Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Data Talks

 

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Lake Attersee, 1900 by Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862-1918)

Lake Attersee, 1900 by Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862-1918)

























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Tuesday, June 25, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Dancing, c. 1920 by Wladyslaw Roguski (1890 - 1940)

Dancing, c. 1920 by Wladyslaw Roguski (1890 - 1940)




























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Monday, June 24, 2024

History

 

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The central planner wolf in philanthropic clothing

From Why I stopped being a YIMBY by Simon Cooke.  The subheading is The YIMBY movement has lost its way becoming just another planning-led and illiberal group that believes its vision, a Young Fogey version of Le Corbusier’s cities in the sky, should be imposed.

I keep intending to write an essay and never get around to it because of its sprawling nature.  The core argument is that the governing powers around the world have largely abandoned the straightforward agenda that is the wants and priorities of their constituents.  These, broadly, are something like, and in no particular order:

Steadily growing productivity which leads to 

Steadily growing economy

Steadily growing real income 

Choice of jobs

Good education institutions

Good public safety (personal and property)

Equal application of the law

Respect for human rights (freedom of speech, religion, association, etc.)

Sound money (low and predictable inflation)

Sound public finance

Good public infrastructure

Low cost of living

Better, cheaper, safer pretty much covers it.

These are not novel.  Most people want most of these things most of the time though the relative priorities might shift around over time.  

And the delivery of these things isn't really rocket science either, though it does require discipline and the willingness and capacity to make trade-off decisions.  A public policy not working?  Cancel it!  Benefits from a program of activity less than costs?  Cancel it!  Expenses greater than tax revenue?  Cut them!

Bad government is substantially a choice made consciously by bad leaders.  Citizens should be voting losers out of office on a routine basis instead of giving them more time to continue failing.

Cooke is touching on one example, Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) a movement theoretically grounded in prosocial philanthropy, encouraging land owners in cities to agree to a degradation in the quality of life in their single family residential neighborhoods in order to increase housing available in the city through increased densification.  

It is, and always has been, an emotional argument, slipping in coerced central planning to achieve redistribution aims of central planners, inevitably of one variant form of Marxism or another.  

You want more housing and cheaper housing in a city?  Don't coercively force densification on neighborhoods that don't want it.  Reduce taxes, reduce regulations, accelerate the construction approval process, get rid of corrupt city employees who gum up the building process, encourage commercial activity within the city by increasing rule of law and improved market access and participation.  Implement that plan and you will get more housing.  Not necessarily where central planners think it ought to be.  Not necessarily in the form they prefer.  Not necessarily at the price points they want.  But it will happen on its own and it will be what residents want.

But that is not what the central planners want.  They want their YIMBY central planner wolf in philanthropic clothing.  Which is the point Cooke is making.

I stopped being a YIMBY because the advocates of building new homes don’t want to allow the building of homes according to what people want but rather according to their grandiose vision of future urbanism. What we get is a twee version of Le Corbusier’s planned urban communities where, rather than brutalist modernism we get a world filled with dull pastiche of Maida Vale mansion blocks. 

[snip]

At first YIMBYs were consistent in seeing that the way to resolve the housing crisis was to increase the supply of land for development. Depending on where you lived there were different priorities - stopping single family zoning, scrapping urban growth boundaries, removing expectations of planning gain and making the permit process faster and more predictable. The feature of all these campaigns was that the way to ameliorate - hopefully end - the housing crisis was to reduce regulation and do less planning. Everywhere the cry was ‘build more houses’.

The problem, however, is that YIMBYs were young(-ish), ideologically left wing and living a childless life in big cities. The simple truth about housing supply (if you increase the supply of land for building, the market will meet need and housing costs will become affordable) wasn’t good enough. Voices began to say it was more complicated and, as criticisms of YIMBYism arose, the YIMBYs backed away from their simple recognition that supply and demand is real and does largely determine values. The new urbanism stopped being about how you dropped house prices and reduced rents by building houses and began to embrace elements of trendy urbanism: a shift to talk about affordable homes not simply homes per se; an obsession with urban densification; and the embrace of environmentalism especially in the form of public transport. As a result YIMBYs stopped simply campaigning for more land supply and more homes, and instead began to talk about planned urban environments, agglomeration theory and using development to make public transport systems economically viable.

Read the whole thing.  YIMBY started out at least with a theoretical good goal - let the market function in order to increase the supply of housing.

