Isegoria

NFL legend Junior Seau was found dead at his Oceanside, California home this morning, at age 43 — of a presumably self-inflicted shotgun wound:

If Seau committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest, it is similar to the way former Chicago Bears great Dave Duerson ended his life. Duerson shot himself in the chest on February 17, 2011 — the method used so that his brain could be examined for symptoms of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), a trauma-induced disease common to NFL players and others who have received repeated blows to the head.

Seau has sounded bitter in the past:

After graduating from high school, Seau attended the University of Southern California (USC). He had to sit out his freshman season because he got only a 690 on his college entrance exam, the SAT, 10 points short of USC’s required minimum score for freshman eligibility. Seau told Sports Illustrated: “I was labeled a dumb jock. I went from being a four-sport star to an ordinary student at USC. I found out who my true friends were. Nobody stuck up for me — not our relatives, best friends or neighbors. There’s a lot of jealousy among Samoans, not wanting others to get ahead in life, and my parents got an earful at church: ‘We told you he was never going to make it.’” This prompted him to apologize to his coaches, teachers, and principal at Oceanside High.

And the Lord said unto the Rabbit, goeth and hideth eggs, and so didst the Rabbit.
— Lepus 3:16

All the fun things about Easter are pagan, aren’t they?

Pre-WWII Shanghai — then the Paris of the East — had a large Jewish population — because the so-called International Settlement did not require a visa of fleeing German Jews and already had large Baghdadi and Russian Jewish populations.

The Kaifeng Jews, by contrast, had already been in China for a long, long time:

Most scholars agree that a Jewish community existed in Kaifeng since the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), some date their arrival to the Tang Dynasty (618-907) or earlier. Kaifeng, then the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, was a cosmopolitan city on a branch of the Silk Road. It is surmised that a small community of Jews, most likely from Persia or India, arrived either overland or by a sea route, and settled in the city. In 1163 they reportedly built a synagogue surrounded by a study hall, a ritual bath, a communal kitchen, a kosher butchering facility, and a sukkah.

During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), a Ming emperor conferred seven surnames upon the Jews, by which they are identifiable today: Ai, Shi, Gao, Jin, Li, Zhang, and Zhao. By the beginning of the 20th c. one of these Kaifeng clans, the Zhang, had largely converted to Islam. Interestingly, two of these: Jin and Shi are the equivalent of common Jewish names in the west: Gold and Stone.

The Jews who managed the Kaifeng synagogue were called “Mullahs”. Floods and Fire repeatedly destroyed the books of the Kaifeng synagogue, they obtained some from Ningxia and Ningbo to replace them, another Hebrew roll of law was bought from a Muslim in Ning-keang-chow in Shen-se (Shanxi), who acquired it from a dying Jew at Canton.

Alain de Botton’s recent piece on religion for everyone starts off with a reasonable discussion of what we’ve lost — namely, a sense of community — as society has moved away from religion and then proposes a not-so-credible secular substitute:

Everyone stands to learn something from the ways in which religion delivers sermons, promotes morality, engenders a spirit of community, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life. In a world beset by fundamentalists of both the believing and the secular variety, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the death of loved ones and our own decay and demise.

Religions are a repository of occasionally ingenious concepts for trying to assuage some of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life. They merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition and for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture—a range of interests whose scope puts to shame the achievements of even the greatest secular movements and innovators.

It feels especially relevant to talk of meals, because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company—cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants—but what’s significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

The large number of people who patronize restaurants suggests that they are refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanism for introducing patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which they segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. At a modern restaurant, the focus is on the food and the décor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections.

Patrons tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city (libraries, nightclubs, coffee shops), restaurants know full well how to bring people into the same space, but they lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant. Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangement, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of being in the space, guests would be signaling—as in a church—their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

Though there wouldn’t be religious imagery on the walls, some kind of art that displayed examples of human vulnerability, whether in relation to physical suffering, poverty, anxiety or romantic discord, would bring more of who we actually are into the public realm, lending to our connections with others a new and candid tenor.

Shoe sizes are something of a mystery, but the customary British and American systems aren’t terribly complicated; they’re just based on old units of measure, like the barleycorn, which is one-third of an inch, and shifted so that the smallest size is 0 or 1.

