Weirdos

The countries in green are more individualistic than the world average. The ones in red are more collectivistic (Beugelsdijk & Welzel, 2018). This difference between northwest Europeans and other humans goes back at least a millennium. Was it due to Western Christianity or does the cause go farther back?

From Peter Frost's Newsletter:

When did northwest Europeans become WEIRD? Not when they became Christian - Peter Frost

Joseph Heinrich has argued that northwest Europeans are less clannish and more individualistic because Western Christianity banned cousin marriage—to a limited degree in the 7th century and then much more in the 9th. Evidence from aDNA, however, suggests they were already avoiding cousin marriage before the ban.

WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It refers to people of northwest European descent and was coined to warn against using them in studies to understand human nature in general. They are not necessarily the same as people elsewhere.

Two decades ago, Joseph Heinrich and other social scientists concluded that WEIRD people are outliers in many aspects of mind and behavior, including sensory ability, economic preferences, personality structure, morality, and cognition. They are divergent because they have adapted to an atypical environment of weak kinship, strong individualism, and “impersonal pro-sociality”—in other words, social interactions that are less personal, less emotionally intense, and extending much further than friends and family.

For at least a thousand years, this behavioral environment has prevailed north and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg (known as the Hajnal Line). It is characterized by certain longstanding patterns of behavior:

• Solitary living for at least part of adulthood, with many individuals remaining single their entire lives.
• Departure from the home upon reaching adulthood, either to form a new household or to circulate among unrelated households, typically as servants.
• Less loyalty to kin and greater willingness to trust strangers

What the heck is the Hajnal Line? Wikipedia knows:

Hajnal Line

Middle Class

US Social Trust
Scale along left hand edge goes from 25 at the bottom to 60% at the top.

I sometimes wonder how the West got so far ahead of the rest of the world. This story offers an explanation:

How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class Now? by Charles Hughes Smith

If we want social / economic renewal, we have to make it straightforward for anyone willing to adopt the values and habits of "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work" to climb the ladder to middle class security

How easy is it to climb the social mobility ladder into the middle class? It's a key question because the middle class is the ultimate source of social stability, innovation and democracy.

To answer this question, we must start with the rise of the middle class in Europe and the market economy which enabled that rise.

This article explores the specific cultural adaptations which set the stage for Europe's adoption of a market economy as the primary social-economic force, supplanting family and feudal ties.

When did Europe pull ahead? And why?

The author notes that Northern European economic expansion began in the 1300s, before the Protestant Reformation, the discovery of the Americas and before the printing press--all factors others have identified as key to Europe's rise to dominance.

He identifies the assimilation by Catholic Europe of two Northern European cultural traits--individualism and the ban on cousin marriages, which led to social trust extending beyond the immediate family-- as critical preconditions for the acceptance of a market economy.

He then adds a third condition: the suppression / elimination of violent males from the social order via harsh secular and religious punishment of evil-doers. Murder rates declined as the most violent were executed or imprisoned in large numbers.

Here are some key excerpts from the article:

"Those three causes--individualism, impersonal sociality, and a pacified environment--allowed the market economy to grow beyond its former limits.

'The Market' could thus spread farther and farther beyond the marketplace, replacing older forms of exchange and ultimately replacing kinship as the main organizing principle of society.

The English as a whole became more and more middle-class in their mindset: 'Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving.'

The Western world thus embarked on a trajectory of sustained economic growth. This is in contrast to what we see in other times and places, where economic growth tended to stall after a while and give way to stagnation or even contraction.

Western Christianity (which assimilated pagan characteristics of northern Europe) enabled 'the peace, order, and stability that allowed the middle class to expand and become dominant.'"

He goes on to talk about how things have changed recently and why.

Why Arabs Lose Wars

Detailed Analysis: Why Arabs Lose Wars?
Magical History

The value of this video is found in the audio. The video is just a sequence of very short clips of military scenes. They don't seem to have anything to do with the audio. 

I kind of suspected that Arab culture is as paranoid and self-serving as described, so it's nice to have someone reinforce my beliefs.

Will they ever change? I dunno, the Soviet Union went on for a long time before they finally collapsed due to lack of money. The Arabian oil states don't show any sign of running out of oil anytime soon, but there are several Arab states that don't have any oil to speak of. What's propping them up?

P. S. An older post about Shame, Guilt and Arab Culture.

Lie

METRIC - Lie Lie Lie (Official Version)
metricmusic

Richard Fernandez has something to say about the noise that passes for civilized discourse these days:

I used to think there were subjects so important that public officials would never lie about them. Nuclear war for instance or an earth-wide pandemic. Then gradually it became clear that no one, not even politicians at the highest levels, consciously makes decisions about whether to tell the truth however important the matter.

