Barrel Strength

I admit that I have lived a long time, and yet it seems like nothing until I talk to younger people, who do not remember a time before the Internet.

Recently I saw a photograph I took of my two eldest children, as teenagers, beside my then living parents. The season was March, the day sunny, everyone in sweaters but no coats or hats, and the field behind them still covered in snow, which might have lasted another week. It was 1995. My father, still black-haired at 83, was to live until 2000, five years later. He would be healthy for another two years, until a gentle decline. My mother is still alive, somewhat frailer than in the picture, but mentally still sharp at 91.

It struck me that that photo was 15 years old! I would have been 45 years old when I took it. Forty five is full middle age.  Wait! The realization how old I am only gets  worse.

I recently spoke to a group of 22 year-olds in fourth year university. It means the average person in that class was born in the last year of Reagan. Their infancy was in the regime of George Herbert Walker Bush, their childhood under Bill Clinton, their teen-age under George W. Bush the Younger.

These young people do not remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or the fall of Communism any more than we remember the coronation of George VI, which my mother remembers well, she then in her 18th year, passing down sandwiches to the equally young Bud Drury, later Pierre Trudeau’s minister for everything,  from her hotel window in London before the parade was to pass by.

I suppose if we had the privilege of asking our forebears, some would have remembered Armistice Day in 1918, and others would have remembered bells ringing to mark Trafalgar in 1805, and Waterloo ten years later.  Or the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, which solidified the claim of Protestants to the throne of England.  Or how Bach the elder used to forget his frustrations with the Lepizig town council by going into the organ loft at Thomaskirche to improvize for hours on the organ, and communicate as directlyas a man can with God. Or what Akhnaton said to his priests when he established worship of the one true Sun-God against the polytheism of Egypt. Or how one of our forefathers worked out the bow and arrow, or one of our foremothers who first brewed beer. God bless you, madam!

The next miracle, if you will forgive the word, is how my contemporaries are so much younger than 60-year-olds in my parents’ day. Sure, there were healthy looking parents at sixty and well-preserved people at seventy forty years ago in the year 1970, but they were exceptional. 

If it were not for the face in the mirror, I would not know I was getting older, and even now I suspect some Dorian Gray portrait may exist somewhere, doing the ageing for me, because I feel great!

As in the Academy awards, my thanks to the following list of people and forces:

• my parents, or giving birth to me
• the healthsystem, for dealing with my ailments, few though they be
• for the victors of World War II, for making the world safe for liberal democracy
• for the Cold Warriors, for keeping Communism contained
• for my guardian angel, for looking out for me
• for my children, for confirming me in my life’s choices
• for those who have loved me, for upholding me
• to the Creator of this Universe, for giving us all a place to live
• to my Saviour, for keeping me in mind.

Thanks to you all! I could not have done it without you! Thank you!

Amid the terrible news of earthquake in Haiti and the world-historical confrontation between Google and China over the unity of the Internet, comes this news: the male Y chrmosome keeps reinventing itself.

The Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, published this today in Nature
The study compared the Y chromosomes in chimpanzees and man, to discover that the rate of change in humans was phenomenal.

Quoting from Nature:

“As the earlier studies had suggested, many of the stark changes between the chimp and human Y chromosomes are due to gene loss in the chimp and gene gain in the human. Page’s team found that the chimp Y chromosome has only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human Y chromosome and only 47% as many protein-coding elements as humans. The remainder of the chimp and human genomes are thought to differ in gene number by less than 1%.

“Even more striking than the gene loss is the rearrangement of large portions of the chromosome. More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome, and vice versa, whereas this is true for less than 2% of the remainder of the genome.”

All this reinforces how different we are from chmps as a species, but how much more different we are becoming over time. It also reverses the previous notion that the Y chromosome was residual or of declining importance. As we male chauvinists expect, it is the source of most of the change in the human species. Take that, Andrea Dworkin!

[Note: The genome sequencing comparison between men and women, and chimps of either sex, has yet to be conducted. So my headline is yet unproven.]

 Test: Which of the three items just mentioned: the disaster in Haiti, the unity of the Internet, or the rapid evolution of the Y chromosome, do you consider most important? Discuss.