For instance, in the American system, a men’s shoe is sized based on the length of the last, the foot-shaped template for the shoe, as measured in barleycorns, or thirds of an inch, starting at size 0 for an eight-inch foot:

US men’s size = 3 × last-length in inches – 24

American women’s shoe sizes are equal to men’s sizes plus 1.5:

US women’s size = 3 × last-length in inches – 22¹/₂

American children’s shoe sizes are equal to men’s sizes plus 12¹/₃:

US children’s size = 3 × last-length in inches – 11²/₃

British sizes, for both men and women, are equivalent to American men’s sizes minus one:

UK adults’ size = 3 × last-length in inches – 25

British children’s shoe sizes are equal to men’s sizes plus 13:

UK children’s size = 3 × last-length in inches – 12

In Europe they use Paris points, which are two-thirds of a centimeter, with no constant term:

European size = ³/₂ × last-length in cm

I’m not sure what would be so bad about straight inches or centimeters.

Looking back at my site’s analytics, I just noticed that my top 10 most popular posts of the year are largely “evergreen” posts from previous years that appeal to a larger audience:

1. Archetypal Stories (2004)
2. When Black Bears Attack (2011)
3. Foux Da Fa Fa (2007)
4. LOL Memory (2009)
5. Don’t Trust Any General Over 50 (2010)
6. Myostatin, Belgian Blue, and Flex Wheeler (2004)
7. Anders B. Breivik (2011)
8. Longbow vs Armor (2011)
9. He-Man Opening Monologue (2007)
10. Six out of 50 (2011)

If we restrict ourselves to posts from 2011, the list looks like this:

1. When Black Bears Attack (2011)
2. Anders B. Breivik (2011)
3. Longbow vs Armor (2011)
4. Six out of 50 (2011)
5. How a Differential Gear Works (2011)
6. Self-Defense Is What Happens When You Are Losing (2011)
7. Jake Zweig (2011)
8. Lost Purposes (2011)
9. Group IQ (2011)
10. Three Kinds of People (2011)

I suppose that qualifies as an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small.

I’ve discussed Christmas a number of times over the years:

• Chestnuts and Silver Bells
• A Christmas Tree with a Heap of Presents
• The Muppets Sing “12 Days of Christmas”
• The Darker Side of Christmas
• How Economics Saved Christmas
• Thank Zeus It’s Thor’s Day
• Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Candy Witch?
• The Straw Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future
• Rudolph the Jewish-American Reindeer
• Yule
• It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Newtonmas
• Unwrapping the Miraculous Logistics Behind Operation Christmas
• All I Want for Christmas…
• The Christmas classic that almost wasn’t

Top Shot season 3 runner-up Mike Hughes offers a refresher on the basics of practical pistol shooting in this video, emphasizing grip and stance:

So, just what is Salisbury steak?

Salisbury steak is a dish made from a blend of minced beef and other ingredients, which is shaped to resemble a steak, and usually is served with gravy / brown sauce. Hamburger steak is a similar product, but differs in ingredients. Salisbury steak was invented by an American physician, Dr. J. H. Salisbury (1823–1905), an early proponent of a low-carbohydrate diet for weight loss; the term “Salisbury steak” has been in use in the United States since 1897. The dish is popular in the United States, where it is traditionally served with gravy and mashed potatoes or noodles.

So, it was invented by a low-carb pioneer and is now “traditionally” served with mashed potatoes or noodles.

Anyway, nothing makes a food less appealing than reading its standards of identity:

The USDA standards for processed, packaged “Salisbury steak” require a minimum content of 65% meat, of which up to 25% can be pork, except if defatted beef or pork is used, the limit is 12% combined. No more than 30% may be fat. Meat byproducts are not permitted; however, beef heart meat is allowed. Extender (bread crumbs, flour, oat flakes, etc.) content is limited to 12%, except isolated soy protein at 6.8% is considered equivalent to 12% of the others. The remainder consists of seasonings, vegetables (onion, bell pepper, mushroom or the like), binders (can include egg) and liquids (such as water, milk, cream, skim milk, etc.). The product must be fully cooked, or else labelled “Patties for Salisbury Steak”.