Adherence to reality is more a question of bureaucratic habit. There’s a saying that habit eventually becomes character and character eventually becomes fate. Nowhere is this truer than in the lives of civilizations. Lie enough and it becomes second nature. Organizations, and indeed whole societies, by this process eventually become prisoners of their own lies.

The most alarming thing about the new Woke culture is that it assumes there is no consequential difference between the lie and the truth. That it is all a matter of spin. In that sense Woke is not even a mode of thought but a kind of terminal arrogance, a conceited zero. It is the state of mind of a Ponzi con man who convinces himself the pyramid will never bottom out; that the music will always. Except that with the con man there is the subconscious awareness the music will someday stop. For many true Woke believers there is not even that.

When the reckoning comes it will affect everyone who relied on the falsehood, whether deliberate or not. They Woke are careless people. They throw parties with imaginary guests all waiting around for the arrival of the most magnificent feast from a caterer who does not exist. 

 Well, what can you expect from a society where $1,000 sneakers are a thing? Okay, it is, or I hope it is, a small minority that indulges in this kind of idiocy, but we are still talking about billions of dollars. And what is it with people not wanting to work? I can sort of understand it, I didn't like most of the jobs I had, I only did them because I needed the money. Meanwhile the price of lumber has skyrocketed in the last year.

NSA Security Posters form the 1950's & 60's

We are doing all we can to liberate those people who are still under the spell of this religious opiate. - Nikita Krushchev

GOVERNMENTATTIC.ORG has a PDF file of NSA Security Posters form the 1950's & 60's. I looked through them and I picked out a few that piqued my interest. Several of them conflate Christianity and Freedom, which I thought was kind of interesting being as our government is supposed to be free of religious influence (3rd amendment in the Bill of Rights). Then there were my parents who were pretty much avowed atheists. My mother's favorite argument was that religion caused more wars and killed more people than any other cause. Could this have been before Stalin's killing of zillions came to light? Let's pretend it was, she was my mother after all. And here we have Krushchev echoing the Communist party line regarding religion.

If you are going to have a functioning society, you need a basic set of beliefs that everyone can agree on. Communists had communism. The West has Christianity, which somehow includes Judaism. The Mid-East has Mohammedanism. And it's not religion that leads to war, it's just the nature of people. We have been fighting wars for tens if not hundreds of millennia. Belief systems just give leaders a way to get everyone motivated to move in the same direction, which is kind of crucial when you go to war.

Via Schneier on Security

Conspiracies Я Us, Japanese Edition

Former Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn escaped house arrest in Tokyo

Carlos Ghosn, big shot Nissan executive, arrested and charged with crimes, has escaped from Japan. At first glance, it sounds like another self-important jackass was caught with his hand in the cookie jar and snuck out his bedroom window to avoid getting his hand slapped. Well, that's the way I read it. To my mind, ridiculously rich people are all criminals. Japan was just going to apply some well deserved justice. Then I read this follow up story, which reminded me of this video I watched:


Why Every Japanese Criminal is Guilty
Mix all this with the story of high level corruption in the TV series The K2 (yes, that one is set in Korea, not Japan, but all them thar Asian countries suffer from culturally ingrained deference to authority) makes me think that it is entirely possible that there was a power struggle going on in Nissan and the anti-Ghosn faction ginned up enough 'evidence' to get him booted out. I doubt we will ever know the truth of the matter, but we should get a decent movie or two out of the deal.

All this reminds me of the local woman who was arrested in Japan a few years ago for carrying a prescribed botttle of ADHD medication.

PE-2 Soviet dive bomber

PE-2 Soviet dive bomber

Wikipedia has a few things to say about this aircraft and how it came to be:

The Petlyakov Pe-2 was a Soviet twin-engined dive bomber used during World War II. It was one of the best front-line medium bombers of the war. In many respects it resembled the wooden British de Havilland Mosquito. The Soviets built 11,430 Pe-2s during the war. The Pe-2 was designed in a prison design bureau (sharashka); Vladimir Petlyakov had been arrested and imprisoned in 1937 for allegedly delaying design work on the Tupolev ANT-42 bomber. 

Sharashka was an informal name for secret research and development laboratories operating from 1930 to the 1950s within the Soviet Gulag labor-camp system. Etymologically, the word sharashka derives from a Russian slang expression sharashkina kontora ("Sharashka's office", which in its turn comes from the criminal argot term sharaga for a band of thieves, hoodlums, etc.), an ironic, derogatory term to denote a poorly-organized, impromptu, or bluffing organization.

