tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:53:01 +0000nostalgiachurch and culturemusicpoliticalself-observationhumorself-observation (liberal)New HampshireironybibleMay we believe our thoughtsbookssonsChristmasbaseballevolutionary psychologylinguisticssocial workwordseducationRomaniaCS Lewisanosognosiahuman biodiversitytribeswayfindingIQABBAChestertoncolonial historyGrailfraudSudanprehistorytrusting our thoughtsGhostcrawlerInternetMayerPaladinsPattericoWindows 7WoWWorld of Warcraftcelticscomputer problemsdoctorwyrd and providenceAssistant Village IdiotSaying the Quiet Part Out Loudnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)Blogger11691125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-362209500744288692Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:53:01 +00002026-10-03T21:53:01.793-04:00Kids These Days<p><a href=" These Days Part II</a> by Paul Bloom. Part I is linked there. He goes directly after the smartphones-are-the-problem issue, but expands to trying to explain anything about development.</p><p></p><blockquote> Turkheimer’s skepticism is about explaining individual differences, but population trends also emerge from many interacting causes. When trying to understand an increase in depression among a certain population at a certain time, we should take seriously a similar skepticism about theories that say it’s caused by this—and even about more subtle theories that say it’s caused by this and that and this other thing. When it comes to the claim that smartphones are to blame, this skepticism should be reinforced by the failure to find robust evidence in its favor.</blockquote><p></p><p>Kids these days can't even shoe a damn horse. </p>2026/10/kids-these-days.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-3519235566347656749Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:50:02 +00002026-10-03T18:50:02.911-04:00Johnny Most<p>Everyone around the league hated him. I grew up with him. I thought that's the way basketball announcers were supposed to sound. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="; width="320" youtube-src-id="Yu8Da3pe9h0"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>2026/10/johnny-most.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-6301094315546999862Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:49:22 +00002026-10-03T18:49:22.642-04:00Pound the Table<p> There is an old lawyer's joke that works well for just about any dispute:</p><p>If the facts are with you, pound the facts into the table.</p><p>If the authorities (professors, officials, regulations) are with you, pound the authorities into the table.</p><p>If neither the facts nor the authorities are with you, pound the table.</p><p>This comes up in hereditarian disputes all the time. The hereditarians pound the facts, the environmentalists pound the authorities...</p><p>Who pounds the table? That should tell you something. </p>2026/10/pound-table.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-1021133328974937480Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:40:46 +00002026-10-03T18:40:46.354-04:00Ever Green<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="; width="291" /></a></div><br /><p></p>2026/10/ever-green.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-6995655128758546455Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:10:01 +00002026-10-02T19:10:01.146-04:00Chart-topper in 1909<p>I don't think they called it barbershop quartet singing until much later, but this kind of four-part harmony was big for many years. The soloist was more prominent at this point, while a full blend became the standard later. I have a dimly remembered fact I will confirm before going forward...</p><p>Yes, the barbershop sound was all-male at first. But women sing as well as men if not better and there was resentment that they could not join, so they formed their own groups, called the <i>Sweet Adelines</i>. Great name, BTW. They tended to be more choral than quartet. Eventually there was enough pressure that the SPEBSQSA (checks notes, yes, that's it) admit women that they did so, but an all-male movement started up almost immediately after. The claim was that the all-male sound was distinctive and worth preserving.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="; width="320" youtube-src-id="wH5X_sd7ZQo"></iframe></div><p>They were right. It's not the same. For choirs, Soprano-Alto-Tenor-Bass or Soprano-Alto-Baritone is standard, and it is just different from all-male or all-female. It is not accidental that the most precise arrangers mixed both sexes for voices voices. There is something more universal about that. But for homier, more intimate harmonies in performance, those community groups tend to be all-female or all-male. Three or four sisters dressed alike, four neighborhood guys on the corner trying to make it big, all the Oak Ridge/Byrds/Temptations with qualitatively different sounds than the Supremes or Vandellas. When the voices were mixed, it was a female lead with Pips behind her, or a famous male with interchangeable female backups. Call it whatever you like and complain about it if you have nothing better to do, but t<i>he sound is different. </i>I like them all, but don't consider them interchangeable. </p><p>I had a friend who went to Mount Holyoke who claimed that there was nothing more breathtaking than spending all week hearing nothing but female voices and then having a male chorus come in to perform on the weekend. Similarly, USO performances always brought in females.