Happy New Year

 Happy New Year

One of the curiosities of New Year's Resolutions is the unspoken belief that new and better ideas are always coming to the fore. I hope that is true but my advice is always a hash of old suggestions:

Seek fulfillment. Emphasize safety.

The great Old and New Testament sin is pride, the great sin of the doomed Greek was anger. These geniuses were not kidding.

Do not go out of the house in your pajamas.

Spend less than you earn.

There are better ways to do military-type lifts that pressure bones and joints but no good reason to do them at all.

Keep boundaries. Always reassess them.

One thing at a time. Multitasking has been shown to be terribly inefficient.

Do not be on time, be early.

Never use the phone at social events, dinner, or in the car.

Keep up-to-date phone numbers and addresses of friends. Use them. Keep up with old friends with a line or e-mail; do not allow them to slip away.

Get seven hours of sleep a day.

The time before and after exercise is very important. Warm-up and cool down.

People will not remember presents but they will remember how you made them feel.

Ours is a period of downgrading. Start a mild upgrade with more effort on appearance. Maybe it will catch on.

Do not phone from the bathroom.

First dates should always be coffee or lunch.

Do not read anything other than menus while eating a meal with others.

Sign all petitions and always vote "no."

Build a good wardrobe, one good piece at a time.

Do not put ice in wine. If the wine is not cool enough, go to a better place.

Angry people are usually entertaining but avoid them after 6 o'clock.

Read a formal literary effort, a book, or essay, or play, a little bit every day.

Wake up. Early. The day will be nice and long and full of opportunities.

Go to bed at a reasonable time. Anything that happens late at night is because the perpetrators think no one is watching.

Do not name your children after large cities in Texas. Or European cheeses.

If you are going to drink alcohol, drink only good alcohol. Never drink something because it is there.
Never drink alcohol because you "don't want to waste it."
Never forget, alcohol is a neurotoxin.

Generalizations are verboten in our time. Nonetheless, the Irish have an inordinate appreciation of alcohol. Watch it.

Memorize one insightful quote or poetry line every week.

Have your teeth cleaned every six months.

Make a budget. The discipline alone is helpful. 

Set aside a percentage for two groups of savings. Use one account to go to when necessary for a big purchase or a surprise problem. Use the other one for retirement. Never touch the second one.

People tend to like what they do when they are good at it. So, be good at your job and your diversions.

Always get the cost of goods or services upfront. This is especially true of lawyers.

When traveling:

Never travel without a phone that works.
Always, always get the harbormaster's number when you leave a ship.

Never travel alone to an area where you do not know the language or the alphabet.

Always travel with enough money.

Avoid areas where you might depend upon the goodwill of people with old political grudges towards some group you remotely resemble.

Again, always, always get the harbormaster's number when you leave a ship.
 

Buy one tailor-made piece of clothing so you can see the difference from retail.
 

Floss.
 

"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying, and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none." (Friedrich Nietzsche) 

Remember this when attacking another's beliefs. You are attacking more than his intellectual position, you are attacking his area of comfort and command.

Save 10% of your income for retirement.

And some book suggestions from a truncated reading year.
Palace Walk by Malfous (the trilogy got him the Nobel Prize) is a real challenge, almost an immersion in an alternative universe. It's the first of the trilogy around WWI in Egypt and centers on a Muslim family ruled by a conservative autocrat. Very good. I did not like Philip Larkin.  Hayek's Fatal Conceit is a good introduction to him. My project for the year was Paradise Lost. (Was on the Index.) The problem is that it is so profound and demanding that it can not be read once and fully enjoyed. Still, a wonderful project if you can put the time aside. (And some references will help.) I did not think the Devil was the most interesting, I thought Eve was. And I've started to reread, at Chris's suggestion, Fire and Ice, just to understand how Martin makes it so readable.