In an odd inversion, YIMBY has become the very thing that has lead to the housing crisis in the first place - a central planning nightmare.  It involves pursuing goals incompatible with those listed at the top of this essay.  Central planners want what is ideologically appealing to them and DO NOT want residents to choose different objectives.  So we end up with:  

Imposed densification

More money dumped in mass transit which no one rides

Penalties for cars which everyone prefers

Imposed speed limits to make commutes longer (Vision Zero)

Aspirations towards walkable cities

Imposed DEI principles

Redistribution and subsidy based on race and other preferred attributes

Imposed energy restrictions in pursuit of AGW goals (Net Zero and 100% clean or renewable energy)

Rent control

Set asides (a percentage of new construction set aside for the poor)

Focus on Affordable Housing (and Housing First) rather than focusing on Housing in general

Expanded imposed environmentalism

Anti-family and more specifically anti-children policies (in effect if not explicitly acknowledged)

Higher costs of everything

Less economic growth and dynamism

Less choice/freedom

Listen to your constituents.  Observe rule of law and equality before the law.  Let markets function.  Focus on growth.  Focus on cheaper, safer better.  Everything else - jettison.  It is expensive and deceptive junk making everything worse for everybody.  

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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We found that over 3/4 of textbooks contained inaccurate statements.

From What Do Undergraduates Learn About Human Intelligence? An Analysis of Introductory Psychology Textbooks by Russell Warne, Mayson C. Astle, and Jessica C. Hill.  From the Abstract:

SCIENTIFIC Human intelligence is an important concept in psychology because it provides insights into many areas, including neurology, sociology, and health. Additionally, IQ scores can predict life outcomes in health, education, work, and socioeconomic status. Yet, most students of psychology do not have an opportunity to take a class on intelligence. To learn what psychology students typically learn about intelligence, we analyzed 29 textbooks for introductory psychology courses. We found that over 3/4 of textbooks contained inaccurate statements. The five most commonly taught topics were IQ (93.1% of books), Gardner’s multiple intelligences (93.1%), Spearman’s g (93.1%), Sternberg’s triarchic theory (89.7%), and how intelligence is measured (82.8%). We learned that most introductory psychology students are exposed to some inaccurate information about intelligence and may have the mistaken impression that nonmainstream theories (e.g., Sternberg’s or Gardner’s theories) are as empirically supported mainstream theories (such as Spearman’s g).


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Night Walk, 1981 by Alex Colville

Night Walk, 1981 by Alex Colville

























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Sunday, June 23, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Shipwreck by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

Shipwreck by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky




















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Saturday, June 22, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London, Viewed from an Interior, 1936 by Thomas Dugdale Cantrell

The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London, Viewed from an Interior, 1936 by Thomas Dugdale Cantrell






























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Friday, June 21, 2024

Philanthropy - Just another form of the Daughter from California syndrome?


"Daughter from California" syndrome is a phrase used in the American medical profession to describe a situation in which a hitherto disengaged relative challenges the care a dying elderly patient is being given, or insists that the medical team pursue aggressive measures to prolong the patient's life. In California, the "Daughter from California" is known as the "Daughter from New York"; the "Daughter from Ontario" is a Canadian variant. The "Daughter from California" is often described as angry, articulate, and uninformed.

Further:

Medical professionals say that because the "Daughter from California" has been absent from the life and care of the elderly patient, they are frequently surprised by the scale of the patient's deterioration, and may have unrealistic expectations about what is medically feasible. They may feel guilty about having been absent, and may therefore feel motivated to reassert their role as an involved caregiver. In his 2015 book The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care, American physician Angelo Volandes ascribes this to "guilt and denial", "not necessarily what is best for the patient"

Is almost all philanthropy just a dressed up version of the Daughter from California.  Emotional insistence that the donor knows best without either knowledge or skin in the game.  Actions driven by their emotional self-tending rather than the welfare of the beneficiary.  




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Emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness together are highly correlated with Life Satisfaction

From Most people's life satisfaction matches their personality traits: True correlations in multitrait, multirater, multisample data by R. Mõttus, et al..

