far better to do what he wants (and quietly divest myself of my shares in the company, as much as possible).
Then, if worst comes to worst and the company folds or is bought by somebody who wants to make money, the billionaire and I will share a nice Just So story about how evil white supremacists in their evilness ruined our efforts to enlighten the masses and Move Forward on the Right Side of History ™.
And he’ll give me another job.
And that’s just one layer of the onion. Wealthy people either play by the rules of the Athenians in Melos, or they stop being wealthy people. There’s a lot of jockeying going on, pecking orders and loyalties to establish, and backs to stab. I don’t imagine the tech billionaire’s fortunes will long outlive them – these callow youths from hippy boomer households are not winning long-term against modern Medicis and Rothchilds.
Henry Ford is estimated to have been worth about $35B in his heyday. Less than a century later, and the entire Ford family is said to worth about a $1B. Give it another couple generations, and a Ford is as likely to be washing your car as selling you one. Very few fortunes in America last more than a generation or two; very few children of billionaires have whatever gifts it took to make that first billion. Money to them is like water to a fish – it is just the medium they live in, hardly ever noticed. Most children of the rich start right off burning through the family fortune and leave dregs to the grandkids.
There are exceptions, of course. The Medici fortune reached its peak within the first century of the Medici bank in the 13th century, but persisted for about 500 years before finally vanishing. (Another wildcard that some real historian should enlighten us all on: when the fortunes of others depend on or at least benefit from your fortune, you may be propped up indefinitely. The Medici married into many prominent and noble families – how much did this contribute to their riding out some incompetent and occasionally literally insane heirs? Were the family to fail, however, political turmoil would result. How often over those 5 centuries did other players decide they would rather that didn’t happen? But in the end, it did, but only through lack of male heirs.)
But in the meantime, they ape Kane. They all can throw around a billion here, a billion there, without feeling any pain; they can have the companies they control burn billions on idiot programs and policies and propaganda, and hardly notice except to blame others.
So rejoice when the mighty are brough low. But right now, these superficial loses are not hurting the real money. They can afford to keep up the idiocy indefinitely, if the want.
Prepping for the last lecture class before we start reviews and head into finals. Looking at the stuff I prepared last year, I can barely remember doing it. Probably something to do with the physical and emotional exhaustion from moving, and the continued attention demanded by the endless steps needed to get our house finally on the market. (target date: 5/26.)
This, from Britannica, a source I use cautiously if at all. Here, the writer, describes the triumphal revisionism of the Renaissance writers, who so badly wanted to tout themselves as the best and the brightest that they ignored reality when needed. I’ve long wondered how scholars writing sometimes literally in the shadows of the great medieval churches, could not see how preposterous their claims of *obvious* superiority were. Example:
A nice church. I’d take it, Buuuut….Clearly better than this? I think not. And I’m not even going with the High Gothic stuff here, which is the greatest architecture the world has ever seen.
Reports of the death of the Middle Ages have been somewhat exaggerated. What’s really been overblown are the achievements of the Renaissance:
The next (and, as it proved, final), steps taken in this direction (physics of motion – ed) were the accomplishments of the last and greatest of the medieval scientists, Nicole Oresme (1325 – 1382). …devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics. He invented graphs, one of the few mathematical discoveries since antiquity which are familiar to every reader of the newspapers. He was the first to perform calculations involving probability. He had a good grasp of the relativity of motion, and argued correctly that there was no way to distinguish by observation between the theory then held that the heavens revolve around the earth once a day, and the theory that the heavens are at rest and the earth spins once a day.
Then everything came to a stop. Given the scientific and mathematical works of Descartes and Galileo, but no chronological information, one might suppose the authors were students of Oresme. Galileo’s work on moving bodies is the next step after Oresme’s physics; Cartesian geometry follows immediately on Oresme’s work on graphs. But we know that the actual chronological gap was 250 years, during which nothing whatever happened in these fields. Nor did any thing of importance occur in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus.
James Franklin, Honorary Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales
Then, yea, there’s that.
There’s a bunch more, but now I’ve gotta go do class. Yes, I inflict this stuff on 15 year olds. Toughens them up.