</p><p></p>2026/10/chart-topper-in-1909.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-6432931361435550362Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:52:43 +00002026-10-02T10:52:43.286-04:00Effective Altruism<p>Data Republican believes <a href=" should be <i>banned</i></a> from AI safety, policy-making, and governance. That's a pretty extreme position, but she makes a solid case for both the mild and extreme versions.</p><p></p><blockquote>Fundamentally, EA is a maximizing philosophy: it always tries to price future value. And extinction is the “negative infinity” number in the ledger. Once you are determining outcome by probabilities, just having even a tiny chance of extinction dominates every other calculation.<br /><br />One such scenario that many conservatives might find sympathetic is: do you do gain-of-function research for a 70% chance that you will prevent the next swine flu, or is the 1% risk that the virus escapes containment in Wuhan and kills 10 million people acceptable? Many of us, having lived through COVID-19, would put our foot down on allowing any kind of gain-of-function research again within our lifetimes. That’s one scenario where conservatives can potentially reason their way to the same answer as EAs.<br /><br />EAs run that same logic in every calculation. What this means, inside their heads: an extinction level event scenario is the greatest threat vector. </blockquote><p></p><p>Scott Alexander, like others, is obsessed with AI, alignment, and its effects. He is very much a supporter of Effective Altruism in general, though not slavishly so. Still, I imagine he would object to such a blanket disallowing of EA from the discussion (or at least, from the decision-making). There are so many discussions and counter discussions over at <a href=" Codex Ten</a> that I won't even attempt to choose for you. As his commenters are also quite brilliant - I consider it one of the few sites to compete with this one for average IQ - you can either dabble or go hard against them, trying to steelman your own arguments. This would be the major leagues. And yet...</p><p>I have felt uncomfortable with Effective Altruism since I first heard of it, though it took me a while to articulate why. Frankly, it probably took reading others who had thought about it more rigorously to be able to articulate it. One of the consequences of becoming lazier, and thus less intelligent, is not being able to provide some of the service I was designed for. I have excuses. Not good excuses, but at least some things I can say out loud with some earnestness. </p><p>The best arguments against EA are in Data Republican's essay. <i>Pricing future value</i> is a great example. It makes entire sense, but somehow leads to insane conclusions. If a future life is worth the same as a life now, then the sheer volume of future humans and their needs with forever dwarf what is good for us. More interestingly, perhaps, is how that completely devalues our ancestors. There is the (bogus in reality but worth valuing as a myth) Native American belief in Seven Generations, that we owe something to the three generations before us and the three after us. GK Chesterton wrote similarly that tradition is the only way of giving a vote to the dead. CS Lewis, describing the Tao in The <i>Abolition of Man</i> shows that the wise in every tradition teach that we owe something to both our heritage and our posterity. But EA very quickly reveals that it owes nothing to heritage and everything to posterity. The dead have made their contribution and their suffering is now a sunk cost. </p><p>There is also comparative suffering among species, leading to calculations that the horrible suffering of three chickens or thirty-two shrimp are equivalent to the suffering of one human. The actual numbers are immaterial. Thirty or three-hundred chickens would be the same. The principle of comparing it to any human suffering is something new in the world. It may be a logically consistent and defensible philosophical and moral position.</p><p>But it is not a human position, despite being favored by "humanists." It gives away the game, recognising that humanists are in fact subhumanists, valuing some bare minimum of the species as fungible with any other human. Dismiss it as a mere prejudice on my part if you will, but the idea of perpetuating humans who are only biologically and not culturally related to me is not just disquieting, it's silly. </p><p>Humanists are actually Subhumanists. I should probably think about that and post on it. Yet now that I have said that, I recall that CS Lewis already covered that in the last debate section of <i>Out of the Silent Planet</i>. </p>2026/10/effective-altruism.