In a recent advice column the issue concerned the tolerance of the housewife for her husband’s Playboys in the living room for the children to see. You can guess the tut-tutting from those guardians of morality.  The readers were warned that dad’s Playboys might give the girls the false idea that their body image and their ability to satisfy a man sexually were of primary importance.

Well, actually…. they are. And anyone who denies it is in rampant denial fo the facts. The ability of the woman to satisfy a man sexually is absolutely primary. It is job #1. Sometimes it is the less immediate concern, such as when mum and dad are shopping for groceries, reading stories to the kids or cooking dinner. Work can interfere too. But over the long haul – especially if there is going to be a long haul – satisfying your man sexually is the job. Because if that is working out, everything else is working out.  Sex life is the measure of the relationship.

And if you disagree with me, please go live somewhere else, preferably in a convent.

With the revelations of scientific fraud in the AGW debate, I await the emergence of our next Senator McCarthy. Who was a party to this conspiracy? Who is covering up for them? How many warmists have been inflitrated into government? What is their relationship to Maurice Strong? Who authored the Copenhagen Treaty and why are they still in government?

Why is the Gaiain religion Leftist?

Let’s start with Leftism. I posit that there is such a thing as Leftism, which is a permanent feature of the human species. It basically says a large No to reality. Reality is wrong and needs to be fixed. Here is a set of its characteristics:

• The world is wrong at some fudamental level.
• The world is rationally knowable.
• Our party has that knowledge.
• That knowledge is perfect.
• Armed with perfect knowledge, we can remake the world.
• Since our knowledge is true and perfect, those who oppose us must in principle be ignorant, or in bad faith.
• The only thng standing in the way of remaking the world into the place it ought to be is the ignorance and bad faith of those who do not know.
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge.

Compare this to the Gaian religion/ideology:

• man is poisoning the planet with carbn dioxide, and if nothing is done, we will destroy ourselves with the by-products of fossil fuel consumption.
• Our science is unassailable.
• We can re-engineer the world production systems through treaties requiring new production methods to reduce carbon footprints, as well as wealth transfers  engendered by those transfers.
• Those who oppose us are ignorant or deniers.
• The only thi
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge: viz. the Copenhagen Treaty.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE59D0BR20091014?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=11604

Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister has published a book entitled “Manthropology” and provocatively sub-titled “The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male.”

The lack of physical stress in modern life has led us to be much slower and weaker than our ancestors of 30,000 years ago, according to his evidence.

How come every advance of ease of life is greeted with derision, yet we all will refuse to haul water up hill if we can get a pump to do the work? North American Indians immediately took to European firearms, as did the rest of the world when they faced a choice.

Human nature, of course, causes us to avoid unnecessary labour. Human ingenuity devises the tools which make labour unnecessary. It also devises the societies in which humans can live together peaceably long enough to invent and use labour saving devices, and even to reward their inventors.

But there is a more subtle objection to Professor McAllister’s argument. The general weakening seems to apply to all of humanity, even those who still hunt for a living, such as Australian aborigines.

Why does the general weakening postulated by McAllister apply as well to those hunters who might be expected to have retained the capacities of their distant forebears?

Are human capacities as plastic as he thinks? Were we once much stronger and faster? There are reasonable grounds to think so.

We know that chimpanzees are much stronger, pound for pound, than humans.  It takes a large  200 pound human male in superb condition to wrestle a chimpanzee, for instance. And even way back then, we were no match for neanderthals. But here we are and neanderthals are in their graves.

Musculature and speed are obviously not decisive for fitness in the Darwinian sense.  Go figure.

Relevant and more important is The Ten Thousand Year Explosion. Evolution is accelerating under the influence of civilization. If we are not the six-foot tall superbly muscled athletes of 15,000 years ago, it is because we have found better ways to live.

The modern man is weak thesis will inform much cocktail party chatter this fall.

This entry is about learning and teaching. In an earlier posting I ranted about how no one actually knows how to do anything practical anymore, such as observe the problem, reframe it if necessary, and solve it.  Today’s sermon is taken from recent experiences with the people mentioned in the title to this posting.

I have three kids of my own, two step-children by a recent marriage, aged 18 and 26, and a son-in-law, aged 41.

There comes a time when the young ones are ready to learn. Once upon a time, it might have been when they were twelve or thirteen; now with advances in technology and the extension of schooling, it seems to come after they have turned twenty five.

Three cases in point:

Read the rest…