I didn't expect this

As an engineer, I admit that I am a rare bird in that I also greatly enjoy literature, and when teaching Sunday School last weekend, I used the picture of Sinbad the Sailor and his seven voyages as a picture of James 4:13-17, where the merchants in the church were cautioned against presuming upon the future and planning for great wealth.  I thought there were great parallels between the voyages of Sinbad and the risks noted by James.

While eventually I was able to explain what I was getting at, I was rather shocked that few, if any, in attendance were really familiar with the story of Sinbad--despite numerous movie and even cartoon adaptations of the story.  Somehow it seems that despite the great literature being available on "Gutenberg Project" and the great movies of the past being available on streaming video, our culture is becoming more and more insulated from the greater cultural and literary conversation.

I guess I should have expected it, though, as I got a rebuke about 20 years ago because many of the literary comments I made on conference calls with colleagues in Asia were not understood by....my American colleagues.  The Asians had been educated in English-inspired schools and got the references and jokes.

Perhaps Gaza, Ashkelon, Ekron, Adhdod, and Gath are actually in the United States.  Just sayin'.  

Now there's an epitaph

Ben Sasse has not yet died, and I hold out hope that the therapy that's already looking powerful bears fruit in his body, but this wish for America is just wonderful: 

I'd like a lot more dinner tables to turn off the devices, put them out of the room, pour a big glass of wine, break bread together, and wrestle with some really grand questions about what you're building for your family and your next generation.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Interesting change of definitions

Back when I was young, "single" simply meant, for the most part, that a person was not married.  Certainly people did live together outside of marriage--we called it "living in sin" of course--but it was not prevalent enough to warrant saying that those doing so were no longer single.  If one wanted to say that someone was not even dating anyone, one said one was "unattached".  "Dating" meant exactly that, "going steady" was the next step, and so on.

Now, with far greater prevalence of living together (and don't you dare call it "living in sin", or marriage as "making it legal" anymore?), "single" seems to mean "not involved in a relatively permanent or sexual relationship", and the current word for what used to be known as "single" is now "unmarried."

It's an interesting comment on sexual mores today, and it brings to mind the question of how we reach out to the apparently strong majority of young people who see living together as morally acceptable.  The historic ways of doing so are to point to STDs (hard to get them if you're with your first partner for life), the pain of broken relationships and risk of domestic violence, and the likelihood of having children without the protective elements provided by law.

But perhaps what's really going on is that most young people haven't had the protection of married parents throughout their growing up, and as they leave high school, they're told that (a) jobs available to most high school graduates won't pay the bills for a home and (b) getting to that point requires one to get a bachelor's or even master's/doctoral degree.  So what we've got, really, is a perfect storm where opportunities to live well while unmarried and unattached are rare, and at the same time, larger proportions of young people are in college until their late twenties.

Since sex drive doesn't take a break because one is in college, the result is obvious.  We're set up for family disarray.

More inspiration

 The lunch lady at my son's school made a tuna-jalapeno quiche for me.  I am so going to have to take Mrs. Bubba out for Italian--watch out for flying toilets around Rochester.  My son is cringing at the thought of being a graduate of Jerome Horwitz Elementary....

Side note: tuna-jalapeno quiche with sharp cheddar is seriously good.  Now why do I have a weight problem?

Inspirational Quote of the Day

 Whatever you are doing  today, do it with the confidence of a 4 year old in a Batman t-shirt

RIP, David Allan Coe

The man who coined the four greatest lines in country & western has died at age 86.   

Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison

And I went to pick her up in the rain

But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck

She got runned over by a da*ned old train

He lived a rough life, but for the joy that he gave many of us, rest in peace, Mr. Coe.  And on the light side, I really enjoyed those four lines when I lived in Waseca, home of the federal women's correctional facility, which of course should have become the home of Hilliary Clinton.  Waseca, home of about 9000 souls (including the prison if memory serves), had 18 bars, two rail lines, and of course, a prison where Mom could be picked up.

The glories of AI

My son is very eager to break five minutes in the mile, and just for fun, asked ChatGPT what his race plan should be.  It came back with a first 800 in 1:49-1:51, which is just a little bit faster than a pace to break the world record of 3:43.

Thankfully he knows the actual pace to break five minutes--it's 2:30 for the first 800 meters of course--but it strikes me that AI hallucinations can not only infantilize people by doing work that they ought to be doing themselves, but in doing so, can actually endanger people.  Had he actually tried that advice, he'd have come through 400 in about his PR pace (61 seconds), then collapsed in the second quarter.

Ten million and counting

That's the cost of an independent audit investigating the misconduct of former Michigan football coach Sherrone Moore. Now granted, top lawyers are expensive--I'm guessing that the lawyers for this are going for $1000 per hour or so--but even given that, this means that the investigation is in the ballpark of ten thousand hours, meaning there is a LOT to go through.

And then you've got, I would assume, the investigation of Matt Weis, the other offensive (to put it mildly) coordinator who appears to have spent most of his time ogling pretty athletes on the NCAA social media portal.  And with both of them having every email, every letter, and the like read, you've got to wonder how much it might tell us about the sign-stealing cheating that went on.  I am still not persuaded that Harbaugh, Moore, Weis, and others could have watched footage of games without asking themselves "Boy, this defensive unit is uncanny....they're in the right place almost all of the time, which never used to happen before.  I wonder what that Navy grad is doing going to games with our rivals?"

Put gently, there is a lot of rot at Schembechler Hall.  Hopefully, they come clean.

A thought on marriage

Probably a little bit risque, but regarding the obligation of men to protect their wives, it struck me this morning that if a man doesn't have his wife's back, he probably won't get her front, either. 