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-6631270644693559915Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:01:53 +00002026-10-01T17:01:53.797-04:00Common Criticisms<p><a href=" Kurzban</a> on discussion of evolutionary psychologists:</p><p></p><blockquote>Critics assert that evolutionary psychologists are wrong in believing behavior is genetically determined, that every aspect of the organism is an adaptation, and that discovering what is informs what [should] be. Evolutionary psychologists reply that they never made any of these claims, and document places where they claim precisely the reverse. The critics then reply that evolutionary psychologists are wrong in believing behavior is genetically determined, that every aspect of the organism is an adaptation, and that discovering what is informs what should be.</blockquote><p></p>2026/10/common-criticisms.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-2748667189389910254Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:34:55 +00002026-10-01T14:34:55.691-04:00Death Used to Be the Term Limit<p><a href=" Threatens Democracy</a>, by Lyman Stone </p><blockquote>Key points in this post: </blockquote><blockquote>Death has historically been the main exit mechanism for unelected rulers, including natural death, but this exit route is vanishing thanks to rising lifespans. </blockquote><blockquote>All else equal, longer lives mechanically produce longer tenures in power. </blockquote><blockquote>Political power compounds over a career, so longer careers mean more concentrated power. </blockquote><blockquote>Older electorates carry a larger cognitive-impairment burden and are further from the experiences a vote is supposed to be able to think about when making electoral decisions. </blockquote><blockquote>As a result, political elites face weaker accountability from less attentive electorates, have longer careers over which to accumulate power, and upon reaching the top are likely to have longer tenures since mortality rates are falling. </blockquote><p></p>2026/10/death-used-to-be-term-limit.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-4613262743095952645Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:23:30 +00002026-09-30T18:23:30.378-04:00Things You Don't See At The Time<p>Which is why I'm not a boxing judge.</p><p>When you are a fan, looking mostly at the punches and probably rooting for one guy over another, you miss things. Watching and listening now, I hear the referee telling Tyson to let go, but it is Bruno who is holding Mike on the back of the head rather continually. Yet at the time I would have only noticed that Bruno had a lot of ineffectual punches that count in scoring but do not damage, plus a few that really rock Tyson. Tyson, OTOH, misses a lot but hits more generally solid shots. By rounds 3 and 4 this pattern is almost embarrassingly consistent. That really looks like a home ref at this point. "Last warning. Last warning." he says to Bruno but I haven't heard many warnings since round 2.</p><p>Tyson was never a smart man, but was a smart fighter, perhaps by training to channel his amazing instincts into the right avenues. This gradually tips toward the winner, but ends quickly, which is often the case in boxing. As with an economy, a war, or any other collapse. <i>Slowly, slowly, then all at once.</i></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="; width="320" youtube-src-id="BrCtnFYgb4Y"></iframe></div><br /> Did Tyson and Ali ever discuss boxing? I would love to watch that.<p></p>2026/09/things-you-dont-see-at-time.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-3884688721224420109Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:17:49 +00002026-09-29T20:17:49.801-04:00Caspar the Friendly Ghost<p> I said to myself I couldn't remember the second verse. This turned out not to be a big problem.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="; width="320" youtube-src-id="OlyR9U1pQ70"></iframe></div><br /> The tune is reminiscent of "Frosty the Snowman" in places.<p></p>2026/09/caspar-friendly-ghost.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-7029444278773745249Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:57:25 +00002026-09-29T19:57:25.655-04:00Grand Am<p>There has been long suspicion that the variant use of "am" in Black English is a minstrel show fabrication that was never actually used. "Brother Jones am a fine preacher," or "The corn harvest am a little late this year."</p><p></p><blockquote>Scholars of AAVE have typically assumed that the invariant <em>am</em> typical of minstrel depictions of black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant <em>am</em> occurs in transcriptions of ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the transcribers. </blockquote><p>John McWhorter uncovers enough believable, non-critical and nonsatiric reports of the usage to declare it was not only used in Southern Black dialect in the 1800s, but that it came from nonstandard dialects in England in the late 1700s, which were still in occasional use up until the early 1900s. The 20-min podcast am<a href="; here.</a></p><p></p>2026/09/grand-am.