Paul's Letter to the Galatians says that Christ on earth means that all men are adopted sons of God, heirs to His infinite creation.
So every man, regardless of station or circumstance, wealth or heritage, birthright or appearance, sickness or health is equal in the eyes of God. There have been a lot of notions--from nihilism to castes, from divine right to class conflict, from Freud to Malthus--that have come down the pike since the beginning of recorded time but has there ever been a more radical, more hopeful, more optimistic idea than that? And could there be a better thought to start the new year?

Happy New Year.

Hogmanay

“The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette.”--Schumpeter

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For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships.

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The word pharmacopoeia has four vowels in a row. Some other words with four vowels in a row are obsequious and onomatopoeia. The word queueing has five vowels in a row.

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AAA tested the range effects of 20F degree weather on several popular EVs and found that temperature alone could reduce range by 10-12%, while the use of in-vehicle climate control could amplify range loss to 40%. Idaho National Labs reported that cold weather can increase charging times by almost threefold.
Wait. What?

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Hogmanay

Hogmanay is the Scottish New Year, a mixture of ancient traditions and, possibly, a more modern reaction to the strict Cromwellian restrictions of the Middle Ages. It has a number of characteristics. Bonfires are a part, perhaps from Viking or Clan days. "Redding" the house is another. It is a ritualistic cleaning, a readying for the new year. The fireplace is swept and some read the ashes, like auguries. After midnight, neighbors visit, bringing small gifts, usually food, and receiving them, usually whiskey. 

Importance was placed on the first to enter in the new year, the "first foot." (Tall handsome men were good, redheaded women bad.) The house and the livestock are blessed with water from a local stream--which sounds really old--and then the woman of the house would go from room to room with a smoldering juniper branch, seemingly counteracting all the "redding" with smoke. Robert Burn's version of the traditional Scottish Auld Lang Syne, which translates to “times gone by,” is sung.

The Holy Family

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.--Voltaire

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A Dominican court convicted 10 people involved in the 2019 attempted killing of baseball Hall of Famer David Ortiz, authorities confirmed on Tuesday.
Ortiz, a Dominican native, was ambushed by a man who got off a motorcycle and shot him in the back at close range while the former Red Sox slugger was at a bar with friends in a well-off neighborhood of Santo Domingo. American private investigators hired by Ortiz said that the slugger affectionately known as Big Papi was targeted by a Dominican drug trafficker who was jealous of him.

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Pelé has died. When he visited Washington to help popularize soccer in North America, it was the U.S. president who stuck out his hand first.
“My name is Ronald Reagan, I’m the president of the United States of America,” the host said to his visitor. “But you don’t need to introduce yourself because everyone knows who Pelé is.”

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 The Holy Family

Today is the feast of The Holy Family, one of those feasts that are so Catholic; it is not a feast of an event, it is from "The Feasts of Ideas." The gospel involves the astonishing loss of the young child by his parents on a trip back from Jerusalem, something that would be a felony nowadays. He is found teaching the teachers and seems curiously dismissive of his parents' anxiety, as if just outside of empathy, looking in.

This is Thom Gunn's "Jesus and His Mother:"

My only son, more God's than mine,
Stay in this garden ripe with pears.
The yielding of their substance wears
A modest and contented shine:
And when they weep in age, not brine
But lazy syrup are their tears.
"I am my own and not my own."

He seemed much like another man,
That silent foreigner who trod
Outside my door with lily rod:
How could I know what I began
Meeting the eyes more furious than
The eyes of Joseph, those of God?
I was my own and not my own.

And who are these twelve labouring men?
I do not understand your words:
I taught you speech, we named the birds,
You marked their big migrations then
Like any child. So turn again
To silence from the place of crowds.
"I am my own and not my own."

Why are you sullen when I speak?
Here are your tools, the saw and knife
And hammer on your bench. Your life
Is measured here in week and week
Planed as the furniture you make,
And I will teach you like a wife
To be my own and all my own.