The standards for hamburger limit the meat to beef only, and of skeletal origin only. Salt, seasonings and vegetables in condimental proportions can be used, but liquids, binders and/or extenders preclude the use of the term “hamburger” or “burger”. With these added, the product is considered “beef patties”.

I remember being surprised to learn that Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) would be directing The Walking Dead.  I was even more surprised to learn that he wouldn’t be directing its second season — AMC fired him:

Within a space of months, AMC has become embroiled in messy public fights with the creators of its top three shows — Mad Men, Breaking Bad and now Walking Dead. The battles have been about money, but in this case, at least, it was more of a slow burn than a sudden flare-up. Sources say last fall, even before the first episode of the show had aired, AMC let it be known that it would effectively slash the show’s second-season budget per episode by about $650,000, from $3.4 million to $2.75 million. AMC cut the budget and pocketed a tax credit previusly applied to the show. An AMC source says the size of the cut cited by sources is “grossly inflated” and that the second-season budget represents a more typical and sustainable number for a basic cable show.

At a glance, it would appear AMC is taking a big risk with its only huge commercial success. Mad Men and Breaking Bad are Emmy magnets that average 2.3 million and 4.3 million viewers, respectively. But Walking Dead, based on a series of graphic novels, attracted an astonishing 5.3 million viewers when it premiered on Halloween. The season finale in December drew more than 6 million viewers. In the 18-to-49 demo, it chalked up the biggest number ever for any drama on basic cable.

Class war is real, Brett Stevens argues, but it’s in reverse, from the bottom upward. Think of it this way, he says:

You start a civilization with ten of your buddies and their families. A few others come along, and while they’re not quite as sharp, you let them tag along as unskilled labor.

You and your buddies find a way to prosper. First, you organize specialized roles and get everyone working efficiently; then through hard work, you make the land ready for sustainable farming, and start producing.

Over time, a surplus of food is created. This enables you to spin off more people — grandchildren, at this point — into specialized roles such as doctor, hygienist, inventor and law enforcement. Stability increases, efficiency increases, and with your new technology, so does safety.

What happens next is a shift in perspective, but a valid one: because you offer more of a safety net, the poorer and/or less intellectually powerful people in your society have more of their children survive, which means you have a sudden surge in the lowest sectors of your population.
[...]
With the advent of a modern-type society, childhood mortality falls and so those who pop out the most kids dominate demographically. That means a shift from the wealthy and powerful, to the poor and less powerful.

In other words, you replace the founders of a society who could craft civilization out of raw wilderness. You replace them with the people who tagged along and ended up being unskilled labor.

The unskilled labor starts demanding that it be recognized, because it can. It now knows that the civilization you built is passing on to those who came along for the ride. This is as natural as a leech draining blood, or rats stealing grain, or snakes snagging the eggs of unwary birds. It’s class warfare of the unskilled labor against the skilled founders.

Eventually, degenerate members of the founders class — generally those with stern and judgmental parents — decide to “defect” and take up the cause of the poor. They invent theories of equality and the brotherhood of humanity to sugar-coat what is essentially a seizure of society by its least competent members.

A revolution occurs. Like the revolutions in France and Russia, as well as the political intrigues of old Rome and Athens, it is followed by executions of those with the wisdom to point out what is going on. Socrates dies alongside the Romanovs; the guillotine severs the head of Lavoisier and drops the average IQ by ten points.

Now the civilization enters its death cycle. The unskilled promote their Middletons own, who gain riches for their party-planning businesses relatively trivial acts. These nouveau riche are nothing like aristocrats; they squander wealth and use it as an excuse to be abusive. Society as a result enters into a downward spiral of class warfare that is actually not class warfare; you’re not seeing the hereditary upper classes versus the poor/unskilled, but the former-poor against the poor. This isn’t productive class warfare, but incompetents squabbling over social status as they try to divide up what’s left of the pie.

(Hat tip to Ilkka.)

We’re a political species, Robert Greene notes, but we don’t all deal with that fact the same way. There are three kinds of people, he says:

There are, what I call, the deniers, the people who deny this reality exists. They almost want to pretend that we are descended from angels and not from primates. That what I am talking about here is cynical. It doesn’t really exist. It doesn’t happen.

Among these deniers, you will find two types. You will find people who are genuinely disturbed by the politicking aspect of human nature. They don’t want any kind of job in which they have to do that. You will find that they are slowly marginalized. They can be happy that way. They are never going to assume a position of great responsibility because it involves all of this.

