Throwing things

Ann Althouse blogged today on "milkshaking," the new-ish trend of throwing the contents (apparently it's usually only the contents) of your milkshake cup at someone with whose politics you disagree. Oh, heck, let's dispense with the even-handedness: "milkshaking," the new-ish trend on the Left of throwing milkshakes at conservatives.

I have two thoughts. The first relates to a young kid I've known for many years; he is the king of the not-quite-justifying-physical-response annoyance. Erma Bombeck had a kid like this, apparently. In The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, her brilliant and hilarious commentary on suburban life, she describes a road trip with her family. The kids, all piled together in the backseat, are making the family vacation a banal and enervating hell, as they can do; one of them complains, "He's humming!" Erma or her husband responds, "I can't hear anything." Kid counters with, "He's humming so nobody can hear it but me!"

This is quintessentially the kid I know. For as long as I've known him, he's skated at the thin edge of inviting repercussions for his actions. He's repeatedly thrown balls and other projectiles past people's heads; he's scootered inches from people's bare feet; he's moved his chair so it's touching the chair of the person next to him; he's taken over the playlist and played Minecraft parody songs nobody wants to hear; he's done the repeating-what-people-say thing right up to the point where he's about to get smacked by the kid whose words he's repeating. And then the other kids, who just want him to stop but don't want to resort to violence, appeal to the adult on the scene, who tries to intervene: "Stop what you're doing."

"I'm not doing anything!" or variants of this, such as, "I wasn't touching him!," "I wasn't even close!," or "I'm not hurting anybody!," ensue. The adult is thrown back on, "I don't care what you say you were or weren't doing, it stops now."

Aaaand the kid gets upset. Sometimes he protests: "S/he does stuff like this all the time and doesn't get in trouble." (The adult is well advised not to argue against this point; it's a black hole.) Sometimes he just invokes the silent treatment. (The adult is well advised to ignore this.) Either way, he's getting upset because he's been called on something he was doing that he thought wasn't quite over the line, but that has now drawn the attention of authority. The adult sometimes points this out to him - the fact that he's not upset because of the rank injustice of being called out, no matter what he says, but rather because he misjudged the line. It doesn't do any good. Give him an hour (he's a pretty happy-go-lucky kid and bounces back fast) and he'll be right back on the scooter again.

A milkshake-thrower is likely to be mighty surprised - probably furiously angry - if he is brought up on an assault charge for throwing that milkshake. But it is a perfectly rational response to what is, in fact, an assault.

My second thought relates to the first. A number of commenters on the Althouse thread took the tack of, "When the Right finally decides to stop being nice and actually fights fire with fire, things are going to get real." A dangerous thought, and potentially a true one, and the whole reason why the adult on the scene with the kid I described would always try to intervene, no matter how frustrating and pointless that intervention seemed: because if the adult didn't intervene, the other kids would eventually get fed up and punch him in the nose.

Milkshake-throwers, like pie-throwers before them, should be leery of what they might unleash against themselves. I always want my side of the ideological argument to show endless restraint, invariably to take the path of debate rather than any sort of violence - but I am not in control of other people's actions. I think it's possible, perhaps even likely, that the throwers of supposedly funny, squishy, "harmless" stuff believe that the vaunted Rule of Law will protect them from the thrown punch and worse, since after all, "they're not hurting anybody." But people get fed up.

Game of Thrones, Conservative Manifesto

Spoiler alert! I'm going to speak freely about the final episode of the series. I do apologize to anyone who's slogging through said series now, trying to avoid all water-cooler conversations (or wherever such conversations take place now), but I sat there watching the last episode with my mouth hanging open at the fact that HBO was willing to let it be made.

I'm overstating the case to say it was a "conservative manifesto," I admit; there was still a lot of throwing out of babies with bathwater, which we conservatives think is a bad idea. And nobody is going to like it as a piece of storytelling, because (as my recent college graduate son said) "they were so busy trying to write endings we didn't see coming that they gave us endings nobody wanted."

But let's set storytelling aside. I want to address (here come the spoilers) the end of the Daenerys/Jon arc. Jon is the forces of conservatism; can there be any doubt of that? (Ans.: of course there can.) He follows the rules, questioning them only at the margins; he serves where and as needed; he Does the Right Thing even when that Right Thing comes with a cost - either a personal cost to him or a larger cost that nevertheless must be paid. Now, I expect the real, non-fictional forces of what I'll call "progressivism" (I reject the term "liberalism" for this political stripe - not crazy about "progressive" to describe what are so often regressive policies and ideas, but I don't want to make up a whole new word and I don't want to demonize the other side, only to point up its weaknesses) don't see him as conservative; I think they see him as:

• brave
• noble
• quixotic
• therefore certainly a Hilary! voter in the last election, except that because of our backward system he can't vote in an American election
• forced into awful action for which he will forever suffer because of his passionate commitment to Goodness
• and of course dreamy.

But that's because they have such a hard time ascribing good intentions to a conservative. Daenerys is the forces of progressivism - seen by the real forces of progressivism as:

• brave
• noble
• populist (um... sort of, if we gloss over her continuing to live as an absolute monarch despite her "break the wheel" rhetoric)
• therefore Hilary! herself
• in a sex-positive, un-scoldy way
• but tragically undone by the depth of her passionate commitment to Freedom.

And we the forces of conservatism see her as:

• strongly "in touch with" and, more importantly, motivated by feelings
• apt to let those feelings rule over sober thought, whether the thought is her own or her advisors'
• not great at seeing forward from action to consequences
• and not very likely to alter her future behavior on the basis of those consequences, because after all her intentions haven't changed.

So what happens? Daenerys doesn't go mad with power - not exactly. That would be too easy. Tyrion lays it all out (I was most impressed with whoever wrote his monologue to Jon - how'd they ever get it past the wokeness censors?), saying that again and again she freed enslaved people, and her supporters cheered; again and again she punished - cruelly punished - those who had enshrined the institution of slavery, and her supporters cheered that too. With each victory, with each punishment, she grew more powerful and (here's the critical part) more convinced of her own rightness, because she took each instance as a referendum on her opinion, her feelings, and the voices of her supporters were unified each time in admiring support for what she chose to do. She grew to understand that her feelings about rightness and goodness were what mattered, not the effects of her actions. And her feelings led her to burn King's Landing to the ground, killing a(n unlikely) million people, almost all of whom would have accepted her as queen just as readily as they had accepted Cersei.

Tyrion acknowledges his own hubris in thinking he could have led her down a different road while still supporting everything she did. But the monologue is Tyrion as Greek chorus. Jon does the dirty work of removing the monstrous evil Daenerys has become through her coming to believe that her intentions are all that matter.

That scene is also a jaw-dropper, as the writers let Daenerys actually say things like (in response to Jon's question, "But what about all the other people who think they know what's good?"), "They don't get to choose."

Now, they do make her seem a tiny bit crazy-eyed when she says that. But not so power-mad that it's obvious to the great mass of her supporters that she'll eventually turn on everyone she once valued. They all still support her and are bereft by Jon's regicide. 

The analogy, to a conservative, is obvious: Daenerys, like progressivism, is in thrall to her intentions. She's so caught up in "doing good" that she doesn't notice, or doesn't care, when her actions result in tragedy, or even when her actions themselves are evil; she's just breaking a few eggs, after all, to make her beautiful utopian omelet. 

Okay, it's possible for a progressive to see this story arc as a battle for the soul of progressivism instead: Jon is just as idealistic and socially conscious as Daenerys, they may reason, but has a useful sense of proportion that Daenerys has lost. Jon is Joe Biden; Daenerys is - well, any of about twenty of the other 2020 Democrat Presidential candidates, or the redoubtable AOC. But - especially given that the series ends with the creation of a House of Lords, for goshsakes - I see conservatism prevailing against progressivism. 

Maybe one of these days I'll write about Sansa as the progressives' version of a conservative.

On Merit

Stories about academics who argue that the Western canon is a tool of the patriarchy abound. There's even some foundation for those arguments - it's a fact, after all, that female literacy lagged behind male literacy in the West for a long time, for instance, and that women with an artistic bent back in the day might only be able to express their talent in textiles, like tapestries and embroidery, rather than with paint on canvas, with its relative durability, stability, and above all status. In modern times, we've reclaimed a good deal of what was created in the past by women and people of color, but not recognized as important in its own time. Of course, we've also privileged modern creations by women and people of color (and non-straight people, whose personal proclivities might have been unrecognized or winked at, and were certainly not Line 2 on their resumes, in the past) that may or may not prove to be important, and we've deemphasized the creations of the Old White Men, simply because they were created by Old White Men, to the point that it's easy to understand why kids today don't "appreciate" the things that have proven to be important and timeless.

