Barrel Strength

Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Barrel Strength - Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Category Archives: Life

Things I do not understand

1. Elvis Presley: I never got him. I still do not understand why the greasy drug-addicted hillbilly had the effect he did. What about Carl Perkins? Why of all the rockabilly musicians emerging in the 1950s was Presley singled out for world adulation?

2. Tattoos: Are vulgar signs of abandonment of the ideal of the body beautiful for the body distorted. They are ugly. They make one look uglier the older one gets. They indicate a propensity for hepatitis C, which was once virtually unknown outside the South Pacific Islands, and is now spreading with tattoo needles, among other needle-driven disease vectors.

3. Photographing your wife having sex with black men: I would not lend out my wife to anyone I would not trust with my chain saw, my rifle, or my wallet. In fact I do not think I would lend her out at all, both as she is not really mine to lend and because I might not like the results if I did.  Yet there seems to be a genre of home-made pornography that seems to involve wives being pictured penetrated by one or more black men, and there seems to be no lack of participants in this craze. Apart from the vulgarity of  posting photographs of the commission of group sex to the Internet, which is quite understandable in the conditions of life these days, and the possible embarrassment years later when she runs for alderman, school trustee, or member of parliament, the whole idea of letting one’s wife be fucked by others while the husband photographs the event is  detumescifying, to find a polite term. Call me a prude. I do not mind healthy people having sex. I do not mind people taking pix of same. I do not object to putting sexual stuff on the Internet, really. But I am mystified by this particular fetish.  My objection is not merely to the portrayal of it, it is to the weirdness of the act itself. Sexual tastes are beyond rational comprehension, aren’t they? Forgive me, readers, next thing you know I will be quoting Malcolm Muggeridge.After this reactionary outburst, I will sign myself in for anti-racist programming from a nearby human rights commission. But I still don’t get it.

Weaker men support wealth distribution, stronger men do not

Social science is always telling you what you suspected but were afraid of thinking. From the Telegraph:

Researchers found that men’s opinions on redistribution of wealth could be predicted by their upper body strength, with powerful men more likely to take a conservative stance of protecting their own interests.

In contrast men who were just as wealthy but were of a flimsier build were less opposed to policies like those of Labour leader Ed Miliband, which would involve surrendering some of their wealth to society.

The scientists, from Aarhus University in Denmark, analysed the wealth, bicep size and views on economic redistribution of hundreds of men in America, Denmark and Argentina.

They found that wealthy men with strong arms were less likely to support economic redistribution, or the fairer sharing of wealth among society, and unsurprisingly strong men with less money supported the policy.

But among physically weaker men, the pattern was reversed. Those with plenty of money were less opposed to redistributing it, while those who were poorer were less supportive.

More elephants in the room: assortative mating

Ross Douthat in the New York Times wrote tongue in cheek about the well-off in the United States doing their best to remain in the upper class by marrying intelligent achievers in university. It is called assortative mating, and it means that the intelligent marry the intelligent. A Princeton alumna, Susan Patton,  had scandalized the university by strongly recommending that young women at Princeton marry before graduating.

Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.

Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next….

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

But really, Susan Patton, do we have to talk about it?

Do you know what day it is today?

Steak and BJ day!

From the Urban Dictionary:

Seriously though, Steak and BJ Day was invented as a response to Valentine’s Day, a day in which men get the ‘privilege’ of showing their affection for their significant other by spending ludicrous amounts of time, money, and effort in showering them in gifts, dinners, shows, and various other things to show them just how special they are to us.

Isn’t it about time that there was a day just like that, but devoted to having the ladies show men just how much they appreciate them? Thanks to Steak and BJ Day, this dream has finally come true.

And look how easy it is! Since we’re really only one of two things, the formula for showing us that appreciation is really very simple.

Of course it will never work. Nubile females are a small minority of available females, whereas able and willing males of all ages and incomes constitute the largest proportion of males. Plus, given the rational reluctance of females to engage in sexual congress with any guy on the street, they will always have an advantage. They create the sexual scarcity. We acknowledge the scarcity, by showing our affections. Those who do not like the way nature has set up the economy of sex are free to visit the gay bathhouses and get their bj’s from wholly devoted cocksuckers who wear goatees and chin beards. Or pay for it with Melissa, who advertizes on the web. Not your cup of tea? Court your woman with flowers and chocolates and love her as you ought.

Nice idea though.

 

Speaking of differences: coneheads?

While we are on the subject of differences, this article came up.

They said the deformation of human skulls was part of an ancient ritual that took place 1,000 years ago. The deformation was achieved by binding a person’s head between two blocks of wood to apply pressure on the skull by wrapping the wood with bands.

“Cranial deformation has been used by different societies in the world as a ritual practice, or for distinction of status within a group or to distinguish between social groups,” Moreno told ABC News. “The reason why these individuals at El Cementerio deformed their skulls is still unknown.”

Moreno told ABC that people deformed their heads in Mexico because they wanted to distinguish important people, or they wanted to distinguish people from one group from another.

I have been thinking of the total unpredictability of social change lately; feminism and gay rights were wholly unpredictable from my perspective growing up in the 1950s and 60s. Tattooing is an inexplicable  eruption of  social change. Is skull binding the next weirdness to erupt in western society? Stay tuned. Everything will happen, eventually. It already has.

 

Original Sin

If perceiving differences and acting against the different is the primary sin of man, then babies are all profound sinners.