Some people are good with things, some are good with people. The former create some amazing stuff, the later organize society so the former have the freedom to create things, even if they are locked up. (Wait, what?)

10,000 seems to be a common number for WW2 aircraft, at least the ones that were successful. The world built a total of 780,000 aircraft for this conflict.

Via daily timewaster

Quote of the Day

King Louis XVI of France is led to the guillotine, Jan. 21, 1793

 “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire

Adaptive Curmudgeon changed his tagline and explains why. It's worth reading. I do wonder if we have a real problem though. There is lots of noise on the internet, but how many people subscribe to that noise? I like to think that most people have real lives and don't have time for the nonsense that is flowing over the optic fibers. On the other hand, people who listen to the noise are more likely to vote, so we they might be driving us to hell.

Glenn Arbery has a related post about the relations between politics, education and culture.

P.S. Voltaire died in 1778, a few years before the French Revolution got started in 1789.

Holy Houses, Batman!

Artwork from Led Zepplin's Houses of the Holy album

Rumor has it that Facebook has banned, or censored this image. I can't verify this because I don't go on Facebook anymore. I think I made 'friends' with too many people that I knew nothing about and so whenever I went there I found all sorts of stuff, but nothing of any interest. Now to make it at least usable I would have to cull all these unknowns and I am not sure it is worth the effort.

I remember seeing this album back when it was in the stores (about a zillion years ago). I thought it was a little odd, but not very interesting. Little kids are just as likely to be a nuisance as to be enjoyable company. I imagined they were put on this cover to symbolize innocence or something other high-falutin concept.

But Facebook has banned it, so in your face Facebook. Maybe this tempest-in-a-teapot will expand into a real storm that will consume Facebook and possibly the whole Social Justice Warrior crap festival.

I'm Rednecker Than You

HARDY - REDNECKER
Another fine, goofball song.

Egg Spoons

The chef Alice Waters cooking an egg over a fire in her Berkeley, Calif., kitchen using her beloved, hand-forged iron egg spoon. - Alex Welsh for The New York Times

California Bob has a few words to say in response to a story in The New York Times:

Even moreso than someone having something that we CAN'T have...when someone enjoys something that we don't enjoy, it seems to infuriate us... even moreso than, say, someone having something we covet.

"I wish I had a Ferrari like Bob.  But Frank cooks his eggs in a weird pan! What a jerk!"  

Is this syndrome what is behind the persecution of the Christians, the hatred of fags, the mockery of "culture?"

Uniberp replies:

Wood fire smoked eggs are nice, even though the eggs themselves are corporate farming products. 

For me to be interested in one of those egg cookers, I would need to know the provenance of the coal smelters iron used, even the origin of the coal itself, plus have a notarized record of the poems memorized for recitation by the blacksmith during the forging and wielding. (note: "wielding" , not "welding). 

There, that should piss a little higher.

I think they have covered the subject well.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have a couple of things to say about the story. I didn't read the whole thing because I have very little interest in cooking. I can grill meat on the barbeque, I can order meals at restaurants and I keep the refrigerator stocked with food that doesn't require cooking.

I'm not linking to The Times (except for the caption under the picture) because they are big stinkers and they want me to subscribe. I was only able to read this story because I am under their monthly allocation, and I am under because I avoid them because I don't want to see another one of their cut-off notices. Yes, I could subscribe, but as Tam has pointed out numerous times they are voice of East Coast stupidity. And if I subscribed to them, I might be tempted to subscribe to The Atlantic and I might start sending donations to Wikipedia and The Guardian, and then where does it stop? Pretty soon you are spending hundreds of dollars a month for stuff that you don't have time to read.

I am still waiting for someone to start a text subscription service. You pay a flat fee every month, they count up all the web sites you visit and divide up your payment accordingly. I could do it, but someone would need to convince some of these big news sites that it would be a good idea. And then I would need a small army to actually implement it.

P.S. There is some debate as to whether moreso is a valid word. Grammarist has a page on the subject.