But now the foundations of science and math are becoming subject to the same postmodern critiques. Why? In God's name, why? Radioactive isotopes don't care whether you think time is a racist construct. And speaking as a (former) geologist, I'm going to say that the rocks don't care if you think a paleontologist should (or shouldn't) have a beard.

The thing is, I believe that the degradation of the Western canon does indeed threaten our civilization (and when I say "our," I'm not saying "belonging to us white people" or "belonging to the menfolk," but rather "belonging to those of us who recognize the relationship between individual rights, property rights, and the incredible level of prosperity enjoyed by an unprecedented proportion of humans alive today"). But surely everyone must acknowledge that the degradation of math and science can threaten lives in the here-and-now.

So here's this from Neo, a "political changer" who used to be on the Left but is now a thoughtful voice on the Right:

But those who are afraid of the truth cannot abide that situation [here she is talking about the Larry Summers story from 2005 when Summers mentioned almost in passing that biological differences between the brains of men and women might explain some part of the difference between male and female participation in, and success at the highest levels of, STEM fields] and feel that jettisoning the entire idea of merit is worth it in order to equalize the numbers, not the playing field but the score. And we will all suffer because, as Solway puts it:

[Tomas Brage, director of the undergraduate program of studies in physics at Lund University in Sweden] seems blissfully unaware that, aside from unadulterated brilliance, meritocratic traits and criteria are precisely those that STEM demands if it is to prosper. He concludes: “Clearly, the subject of all physics is affected by the background of the researcher, teacher and student, and it follows that a gender perspective is needed.” No, it manifestly does not follow. The individual’s practice of physics may indeed be affected by “the background of the researcher,” but the subject of physics is not. The laws of nature are the laws of nature and must be dealt with on their own terms. Physics is physics—nature’s handmaiden, not feminism’s.

Neo's link to David Solway's article is here.

Merit matters. And even the most ardent defender of the postmodern all-is-relative view of learning and knowledge recognizes it in some areas. Take music - not "radio music," where production and especially AutoTune can hide a multitude of sins, but live music, of almost any genre. Whether a singer sings in tune matters. Or take dance. There is a perceivable difference between the way I dance (which is frankly embarrassing) and the way, say, Justin Timberlake or Shakira dances - to say nothing of Baryshnikov.

There is a world of difference between opera and folk music, between heavy metal and soul. But in all, the ability of the singer to sing in tune (yes, even in heavy metal!) is the foundation of whether listeners will enjoy that piece of music - or cover their ears. There is a world of difference between ballet and ballroom, between hiphop and salsa dancing. But in all, the ability of the dancer to move in that ineffable way that strikes watchers as grace is the foundation of whether they'll watch with pleasure - or laugh behind their hands the way my kids do when I dance. Call it "talent" instead of "merit"; it exists, and it remains foundational to the value of the output.

And these are not matters of life and death. How can anyone doubt the merit of an accurate understanding of the foundations of engineering and technology, where life is often on the line? When I read stories like the one above from Sweden, what springs to mind is only, "Holy moly, what a first-world problem."

Geology and the Mueller Report

Let's start with My Favorite Mueller Memes. It's a tie. Here they are:



...and...



I read a great piece in Mediaite today, via Instapundit, about what the press will and will not learn from the release of the long-awaited Mueller report last weekend. In short, the press will learn nothing; they're too invested in a conspiracy theory of their own making, according to Caleb Howe, author of that very worthwhile opinion piece. Howe points out that conspiracy theorists, confronted with a reality that fails to conform to their expectations, don't reexamine the core of their theory; instead, they construct new side-theories to explain why reality is being so uncooperative. Both of these memes speak to this behavior. The top one, I admit, assumes a degree of self-examination that I doubt is present among the collusion faithful; but the message of both is that suddenly, after hagiography after hagiography holding up Mueller as the Savior of Our Republic, his report is now being recast as either compromised by Trump administration pressure or a secret message to Congress urging them to go forth and seek impeachment, or dismissed as unimportant and readily ignored.

So that's where we are, according to the collusion faithful (and is there any other kind of collusion supporter? Have you heard of anyone's mind's having been changed by the release of the Mueller report?). The conspiracy to hide evidence that the President of the United States is a Russian puppet, this poor benighted group must believe, goes all the way to the top.

Howe's close examination of "Russiagate" press failures - he's generous there; it's tempting to call it press collusion to produce a desired result, the unseating of Trump if possible but at least the turning of Congress - would be tremendously useful to media outlets whose credibility has been battered by their own behavior. And it will be ignored. I would love to see the press act as the gadflies they believe themselves to be - if they could embrace their own sense of "journalistic ethics" and bring themselves to gad about both sides instead of just one, that is; but I don't hold out a lot of hope.

In geology, there's a concept called "unconformity." An unconformity is the evidence in strata (rock or soil) of a gap in time, evidence that something no longer present used to be there. There are three primary types of unconformities, each indicative of a different set of events:

• Angular unconformities occur when strata, layers of rock, are tilted or deformed by tectonic action - say by the uplift of a mountain range. Then erosion and more deposition of strata happen, leaving horizontal layers lying on top of tilted layers. It's easy to spot.
• Nonconformities occur when there's a flat surface between igneous or metamorphic rocks and overlying sedimentary rocks. The sequence of events is like this: igneous (formed by crystallization of magma, like basalt or granite) or metamorphic (formed by the "reprocessing" of previously existing rock by heat and pressure at depth, like slate and marble) rocks are uplifted by tectonics, forming a mountain range. Erosion happens over millions of years, leaving them more or less flat. Then deposition happens, such as silt deposited by a river on a floodplain, and the deposited sediment becomes rock, shale in our floodplain example, after more millions of years. This too is pretty easy to spot; when you see layers of sandstone, shale, or the like lying on top of granite with a nice flat surface between them, you're looking at a nonconformity.
• Disconformities are the tough ones: flat layers of sedimentary rock over flat layers of sedimentary rock, but nevertheless with "lost time" in between. In the field, they often have to be inferred from subtle evidence, such as a rusty color at the top of one layer that indicates that that layer was once exposed to air, or evidence of ancient soils such as trace fossils of roots, or an improper sequence of rock types (just trust me on this; I'm happy to go into detail if there's interest). Maybe you can use fossils to infer a gap in time if you know a lot about fossils and you're lucky enough to find one that has a known extinction timeframe in the lower layer followed by one that has a known, and later, appearance timeframe in the upper layer. But these guys are hard to spot.

What kind of unconformity does the Mueller report represent? The objective reader (if there are any) and the reader who took at face value President Trump's repeated statements that neither he nor anyone on his team colluded with Russia will see it as either an angular unconformity - that is, the Democrats will now pivot to the interesting position that the President "obstructed justice" somehow though there was no underlying crime to obstruct justice over - or as a nonconformity - they'll pivot instead to the less interesting position that they'd better look for something completely different to impeach him over. The shaken collusion fan will see it as a disconformity - something happened, they just know it did, but the evidence is so subtle that it'll require a lot of lab work to prove. (And the true believer will deny that there's any gap between pre-Mueller and post-Mueller.)

But certainly the end of the Mueller investigation represents a boundary between two unlike things. There's no question in my mind that it will not represent an end to Democrat public figures' speculation about Trump's putative crimes; I think, instead, it will represent the beginning of those Democrats' speculations taking place in an atmosphere in which ordinary Americans won't believe them uncritically any more. Even those ordinary Americans who bought the collusion story are going to be a little more wary now. I hope.

Because as Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone surprisingly points out,

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

Violence against language - jk, lol

Spencer Case, writing at Quillette, addresses the idea of concept inflation. This is a subject close to my heart - ask my husband; I am so strict as Language Police around our place that I might as well be Language Gest-

Self-censoring before I finish that word; I wouldn't want to Godwin myself. The point is, I'm constantly haranguing about how words have meaning. Now, I'm not saying words have intrinsic or unalterable meaning; I'm perfectly willing to accept the natural evolution of meaning that accompanies natural language. But let's take a look at the genetic engineering (so to speak) of language for particular ends, shall we?

I want to start by defining terms. Language, for purposes of this post, I'm limiting to verbal language; "body language" and things like the "language" of art are too subjective for this discussion. By "evolution" I mean a gradual, and undirected, drift from one state or set of characteristics to another; this definition is functionally opposed to both "intelligent design" and "domestication," in which change is directed toward a particular end. And finally, let's posit that words are the "genes" of language: the building blocks, the carriers of information that can be transmitted to others. If a word is understood in one way by the speaker or writer, and in another way by the listener or reader, then information has not been accurately transmitted.

Case asks his readers to imagine an alternative form of the fable of the boy who cried wolf, in which a bunch of shepherd boys who, unhappy about the lack of attention they're able to command when the problem they face is not wolves but, say, dogs or coyotes (both less of a threat to their flock than actual wolves), decide together to start calling dogs and coyotes "wolves." At first, just as in the original fable, the villagers come running with their pitchforks whenever the kids shout "Wolf!" - only to see that the threat is less than they understood it to be. And just as in the original fable, they grow inured to the kids' shouts and eventually stop responding at all, so that when the real threat shows up, the shepherd on duty has to fight it alone. The shepherds have inflated the concept of "wolf" to the point where their audience, through experience, now accepts their new meaning, and the word has lost the urgency of its original meaning - to the detriment of everyone.