In an article entitled ”Babies show inherent dislike for those who are different”, it was revealed that babies as young as nine months show preference for those who bring harm to people different from themselves – in this case, the difference concerned a taste for graham crackers over green beans, and vice versa.

Psychology professor and lead author Kiley Hamlin found infants who were as  young as nine months old favoured those who brought harm to people who were  different than themselves.

She said adults, similarly, tend to like people who harm individuals who are  different.

“We wanted to see if we could tell whether infants had that same kind of  judgement,” said Hamlin in an interview.

“It was shocking how robust the results were.”

Nothing surprises me about this. Tolerance is a virtue not because it is natural, but because it is an acquired habit of civilization. By contrast, those people who call themselevs “liberals” tend to believe that the natural state of man is acceptance, and only perverse educations make us racist, sexist, nationalist, tribalist, other-ist.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, looked at two  groups of infants aged nine months and 14 months and the food they preferred — green beans or graham crackers.

The infants watched a puppet show, with two puppets demonstrating a like for  green beans or graham crackers.

More puppets then joined the production, demonstrating nice, neutral or mean  behaviour towards the original two puppets.

The study showed that the babies later preferred the puppets who harmed the  puppet with the opposite food preferences.

One baby even gave a kiss to the harmful puppet.

The study said the desire to treat badly those with differences was more  widespread in the age group of 14-month-old infants, suggesting an increase in  bias with age.

Hamlin said almost all of the babies tested acted the same, which was an  unexpected result.

“(Babies) like nice puppets really strongly. That’s in line with our  intuition. Other studies have shown they like punishers if somebody was bad  before, but that’s also in line with our intuitions.

“If someone’s bad they might deserve punishment. This one is not in line with  our intuitions.”

Lady, it is not in line with your “intuitions” because you think people are naturally good, tolerant, accepting. They are not. They are naturally racist, tribalist, differentist, nationalist. They think people from the next valley are feckless swine, unless they have cousins over there, in which case they may know that some people in the next valley are okay, or not, on the basis of real knoweldge.

Man’s innate “differentism” is not something that is going to be fixed by talking about the problem differently, or by different social arrangements, though improvements are possible. Discriminations are at the core of existence. Every cell of my body is locked in a life and death struggle to determine what belongs in that cell and what does not. They all discriminate. I can only hope they discriminate in a way suitable to my survival. Likewise, every person discriminates, and has to for the organism to survive. One can only hope that discrimination takes place on bases suitable for the survival of civilization. That is the best we can do.

 

Lardasses

At the hotel where we have been captured for the last few days on a conference, three related phenomena are observed:

  1. a large proportion of hotel guests are fat to the point of obesity, and not just the aged. Many people have knee problems from carrying around 250 pounds on frames built to take 180.
  2. the food is cheap and plentiful, the portions enormous.
  3. there is no infrastructure for crossing the 6-lane boulevard in front of the hotel.  There is no cross-walk at the lights or anywhere else, no continuous sidewalk running to anywhere from here. Walking is pointless.

So, you cannot escape; you can only eat. I feel like those blobby people on the spaceship in the cartoon movie Wall-E. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

 

Your problems are small

I was up last night contemplating murder for people in my organization who are trying to thwart my travel plans. It took an hour of reading Neil Turok’s The Universe Within to calm me down. Buy the book.

Discussion of Turok’s Perimieter Institute and the state of science in Canada is here.

Also, bookmark Astronomy Picture of the Day, from NASA. It will put matters in perspective.

I am reminded of the saying of some German poet (Schiller?) who said that all he wanted for the contented life was a nice little cottage, a happy wife, a set of apple trees at the end of the garden, and all his enemies hanging from their branches. An honest man.

 

See Explanation. Clicking on the picture will download the highest resolution version available.

We never got the memo

The life of Jake Eberts, the film maker of Gandhi, Chariots of Fire, Black Robe, A River Runs Through It, and over 50 more films, of which 37 won Oscars and 4 won Oscars for best film, was celebrated in Montreal yesterday. He died six weeks ago of cancer at the age of 71.

I shall let the biographical information speak for the man himself. He was perhaps the most impressive person I ever met, Pierre Trudeau only in the same league. Jake was a good,  good man with a clear moral purpose and no pretence to mortal superiority.  They shared one thing,  however: a blazing emanation of personal energy.

Jake’s life was celebrated in a charming and witty speech by his brother-in-law Tony Stikeman, who spoke of his many virtues, his boundless energy, and most of all, his absolute lack of pretension or self-importance. Jake always spoke of his career before film making at the age of 40 as a complete failure, and his career after that as a matter of luck. No one believed his success was luck.

His basic view was that no one in the film biz knew how to control the costs of making films. He did. He negotiated his costs with the zeal of  a Scottish economist and made sure his films made money before they were even released. The result was that many investors could look at investing in a Jake Eberts film, even though his choice of scripts was often eclectic, obscure, or, scarier still, morally upright.

His choice of hymns spoke also of something of himself and the English Montreal from which he came, whose establishment packed the Presbyterian Cathedral full. It was William Blake’s “Jerusalem”.

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

 

It occurred to me that English Montreal never got the memo that the British Empire was supposed to have been a bad thing. To hear one thousand people singing this in full voice would have sent Pauline Marois to hell in a jiffy, where she belongs.

Jake Eberts loved Canada and his home province with a passion. I salute you, friend, and hope the Quebec you so loved may eventually recover from its anglophobia.