The other branch of the deniers are the people that are the passive-aggressors. I would classify this woman who had tortured me as a kind of a classic passive-aggressor. People who consciously don’t want to admit that there is any kind of manipulation involved, but unconsciously are playing all kinds of games. In my books, I often describe the many different kinds, the trickiest kind of person to deal with, the passive-aggressors.

The second type of person besides the deniers are those who love this Machiavellian part of our nature and revel in it and are master manipulators, and con artists, and connivers and are very aggressive. They have no problem handling this part. In fact, they love it. This type of person, which usually you will find one or two in an office or in an environment. They can get pretty far, but eventually they are tripped up in life because they are too Machiavellian. They don’t understand that there is the other side to that whole idea of theory of mind and the mirror neurons, which is empathy and cooperation and seducing people and getting them to work with you. They are too much involved with themselves and their own ego and they love manipulating until they go too far and they have a fall in life. There is a wall. They can never get past it.

The third type is what I am calling the radical realist. It is what I am proposing that you adopt. And it goes as follows.

This is our nature. This is how we evolved over millions of years. There is no point in denying it. It is who we are. And not only am I not going to deny it, I am going to accept that this is the human being as it has evolved over all of this time.

In fact, I love it. It’s fine. There is nothing wrong with the fact that in this world people are playing political games. There is nothing wrong with the fact that there are seducers and con artists and it is going on all the time. It is just reality. It is just the world as it is. Stop fighting it. Just accept it.

Within that accepting of it, it is not that you love it and want to go out in the world and play all of these nasty games. It is that you understand they exist. If, occasionally, you have to do them, fine. That’s okay within reason. If it is often other people are practicing them against you, which you will find a lot in your life, once you leave the confines of Yale, that’s okay.

You understand the laws of power. You understand what people are up to, and they can’t necessarily hurt you. In accepting this reality and in dealing with it and studying human nature and this aspect of what I call Machiavellian intelligence, suddenly with that attitude, with that mentality, you have all kinds of power and freedom.

Why do we let them dress like that?, Jennifer Moses asks, referring to teenage daughters, of course:

In a few years, [the 12- and 13-year-old girls'] attention will turn to the annual ritual of shopping for a prom dress, and by then their fashion tastes will have advanced still more. Having done this now for two years with my own daughter, I continue to be amazed by the plunging necklines, built-in push-up bras, spangles, feathers, slits and peek-a-boos. And try finding a pair of sufficiently “prommish” shoes designed with less than a 2-inch heel.

All of which brings me to a question: Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this — like prostitutes, if we’re being honest with ourselves — but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?

I posed this question to a friend whose teenage daughter goes to an all-girls private school in New York. “It isn’t that different from when we were kids,” she said. “The girls in the sexy clothes are the fast girls. They’ll have Facebook pictures of themselves opening a bottle of Champagne, like Paris Hilton. And sometimes the moms and dads are out there contributing to it, shopping with them, throwing them parties at clubs. It’s almost like they’re saying, ‘Look how hot my daughter is.’” But why? “I think it’s a bonding thing,” she said. “It starts with the mommy-daughter manicure and goes on from there.”

I have a different theory. It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret.

As much as he enjoyed the Narnia books as a child, Andrew Stuttaford never got the whole C.S. Lewis thing and doesn’t intend to start trying now:

Mark Oppenheimer looks at the Lewis phenomenon and, reasonably enough, quotes one of Lewis’ more well-known arguments for the divinity of Christ:

In “Mere Christianity,” Lewis writes of Jesus: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.”

Mr. Oppenheimer notes this:

This famous passage does not, on a second read, make much sense. After all, could not a great moral teacher have messianic delusions? But on a first read, it is quite persuasive, and classic Lewis. It is clear, confident and a bit humorous, and it offers a stark choice as it firmly suggests the right answer.

Fair enough, but it has always struck me (and I’m sure I’m not the first to think so) that Lewis’ argument (at least the extract quoted here) also sidesteps the rather important question as to whether the writers of the Gospels offer an accurate account of what it was that Jesus may have actually said. Was the claim to divinity His or theirs?

No way of telling, I suppose.