Case is talking, of course, about the word "violence," which we're now given to understand can apply not just to physical attacks (such as a "violent crime") or physical conditions (such as a "violent storm"), but also to a firmly stated difference of opinion or a "repugnant" opinion stated all by its lonesome. See, for instance, this - trigger warning! - New York Times opinion piece about "when speech is violence": the writer, a professor of psychology, believes that

[b]y all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.

And when she says "literally," she means literally literally: earlier in the piece, she talks about telomeres shortened as a result of chronic stress, and about the power of words to produce chronic stress in the body. Hang on, it's worthwhile to quote that whole bit:

...Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.

Your body’s immune system includes little proteins called proinflammatory cytokines that cause inflammation when you’re physically injured. Under certain conditions, however, these cytokines themselves can cause physical illness. What are those conditions? One of them is chronic stress.

Your body also contains little packets of genetic material that sit on the ends of your chromosomes. They’re called telomeres. Each time your cells divide, their telomeres get a little shorter, and when they become too short, you die. This is normal aging. But guess what else shrinks your telomeres? Chronic stress.

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

So the syllogism is "Words => chronic stress; chronic stress => bad health effects; therefore words => bad health effects." Fair enough, from the standpoint of logic. But it rests on another set of relationships that isn't a syllogism: "Chronic stress => harm; violence => harm; therefore chronic stress = violence." And that one is not in evidence, but we're asked to accept it anyway. Finish up with one more syllogism: "Words => chronic stress; chronic stress => violence; therefore words => violence" - but the middle set of relationships is still hanging out there, undemonstrated.

I'll note that the writer links to a Psychiatry Online article reporting on a study that found changes in white matter, as well as behavioral effects, correlated with higher incidence of verbal abuse by peers in childhood. This link encompasses her phrase "words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system."

So that's the scientific basis for calling speech "violence" - though, notice, there's already a perfectly good term for this kind of action - "verbal abuse"; and also notice, the term "violence" is not typically understood to mean low-level but constant erosion (chronic stress, in this case) such as is commonly seen in cases of abuse. In other words, society understands that "abuse" and "violence" mean different things. "Violence" means a discrete act or condition. "Abuse" means either a pattern of harmful behavior that may include incidents of violence, or, in a special case, a single incidence of an act otherwise defined as "abuse." (What I mean by that particular expansion of the term "abuse" is that a spouse, for example, who has been subjected once to a type of behavior that we commonly call "abuse," such as being struck by the other spouse, may still be considered to have been "abused" even though that act only happened once. I'm avoiding talking about child sexual abuse here because that subject is terribly fraught and, because of the enormous power differential between child and adult, and often a size differential as well, even sexual contact by an adult that wouldn't cause physical pain or harm to another adult, might usefully be considered violent when suffered by a child.)

The expansion of the term "abuse" to include single incidents of abusive behavior is language evolution in action. Society has come to agree on this expansion as we have come to agree on the idea of what constitutes abuse. The expansion of the term "violence" to include disagreeable speech is not language evolution, but, as I said at the very beginning, "genetic engineering" of language, changing language on purpose to suit a particular end. Make no mistake, the writer in the NYT isn't talking about individual bullying; she's talking about the societal act of "permitting a culture of casual brutality" (her whole statement is, "There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy.") - with no agreed-on definition of what constitutes "casual brutality." She uses Milo Yiannopoulos as an example without providing any example of his speech that promotes "casual brutality"; the reader is expected simply to agree that Yiannopoulos's speech is self-evidently a "danger to a civil society" because it is "violent" by her prior resort to logic - the one that leaves the important middle terms un-agreed-upon.

And of course, returning to Case's essay, the effect is to devalue the word "violence" so that we all just end up ignoring it. In the short run, we all pick up our pitchforks and come to the defense of those against whom "violence" is being perpetrated - those threatened by the so-called "wolf" - but when we see that the poor victims are just milling around, a few of them looking upset but most of them just keeping an eye on the nearby dog, we shoulder those pitchforks, roll our eyes, and go back to our work. The anti-GMO crowd should take note: words do have meaning, and you forcefully change that meaning at society's peril. Way to go, shepherds - when one of your sheep is being ravaged by an actual wolf, good luck trying to get our attention.

Mismatch: does it matter, really?

Outside of STEM, I mean.

When I say "mismatch," I'm talking about when a student's abilities (as measured via test scores and grades) and a school's expectations don't match up. Gail Heriot over at Instapundit posts frequently on this subject; the effect of a mismatch that goes against the student's assessed abilities (I say it this way because it's certainly possible for the mismatch to go the other way - for the student's abilities to be greater than the school's expectations - but I don't know what the result of this kind of mismatch is) is that that student is much more likely to end up at the bottom of her class and to have poorer outcomes generally.

The upshot is that traditional college affirmative action, kindly intended to give disadvantaged students a leg up at a critical time with the expectation that from there on out they'd be on a more or less level playing field, instead results in fewer people of color, et cetera, in challenging fields and high-level positions within those fields. And it seems self-evident that this would be the case. Someone is going to be at the bottom of every class. To hope that that person will turn out to be the high-achieving kid who goes hog-wild at college and loses all that high-achievingness, rather than the kid who started out not able to keep up with the high-achiever, is not a plan. It can happen - my son has a high school friend who got into UMich on his significant merits and left two years in because he just... flamed out, lost all motivation and desire for the life for which he and his parents had been preparing him. But it is not a reasonable part of a policy.

So put me on record as agreeing that AA should be scrapped, not just on philosophical grounds but on practical ones.

But now we learn of Varsity Blues. It involves, of course, the exact opposite starting conditions from affirmative action: the kids involved were the very picture of Advantage, yet their fool parents still didn't let them compete for college entrance on their own merits. (Of course they didn't - what they were going for was entrance into an exclusive club where the bouncers controlling the velvet ropes were admissions officers and the quality of entertainment - pardon me, education - inside was less important than the fact of being inside.)  And they're insulated from bad outcomes by money and connections. Besides, I'd be seriously surprised to learn that any of them planned to get a STEM degree. So, considering that they're all going for "soft" majors from which they never plan to mine any actual knowledge or training, does the mismatch matter?

This isn't an academic question for me - no pun intended. The goal of our oldest was a school with a highly rated undergraduate business/finance program, and he's finishing up there now. He's been offered a great job (better than any I ever had in the workaday world) after graduation. And I vividly remember his rants in high school about the "cycle of advantage."

Now, we're not Lori Laughlin-rich or anything... but because he was our oldest and we were therefore constantly experimenting and improvising, we succumbed to the rants and paid for a private SAT tutor and a program that purported to help him hone his "story" for college essays. I have no idea whether these things did a bit of good; his grades and his first-draft essay would have gotten him into the school he attends. But even if he had been marginal for that school, and even if the money we spent on these potential advantage-builders had had a direct payoff in admission to the school, what would have been the risk of bad outcomes for him, with a mere undergraduate finance degree on the line? What about the disadvantaged kid who also "only" wants a business degree but knows that a business degree from, say, Texas A&M will mean more in the employment world than one from Sac State (my alma mater)?

That's where it gets dicey. And frustrating. That disadvantaged kid isn't wrong. She might be starting out without the money my kid's family has, but if she graduates from a higher-tier school she can gain exactly the same connections my kid did, and get exactly the same first job. And with a less demanding degree program than STEM, the phrase "if she graduates" takes on a much less ominous tone. Who can't get a business degree? I'm not saying business is easy, believe me; but I am saying a business degree is, compared with even a lowly civil engineering degree. And the business degree, not demonstrated business acumen, is the requirement for those initial employment opportunities. After that first job, her acumen either will or will not carry her the rest of the way. Business degrees don't do much, if anything, to weed out those who won't ultimately be good at business.

So now there's a class-action suit taking shape against the universities that have been revealed so far to have compromised their admissions process. It's Stanford students suing; they say that these other schools' unethical behavior deflates the value of their degrees. A Stanford degree "means something" because Stanford, like the rest, is relentlessly self-promoting, actively courts big donors, attracts high-level research by being able to foot the bill for it because of said big donors, admits only the "best and brightest" high school graduates (and now we know, if we didn't before, the dilution of that phrase) but then coddles them carefully, refusing to let them fail because if they fail, the school's reputation falters.

No, really. I know a guy who went to Stanford and, suspicious at the low level of rigor he was experiencing, said he tried to fail his classes. He not only passed, but got B's. Yes, he was smart, and yes, they were non-STEM classes - but even affirmative action students, whether traditional or moneyed, will have to meet some standard to get into a school like Stanford. So the big question is, what is that standard really? What is a Stanford degree worth, really?