Despite numerous meta-analyses, the true extent to which life satisfaction reflects personality traits has remained unclear due to overreliance on a single method to assess both and insufficient attention to construct overlaps. Using data from three samples tested in different languages (Estonian, N = 20,886; Russian, N = 768; English, N = 600), we combined self- and informant-reports to estimate personality domains’ and nuances’ true correlations (rtrue) with general life satisfaction (LS) and satisfactions with eight life domains (DSs), while controlling for single-method and occasion-specific biases and random error, and avoiding direct construct overlaps. The associations replicated well across samples. The Big Five domains and nuances allowed predicting LS with accuracies up to rtrue ≈ .80–.90 in independent (sub)samples. Emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness correlated rtrue ≈ .30–.50 with LS, while its correlations with openness and agreeableness were small. At the nuances level, low LS was most strongly associated with feeling misunderstood, unexcited, indecisive, envious, bored, used, unable, and unrewarded (rtrue ≈ .40–.70). Supporting LS’s construct validity, DSs had similar personality correlates among themselves and with LS, and an aggregated DS correlated rtrue ≈ .90 with LS. LS’s approximately 10-year stability was rtrue = .70 and its longitudinal associations with personality traits mirrored cross-sectional ones. We conclude that without common measurement limitations, most people’s life satisfaction is highly consistent with their personality traits, even across many years. So, satisfaction is usually shaped by these same relatively stable factors that shape personality traits more broadly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Harlech Castle by Ronald Lampitt

Harlech Castle by Ronald Lampitt





























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Thursday, June 20, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Woman, Man, and Boat by Alex Colville

Woman, Man, and Boat, 1952 by Alex Colville
















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Wednesday, June 19, 2024

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Throughout his presidency, as with all presidents, there have been videos of President Biden, stumbling upstairs, falling over cables, and the usual pratfalls to whuch anyone, particularly someone more elderly, is at risk when moving through unfamiliar environments.  Gerald Ford nearly fifty years ago was especially mocked for such accidents but he was still a relatively young sixty-one and a relatively vigorous former college football athlete.  

Still, this episode from Season 1, Episode 4 of the then new Saturday Night Live in 1975 seems strangely prescient of the material available today.  Except that you won't see SNL mocking a sitting Democratic president.

Double click to enlarge.

In the past couple of years, the volume of video of President Biden doing strange things, beyond mere pratfalls, keeps increasing by the month.  It would appear that there is a rising issue with cognitive decline as illustrated by disorientation, confusion, loss of focus, etc.  More and more footage of his wife or members of his entourage or peers intervening to address some addled action (see A deft kindness for a recent example.)

This past month has seen a cascade of video of incidents of inattention, confusion, disorientation, freezing in place, etc.  Multiple videos from many angles of each incident.  

You can read into each more or less significance as one might be inclined to do, but they each and all happened.  There they are, on video.  Lots of video.  From different sources.  From different angles.

The legacy mainstream media, as an extension of the White House administration, are working hard to hide the videos or recast them.  The White House anchors and their pet journalists have worked their way through claims of deep fakes (AI enhanced CGI-type new content of things that did not happen but can be made to seem as if they did) to misinformation (deceptive editing or unsubstantiated claims based on the video) and now are reaching to the bottom of the bag for . . . cheap fakes?   

Yep.  There is so much of the disturbing behavior that they had to come up with a new name to try and hide it.  Cheap fakes.  The deception is laughable.  
The CNN anchor is working hard to refute the representation in the video that Biden wandered aimlessly away from his peers, diverted by something happening off screen.  Critics are of course representing this as the cognitive confusion, distraction and inattention of an elderly man in decline.  The CNN anchor shows us one of the more common versions of the video which seems to show pretty much exactly that.  

But, she claims, it is a cheap fake.  

But actually, he, if you widen the frame out, you can see he was talking to one of the members of the military that was participating in that demonstration.  

AND THEN SHE DOES NOT SHOW THE SUPPOSEDLY CONFUTING VIDEO!

I have seen perhaps 3-6 versions of the incident from slightly different angles and of varying length from 30-90 seconds.  They all appear to show the same thing.  Biden losing situational awareness, getting distracted by something offscreen, breaking away from his peers in the photo-op to go talk to someone, and then being guided back to the photo-op.

The CNN anchor would have us disbelieve our lying eyes and makes the verbal claim that there is video that shows he is not distracted and wandering but she doesn't show that purported video.  It becomes very difficult to believe that they are not doing anything but straight up lying to their audience.

Perhaps there is an angle and a length of video that makes Biden's action seem natural and alert.  Perhaps.  But all you have to do is show that video.  To claim and then not show?    That is just childishly insulting.

To borrow NPR's favorite formulation, the CNN anchor has claimed without evidence that Biden's critics are using a tactic involving a new technique known as "cheap fakes" to misrepresent his cognitive condition.  She has refused to show supposedly refuting video.  She makes the unsupported argument and moves straight to a claimed "expert" to discuss

How prevalent are deep fakes and how big a problem will they be in this election?

We are deep into George Orwells' 1984 where:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.