1.The Move prep continues. Got the house painted – came out nice – got the range replaced, got the plumbing and electrical work started. Aaaaand – made significant progress on the Insane Eternal Brick Project:
Last section of planter/wall/fence. My youngest daughter and her new husband, and our youngest son did a lot of the work. Old metal window bars repurposed as a gateWhere said gate will hang, separating the garden/orchard from the from walk.
Not to mention the 6 or so vanloads of stuff put into storage, and the hours spent looking for a rental an hour and a half drive away – the interwebs are both a blessing and a curse, as I’m sure I’m the first to notice.
2. Some Covidiocy progress: at mass this morning, I, OCD as I seem to be, counted 42 people in attendance. Hard to see all faces, but at least 18 were unmasked. So we’re around 40% saner people, but still have 60% cowering, obedient rabbits. This is down from at least 90% rabbits a mere 2 weeks ago.
Problem is, all these people are still almost certainly convinced that some terrible plague has torn through our country and they just were lucky enough not to die, and now can maybe, maybe, dispense with the mask sometimes.
Unless we can prevent the mass memory-holing of COVID and the duplicity of our ‘leader’ and their lapdog press, the scam worked. Nuremburg trials, or bust!
Let’s do this like good poetry: start with the immediate, move to the universal, then bring it back home.
For the first time in several years, I seem to have caught a cold or maybe the flu. Or maybe the Dreaded Coof. Since I don’t have either of the only two distinguishing symptoms – no sudden acute respiratory issues, and sense of taste is as good as it’s ever been – I’m sticking with ‘flu’ on the ancient principle that distinctions that make no difference should be ignored.
My wife and son are also under the weather, although my wife has long been bulletproof as far as minor illnesses go, and so she’s acting as if she’s fine. If she ever really looked and acted sick, I’d be taking her to the emergency room. The son has a bit of asthma, which amplifies the effects of any sort of cold or flu, so he’s a little more out of it.
(Aside: could you imagine anything more tedious than people typing up and detailing their flu symptoms on a blog? For crying out loud, in the distant past of 2 whole years ago, such a one would be regaling anyone he could button hole over by the water cooler, and be avoided if at all possible. Now? It’s an art form. There will probably end up being a Pulitzer category for most epic description of a minor illness. The competition will be stiff.)
Day 3 – today – woke up at the usual time, took the traditional (for me) acetaminophen/ibuprofen + vitamin C and cough drops cocktail, and went back to bed. Now, a few hours later, I’m doing OK, much better than yesterday. Went from ‘eh’ on Monday morning to bouts of shivering in the evening (30 minutes in a hot bathtub works wonders on that). Slept half the day on Tuesday. I’m betting on ‘feeling tired’ as the outcome on Thursday.
Big whoop. I’ve now had two of my 4 living kids get the Coof with about this level of symptoms or less, and dozens of friends and acquaintances. A total of zero deaths and one hospitalization – an 87 year old who made a quick recovery.
I have sympathy for anyone who lost a loved one over the last two years. I don’t know anyone who has lost a reasonably healthy loved one to the Coof – anyone, that is, that they were emotionally and geographically close enough to to know first hand how healthy they were. (This long disclaimer is occasioned by friends who lost a relative living 10,000 miles away. Just no way to tell much of anything about such a situation.) What I don’t have too much sympathy for is people who put mom in a nursing home who then are sure the Coof killed her, who then try to guilt me for not caring. No, nursing homes are where people are warehoused until they die, mostly within 6 to 9 months. At worst, the Coof sped it up a little; more likely, the Coof showed up on the death cert because that way the nursing home gets government money for caring for a Kung Flu patient.
We had a wedding and reception last weekend. Under the soon to be tightened up rules from our self-appointed betters, such gatherings will be forbidden. Cost and benefits are not being weighed here.
(Now for the real TMI.) It should go without saying that such weddings and receptions are the stuff upon which any civilization worth having is built. My wife and I were married in 1987. We raised 5 kids with, essentially, no help from either of our families. I can make excuses for them, but the base reality is that neither family cared enough to make it happen. Both our families of origin are torn apart in various ways – geography, goals, beliefs – and by various hurts both petty and profound.
My wife and I were very aware of this, and decided to do whatever we can to not let it happen to our kids. First, we work together, and stay together. For reasons that I can’t say I understand, our kids have all become best friends for each other. One cute example: younger daughter drove older daughter to her wedding in my convertible, so older daughter insisted on driving younger daughter to her wedding in my car as well. It just seemed like the thing to do to them.