I suppose I should be happy that this scandal, in the longer term, may result in a real leveling of the academic playing field: high-tier universities are being revealed as the diploma mills they've always been, only different from the Evil For-Profit diploma mills in the amount you have to pay for that sheepskin. (And heck, you used to have to build a new library or something! The universities must be falling on hard times.) But it's profoundly depressing to see not only what some parents will stoop to in order to keep their kids away from the great unwashed, but what supposedly great universities will stoop to to get these absolutely normal, but rich and connected, kids inside.

Somebody thinks I'm a lefty!

I haven't posted in... gosh, apparently two years, I see now, because I've been working on other writing projects (which might or might not ever come to fruition), but today the weirdest thing happened.

I was reading a post on PJMedia about a daycare worker in Michigan who caused the shutdown of the facility where she worked by stabbing a couple of children with thumbtacks. The description of what she did makes it sound as if she did it not because of anything the children did - she didn't get mad at them and come at them with tiny little shivs, which would be awful enough - but rather just to hurt them. Commenters on the story immediately went to race as her reason. She could be of a different race from the children she hurt, or their parents; but she could also be of a different socioeconomic class from them, and that could be what put her over the edge into criminality and cruelty.

I used to direct a preschool, so I have a little background in this area. It happens that there was no socioeconomic divide between the staff I had and the families we served - but preschool workers don't make a lot of money, and it might be easy - apparently was easy for a few of our parents, at first - to believe that the difference between what the preschool teachers and aides made and what they, the parents, made was indicative of their relative worth. So it wasn't hard for me to imagine that such a divide, which certainly does exist in many preschools, and I'm guessing even more in straight daycares, could have pertained to this now-shuttered daycare. And it wasn't too hard for me to imagine that a worker, perhaps already coming in disgruntled by a feeling that she wasn't "appreciated" enough, could have been dissed by a parent and decide to take out her aggrievedness (I may just be coining that word) on the child, regardless of her race or the child's.

So I commented thusly. And the weird thing was that two people immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was defending the worker despite my repeated statements that there was no excuse for what she'd done, and one concluded that I'm a lefty! I love it!

The first commenter said, "You're full of yourself, and it shows. Your reference to 'typical imperious parent' shows your baked-in sense of self importance, mixed with a touch of pseudo-intellectual bigotry. I'm certain you were happy to take their money." I might've deserved that; what I'd written originally was,

And I still spent an inordinate amount of time emphasizing (subtly) to parents that their appropriate mode of interaction should be to look teachers and aides in the eye, get to know them, and treat them with basic respect - after all, we were going to know their child intimately. It wasn't common, in our school, but it did happen from time to time that we'd get other schools' (or, more likely, other daycares') typical imperious parent who hands off his or her child silently, scrolling on the ubiquitous cellphone, as if the person taking charge of that child for the next several hours and giving that child interesting things to do instead of parking him in front of a screen isn't even worthy of a glance or a response to her friendly and direct greeting.

...and a bunch more. So yes, I was speaking from my own perceived position of experiential "authority," and I did come across as pretty lah-di-dah. So I answered that first commenter,

Sorry for how I came off, IC - I should have said "typical" (with quotes) instead. I was one of those parents before I was a preschool director. With my oldest child, I was very caught up in my own worries - hadn't wanted to put the kid into daycare but I had to work while my husband was in school - and I can't for the life of me remember the name of my child's primary teacher/caregiver; I don't think I ever paid her more attention than the bare minimum needed to be sure that my son was actually transferred into her care.

What I was trying to do, I'll say again, was to use my personal experience to highlight a situation that I know does pertain at times in daycares and preschools, as well as among a lot of us, including me, who mindlessly accept service from others.

Et cetera.

The second commenter stuck with it for quite a while. His first comment:

Typical lefty snob from the education/indoctrination collective, the type of clown that has given us morons like AOC. You work for the parents missy, you pompous twit. What an insufferable POS you are. A Masters in Early Childhood Education? Hilarious, do they get better pay for working in the drive-thru?

Oh, if he only knew. Of course, the one undeniable charge he eventually leveled was that I'm long-winded... Here's the whole string.

Ohhhh, Texas...

OK, I have to assume that the fact that I didn't hear the entire report is in their favor.

Today's NPR item: on the program "Think," there was a report called "Turning Texas Blue." The premise was that as Texas goes, so will go the nation - and that since Harris County, which contains HOUSTON, the fourth largest city in the United States, went Democrat in a year in which Republicans picked up seats every-dang-where, huzzah, there is hope that the entire country will go blue in the next few years.

Do you see what I mean about assuming that I just missed some important part of the report? How is it news that a big city went blue? And how does it follow that therefore Texas itself will follow, much less the country? Did they not notice that this pattern was just exactly what we saw all over the country? Every big city went blue. And virtually every non-big-city area went red. Check out this post, with lots of figures, about red versus blue, for instance. I find myself wondering whether this report was begun well before the election, more in the line of, "As the nation goes, so goes Texas."

I am not arguing that the blue voters won the popular vote. Big cities have lots and lots of people, and, as with protests and marches, it's easier to undertake a get-out-the-vote effort in a place where population is concentrated than in the vast landmass where population density is more like 80 people per square mile (about the average population density of the United States) than 7,000, as in Los Angeles. But I hope and pray at least two things: 1. that the red voters will continue to turn out, and to turn out in greater numbers so that they don't lose their place at the table, and 2. that the country won't lose its mind and get rid of the Electoral College, the only thing that keeps that seat available to those who choose not to live at high density.

But - and this next is purely anecdotal - it is my observation that people (of many ages and ways of life) still yearn for small-town life. And why is that? It appears that the people who so yearn are the people who want to have children; the dyed-in-the-wool urbanites frankly can't afford it. (I think this is why so many NPR stories about city folk feature city folk with children. NPR appears to take pleasure in illustrating how inappropriate stereotypes are by telling us stories of people who bust them. Please note that I am not in favor of stereotypes that limit people; any city people who want to have children - more power to you! I just recognize the realities.) As long as cities' fiscal policies continue to make it hard for people with, or who want to start, families to live and prosper within their borders, it seems well within the realm of possibilities that enough people will move to the small towns and suburbs, and will be positively affected by the lifestyle that's in reach there, that they'll continue to give the big cities a run for their money.

Anyway. I don't know how it'll all come out; I just think that a report saying that because Houston went Democrat, Texas is a burgeoning blue state is incredibly disingenuous. If instead the report had said that big cities' continuing indigo hue and high population are rendering vote distribution wildly out-of-whack, now that would have been truthful. Boring, but truthful.

The new egalitarianism

The wonderfully well-read Victor Davis Hanson, a student of history and an observer of the present who manages to synthesize these interests with clarity and style, writes

We are now in a media arena where there are no rules. The New York Times is no longer any more credible than talk radio; CNN—whose reporters have compared Trump to Hitler and gleefully joked about his plane crashing—should be no more believed than a blogger’s website. Buzzfeed has become like the National Inquirer.

His evidence? Please do go read the whole thing, because he's at some pains to lay out the many ways in which the so-called MSM has squandered whatever public currency they ever had through its shamelessly obvious, full-throated, and ill-supported attempts to bring down Donald Trump. It was their mistake to give him so much press during the campaign; they must have felt that he was (a) an inconsequential threat to the anointed Clinton, therefore safe to give lots of exposure, and (b) a super ratings boost, and they now reap their foolish harvest.

Let me be clear (as I've heard somewhere): I also thought Donald Trump was an inconsequential candidate and wrote off the Presidency once he was nominated. Yeah, I voted for him, because I didn't want to throw away my vote on a third-party candidate and absolutely would not vote for Clinton - but it was, for me, more a thumb in the eye to these same media outlets: though they would never know it, I at least would know that this intelligent and thoughtful voter rejected their anointed one and voted for the possible loose cannon, simply because they were laughing so hard at him.

We are not just in a media arena in which the "elite" and hoi polloi find themselves (or are found by watchers) to be equal. We are in a public arena in which this is true. Those who believe themselves to be "elite" were defeated across the board in the November election; those who are told by those "elites" that they are hoi polloi - or, let's use English as well as a clearer statement of what those "elites" seem to mean: the great unwashed - these great unwashed won those elections at all levels, and feel increasingly free to ignore the outlets they're supposed to pay attention to, like not only the New York Times but also Hollywood, the NFL, and academia. Value signaling is all that's left to the Left: they can and do still try to shame everyone who doesn't dance to their tune, and they express first disdain, and then disbelief and irritation, if not outright rage, when not everyone does.

