Pain in life is inevitable but suffering is not. Pain is what the world does to you, suffering is what you do to yourself.--Allegedly from the Buddha
We had a really good dinner last night at Fish Nor Fowl with the McGraws. Good, fun night with interesting talk and good food. Wine, too. Really nice time.
Mom is hostessing a big dinner tonight with the roughnecks from WVa and an entrepreneurial group from Luxembourg. A lot going on.
According to an AP-NORC poll from late October, just 28 percent of Americans prefer switching back and forth between standard time and daylight saving time over a system where the clock stayed the same year-round. Another 40 percent favored using standard time all year and 31 percent preferred daylight saving time all year.
A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that “Among workers in the bottom three wage deciles, every $1 increase in hourly wages reduces the likelihood of receiving means-tested public assistance by 3.1 percentage points.”
The political left loves to refer disdainfully to people who have “faith in the free market.” Mountains of empirical evidence from countries around the world on the superior performances of free markets are thus dismissed as mere faith. Meanwhile, the repeated failures of government-run economies are attributed to personal mistakes by Stalin, Mao or others — thereby preserving the left’s faith in political control of economic decisions, if only the right people were in charge. --Sowell
"Kingmaking is a sacred business, it's transforming a man or a woman into something other than a man or a woman," says a spokesman for the Japanese royal family.
WEIRD
We had a really good dinner last night at Fish Nor Fowl with the McGraws. Good, fun night with interesting talk and good food. Wine, too. Really nice time.
Mom is hostessing a big dinner tonight with the roughnecks from WVa and an entrepreneurial group from Luxembourg. A lot going on.
According to an AP-NORC poll from late October, just 28 percent of Americans prefer switching back and forth between standard time and daylight saving time over a system where the clock stayed the same year-round. Another 40 percent favored using standard time all year and 31 percent preferred daylight saving time all year.
A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that “Among workers in the bottom three wage deciles, every $1 increase in hourly wages reduces the likelihood of receiving means-tested public assistance by 3.1 percentage points.”
The political left loves to refer disdainfully to people who have “faith in the free market.” Mountains of empirical evidence from countries around the world on the superior performances of free markets are thus dismissed as mere faith. Meanwhile, the repeated failures of government-run economies are attributed to personal mistakes by Stalin, Mao or others — thereby preserving the left’s faith in political control of economic decisions, if only the right people were in charge. --Sowell
"Kingmaking is a sacred business, it's transforming a man or a woman into something other than a man or a woman," says a spokesman for the Japanese royal family.
On Thursday evening, Japan's Emperor Naruhito dressed in pure white robes and was ushered into a dark wooden hall for his last major enthronement rite: spending the night with a goddess. Centered on Amaterasu Omikami, the sun goddess from whom conservatives believe the emperor has descended, the "Daijosai" is the most overtly religious ceremony of the emperor's accession rituals after his father Akihito's abdication. Scholars and the government say it consists of a feast, rather than, as has been persistently rumored, conjugal relations with the goddess.
Politics: The willing suspension of disbelief.
Politics: The willing suspension of disbelief.
WEIRD
In 2010, psychologists Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia pointed out something odd: Virtually all research psychology studied only the countries they dubbed WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Disguised in this clever acronym is a very real observation: This research uses a select and maybe not so representative group.
Given that only about 12 percent of humanity lives in such a place, the researchers wrote in their paper, “The Weirdest People in the World?,” “members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.”
The WEIRDs are more individualistic and independent, less conformist and obedient, more likely to favor “impersonal prosociality” — the idea that one set of moral rules should govern how you treat everyone, from the most distant stranger to your nearest kin. This seems normal to them, but in a global context, it is unusual, even rare.
Where did this come from? Christianity, says Henrich (now at Harvard University), in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science. Western Christianity. The number of years that one’s ancestors were exposed to the medieval Catholic Church correlates pretty nicely with things like social trust, creativity and willingness to do things like donate blood — and correlates negatively with traits such as nepotism.
There are a lot of meaningless correlations out there but the paper offers an interesting hypothesis to support their notion: the Catholic Church’s extreme obsession with incest, which isn’t found in the Eastern Orthodox branch. The church kept banning marriages between more and more distant relations, up to sixth cousins, which smashed the tight kin-based networks common to agricultural cultures.
As a result, Europe had to reinvent its society around the individual rather than the family. This created options that had not been available in a world where “family values” ruled every aspect of individual life. And, of course, one of those possibilities is not being religious at all, which is where WEIRD societies seem to be heading.
Of course, Christianity is a lot more than anti-incest laws. It promises forgiveness, community beyond family, a transcendent purpose within the working world. And it is interesting to see, as the religion is leached out of the social assumptions and beliefs, how cohesion and behavior must be increasingly regulated. More, it raises the crucial question: How much can the isolated individual stand?
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