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-6673659384771307450Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:41:29 +00002026-09-29T19:41:29.184-04:00You Already Know Joseph Henrich<p><a href=" Has a Truth Problem</a> Len Gutkin at the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i> reports on Henrich's critique of his own discipline. J Henrich is the author of<i> <a href=" WEIRDest People in the World</a> , </i>famous in the social sciences. I have mentioned him here before.</p><p></p><blockquote>Henrich spends some time rebutting the supposed consensus rejecting the existence of a biological sex binary — actually, a significant faction of biological anthropologists consider the question “settled the other way,” a fact which the AAA ignores — but his real interest is in the moral reasoning that permits Rouse and those who agree with her to assume that a technical claim about biology entails a series of political and social prejudices against both gay and trans people. (In her interview with the Chronicle, Rouse expressed incredulity that Kwame Anthony Appiah, who, she noted, is gay, could consider the AAA’s position on biological sex problematic.) Henrich summarizes this extremely weird logic: “If it turns out that natural selection only favors two kinds of gametes, we would have to oppress gay and/or trans people. What?” </blockquote><p></p>2026/09/you-already-know-joseph-henrich.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-5087798181610193552Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:12:51 +00002026-09-29T18:12:51.071-04:00Biblical Censuses <p><a href=" Biblical Censuses are Correct Demographic Records</a>, by Lyman Stone</p><p>What went wrong was people trying to fix them because they thought they knew better long after the Book of Numbers was composed. This was fun.</p>2026/09/biblical-censuses.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-3240120885135971361Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:44:46 +00002026-09-28T17:44:46.940-04:00Indexes or Indices?<p> We are having a discussion. Mine is the minority opinion - against librarians. </p>2026/09/indexes-or-indices.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-7793857329178232344Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:20:18 +00002026-09-28T17:20:18.853-04:00In Praise of Obsessive Men<p><a href=" Praise of Obsessive Men</a>, by Rosemary Hopcroft at <i>Aporia.</i> It is a good summary of one side of this discussion about autism. As it is the side I lean to more, I pass it along. </p><p></p><blockquote>In short, there is evidence that men are more likely than women to obsessively focus on their chosen area to the exclusion of all else, and this often leads to extraordinary achievement. While the achievements often only benefit the achiever himself, in cognitively demanding areas like science they frequently have tremendous public benefits. Thus, it is likely that extraordinary achievements with the greatest public benefit come disproportionately from obsessive, high IQ men. They deserve our gratitude. </blockquote><p>However there are things worth mentioning that come from another side of the discussion. It is generally agreed that women are in general more attentive to social norms and better at social tasks. This, plus conscientiousness are the prime suspects why they do better at schools as they are designed in most places. I suspect we will find exactly what brain structures are affected by genes being turned on or off by hormones as early as conception, but that is a matter for another day. For the moment, I stipulate that this is so. Women would thereby have more backup social systems, so that even if they have autism, it is less impairing, and less noticeable. This would explain why it is less often diagnosed.</p><p>Secondly, the overlap of symptoms with OCD or Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder makes diagnosis and research less reliable. I think this is going to be wide open for the next twenty years, as genomic data becomes more available. When we say that something is polygenic, that is even more complicated than we think at first. If there is a variant which makes one 1% more obsessive, it is likely upstream or downstream of variants which make one 0.5% or 2% more obsessive, plus a bunch that are so similar that they also weigh in at about 1%. Each of those is surrounded by nearby SNPs that are similar to others in the population that have a tiny effect or magnifying effect, but most likely no effect at all, yet are along for the ride. And our target gene is just along for the ride on some other trait near it on the chromosome which is also being selected for. It's all going to be ranges and percentages combined with a hundred other ranges or percentages elsewhere. Some of those are going to be autism, some OCD, some simply anxiety, not to mention a hundred other God-only-knows selection events. </p><p>Funny thing. The odds for things in genetics are going to turn out looking a lot like the odds for things in real life. What a concept. Because all these conditions are Mendelian only in their extreme and more destructive versions, it is likely that many are going to be <i>rather </i>obsessed, <i>somewhat</i> obsessed, <i>mildly</i> obsessed, and this will be lessened by women who are more likely