Followed by

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

The Mandarin Class, the glitterati, the legacy mainstream media, the deep state "government", the CNN anchors - they are telling us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears, to reject the otherwise indisputable so called "cheap fakes."  Add in the profound incoherence of the Woke ideology and Critical Theory and we are well down the path of War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.  

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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The 1% are the 15-40%

From Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming & John N. Friedman.  From the Abstract:

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

Part of the continuing war on the private sector, on merit and for central planning and authoritarian governances.

But their work does have some of the data which helps me to the answer to a question I had.  To what degree do graduates of elite universities dominate academia, arts, industry and government?  

From a different paper (Expertise in Journalism: Factors Shaping aCognitive and Culturally Elite by Jonathan Wai and Kaja Perina), we know that elite graduates constitute:

WSJ editors/writers: 50%
NYT editors/writers: 44%
Senate: 41%
Fortune 500 CEOs:41%

I would include public sector and all Most Competitive universities as elite (Georgetown University, Georgia Tech, Caltech, Rice University, etc.)  Chaty's work, with a more restrictive definition,

found that less than 1% of Americans attend the eight Ivy League schools, the University of Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford, but these graduates account for 15% of those in the top 0.1% of the income distribution. 

Another reading of Chaty's work yielded:























That doesn't quite answer my question but begins to offer some parameters.  A Fermi Approximation might give us something like 

The 1% of the population who attend most competitive universities are responsible for 15-40% of the most coveted outcomes in government and enterprises.

It is Pareto's law all over again.  The 1% (by IQ, by effective behaviors, and by appropriate goal setting) take a disproportionate share of the winnings.  Not terribly surprising but upsetting to some.

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Isle of Shoals - Moonlight, 1892 by Childe Hassam

Isle of Shoals - Moonlight, 1892 by Childe Hassam





















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Tuesday, June 18, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 
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Data Talks

 

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Still Life with Self Portrait by Marc Gertler (1891-1939)

Still Life with Self Portrait by Marc Gertler (1891-1939)



























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Monday, June 17, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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The walled garden, 1958 by Ronald Lampitt

The walled garden, 1958 by Ronald Lampitt





















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Sunday, June 16, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Girl in a Picture Frame, 1641 by Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606–1669)

Girl in a Picture Frame, 1641 by Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606–1669) 































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When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears.

From Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking by John Protzko and Jonathan W. Schooler.  From the Abstract:

In five preregistered studies, we assess people’s tendency to believe “kids these days” are deficient relative to those of previous generations. Across three traits, American adults (N = 3458; Mage = 33 to 51 years) believe today’s youth are in decline; however, these perceptions are associated with people’s standing on those traits. Authoritarian people especially think youth are less respectful of their elders, intelligent people especially think youth are less intelligent, and well-read people especially think youth enjoy reading less. These beliefs are not predicted by irrelevant traits. Two mechanisms contribute to humanity’s perennial tendency to denigrate kids: a person-specific tendency to notice the limitations of others where one excels and a memory bias projecting one’s current qualities onto the youth of the past. When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears. This may explain why the kids these days effect has been happening for millennia.

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Saturday, June 15, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Magpie eating cake, 1865 by Rubens Peale (English, 1784–1865) 


 














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How rich life had been and how silly,

In Memory of Sigmund Freud
by W. H. Auden

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
     to the critique of a whole epoch
   the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
     who knew it was never enough but
   hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
     so many plausible young futures
   with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes
upon that last picture, common to us all,
     of problems like relatives gathered
   puzzled and jealous about our dying. 

For about him till the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
     and shades that still waited to enter
   the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he
was taken away from his life interest
     to go back to the earth in London,
   an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment
his practice now, and his dingy clientele
     who think they can be cured by killing
   and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed
simply by looking back with no false regrets;
     all he did was to remember
   like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
     like a poetry lesson till sooner
   or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
     how rich life had been and how silly,
   and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
     a set mask of rectitude or an 
   embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit
in his technique of unsettlement foresaw
     the fall of princes, the collapse of
   their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life
would become impossible, the monolith
     of State be broken and prevented
   the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way
down among the lost people like Dante, down
     to the stinking fosse where the injured
   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,
deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,
     our dishonest mood of denial,
   the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,
the paternal strictness he distrusted, still
     clung to his utterance and features,
   it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
     to us he is no more a person
   now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:
Like weather he can only hinder or help,
     the proud can still be proud but find it
   a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:
he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth
     and extends, till the tired in even
   the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered
till the child, unlucky in his little State,
     some hearth where freedom is excluded,
   a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,
while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, 
     so many long-forgotten objects
   revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;
games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,
     little noises we dared not laugh at,
   faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free
is often to be lonely. He would unite
     the unequal moieties fractured
   by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will 
the smaller possesses but can only use
     for arid disputes, would give back to
   the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all 
to be enthusiastic over the night,
     not only for the sense of wonder
   it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
     us dumbly to ask them to follow:
   they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
     even to bear our cry of 'Judas', 
   as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
     sad is Eros, builder of cities,
   and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

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And the moon stood still over Jericho.