Who like an arrogant wind blown
Where he pleases, does without content?
Yet I remember how you went
To speak with scholars in furred gown.
I hear an outcry in the town;
Who carries this dark instrument?
"One all his own and not his own."

Treading the green and nimble sward,
I stare at a strange shadow thrown.
Are you the boy I bore alone,
No doctor near to cut the cord?
I cannot reach to call you Lord,
Answer me as my only son.
"I am my own and not my own."

The Index

“Ultimately, it’s about what it means to be an American and what it means to be an American in nature. To me, it’s not complete and it’s not right without jaguars.”--some ecologist

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It would take years of evaluations, and environmental and diversity impact studies to get a stop sign on your street, the entire energy basis for the western world is being reversed without a hand vote.

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What is the actual evidence that TikTok is serving up slanted, pro-Chinese content, or otherwise swaying public opinion in a negative manner?

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The Index

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, (“Index of Forbidden Books”) was a list of books once forbidden by Roman Catholic Church authority as dangerous to the faith or morals of Roman Catholics. Publication of the list ceased in 1966.

Penalties varied from venial sin to ex-communication for reading or possessing a banned writing.

Books were a source of concern as early as the scriptural account of the burning of superstitious books at Ephesus by the new converts of St. Paul (Acts 19:19). The decree of Pope Gelasius I about 496, which contained lists of recommended as well as banned books, has been described as the first Roman Index.

The first Index Librorum Prohibitorum was published in 1559 by the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition (a precursor to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) in an attempt to combat the spread of some of the writings of the Protestant Reformation.

The Index continued to have official sanction well into the 20th century. The last and 20th edition of the Index appeared in 1948. The list was suppressed in June 1966, when it became a moral guide instead of obligatory law.

The Index was not limited to theology: it banned works ranging from love stories to philosophical treatises to political theory. All the writings of certain authors—including David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Émile Zola, and Jean-Paul Sartre—were prohibited, while only specific books by other authors were proscribed, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. One or more works by nearly every modern Western philosopher were censored in the Index, even those who professed a belief in God, such as Erasmus, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, George Berkeley, and Nicolas Malebranche. Other famous writers with banned books included Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, Montesquieu, Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Laurence Sterne, Daniel Defoe, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Níkos Kazantzákis. That the works of some atheist thinkers, notably Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, were not listed was because of the supplemental Tridentine ban on heretical works.

Hierarchies always try to manage information, to protect themselves or their citizens from themselves. It implies tremendous fear or arrogance. And is a great complement to the written word. Or a slur on the average citizen who will not be allowed to read and make decisions. The original fear that encouraged the Index was the democratization of dogma and translations. (The Quran should not be translated from Arabic because human opinion would be introduced.)

Our new censors would direct us.

We have fussed over writings in libraries and schoolbooks. But our current direction has gone beyond the pale. Stanford's list of banned words is worth the read for humor but it is a cautionary read if it is a thermometer of our times. Our language is to be sculpted, as we are.

Here is the current Stanford list:

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf

"While I’m all in favor of avoiding the use of genuinely offensive terms, Stanford’s list assumes extreme fragility on behalf of pretty much everyone. I find this assumption insulting, but perhaps I’m not adequately representative of, or in touch with, public opinion."--de Rugy

(some from Cath. Enc. and Enc. Brit.)

Sportsmanship, Business, and Entertainment

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.”--Kissinger

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Long Island Rep.-elect George Santos is being pilloried for lying on his resume. 

A politician is being criticized for lying.

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The Biden administration just cleared a Chinese company to own 370 acres of land within 12 miles of Grand Forks Air Force Base in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Sounds reasonable.

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Eunoia is the shortest word in English with all five vowels.

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Sportsmanship, Business, and Entertainment

Colorado Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar is one of the best defensemen in the NHL. It remains open to debate whether he will be allowed to be a sportsman.