Huzzah, we're all equal: equally able to do and say stupid things and be judged for them! Those on the Right are not necessarily right about everything; those on the Left are not necessarily left behind by history. We all have to answer for what we believe. I stand on the Right because I believe this side has the best answers to the big questions of human society, and I expect the other side to disdain me and attempt to shame me for my "reactionary" position. But I feel just fine about fiercely supporting the rights of individuals to go as far as they are able - or not to go anywhere if that's their choice, provided that they also bear the consequences of their choice. I recognize the need to remove artificial (which means "made by humans" in this context) obstacles to equal opportunities for all, and I'm committed to that effort, but I frequently depart from the Left in exactly how we are to remove those obstacles. I don't think I need to shame the Left; I think events will unfold - are unfolding - that will take care of that.

Puppy training

When it became clear that we might be moving to Houston, my husband made two promises to our kids, one (relatively) reasonable and one utterly inexplicable, coming from him: he promised them a house with a pool, and he promised them a dog.

The pool is beautiful! We love having it. And last week, much to my husband's chagrin, the kids held him to Promise #2, and we now have a 9-week-old puppy from the Houston SPCA.

I grew up around dogs and have wanted one for years. I didn't press the point, however, because my husband doesn't even like dogs (that's the inexplicable part). I insisted on a puppy because I wanted the best shot at getting said husband to like the dog, and because I hoped thereby not to "inherit" a bunch of behaviors we might not be up to curbing; after all, though I've shared a house with ten or eleven dogs over the years, I have never had the primary responsibility of training one. And Chili is adorable. She's less than five pounds at the moment, part terrier and part something else, possibly German shepherd. Things are going really well so far, we think; she is happy in her crate at night and when we go out, and while she still has about one accident a day, it's when, for example, Roomba is rumbling around and I am not paying sufficient attention to her state of mind. She's doing well walking around the block with us.

So my dilemma is this: I am using what I can of Cesar Millan's methods, all that "calm assertive energy" stuff, and to curb her puppy-biting, doing the thing where you use your hand like a mouth to hold her firmly but not harshly to the floor and put pressure on her shoulder and chest until she relaxes. It's all working beautifully. She is happy to see us, plays with all of us, and is learning fast, including things like sitting at the door and waiting to be invited in or out. But... now I read that Cesar's Way is not uniformly smiled upon by dog trainers, some of whom at least prefer to use what they call "positive reinforcement" and view Millan's pack-psych methods as instilling hopelessness rather than relaxation (or, as Cesar himself calls it, "submission").

This is one of those times when I feel I have to go with my gut. This puppy is a dog, not a child. She cannot make complex associations. I cannot reason with her. Her genetic background is in a pack, not a human family. Yes, she's the product of extensive domestication and purposeful breeding, but she is still a dog, with a likely mix of den-hunting and herding reflexes. And, she's in a human household, filled with things she must respect and people to whom she must respond, and she's going to be living in a world that is not at all under her control and is only partly in our control. It simply rings true with me that this tiny puppy needs to feel confident that we know what we're doing and that we understand that she needs to know where she stands. People (many of them) thrive on personal freedom; wolves thrive on the comfort of structure provided by the pack - not just the alpha - and heavily bred dogs like terriers and shepherds thrive on knowing their job and the comfort of structure provided by a human director. As Cesar Millan points out, the "pack leader" role is not defined by aggression, but about "dominance" in his terminology; I would use the word "confidence" instead, because frankly I think some of his detractors are among those who, consciously or not, want dogs to be children and see "dominance" and "submission" as negative because a modern Good Parent doesn't want to dominate her children.

I want this cute little puppy of ours to feel confident in our confidence. It will never be her job to decide what is or isn't a threatening situation; she should always look to us for that determination. Even when she's a grownup dog, she will not ever be equal to the humans in this house - she's not our child nor our toy, she's an animal we have chosen to share our space and to whom we have a heavy obligation, as the ones responsible for caring for her. And so I'm going with Cesar. The "professor of dog psychology from the Harvard Extension School" here seems deliberately to misread Millan's TV show as demonstrating punitive training methods instead of using what seems to be very effective dog psychology to work on rehabilitating dogs with serious behavior issues. I'm trying to train a puppy not ever to have serious behavior issues, and, as I used the most natural methods I could find and that our life could accommodate, such as babywearing, long breastfeeding, co-sleeping in a side crib, child-led weaning and toileting, when training - yes, training - our children from infancy through the age of three or so, when reasoning could take the upper hand, I think that this puppy will benefit from my acting more like a mother dog and less like a doting human parent.

A fundamental difference in focus

In my latest dip into NPR, while I was driving all over the Houston area checking animal shelters for potentially hypoallergenic and adoptable puppies*, I happened to hear an interview with a fellow who was likening Indivisible to the Tea Party - I'm having trouble finding it now, but it was introduced as a discussion of whether today's protesting Dems could learn from the tactics of the Tea Party. The interview quickly established that the groups' aims were very different: the Tea Party's ire was aimed, according the interview at least, at "RINOs," primarily people on the same side of the aisle as they were but perceived to be doing it wrong, whereas Indivisible (a Doublespeak name if I've ever heard one) is up in arms about Republicans, people on the other side of the aisle who are inexplicably (to them) in control of almost everything, governance-wise.

All well and good. There's some truth to that formulation; initially, the Tea Party didn't actually want to be considered a separate party; they wanted to bring the GOP closer to its conservative roots. And the protesting Dems are indeed up in arms about the overwhelming Republican election victory (though, I must add, they seem to be protesting mainly the least overwhelming part of it: Trump's electoral college win of the Presidency, rather than the punishing losses the Democrats suffered in Congress, gubernatorial races, and state houses). But there the interviewer pretty much stopped doing or eliciting any meaningful analysis.

The important difference between the Tea Party and so-called Indivisible (I shouldn't be snarky; they can call themselves what they like. But it - whether the group or the name - is darn divisive.) is the reason the Tea Party was standing in opposition to (roughly) its own, and the reason the protesting Dems are standing in opposition to... those they always oppose. The Tea Party thoughtfully and intentionally embraced conservatism, having looked at the alternatives and decided that, no, those alternatives were still destined to fail and/or have bad unintended consequences in the long term, and also were frequently philosophically repugnant to them. (Nota bene: I am not a Tea Party member, but I think they went about their aims with gusto, ethics, and intelligence.) They also believed that there was a "silent majority," to coin a phrase, of Republicans who were deeply disenchanted with the party because of its departure from its philosophical underpinnings. So their fight was ultimately to bring the Republican party back to power because they believed that conservatism is the right way to go.

The protesting Dems, now: they are protesting an election loss. I'm not going to say that they don't believe what they say they believe. I think many of them do. They are, many of them, as committed to their philosophical stance as any Tea Partier. But instead of turning to their own party to see why they lost so badly and what they could do to reverse that loss in future (a "come to Jesus" with themselves, as they sometimes say here in Texas), they aren't acknowledging any systemic failure on their own side - only simple-minded tactical failures like the way Clinton's campaign was run. Instead, they are apparently trying to convince their political opponents that the opponents should abandon their political philosophy. And they're doing it by trying to shame those opponents - to make them feel inferior for holding the beliefs they hold. What they overlook, of course, is that their opponents are by and large not susceptible to shaming from that angle. We can be shamed - but not by strident claims that if we don't hold a particular Leftist niche issue sacred, we are soulless, or idiots, or both.

We have plenty of niche issues of our own, no question. And there are plenty of factions on on the Right who hold other Right factions in... if not contempt, then at least doubt, because they don't share the same sense of niche-issue priority. But overall what the Right is based on is the principle that that government governs best which governs least. We seldom live up to that ideal, and indeed in the world in which we live, it's hard to believe that it can be applied equally in all situations, but that is indeed our fundamental focus.

The fundamental focus on the Left is, in the short term, both more pragmatic and more humanistic: to relieve immediate suffering of whatever type or degree. A noble aim, certainly. But the methodology is also dismayingly pragmatic and not nearly so kind - in fact it seems generally of the end-justifies-the-means school. And the longer term very often if not always reveals dangerous incentive structures, which are then inadequately dealt with by symptomatic treatment. And the beat goes on.

* My inability to remember the details of the interview stems from the new puppy that we adopted! I am now sleep-deprived and excited by turns.

Breathe slowly into a paper bag...

It's not treason.

Charlie Martin over at PJMedia notes the actual Constitutional definition:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

...Article III, Section 3, clause 1. And why is it defined so narrowly? As Charlie points out, it's because where we (the inhabitants of the colonies, that is) came from, "treason" was whatever the King or Queen didn't like. Rather than continue to subject ourselves to the pique of an individual, the Founders (who would certainly have been tried as traitors if they'd lost the war) decided to make it very clear that criticism of the government, the president, the flag, apple pie, motherhood, or those who choose not to undertake motherhood is not treason. 