There's a nice confession

Iran is noting that if Israel keeps on attacking the terrorist group Hezbollah, future talks will be meaningless.  Well, that's a nice way for Iran--and their sponsor Russia--to admit that when Hezbollah launches attacks on Israel, the reprisals ought to be in Teheran, not Lebanon and Syria.

Really, my thought is that by not making the case for reprisals on Iran itself, Trump has shot himself in the foot, and if we openly had a policy "you attack in Israel, we respond in Iran", this kind of nonsense would stop quickly.  Hezbollah is, sad to say, more or less a gambit that Iran plays to attack Israel, and when the pain is suffered in Iran, the mullahs will start to realize that we mean business. 

Update: I just remembered a story I learned way back in college European history class.  Apparently in the late 1800s, German nationalists were very concerned that the larger French garrison near Cameroon would allow the French to take the German colony.  Chancellor Otto von Bismark responded by saying "That would be an act of war, no?", and when they replied in the affirmative, he's said to have said "Then if France desires war, they shall have war--on the Rhine.".  And there were no attacks in Cameroon until there was a very active war on the west side of the Rhine.  It is critically important that the instigators of problems feel them where they care the most.

Academics, smackademics

All ten starters in yesterday's "national championship" game were transfers.  What that means, in practical terms, is that none of the starters were developed from high school by their college coaches.  None of them took their lower division (freshman, sophomore) courses at Michigan or Connecticut, and for that matter, none of Michigan's players have their major declared on Michigan's fan site.  It is a reasonable question; do any of them ever take upper division courses?  Are Michigan and UConn sheepskins going to provide huge competition for Charmin?

More or less, both teams in the "championship" game are "the best money can buy", and neither team really has the kind of player and personal development that was the rule in college sports just a couple of decades ago.  For that matter, neither team has the personal or player development that was the rule in the professional leagues until the great expansion of free agency made the development (minor) leagues and player development less important.

To me, it's a scary reality that the going deal in college basketball is pretty mercenary--the old goal of developing the player, personally, sportswise, and professionally, is all but gone.  edit/update; it strikes me that the current college sportsball complex is the Monkees to the old Beatles, the "Pre-fab 4" to the genuine "Fab Four".

 

An interesting viewpoint...

Marriage psychiatrist John Gottman is renowned for coming up with a theory of the "Four Horsemen" (Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, Layden) of marriage, specifically four behaviors of criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.  Evidently he's got statistical evidence that these behaviors predict marital failure better than anything else.

For a long time, I resisted this, because in my mind, it was more important about the "why" people might engage in criticism, contempt, and the like.  Wasn't it important if someone was assaulting their spouse, or cheating on them, and the like?  

Well, I don't change my opinion that the provocation matters, but upon looking at Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden Gottman's definitions for criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, what I notice is that Gottman defines these behaviors as a rule in terms of attacking the person instead of addressing the behavior.

Or, in a nutshell, what he's done is to formulate family breakdown in terms, so to speak, of genetic fallacies in general and the ad hominem fallacy in particular.  If you're willing to routinely attack your partner, more or less, don't be surprised when the relationship doesn't work out.  And if you want to preserve relationships--marital or otherwise--it'll help a lot if you're addressing behaviors, not attacking a person.

Well, might as well have fun with this

Apparently, a Russian court has sentenced German artist "Tilly" in absentia for the  "crime" of making fun of Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kyrill at a Karnival (Fasching) parade in Dusseldorf.  Now for the uninitiated, at Karnival parades, you can make fun of just about anything, and the last Fasching Parade where certain political statements were verboten would have been during World War Two, if you catch my drift.  Tilly has also done a float featuring Trump with a swastika--any other day in Germany, that's banned, but not on Rosenmontag.

So more or less, by trying to prosecute this "offense", Putin joins the company of no less than Adolf Hitler.  Since Putin's been putting up statues of his hero (and Hitler's buddy, well, until he invaded the USSR) Stalin, that sounds about right.  And so let's see what Tilly did to 'ol Vlad:

Verdict; given that Kyrill is, like Putin, a former employee of the KGB, and has spent a fair amount of time and effort backing Putin's series of war crimes in Ukraine, this is absolutely true.  In civilized countries, defamation has to make you look worse than you actually are.  We might say that Tilly's work actually downplays the evil of Patriarch Kyrill and Fuehrer Putin.

In honor of the progressive left

As you may have heard, the International Olympic Committee has decided that henceforth, biological males (XY) may not compete as women (XX) in the Olympics.  Thankfully, Angela Carini did not need to be carried out on a stretcher with a sheet over her face before the IOC realized that allowing the likes of Imane Khelif in the ring with her could be deadly.

That noted, we've really got to have some compassion on the trans community, so here's a bit of sympathetic cinema.

 And, of course, a bit more:

A picture of the "anti-zionist" left?

An "art" exhibition in England features...well...pictures of Jews eating babies,  and we are led by Scotland Yard to believe that somehow, despite at least one of the artworks pretty much illustrating the blood libel, that the exhibition is not anti-semitic.  H/T Powerlineblog.

Of course, viewing some of the artwork, part of me wonders why nobody showed the "artist" the kindness of taking away his crayons and telling him that he could have them back when he grew up a little (he's 70, apparently) and learned how to draw.  I don't know what it is about modern "art", but all too often, the beauty and grace expressed in the past has given way to a puerile lack of skill combined with a manic depressive effort to "say something", no matter how evil that something is.  Can't we have an agreement that if a three year old could do better, it doesn't belong in an art gallery?  Just sayin'. 

Also worth noting is that of the modernized racial, sexual, and other slurs I've heard in the past few decades, pretty much all of them were being used by progressives.  Maybe it's time to invest in mirrors so progressives can direct their bile at the proper culprits.