to say to themselves "This is just too much. It costs too much socially" and back off. </p><p>There is a further set of arguments which come from autists who declare that the supposedly scientific claims are weaker than advertised, which they often noticed because the internal experience of autists is ignored and dismissed in favor of that which is objectively measured. There is something to this, but that data is, well, <i>polluted </i>by a very high percentage of the self-diagnosed. When these are female, they borrow heavily from feminist perspectives that science/men/logic itself are antagonistic to women's wisdom. (Which is in turn complicated by women who are striving mightly to argue from an entirely objective and logical perspective. Sigh.) I can only say that I take the point that the holes in the autism mainstream's position are real, but that does not prove that all opposition to it is correct. </p><p></p>2026/09/in-praise-of-obsessive-men.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-3881133757638401619Sat, 26 Sep 2026 16:02:11 +00002026-09-26T12:02:11.087-04:00Destructive Bureaucracy <p> David Foster put this up during my trip, but it got buried in my notes. Sorry to be late.</p><p><a href=" ">The French Army in 1940 and the CDC in 2021</a>, </p><p>(And we know what happened to the French Army in 1940). Mr Foster sees a parallel</p><p></p><blockquote>I was reminded of this history in early 2022 by a sequence of posts at twitter. Joanna Masel, a theoretical biologist, says the CDC contacted her (following an NYT story) about an app she helped develop to notify people (anonymously) about possible covid-19 exposure. Her group put a very informal preprint on github nearly immediately, and a more formal one on medrxiv soon after. A CDC coauthor was added to shepherd it through MMWR, which is described as “CDC’s primary vehicle for scientific publication of timely, authoritative, and useful public health information and recommendations.”<br /><br /><i>The preproposal was rejected. Informal feedback was that they liked it but were so backlogged that a peer reviewed journal was likely faster. This initiated 6 months of clearance procedures needed for CDC coauthor to stay on paper.<br /><br />What CDC staff spend a LOT of time on: rewriting manuscripts with meticulous attention to style guides. Eg, Methods must follow exactly the order they are used in Results, all interpretation must be in Discussion not in Results, etc. to a point truly unimaginable in my field. </i></blockquote><p></p>2026/09/destructive-bureaucracy.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-3763737006218113633Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:55:42 +00002026-09-26T11:55:42.314-04:00Thanking the Algorithm This Time<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="; width="320" youtube-src-id="zt0RsBxWMmc"></iframe></div><br /><p></p>2026/09/thanking-algorithm-this-time.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-4392278952617278404Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:54:45 +00002026-09-28T19:54:21.515-04:00St Magnus Cathedral<p>We expect the attractive balance of the Renaissance and even slavish symmetry post Sir Christopher Wren* in our architecture and are surprised when it is repeatedly violated in earlier buildings. But they were as aware of it as much as we are, they just put it farther down their priority list. If you needed an alcove to put in a special chapel, you just put in an alcove on that side. If someone needed another alcove later they natural gravitated to the matching spot on the other side, but if they never needed one, that was no problem. They wouldn't move an altar a foot to the side, but if it needed to go to the 2/3 mark, that was pretty too. St Magnus in Kirkwall has got a few sections where they moved a wall in a foot or out a foot because of practical considerations. It's still solidly symmetrical, though</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="213" src="; width="320" /></a></div> <p></p><p>There's that ubiquitous red sandstone again, that they built everything from. It's a soft stone, so when they started using it for gravestones, families found that the were becoming weathered and unreadable. Richer people started sending for more durable stone, even when the bones were interred indoors. Sometimes people would put up a wooden marker in anticipation of greater wealth later. I found this Memento Mori fascinating. It is much like a sign for a shop.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1952" data-original-width="1464" height="320" src="; width="240" /></a></div>The sandstone stills shows signs of being painted over during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Whatever illustrations the Catholics had were now forbidden, to be replaced by plaques commemorating human beings or groups of them, which the Reformers considered Less Idolatrous. <p></p><p>You get things like memorials to the war dead, which includes their family identifiers, including this one I found humorous. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1952" data-original-width="1464" height="320" src="; width="240" /></a></div>Much better than pictures of Biblical stories. Sure.