Enough with the hysterics, Democrats - neither the President nor members of his cabinet have committed treason. And Republicans, reporters aren't committing treason by being unabashedly biased and hostile toward the President, either.

"Deep state" - the continuing story

Go here for more of Patrick Poole on Gen. Flynn's travails. The short version: the FBI is calling their interview with him "cooperative" and "truthful," and evidence mounts that he will face no legal jeopardy. The Trump organization's supposed cozy relationship with Russian intelligence during the election months also continues to elude; still no signs of collusion between Trump's people and the Russians.

This whole thing is an embarrassing own-goal for the Trump administration, but it sure looks very far from the impeachable offense the Left is hoping for.

It is, however, more data in the ongoing "media==Democrats with bylines" story.

Let's talk about the "deep state"

It's a phrase I'd never heard before, and now can't escape: the "deep state." Apparently (according to Google) it's been around since the 1990s:

a body of people, typically influential members of government agencies or the military, believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy. "the deep state and its policy of allowing extremist ideologies to flourish may be the actual issues of concern" Origin 1990s: probably a translation of Turkish derin devlet (the term was first used with reference to Turkey).

Who knew? It has long been the position of conservatives that an ever-growing bureaucracy is a dangerous thing; this is why. Yes, yes, we are continually told that these are "career civil servants" who faithfully execute their positions come Republicans or high water. But if so, how did this happen:

As our own Michael Ledeen reported here [https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2014/08/29/latest-big-lie-we-have-no-strategy/] at PJ Media back in 2014:

During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies. The secret channel was Ambassador William G. Miller, who served in Iran during the shah’s rule, as chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and as ambassador to Ukraine. Ambassador Miller has confirmed to me his conversations with Iranian leaders during the 2008 campaign.

(I have visibly inserted the relevant link to the 2014 Ledeen article into the quotation from Patrick Poole's article for clarity. Please note that Mr. Poole did the research and I strongly encourage reading the whole thing as he wrote it.) (Seriously, please read Mr. Poole's piece - he lays out the whole mess beautifully.)

If Gen. Flynn's conversation with the Russian ambassador was worthy of prosecution under the venerable but difficult Logan Act, how is former President Obama's agent Miller's not? It's worth noting that Gen. Flynn maintains that his conversation was not about the Obama administration's late-stage sanctions against Iran; it was about the 35 Russian diplomats whom the Obama administration was expelling over Russian interference in the 2016 election. (We must certainly turn our attention to the status of the investigation of that Russian interference very soon.) Discussing the expulsion of diplomats is a far cry from the quid pro quo being implied and sometimes stated outright - generally in the form of a question, which I understand is a tool that's been used to good effect by some trying to skirt accusations of libel - by the press: "You helped Trump get elected; he will raise the sanctions on your country." Scurrilous.

And do we all remember the giant media hoopla that surrounded questions of whether the American intelligence and security community was wiretapping Americans during the W years? That was a mortal sin back in the day; now, like the dissent that was considered borderline treasonous in the Obama years and is once again the "highest form of patriotism" since there's an R behind the President's name, it's hunky-dory.

Remember the Laputians of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels? There was a class of civil servant among them called a "flapper." It was this guy's job to flap the ears of the king whenever the flapper thought the king should pay attention. In other words, the flapper controlled the agenda of the king and therefore of the kingdom. This is where we live now.

You pop out for groceries and...

...six years later, gosh, a new-ish state (back in Texas again), a presidency that's ever more transformative (for good or ill - more on this in a moment), but the same old Lipstick Republican! I am clearly a fair-weather blogger, though my politics didn't change during the Obama years; I just found it so dispiriting to write about the Obama administration and all that went along with it. Schadenfreude is so much tastier than ashes. Let me dispose immediately of the Trump election: when Donald Trump appeared on the long Republican bench a year or so ago, I was bemused but otherwise paid no attention; he was nothing to me but a flashy New York real estate developer with terrible taste in hairstyles and predictable taste in women. And then he began to run in earnest.

You know that scene in Last of the Mohicans where Daniel Day Lewis (with Uncas) starts at one end of the column of retreating British soldiers and civilians who have just been ambushed by the Huron, and runs full-tilt down the column, whaling away at every warrior he encounters as he makes his way to save Cora from a Fate Worse Than Death? If it were voiced over, the narration would be, "The obstacles were insurmountable. The danger, unthinkable. But he had to try." Just picture that for a second: tomahawk slashing, yellow combover flying, Trump overcomes sixteen variously formidable opponents to gain the Republican nomination - that's halfway down the column, his goal perhaps in sight by then - and continues his gallop down the line. Whoosh, there goes another poll; smash, there goes another pundit... and then, against all odds, he symbolically beheads the Democrat party and pulls up short, raising the shivering American people to their collective feet and embraces them with surpassing tenderness... Okay, I cannot go on. I apologize for that image there. But it was quite a run, wasn't it? I wouldn't think you have to have particular sympathy toward either Trump's policies or the Republican platform to appreciate the magnitude of the task.

I offer the previous rather uncomfortable paragraph to illustrate the fact that Trump was not, was never My Guy, but I sat there on election night and marveled at the yuuuuge turnaround. (Yes, I know it probably shouldn't have been as unexpected as it was; yes, I know Clinton was a weak candidate who ran on, "It's my turn this time"; yes, I know the press was totally in the tank for her and abdicated their - I won't call it "duty" because I don't want to anoint them, so let's just say "job.")

So, here we are: another faux Hitler to render the Left incoherent, a new burning Rome to ignore. Republicans have this nasty habit of winning electorally although the popular vote (which you should generally take as "the California vote") goes to the other candidate; the calls for abolition of the Electoral College were right on cue and just as footless as always. The tendency toward violent protest is kind of new. The press continues to astound, daily massaging or contorting the news of the day into its proper shape. This last is probably going to be my subject for a while, because while I repeat that President Trump was never My Guy, I am seeing way too much "President Trump is not my president" from American journalism. Let's begin again, shall we?

It all starts... with a choice -

- again to turn a formerly political blog into a movie review one: yes, Eclipse is out, yes, I saw it at its opening at midnight a couple of nights ago, yes, I saw it again alone yesterday, and yes, I'm going to talk about it herein.

First let me say that Roger Ebert is a big whiner. His review, which I saw described elsewhere as having "richly" detailed the plot of the entire Twilight series, was full of - let's call it "baloney": it was so rife with misstatements and chortling over his and his audience's sophistication (of course as contrasted with the Twilight girls' silly naivete) that it was hard for me to read seriously.

Because that, I think, is where you have to start with these movies: in order to do justice to the experience of those same Twilight girls, of whom I represent a piece of the upper end of the bell curve, the movies have to be in earnest. There's plenty of room for teenage repartee, but the object of the game is suspension of disbelief - Bella really is, for some reason, the target of deadly supernatural forces; she really is the love of Edward's, um, existence; she really does have to choose between Edward's overprotective, jealous, but very sincere adoration and Jacob's more normal plane of devotion.

Or, as the Eclipse screenplay makes clear to the relief of moms of tweens and romantic teens everywhere, she has to choose between who she ought to (implied: "wishes she could") be and who she is. Finally, an attempt to explain why she sticks with the vampire! Melissa Whosis (sorry, I don't google before my first cup of coffee), who wrote the screenplay, either on her own or by direction gives Bella one speech in which she explains that since discovering that the vampires' "world" exists, she's been more comfortable, more self-actualized if you will, whenever she's been in or interacting with that world than she ever was while "literally stumbling through [her] life." Great move! I've been Team Edward all along, but - more on this point later - it's awfully nice to have a reason for it beyond, "He's smokin'!" (Especially since young Taylor Lautner has now just about achieved parity in that regard, much as it oogs me out to admit it.)

All righty then: this is the best of the Twilight franchise. Partly that distinction was handed to it on a platter, because of the books, Eclipse is also the best - most "happening" plot, best character interactions, best theme to move it along. But it's also an earned distinction, as the secondary characters have a chance in Eclipse to do something - one scene in which Jasper tells the story of his bloody life before becoming a Cullen finally gives Jackson Rathbone something worthwhile to say, and he and Ashley Greene/Alice have a nice little moment at its end, for instance. Rosalie finally gets a backstory for why she's so darn mad all the time (that's in the book, but Nikki Reed does a good job with it). The Lesser Wolves, for lack of a better term, get to strut a little of their stuff, albeit mostly silently, hanging onto their endearing teen-boy goofiness where it makes sense but going alert, wary, and all business when they're around vampires.

And Jacob and Edward? Well, I've always given Robert Pattinson credit for being a better actor than his pretty face allows him to be for many critics. The big challenge for him in these movies is indeed to overcome that face: can we feel sympathy for him in spite of the fact (yes, fact) that Jacob really is the better choice by pretty much any light? And Taylor Lautner - can he be believable as the underdog love-interest? Can he generate enough romantic chemistry with Bella (they had plenty of buddy-buddy chemistry in New Moon) to make their climactic kiss make sense?