During the Avalanche's 1-0 win over the New York Islanders on Monday night, Makar appeared to be tripped as he was skating with the puck out of his own zone. His fall brought an immediate penalty call from the backside referee who naturally assumed he had been tripped by Islanders forward Mathew Barzal.

Makar immediately objected, telling the official that Barzal did not trip him, that he had fallen on his own.

The referees huddled, and then decided that there would be no penalty called on the play.

A sportsman, right?

But, Makar essentially negated a two-minute penalty advantage for his team. And he said after the fact that he felt guilty doing it because he was afraid he was going to let his teammates down while adding “I don’t know if it’s something I’ll do again.”

Sportsmanship has its downside.

More, officials do not like getting shown up by players, and players that have a tendency to dive or embellish do not always get the benefit of the doubt on calls. Lord knows what will happen if the players start taking the higher road with them.

I wouldn't look for another outbreak of sportsmanship to strike again soon.

How to Make a Tiger

We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity — your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement — and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, “bounced,” deleted or “visibility filtered” by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons.--Tiabbi

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An opinion on the internet: " GPT 3.5 (ChatGPT) is civilization-altering. GPT-4, which is 10x better, will be launched in the second quarter of next year."

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People who research and treat problem gambling say the line between gambling and videogaming is blurring. Videogames, which are often played on smartphones as well as computers and game consoles, include features that mimic gambling activities like roulette and slot machines.

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Thousands of residents were without power near Tacoma, Washington, after three electrical substations were vandalized, local authorities said on Sunday, adding that it was not yet clear if the Christmas Day incidents were linked.

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How to Make a Tiger

How many men does it take to make a tiger? 

Three.

"Three Men Make a Tiger" is a Chinese Idiom ("San Ren Cheng Hu" in Chinese pinyin). There is a story behind this idiom recorded in the Chinese history book Zhan Guo Ce.

During the Warring States period (about 5th century BC) in China, seven prominent states battled each other and sometimes made alliances.

One year, the state of Wei allied with the state of Zhao. To ensure this alliance, the two states had to exchange princes as hostages.

Pang Cong, the minister of Wei, was chosen to accompany the prince of Wei to go to Zhao. He was worried that his political opponents would speak ill of him while he was away, so he came to the king of Wei, saying, "Your Majesty, if someone were to tell you that there was a tiger running in the street, would you believe it?"

"No," the king replied.

"If two people were to tell you there was a tiger running in the street, would Your Majesty believe it? "

"I might suspect it, " the king said hesitatingly, "but I wouldn't believe it." 

"What if three people were to tell you that?"

After thinking for a while, the king said, "Yes, I would."

Pang Cong said, "Your Majesty, it is for sure no tiger is running in the street. But after being told by three people that there was one, you would believe it was so. Now I'm going to Han Dan (the capital of Zhao) far away from Da Liang (the capital of Wei). There will certainly be more than three people speaking ill of me in front of you, and I wish that Your Majesty would give it your discernment."

The king said, "Yes, I will."

However, after Pang Cong left, the king believed the slanderous gossip about him and no longer trusted him.

This idiom, "Three Men Make A Tiger," came to mean a lie, if repeated often enough, will be accepted as truth.  

(N.B. This is a little historical note and has nothing to do with the internet, the Press, or politicians.)

Christmas

There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures. -James Thurber, writer, and cartoonist (8 Dec 1894-1961)

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The CIA has been meddling in Twitter’s internal content moderation for years, according to the latest dispatches from Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” — which also revealed “mountains of insistent moderation demands” from the Democratic National Committee, but not from the GOP.

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The Marines, for fear of misgendering someone, may drop the terms “sir” and “ma’am.”

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Scientists have identified two minerals never seen before on Earth in a meteorite weighing 15.2 metric tons (33,510 pounds).

The minerals came from a 70-gram (nearly 2.5-ounce) slice of the meteorite, which was discovered in Somalia in 2020 and is the ninth-largest meteorite ever found, according to a news release from the University of Alberta.

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Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing, and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.