<br /> <p></p><p>A note on Saints and local gods: Learning two unrelated eras side-by-side can suggest associations you might not otherwise have had. When Orkney was Catholic, the center of its authority was in Rome, a place where few people had ever been. Being able to have your own bishop gave you a chance to send someone you knew to represent you among the great and the wise. The idea was echoed at royal courts as power consolidated and kingdoms grew larger. Having an earl who was married to one of the king's relatives gave you an avenue to be heard. This would have been even stronger before general literacy, but even now, we want someone of our own to advocate for us. God gave other tribes pictures, but to the Jews He gave the captions, rather forcing them to focus on words, which traveled better and were more universal. Yet we iz who we iz, and the Jews got idolatrous about the words themselves, and Christians gladly and self-righteously followed. It's a step toward abstraction, but it's not foolproof. Jews had Kabbalah, pre-Christians had runes, and Christians dabbled in grammarye, leading to Baptists putting Bibles on secondary altars with a single light shining down on it. For all of them we must say "Not thus, but thank you for your assistance." Asking a saint to pray for you is not that different. When we destroy one idol we secretly build another.</p><p>Where was I? St Olaf, who is big in Norwegian thinking and thus in early Orkney, was a pagan convert to Christianity. His statue in the Kirkwall cathedral has interesting symbolism. And there's that stonework again.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1952" data-original-width="1464" height="320" src="; width="240" /></a></div>If you look at the serpent he is crushing, it has a human head. The face is in fact his own, representing the death of his old self, or perhaps the constant need to keep killing it.<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1952" data-original-width="1464" height="320" src="; width="240" /></a></div><br />The scratching is a mason's mark showing which person cut the stones in this section. There is an identical mark from a very close time in the Cathedral of Durham in the north of England.<p></p>2026/09/st-magnus-cathedral.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-7623797603146393932Sat, 26 Sep 2026 06:29:41 +00002026-09-26T02:29:41.244-04:00Neolithic LegosAs you can see from the second photo, the sandstone of Orkney looks like it could practically be split with few hands and put into place for building in a few minutes."Neolithic Legos," one of our guides called it. The first picture is of a rock structure thousands of years old, the last picture about a hundred, but you can see the second stories are remarkably like the old brochs. The first stories are as well, underneath the stucco-like coating and pebbling to create an extra barrier. It's stacked stones underneath, in nearly every building. Fences and outbuildings do not look like much of a change from Skara Brae or the Broch of Gurness. St Magnus Cathedral is built of much larger pieces of red sandstone, finished more finely, but it's the same thing as well.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="; width="240" /></a></div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="; width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="; style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="; width="240" /></a></div><p>Why would they change? It's right there, it's easy, and it works. One downside is if you use it for standing stones it attracts lightning, which can also split it pretty quickly. The stone circles of Orkney have not held up as well as Stonehenge and Avebury for that reason. Still, 5,000 years is a good innings for any built structure, wouldn't you say?</p>2026/09/neolithic-legos.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-705295333817777829Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:48:40 +00002026-09-25T22:48:40.315-04:00Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast<p>This WSJ article is making the rounds, so most of you might have seen it, but I wanted to make sure it got noticed. <a href=" Christianity is Dying Fast.</a> The aging of the mainstream denominations, especially the leadership has been pointed out more and more frequently over the last twenty years.</p><p></p><blockquote>This hasn’t always been the view of the Catholic Church. Mr. Thomas and his fellow activists are drawn to the imagery of the crusades. Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095 to a crowd that responded with cries of “<i>Deus vult</i>” or “God wills it.” That phrase is popular among nativists on social media. Which pope is the greater authority on the gospels, Urban or Leo? I don’t know. But a glance at Christian history shows that the current consensus among church leaders hasn’t always been so. Taking the long view, it is by no means a settled position among Christians that nationalism and militarism are “contrary to the gospel,” as Bishop Hudson-Wilkin put it </blockquote><p>I think bringing in Urban II is a bit of an overshoot, but point taken. There are ideas in church leadership which are treated as obvious but would not even be recognised in other eras of the faith. I always hesitate to begin an argument with "One would think..." because it carries a great danger of subjectivity, but <i>one would think </i>that the leader of an eternal church would ask him/herself whether his opinion owes more to his narrow slice of time than it should. I learned decades ago from CS Lewis that while it is true that all eras have their own biases and cannot be entirely objective, this is nowhere more true than among the moderns who insist this. The thing they preach loudest they seem to think themselves exempt from. He called it Chronocentrism and Chronological Snobbery, giving credit to Owen Barfield for alerting him to the illogic of it.</p><p></p><blockquote> Boomer Christians are alarmed and bewildered by a return to the faith of centuries past. They forget that the political priorities of their generation emerged from a very unusual historical moment. Their confident worldview was a gift from a different era. And it will, I fear, die with them.</blockquote><p></p><p>Have some humility.</p><p> </p><p></p>2026/09/boomer-christianity-is-dying-fast.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-5266724661341806867Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:33:30 +00002026-09-25T10:33:30.832-04:00Welsh Men's Chorus<p>Just to keep the A capella going. I swear the whole country can sing. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="470" src="; width="564" youtube-src-id="OxgymLKqVP8"></iframe></div><br /> <p></p>2026/09/welsh-mens-chorus.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-3587817910510135653Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:26:06 +00002026-09-25T10:26:06.825-04:00Amazing Marvin Gaye<p>Strong and solid. I didn't know this version existed</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="470" src="; width="564" youtube-src-id="87FjkqtK67o"></iframe></div><br /> <p></p>2026/09/amazing-marvin-gaye.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-2634468171424919730Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:57:23 +00002026-09-25T09:57:23.472-04:00The Ness of Brodgar<p>Orkney is one of the few places where any <a href=" balls</a> have been found <i>in situ. </i>None of the theories of what they were used for has been very persuasive, but they have been found many places in northern Scotland. One was found at the Ness of Brodgar in 2013, and a new one at this summer's dig. This Ness was a community structure between the major standing stones sites, containing houses, cooking areas, and workshops. It was only discovered in 2003 and usual, accidentally by a farmer plowing his field. Though it doesn't make for good tourist photographs, it is much more extensive than the stone circles themselves and tells us more about how the people lived.</p><p>A funny thing about experts. We had international experts, even the decades-long chief archaeologists on some sites. Because of this story I will not mention any names, though anyone determined could narrow it down to a few persons pretty quickly if they chose. In explaining about the Ness, our guide had a mind-numbing amount of detail at his fingertips and ability to offhandedly point things out that would only be noticed by people who had spent a lot of time at this. Occasionally there would be another archaeologist in the group and they would talk shop in a manner that was almost incomprehensible. Sometimes they would double back and explain something to the rest of us, sometimes not. In summing up before the Q&A our guide mentioned that there was now some assurance that the very top layer before the site was abandoned not only had some artefacts from the <a href=" People</a>, but good evidence that they had used an inhabited the site.</p><p>I fancy there were murmurs of appreciation of this, but it may have been only me. This is the moment of transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The Bell Beaker culture was the group that almost fully replaced the previous culture - the one that had actually built Stonehenge, Avebury, Newgrange, and the stone rings around us but were overwhelmed throughout Europe by the Indo-Europeans, the Yamnaya, the wildly violent Steppe tribes who were our ancestors. In most places the male lineages were completely replaced. Orkney and eastern Scandinavia were two of the few places where that replacement occurred differently or not at all. That's another story, but the short version is that the incoming paternal lines did not replace the Orkney natives, while both groups of females persisted. As this occurred at the far end of their spread, where horses and carts were not the advantage on islands they had been previously, the resident males could mostly hold off the invaders. </p><p>"Ah, this is the part I'm most interested in," I blurted, barely raising my hand to be called on. "The Beaker usually brought the practice of burial in mounds with them, but mound graves were already in place here. Were they brought at an earlier date by a variation of these people from the Steppes? Are they influenced by <a href="; or completely unrelated?"