A scene in which Jacob and Edward actually talk with one another, awkward in the book because it has to take place as Bella, the narrator, drifts in and out of sleep (lots of references to "what a strange dream I'm having, all this whispering," etc.), works better in the movie because the movie is able to suspend its already less determined first-person-ness temporarily and have that conversation while Bella's actually out like a light. Edward's very reluctant resignation to the necessity of Jacob's keeping Bella warm is clear; Jacob's smug satisfaction in that role is just as clear. Each of them moves from belligerence to a tentative understanding, even acceptance, of one another's importance to Bella, while in Edward's case never ceding his primacy, and in Jacob's case never ending his rivalry. Edward is smoother, more measured in his emotions, either because of his much longer life (or whatever) or because Robert Pattinson's just that way; who knows? Jacob lapses back into uncertain-sixteen-year-old as he asks how Edward felt when he thought he'd lost Bella forever back in the New Moon days; it was a credible moment. In other words, the boys did good.

As for their interactions with Bella now. Edward has fewer "Twilight" moments now, in which he seems to be orbiting Bella, anticipating her, weirdly cautious with her - I'm thinking of the scene in Twilight when he helps her off with her jacket the first time she visits his family, when she's just trying to shrug it off and he's getting in the way trying to take it, touching her while trying not to touch her too much; that little bit was a nice illustration of the dual differences of era and species between them. Instead, Edward finally acts mostly human with Bella in Eclipse - true, the most perfectly devoted (and chaste) beau a high school senior ever had in her most fevered dreams, but at least not strange. They're very sweet together.

Jacob and Bella? Trickier. Jacob, appropriately, seems to feel time flying by, all through the film; he rushes everything he says and does with Bella. There's the sense that he'd have better luck with Bella if he took more time with her, and that he knows it, too. His desperation is pretty palpable. His first, unwelcome kiss got lots of squees from the girls (I restrained myself, cognizant that better was on the way); the second, which he approached with a small smile that I thought was just about the perfect balance between joy and triumph, got more, followed by that sighing silence that meant, "OK, now I understand that 'Team Jacob' thing." Also very sweet. Taylor Lautner had some heavy lifting to do in this role, in this film - as heavy as this genre gets, anyway; I thought he carried it off well.

As for the cinematography: we were back to the Twilight blues in many places, cold sharp drama, but overall effectively used; the special effects were, I thought, graceful and not too intrusive, so that's a big plus. There was a LOT less sparkling, such that when it did occur, its subtlety was a subtext rather than a "Hey! Look at me sparkling!" moment.

So now is the time in Sprockets when I diss the critics. Their problem, most of 'em, is that they insist on reviewing these movies as if they stand alone, not just separate from one another but separate from the canon of the four books. I use "canon" here advisedly, not just with regard to the details of the books' world, but also with regard to the attitude of those who read and enjoy them. I've never deluded myself that these books are lit'rature - they're an escape into the world teenage girls like me (I'm still well in touch with that girl I used to be) wished existed. Not a world of vampires and werewolves, although as long as we're making a world, why not make it an interesting one? But a world in which those things that seemed absolutely vital, or absolutely clear, or absolutely unbearable, to my absolutist thirteen-to-nineteen-year-old self, really were that absolute. A world in which my first love really was the love of my life, in which his leaving me felt like my death, in which every decision I made felt as if it had lifelong consequences. It's adolescence in its purest form, and when it's examined from a position of adult judgment and experience (I won't call it "wisdom" since I don't give a lot of movie critics credit for that), it looks jejune.

My church just put on Our Town. At one point in the second act, "Love and Marriage," the Stage Manager urges the audience to remember what young love was like, to put themselves into that faraway place in order to appreciate the scene to come. That attitude is what the Twilight series, books or movies, also requires: a willingness to forget what you've learned over time, to ignore the constant pull of popular culture to be more and more cynical, and simply to open oneself to a kind of distilled, self-perceived purity that doesn't actually exist in ground truth. I can do that. I don't often get the chance, which is why I've enjoyed these books and movies so much.

Sherlock Holmes, steampunk, and canon

How this sorta-politics blog keeps turning into a movie review blog, I don't know... but it keeps happening.

I finally saw Sherlock Holmes today, having wanted to catch its Christmas opening but being far too busy living actual life with my actual loved ones to indulge in vicarious life with the ever-crushworthy detective. (More about that in a moment.) I was... bemused. Because I liked it QUITE a lot, in spite of a convoluted and hard-to-follow plot (which, like my darling Twilight movies, relies pretty heavily on an informed audience, of which I'm definitely one - but it was still hard to follow), weird casting in the parts of Irene Adler (about whom I say "meh") and John Watson (about whom I say, "FINALLY, a movie where I can like Jude Law!" even while acknowledging how little like the traditionally understood Watson he is), and heavy application of steampunk.

Actually, that last point turns out to be a big reason why I liked it, I think, to my surprise: I thought the steampunk stuff was distracting me until I suddenly realized that I was looking for it eagerly in every scene.

So anyway, what was to like? STRICT ADHERENCE TO CANON on points that don't usually benefit from that attention. I've read six or seven critics' reviews now, and (I love when this happens) except about Downey's performance as Holmes, they don't agree about much. However, one point on which they do seem to agree is that this movie is, like, totally revisionist. I argue that it's Basil Rathbone that's the revisionist (but great in his own way, I'm sure - though it occurs to me that I've never seen any Holmes movie until this one). Go back and read the stories: Holmes isn't fastidious, he's messy. (Tobacco in a slipper?) He isn't prissy, he's blasé about moral lapses. (King of Bohemia has ill-advised affair with Adler; Holmes doesn't bat an eyelash, just goes to work recovering the evidence.) He is a bare-knuckles fighter, as well as an adept of "baritsu." He is likely to appear in disreputable costumes at unexpected moments. He doesn't eat, live, or entertain himself as a Victorian British gentleman of independent means would; he's described by his creator (or is it "his biographer"? Who can say?) as "bohemian" and "eccentric." So when I first saw trailers for this movie, I thought, "Robert Downey, Jr.? Really?" But I quickly came around to, "Swoon!"

Because I've had a crush on Holmes forEVer. My parents had a copy of The Seven Per Cent Solution lying around; I fell into it when I was, oh, twelve, and the allure of the moody druggy Holmes led me to the "trad" Holmes of Doyle - wherein the moody druggy Holmes was visible at the edges of the stories - and those two together led me to the Laurie King Holmes-in-"retirement," the most crushworthy of all, because finally we no longer have to guess at and hope for clues to his emotional climate. Holmes: the best bad boy ever, because he's not really bad, just inscrutable and untouchable.

I also decided, eventually, that I liked the direction and the cinematography a lot: there was not one scene of a sunny London, which makes great sense in the time-context: the sun had a tough row to how in coal-heated London. Ritchie's overcranked and undercranked scenes were disconcerting but effective; perhaps if I watched 24 I'd not be so whipsawed by them, but even though I had to mentally reset myself each time the speed of action changed, I dug the way it looked.

And the Holmes-Watson bromance? First, never say that word again; it's stupid. Second, you know, there was no "gay" there for me, though just about every reviewer seemed to find it. (Please see the paragraph a few up, about how dreamy Holmes is, and then see "projection" in the dictionary, I'm thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Obviously I'm employing it myself, incorporating my own bias.) The scene (SPOILER!) in which Adler, Holmes, and Watson are arrayed in that order along the side of a building that explodes toward them was, I thought, terrific: Holmes, caught between his best friend and the newly returned woman he won't quite admit he loves, makes a typical Holmes snap decision, turns toward one, looks back toward the other, and races for the one - all in slow-motion, and shot confusingly on purpose (I think) so that until he reaches his destination we can't tell which one he's running toward, which one he's wishing he could also save. How is that evidence of Holmes's sexual orientation? He loves both; he can only get to one. The rest of the Holmes-Watson interaction is exactly like the conversations my husband has with his brother - occasional uncomfortable references to an affection they don't want to talk about, lots of ribbing, quarrelling, and punching. What?

And the steampunk. Brass clockworks. A waistcoat lying dusty in the road (you know that thing that appears sometimes in catalogues and women's mags as a "weskit"? A tailored vest? Well, that's a waistcoat. It's how it's pronounced. Silly catalogues and mags). The Tower Bridge under construction - it's ultramodern! It's ultra-retro! It's an engineering marvel rendered with slide rules and a preponderance of hand tools with steam power (hence the "steam" of steampunk) for the heavy lifting. Whoa. It's all so beautiful, so soot-soiled, so romantic, so gritty, so full of portents, manners, cruelty, and quick double-entendre.

I give the movie a big analog 9 or so, cast in brass and tarnished by the sulfurous "fog" of Victorian London. Fun!