The kids stay in touch with each other constantly; they have made trips, sometimes cross country trips, to visit each other while they were in school. Now, 2 live close to each other, a third is talking about moving closer once he’s done with grad school, and the youngest is with us. And we’re planning to move much closer to both daughters ASAP.
This should be no big deal, it should be something anybody with kids would be hoping to do, anybody with beloved siblings would want. But is it? Instead, a marriage as traditionally understood, where the whole goal is 1) for the spouses to support and sustain each other; and 2) produce and raise children, is laughed off stage, replaced with ‘fulfillment’ or some other seductive ephemera. Over the last 30 years, marriage was first mocked (my wife and I, living in San Francisco, were personally so mocked by gay men) as something only stupid ‘breeders’ did. Then marriage was invaded, then destroyed.
Our little experience of non-support from our families is now the norm. Kids (if any) are expected to leave the nest – and never look back. Not that it would matter – people my age and maybe 10 to 20 years younger seem to be far too self-absorbed to even consider making changes, let alone sacrifices, for kids who probably hardly know them and don’t really like them.
Which brings us back to weddings and receptions, celebrations of exactly those family ties most hated by our current cockroach overlords. Such events held in the cold of winter (even here in California it gets cold-ish) are really good places to catch a cold, the flu, or even – gasp! – the Coof! So – do we stop doing it? Do refuse to live well so that we can ‘live’ wrapped in bubble wrap and terror?
So, I sincerely hope all the other guests are OK, if, indeed, the wedding festivities are where we picked this bug up. (Probably not, right? 2-day incubation seems pretty quick. More likely picked it up earlier in the week? But what do I know?). I, for one, would not have traded the wedding gatherings for any mere safety from a cold or flu – “It’s a dangerous business, walking out one’s front door”.
Off in a bit to begin the ceremonies – rehearsal, rehearsal dinner today, then wedding and reception tomorrow – demarking the handing off of Younger Daughter to her husband.
UPDATE: Logistics are a bit – interesting for this wedding. The church is a little over an hour away, near where Younger Daughter lives; the hall where the reception will be is about 20 minutes from there. BUT: the team doing the catering is my middle son (bride’s older brother) and his lovely wife of all of 6 months. They both have years of experience in food service, so it’s not as crazy as it seems. Issue: our nice kitchen has been volunteered for all the food prep – an hour and a half away from the hall. The hall also has a nice kitchen. The proprietors of the hall generously allowed us access starting at 3:00 today for a reception that start around noon tomorrow. But (almost) everybody involved is in the wedding itself, so we need to do as much set up between 3:00 and 4:40 (5:00 start of the rehearsal, a 20 minute drive away). Then, morning of, do the final cooking of the hot stuff so that it comes out warm around noon.
Future son-in-law knows a big Catholic family, the patriarch of which also knows my middle son and his wife – two of his daughters worked with them in the kitchens at Thomas Aquinas College. So, as we’re prepping here like mad, son gets a call from the matriarch of the above large family asking: how many of my kids do you want me to send over to help? So three daughters, two of whom have worked with and for my son, will be meeting the posse at the reception hall at 3:00 to help with set up and prep. Pretty darn cool. One friend of a friend also volunteered to get the cooking started morning of the wedding.
So, it’s working out. I rented a house for tonight in the neighborhood of the church, so we all can crash after the rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, and the finishing touches on the reception hall, and mom can support the bride without a 1:30 (at least – there’s snow on the mountains, skiers will be jamming the road Saturday morning) drive. Again, we are grateful and blessed.
So, quotations – first up: Eddie Burke, because why not?
Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, an the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter? I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity in all the proceedings of the assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.
All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.
Sotomayor has already asked how “a human spewing virus is different from a machine spewing sparks.” As one’s brain ossifies with age, one begins to perceive the world through analogy. Everything gets referred back to one’s past experience. Everything is “just like.” Accepting that anything can be genuinely new means facing that one is outdated, possibly even mortal. And no, not every old person is like that. There are rare but important exceptions. For the most part, though, this is exactly how it works. If you don’t subject your brain to rigorous daily training in processing new information from new sources, you will become that sad old fart who “justlikes” every conversation into the ground.
Yard Sale of the Mind 