</p><p>"What are kurgans?"</p><p>It was as if a mathematicians had said "Who is this Fourier chap you keep talking about?' or an astronomer had said "What do you mean, moons of Neptune?" I was almost too embarrassed to continue, suddenly worried that it was I who had been inhabiting some obscure backwater and thinking it important. I was able to explain that they were the burial mounds of the Steppe people. He said briefly and generally that the Steppe people had been the Indo-Europeans and "come into" Europe, a rather mild description for complete replacement. He didn't comment on the any relationship between the two types of mound, and I just dropped it.</p><p>All I can think is that the field is so specialised that the experts do not need or desire to keep up with the larger movements in their own area of study. It seems rather like economics, where Nobel winners sometimes seem to have no better grasp on larger issues than other educated people.</p><p>So I'm going to say, no, no relation, because if there were he would have been all over it, as obsessed as he was by Orkney information. </p><p><br /></p>2026/09/the-ness-of-brodgar.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-8536405875987245332Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:35:09 +00002026-09-24T13:35:09.964-04:00Skaill House<p><a href=" House</a> was already the seat of earls and bishops of Orkney (Some Graham and Watts Lairds, mostly) with some small archaeological importance when <a href=" Brae</a> was discovered on its lands after a storm two centuries ago. The tumulus had been noticed, with the idea that "Someone should dig that up and see what's there someday," which describes half of Orkney. </p><p>If you are interested in American East Coast domestic history, the displays start in the era of Williamsburg, VA and end at Newport, RI. You can see it and it just jumps out at you. But because its earls and bishops in the UK, a lot of the enthusiasm by the presenters is about noble alliances and visits by the Queen Mum. If we weren't such a good match for Williamsburg and Newport here, it might not have interested us as much. Quite the cottage, though. If you are there at Skara Brae anyway, it's a definite plus.</p><p>This is the place to mention that Orkney was a wonderful and valuable trip for us, but we have no need for a second visit. Maybe if I had to go into the witness protection program or something. </p>2026/09/skaill-house.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-6259359161023426574Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:08:04 +00002026-09-24T13:20:55.126-04:00Orkney has both outsized importance and is neglected<p>In Scotland, no one pays much attention to Orkney. It has only 22,000 people across the whole chain of islands. It has almost 200,000 sheep, 100,000 cattle, and I didn't look up how many fish, but really, it's islands in the North Atlantic. It has several local brands of beer and scotch, including some specialty beers from <i><a href="; an ancient form of barley which is also used to make a very <i>authentic</i> bannock or other tourist bread. Though other parts of Scotland have different authenticities, you will notice that this does not differentiate it much from the Shetlands, the Western Isles, the Highlands, or Scotland in general. Scotch, not many people, sheep, necessary for tourists, otherwise rather a drain on resources. Orkney needs lots of ferries and small airports, and there is only so far you can cut back the safety regulations on those things.</p><p>OTOH, Orkney has outsized importance to Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Age archaeologists, Viking historians, and WWII buffs. Standing stone in concentration are always a big deal. St Magnus and his cathedral are a big deal. Scapa Flow is a big deal. </p><p>When you think about it, most places in the world are like this, of immense importance to some groups and no importance to others. The archaeology tourists always tut-tut about the farmers who are uncooperative with digs, not recognising their value. But really, why should they be? They have crops, they have livestock, they have harvests and hard work. <i>This is a potentially important Mesolithic site for the entire North Atlantic! </i>SO WHAT? They're dead and gone. Go away and stop bothering the sheep. </p><p>Rural New England farming. Historically important, but who cares? If it can't pay its own way with tourists...</p><p>Prairie family Bibles. Folk arts of the Ozarks. Almost everything with an historical designation that gets money or is untaxed means that we all pay for it. It is a tradeoff scheme played by politicians. It is a sign of immense wealth when a country can do this. <i>But it's got billions of dollars of mineral resources under it! </i>So what, it's a park now, and sacred to Gaia, so you can't touch it. <i>Why can't you have a park over here instead? </i>It's different. You are just an ignorant person who does not understand. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.</p>2026/09/orkney-has-both-outsized-importance-and.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Assistant Village Idiot)1