Global warmi - I mean "climate change"

Megan McArdle, writing here in The Atlantic, criticizes the "scientists" (scare quotes rendered necessary by their alleged reprehensible behavior) involved in the CRU anthropogenic-global-warming email collusion/data fudging/destroying-fest. That's good; she should. She says that

...I have yet to see the makings of a grand conspiracy, rather than the petty bullying of the powerful over the weak, the insider of the outsider. I'll take the statements of this particular group of scientists with a little more salt in the future. But as far as I can tell, the weight of the evidence--and what we know about the history of the planet, and carbon dioxide--still seems to be on their side.

But here's the problem: what is the "weight of the evidence"? This group's original data set was destroyed. Inadvertantly? Possibly... but considering that they were discussing destroying it in the event of a freedom-of-information request, that too is questionable. As one of McArdle's commenters said, "One notes that, in both law and common sense, when a person destroys evidence, you are allowed to presume that it supported his opponent's case."

Sure, it's not the only evidence. But there have been problems with every data set I've heard of: new urban heat-sinks where temperature stations used to be rural, cherry-picked tree ring data, glaciers growing where not measured for an AGW paper, shrinking where the AGW boosters measured, inability to explain the mechanism behind either an ice age or a warming period, pre-1960s temperature data that dramatically smooths out temperature variance graphs, Mars warming up in the absence of coal-fired power plants and SUVs... With all this uncertainty out there - uncertainty noticed only by "skeptics" (another McArdle commenter noted that skepticism used to be considered a virtue in science, not a vice) - one could be forgiven for believing that the really bad acting on the part of these CRU folks calls their findings into question.

I used to be a geologist. In the summer before I graduated, I worked for a gold mining company, collecting rock samples from a very steep hunk of the Sierra Nevada. Here's how you collect a rock sample: you locate yourself on a map, find a rock where you're standing, whack it with a rock hammer until you can collect enough pieces of it to fill a bag about the size of a quart of milk. Mark the location on your map with a unique identifier, mark the bag the same way, stick the bag in your backpack, take it to a lab. The first step - locate yourself on a map - is VITALLY important, because if you don't know where your sample came from, you can't draw any conclusions about where the most gold is. (Samples A, B, and C, in an east-west line, show increasing gold concentrations to the west; perhaps you could put a mine toward the western extent of your sampling area; you certainly wouldn't put it to the east. But say you mislabel your bag - I did that ONCE - or you can't find yourself on the map; where do you dig?)

My map, the best one available for my field area, had 40-foot contours. Think of contour lines as the "bathtub ring" around an object - put a big irregular rock in a tub, fill the tub exactly an inch deep, and look down on it from above. The "bathtub ring" around the rock would be exactly level at one inch, and would show the shape of that rock at a height above ground (the bottom of the tub) of one inch. Now fill the tub two inches high and look down on THAT bathtub ring to see the shape of the rock at two inches above ground. Et cetera. Draw those bathtub rings and you have a contour map of the rock, with bathtub rings closer together where the rock's side is steep, farther apart where it's more gently slanted down. Now scale up: a field area five miles square or so, with the "bathtub rings" at 40-foot intervals. It's mountainous - but most of the outcrops of rock, ridges, cliffs, are shorter than 40 feet. So the map, friends, is nearly useless: you can't tell where you are from it. I could be standing next to a thirty-foot ridge of rock as steep as the side of a building, and it'd be nowhere on my map if it happened to fall between, say, the 5,000- and 5,040-foot contours.

So I had to start from a known point (say, the end of the high-center dirt road I drove to get to the area), tie off a 200-foot nylon tape measure, take a bearing with my trusty compass, and walk to the end of my tape. Mark that spot, on the ground and on the map. Go back and untie my measure, return to new known spot. Tie off measure, take a bearing, walk (or sometimes, essentially rappel, using my tape measure as a line - though the steep slopes naturally mess up the horizontal measurement)... until I could get to the area from which I was to collect a sample. Oh, and sketch in those 20- and 30-foot cliffs and ridges, for the next schmuck. Took a long time.

The point is, my model - my map - was missing a LOT of data, and in fact bore next to no resemblance to reality. I had to fill in those data as best I could, and I had to do it with an eye to the next baby geologist who would be sampling there - he or she would need to know where things were, just as I had. So I had to be (a) careful and (b) transparent. But even so, my map at the end of summer was only a little better than the one I started with, because it only improved where I was sampling; to look at my map, the next baby geologist might think, "Wow, this area here where Jamie was working sure had a lot of cliffs and ridges; luckily it evens out over here in the part she didn't get to. I'll start there!" And that baby geologist would find him- or herself rappelling down scree slopes hanging onto a 200-foot tape for dear life, just as I had.

The dangers of relying on a model, that's what I'm talking about. And when you throw in incomplete reality checks, reality checks in only the convenient or hypothesis-confirming places, and deletion of reality checks that either do not or might not agree with your model, well, the best face you can put on that is that, poor you, you're going to get all wrapped up in the model and lose the ground truth, ending up looking like a fool; the worst face is that you're trying deliberately to deceive.

And just to clarify...

I've spent too much time today, as I did after seeing Twilight, reading movie reviews. The reviewers, almost to a wo/man, hate New Moon* - and who can blame them? It's not a movie for movie fans. It's a movie adaptation of - not even a book for book fans, but a book for fans of a specific mythos.

I am not a fool (she insists uneasily). At no time have I ever had even the sneakiest secret thought that Stephenie Meyers is a good writer**. I've had a free sample of her post-Twilight-series novel The Host on my Kindle since I finished the T-series, but haven't even been able to slog my way through its few pages; Meyers simply writes like a halfway decent fanfic "author." (I've read too much fanfiction; most writers in the genre really suck wind.) And of course I've dealt with Bella as Mary Sue, last year after reading Twilight.

In other words, it's not the writing.

As for plot, well, I wouldn't be the first to point out that there isn't much that makes sense, has any kind of inevitability, or appears to be moving forward in any of the four Twilight books. It isn't the plot.

Characterization: in short, all characters in Meyers' books appear to have come out of either a Harlequin romance or an iconography - a bad one. I remember a quote from the VERY funny Jean Kerr in Penny Candy, in which she describes her lengthy convalescence after a bad cold; she talks about how she wants to use this enforced bedrest to read a "good" book, and keeps trying to pick up some giant worthy tome - but reverts again and again to a trashy novel, even though she knows it's trashy. I don't have Penny Candy, to my sorrow, but she says something like this: "What is it with the way these characters are portrayed? If he has 'crisp black hair,' then she simply can't have 'moist red lips'; things like that just don't happen in real life. She should have 'dry pale lips,' or he should have 'limp gray hair.'" And so, no, it's not the characterization.

As I've said too many times now, it's seventeen, that's what it is: for someone like me, much older than seventeen, it's a grasping for what once seemed like a possibility, now revealed to be a fever dream - not just impossible but not even really desirable once the fever cools. For the kids of the right approximate age, I have to speak from memory, but it seems to me to be an affirmation that that bruised and battered sense of possibility, so alive in the ultra-romantic anti-cynics who think they're world-weary, could indeed be real... somewhere.

* I do find it interesting that they hate it for such varying reasons: the split between those who think Stewart is brilliant but hampered by the screenplay and those who think she's a one-trick pony and in this movie the screenplay asks her to do another trick that she's just not up to is particularly clear. Lautner gets kudos for being the "only" member of the young cast who can act, or emote, or smile naturally, or make you care what happens to him; he also gets slammed for posing, reading lines, being utterly unbelievable, etc., etc. Pattinson is a minor character, really, but because he was so important in the first movie, HE gets roundly slammed for being all emo and stuff. Dakota Fanning gets oddly enthused reviews considering how little she had to do - and honestly, put me in red contact lenses and I could smile enigmatically as well as she does. Across the board, they all seem to love Michael Sheen, whom I've never even heard of but who is evidently a "serious" actor - apparently you can be totally embarrassingly over-the-top and all the reviewers around will say you're being "deliciously campy" if you were a "serious" actor before. Some loved the soundtrack; some hated it. (I hated it.) Many, but not all, liked the cinematography. Weitz's direction was generally noted as a step up from Hardwicke's - but not in every case; some reviewers thought Hardwicke, as opposed to Weitz, really understood her subject matter, whereas Weitz is just out to make a buck. Whatever.

** But at least the Twilight books do explicitly encourage the reading of good stuff. Bella's a big booster of classical romance.

As the kids say, zomg!

For a both hilarious and oogy take on the whole Twilight series, go here. But brace yourself: while everybody who's paid the slightest attention to the books knows that Stephenie Meyers, a Mormon, pays a certain homage to her faith throughout the series, the link seeks to explore JUST HOW MUCH homage.

F'rinstance: Edward Cullen, from the books' descriptions, looks a whoooole lot like Joseph Smith. Yeesh!