Hooptie

Honda Civic DX hatchback with Chattering Skull Brake Lights, one of the most annoying customization features imaginable. PHOTO BY MURILEE MARTIN

A Hooptie is any car that meets the following:

a) driver must enter car through passenger side
b) three different brand and size tires - 3 of them missing hubcaps
c) exhaust is held up by half a clothes hanger - other half replaces the antenna
d) backfires every three blocks - loudest backfire being when car is turned off
e) must open door at drive-threws as windows don't roll down
f) you only get one AM station and the tape deck eats all tapes inserted
g) can't open the glove box as the whole thing will fall out
h) if you let go of steering wheel while driving you'll make a u-turn
i) must manually move blinker lever up and down as it no longer blinks on it's own
j) must keep one foot on brake and one on accelerator when at a complete stop
k) has had the same temporary registration sticker in the window for the last 18 months
l) has all the above issues but still has a $200 professional tint job

Reformatted from Urban Dictionary because that's who I am / what I do. Via Dustbury

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Picked this book up at Powell's at the airport the other day. It's really quite wonderful. I've been thinking about belief and culture and how some cultures appear to be suffering from a bad case of mental illness, and then I came across this passage which I thought was remarkably telling.

Cathedrals were like the cell phones and rocket ships of their day. It's unbelievable that a bunch of peasants armed with pitchforks and shovels could have built such things, yet there they are.

---

I like going to the big Powell's store in downtown Portland, but going downtown is a colossal pain, mostly because of the parking. Meanwhile, I go to the airport perhaps a dozen times a year, so I may as well make the most of it. This month alone I will make five trips. This book cost me $9, dinner for two at Stanford's cost me $45 and I think parking ran about $9. We went early because my wife likes to shop, and because we were early, younger son's flight was an hour late.
     The short-term parking garage at PDX might be the best parking garage in Portland. There are spiral entrance and exit ramps so you don't have to drive up and down aisles of parked cars to get to a floor with open spaces. The floors are marked as being full or not at the entrance, so you don't need to cruise looking for a spot. Each row is marked with the number of available slots, and each open space is marked with a green light. Occupied spaces are marked with a red light. Very festivus (for the rest-ov-us). The charge is $3 an hour which is exorbitant given that parking used to be free and would still be if the cowards in government had imposed a dollar-a-gallon tax on gas fifty years ago like they should have.

Update March 2026 corrected spelling errors.

Pointing With Your Lips

As one Creek woman from Green Country, Oklahoma put it, “We don’t point with our fingers or hands. I think that it is not just rude, but also because some people use their hands for medicine, and so it creeps people out. It’s rude to make people feel like you might be doing something when you are not. It’s also bad to touch people you aren't close to unless you are shaking hands at certain times. Even then, many people are still uncomfortable about that...no touching and no pointing...may be someone puttin’ their bad on you”. - excerpt from Pointing With Our Lips by Corina Roberts

Seems it might be a thing with Hispanics and Filipinos as well. Via Post Hip Scott.

Cultural Hegemony

Pete Seeger is dead and Tam had a few cryptic words to say, cryptic in that they are not machine related and so are therefor unfamiliar to this gear-head. So I had to go look it up, and when I did I found this, the intro to Wikipedia's article on Cultural Hegemony:

In Marxist philosophy, the term Cultural Hegemony describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of the society — the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that their ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm; as the universally valid dominant ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

The initial phrase "In Marxist philosophy" is superfluous. I think this definition applies equally well in any culture, East or West, Communist or Capitalist, Democracy or Dictatorship.

Value of Life

Picture from Breakfast @ Tiffany's

I started reading  Soldiers of God yesterday and I was struck by a thought. The same thought has struck me before when reading other stories, and that thought is that there is a big cultural difference between modern, Western civilization and the rest of humanity in the value we place on an individuals life.
    It struck me when I was reading a story in The New Yorker about how some subsistence fisherman living on the West Coast of Mexico were adrift for a couple of weeks when the engine on their boat quit. They had no plan for what to do in that situation, they had no emergency provisions, no water, nothing. They were just putting their fate in God's hands. My thought at the time was they weren't too concerned with losing their lives because their lives were so marginal anyway. If nothing bad happens they will make it back to shore with enough fish to keep them going for another day or two. If they die, then their suffering is over.
    It was explained very clearly to me by Neal Stephenson in Reamde when he's talking about a Jihadist during a firefight, taking big risks, but killing several people and getting away with it.
    I saw it in the movie Avatar when the braves are running for their mounts for some kind of big flying party. They are running on the verge of the abyss, one false step and down they go, but they are totally confident in their running and totally heedless of the risk.
     I don't know when or where it happened, but the idea arose that maybe an individual's life was worth something and you should take steps to insure that it isn't thrown away uselessly. We are still building on this premise. Seatbelts were only introduced in the last half century. Never mind that the Consumer Safety business has become a foolish political exercise. Where did this idea come from anyway?
     Anyway, it kind of explains how terrorists can blow up themselves along with a bunch of other people. Their own lives mean nothing to them, so why should anyone else's? It goes against most everything in our Western culture, but evidently their culture embraces the idea.