Coda 
by Louis MacNeice

Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.

So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.

But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.
 
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Friday, June 14, 2024

I'm actually a hillbilly from Appalachia, but for the moment, I self-identify as a Jew.

While Biden opened his presidency with the improbable claim that he would be a uniter rather than a divider, I certainly did not anticipate this act of unity.

Just as an aside, the brawling, justice seeking, cantankerous nature of the Scots-Irish (concentrated especially in the Appalachians) has been well documented in Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer and Born Fighting by James Webb.  

The Scots-Irish, rock-ribbed Presbyterians have always been a disproportionate percentage of our leaders and of the military.  And have also been long reviled by the bien pensant of the Mandarin Class.  They have been characterized as white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, anti-semitic racists.  Materially untrue but that's the received stereotype among the Woke elite.  

In his desperate pursuit of Somali and Muslim votes in Michigan and other mid-west states, Biden has been especially indulgent of the noisy, violent, flag burning (American and Israeli), anti-semitic protesters on campuses and select blue cities near you.  A blatant and unpleasant anti-semitism alien to most Americans and certainly to most Normals.

So I really liked this rather striking example of unity.

I'm your huckleberry by Martin Hackworth.  The subheading is 

Yo, you over there in the keffiyeh asking about Zionists on this bus. I'm actually a hillbilly from Appalachia, but for the moment, I self-identify as a Jew. Come on over and let's have a chat.

Appalachian, Scots-Irish Presbyterian whites happily self-identifying as Jewish in order to right a demonstrable wrong.  Now there's a Uniter for you.  An amusing essay that captures a vibe that I think is quite real and unreported.

Echoes of Next of Kin from 1989.  

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A deft kindness

This incident is striking and concerning on several levels and of course has generated a storm of accusations and defense.  Holding the issue of dementia aside, I was struck by something different than Biden's behavior.
When Giorgia Meloni became Prime Minister of Italy a year and a half ago, the legacy mainstream media went all in with accusations of fascism and inhumanity.  She was evil personified, were you to believe the establishment media.  It was, of course, all nonsense.

Her policies were not Woke, but they were still very much in the mainstream.  Not only popular with the electorate now but very consistent with policies accepted as mainstream from the seventies into the noughts.  But because she was not hard left, in the eyes of the Mandarin Class, the glitterati and the legacy mainstream media, she was evil and therefore kissing cousin with fascists and Nazis.

It was such an absurd set of charges that it finally began to lose steam after a few months.  There simply was no substance to the accusations and people could see that.  In addition, Meloni held her ground with a series of hard hitting and effective speeches.  The MSM finally simpered away.

Rugg, I think, exaggerates in his tweet with "grabbing." He is scoring an opportunistic political point but I think a neutral observer would describe this incident differently.

There are nine other adults in the group, most of whom quickly notice Biden's distraction.  They begin a side shuffle to close up the ranks but they do nothing more.  It is Meloni on the far left of the frame who almost immediately notices Biden moving away.  She hesitates a few seconds.  I assume she was waiting for others much closer to him to address the situation.  They don't.  

Meloni then crosses the front of the group, ostensibly to talk to Macron and Van der Leyen (who were standing contiguous to the left of Biden.)  Meloni tactically positions herself with her back to the cameras as if talking with Macron and Van der Leyen but then takes a couple of further steps to the right to touch Biden's arm and deferentially, tactfully, as unobtrusively as possible, gets his attention focused back where he needs to be.  Biden returns and takes his place as the rest of the leaders reposition themselves back around him.

One of only two women among the ten.  The shortest of all the leaders.  Yet she was the one most able to demonstrate a deft kindness, protecting another from his own actions.  I was very impressed to see such touching humanity in a politician.

Either she is natural mensch or she has had experience in dealing with the very elderly.  In any case, I do not think any argument or speech on her part could be a clearer refutation of all the baseless accusations made against her.


UPDATE:  I see this data after posting.  Maybe just a coincidence that Meloni gets the best of the bad ratings.  

 

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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