WikiIslam

Stewart Dean left an interesting comment on one of Comrade Misfit's posts, so I followed the links to his page. He seems to be a thoughtful, intelligent person. I'm reading one of his pages and I find this phrase:

Lesser Jihad (forgetting the Greater)..

which intrigues me because I still can't understand how crazy can be contagious. The phrase links to a page about Jihad on WikiIslam (which had to exist because Internet).
    Recently I've been hearing stuff that implies a Jihad can be just about any kind of quest or project and does not exclusively mean holy war. However, from reading this page it sounds to me like the only real definition of Jihad is holy war, and those people who are claiming other meanings for Jihad are heretics. Well, they'd be heretics if they were Christians. I imagine Musslemen have their own word for it. Maybe the heretics will prevail and force a change of meaning on the word, but right now it's kind of suspect.

P.S. The best endorsement for WikiIslam is that is has been blacklisted by the Saudis.
P.P.S. Yes, I know history is full of examples of the crazy contagion. Germany and Japan during WWII are my prime examples today. I still cannot understand how it can happen. Marcel quoted G.K.Chesterton the other day. He makes for some interesting reading.

Feed Me

Russian military ceremonies often seem to include women offering platters of food.  Sometimes it's a roast pig. This time it looks like bread or cake.

Lojack Experience

Iowa Andy writes:

Last night we received a emergency phone call from Bobbi (the daughter). She then put the Tucson Police department on the phone. Bobbi's car, 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid, was stolen from in front of her house.

A week ago her apartment was burglarized, (while she was asleep?!?!) her bass guitar and car keys were stolen. She reported that to the police but not to us. $1350 to get Honda locks changed, not able to afford that she just took everything of value out of the car. The apartment manager changed her apartment locks.

Cops say college kids are easy and common victims to predators. The kids have stuff and they are unaware. The Honda did have Lojack. The police would not pursue the thieves unless Bobbi and her mom agreed to prosecute. "Damn right we'll prosecute" says Bobbi.

Thanks to Lojack, the Honda was recovered within a couple hours miles away on the other side of town in a trailer park. The thieves tried to remove the speakers, tearing up the interior. No arrests made.

Push Me, Pull You

From my conversation with the Westside Proggers last night, I deduced that Twitter is not just being used for useless trivia (I'm eating a ham sandwich right not. With mustard.) but is also being used for something useful. Just what that might be I have not discovered, but at least with this group it seems to be true.

This got me thinking about a similar phenomena that I have noticed about other mass-market products and services: they provide a very useful, sometimes essential service for a small segment of the population, but because these same products and services are used by the vast majority of people, they have become commodities and so the cost is now very low. Cell phones, personal computers and the internet are prime examples. What percentage of calls that are made do you think are actually essential business calls? One in ten maybe? And how many are just people chatting?

Which reminds me of another related phenomena. Intel had a factory here that made PC's and the motherboards that went inside. Some of their orders were really big for companies like Dell and Gateway, and the margins on those orders were slim to non-existent. Of course, they made a bundle on every Pentium processor they sold, so the chip division was doing fine. But the systems division would also like to show a profit and they made it by also doing smaller orders for other PC vendors. Smaller orders (how small? 100? 1000? 10,000? I have no idea.) didn't get the same discount as the big orders, so Intel was able to make a little money building PC's for these smaller vendors. However, it was only because they had the facilities in place to build the PC's for the big orders, that they were able to make a profit on these smaller orders. That's the story I heard anyway.

While I am on the subject of Intel, let me relate a couple of other "insights". Back in the early 1990's, Intel was comprised of two divisions: the chip division and the systems division. The chip division made integrated circuits, like processors. The systems division made boards that used these chips, packaged them in boxes and sold the whole package as a microcomputer system. One of Intel's goals at the time was to grow the systems division to the point where it was as big and important as the chip division. But then the Pentium came along, chip sales skyrocketed and the systems division became a marketing arm of the chip division. It was no longer a matter of whether what you were doing was good business, it was a matter of how much you were contributing to chip sales, and that was a matter of perception. Politics triumphed and the systems division became a hell-hole.

You could say that the systems division did it to itself. They got started building boards for the industrial market (Multibus I & II). They were building boards that had approximately the same functionality of a PC motherboard, but they were selling them for $1000 where the PC motherboard was going for $100. The overhead for designing and manufacturing either kind of board is about the same, but when your volume can be counted in the hundreds of boards, you kind of need the large margins.