That was 1974. Today the two in the middle with the flag and the matches represent something like half of the American population.
One of the top 100 moments in major league baseball history
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Monthly Archives: April 2016
It’s amazing anyone is getting married at all
That uptick for men at the end of the 1970s is me. It had been the world till then that you married the last girl you dated at university, had children and settled into life. I was not prepared to do that, nor were, apparently, others. as these stats make clear.
The median age at first marriage has risen dramatically in recent decades. Historically, the typical American women married between ages 20 and 22. From 1947 to 1972, the median age at first marriage for women ranged from 20.1 (in 1956) to 20.9 (in 1972). What this median number means is that the first-time bride in 1956 was more likely to be 18 than to be 23. In such an culture, most young men took a serious approach to their romantic pursuits, because by the time a man reached his early 20s, most young women were either already married or engaged. High-school boyfriend/girlfriend relationships often led directly to marriage and there were relatively few single people older than 25. The birth rate was substantially higher then, so that the typical 25-year-old man during that era was working to support a wife and two children. A teenage boy could see all around him the same pattern, and follow the familiar steps of a path — finish high school, get a job, marry his girlfriend, have babies — that would lead him toward the role of responsible adulthood by the time he was 25.
This social script has been torn to tatters in the past 40 or 50 years. In 1973, the median age at first marriage for U.S. women reached 21 for the first time in more than two decades, and has continued rising steadily — to 23 in 1980, to 24 in 1991, to 25 in 1998. The median age at first marriage for men, meanwhile, increased from 22.8 (in 1966) to 27.1 (in 1996). What this means, culturally, is that adolescence has been extended and adulthood has been postponed, so that the typical 25-year-old American man nowadays is more irresponsible and immature than his grandfather was at the same age, and this postponement of maturity has social consequences.
Marriage is middle and upper class. It is for grown-ups, of which there are fewer every year.
Hitler’s favourite religion
Hitler, like virtually all socialists, was an atheist. But religion did have its uses, with some religions more useful than others.
‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. “Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” Islam was a Männerreligion—a “religion of men”—and hygienic too. The “soldiers of Islam” received a warrior’s heaven, “a real earthly paradise” with “houris” and “wine flowing.” This, Hitler argued, was much more suited to the “Germanic temperament” than the “Jewish filth and priestly twaddle” of Christianity.
And how did it matter?
Muslims fought on both sides in World War II. But only Nazis and Islamists had a political-spiritual romance. Both groups hated Jews, Bolsheviks and liberal democracy. Both sought what Michel Foucault, praising the Iranian Revolution in 1979, would later call the spiritual-political “transfiguration of the world” by “combat.” The caliph, the Islamist Zaki Ali explained, was the “führer of the believers.” “Made by Jews, led by Jews—therewith Bolshevism is the natural enemy of Islam,” wrote Mahomed Sabry, a Berlin-based propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood in “Islam, Judaism, Bolshevism,” a book that the Reich’s propaganda ministry recommended to journalists.
Moreover, the tentacles from the 1940s reach into the present and the likely future.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the founder of Palestinian nationalism, is notorious for his efforts to persuade the Nazis to extend their genocide of the Jews to the Palestine Mandate. The Mufti met Hitler and Himmler in Berlin in 1941 and asked the Nazis to guarantee that when the Wehrmacht drove the British from Palestine, Germany would establish an Arab regime and assist in the “removal” of its Jews. Hitler replied that the Reich would not intervene in the Mufti’s kingdom, other than to pursue their shared goal: “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space.” The Mufti settled in Berlin, befriended Adolf Eichmann, and lobbied the governments of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria to cancel a plan to transfer Jews to Palestine. Subsequently, some 400,000 Jews from these countries were sent to death camps. . . .
Fearing Muslim uprisings, the Allies did not try the Mufti as a war criminal; he died in Beirut in 1974, politically eclipsed by his young cousin, Mohammed Abdul Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, at Munich, the surviving SS volunteers, joined by refugees from the Soviet Union, formed postwar Germany’s first Islamic community, its leaders an ex-Wehrmacht imam and the erstwhile chief imam of the Eastern Muslim SS Division. In the 1950s, some of Munich’s Muslim ex-Nazis worked for the intelligence services of the U.S., tightening the “green belt against Communism.”
The most important lesson from history is how unpredictable it is. The likelihood that Christianity will be the dominant religion of Europe a century from now is already looking very unlikely and becoming less likely by the day.
Is this an anti-Trump cartoon?
This is apparently an anti-Trump cartoon but looks exactly like reality to me. The question is why the #NeverTrump people have the belief that going over the cliff with Hillary is preferable to keeping to the path with Donald. But they do. Here we have this: Charles Koch: ‘It’s possible’ Clinton is preferable to a Republican for president.
Billionaire businessman Charles Koch said Sunday that “it’s possible” another Clinton in the White House could be better than having a Republican president.
Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, made the comment to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl during an interview that aired on ABC’s “This Week.”
The comment came after Karl asked about Bill Clinton’s presidency. Koch said Clinton was “in some ways” better than George W. Bush. “As far as the growth of government, the increase in spending, it was 2½ times under Bush than it was under Clinton,” he said.
Four years of Hillary does not sound like the answer to me, but since everyone is a political genius and sees more perfectly than anyone else into the nature of things, here we find one more answer among the many others.
An interview with Australia’s human rights commissioner – enough to make your skin crawl
Just the introduction to this interview with Jillian Triggs is enough to make the skin crawl:
After the government’s attempts to trash her reputation and to ignore most of the 16 recommendations in The Forgotten Children report, she’s just back from Geneva where the United Nations review of our human rights record found we’d regressed. Australia, the review found, continues to be in breach of its human rights obligations.
Triggs’ reputation has been self-trashing with no outside assistance required. The interview shows an astonishing level of arrogant ignorance, the basic setting for pretty well everyone on the left. It also shows a fantastic ignorance of the philosophy of Edmund Burke, who understood perfectly well in the 1790s the dangers in trying to implement some abstract set of human rights, which were part of his reflections on the Revolution in France. A bit from Burke, which she would have no comprehension of:
The foundation of government is . . . laid, not in imaginary rights of men, (which at best is a confusion of judicial with civil principles,) but in political convenience, and in human nature; either as that nature is universal, or as it is modified by local habits and social aptitudes.
Some highlights from the interview.
We’ve had, in my view, very poor leadership on this issue for the past 10 to 15 years, from the “children overboard” lie. They’ve been prepared to misstate the facts and conflate asylum-seeker issues with global terrorism. What I’m saying applies equally to Labor and Liberal and National parties. [Where are the Greens?] They’ve used this in bad faith to promote their own political opportunistic positions. . . .
I find myself saying pompous things like, “Please don’t break the rules here in the camp. If you do they declare you noncompliant and you end up staying longer or they are spiteful to you. Please be patient.” You can hear I’m not saying anything very comforting. The government has used the word unlawful [in relation to asylum seekers] and George Orwell understood the power of language very well. In the department you have a minister saying, “You will call these people ‘illegals’.” It’s shocking that Australia would come to that depth of abuse of power. . . .
A shocking phenomenon is Australians don’t even understand their own democratic system. They are quite content to have parliament be complicit with passing legislation to strengthen the powers of the executive and to exclude the courts. They have no idea of the separation of powers and the excessive overreach of executive government. . . .
“I must stay calm, I must keep my answers measured, moderate and evidence-based, I mustn’t be rattled by them and I mustn’t react with the same lack of courtesy that they show to me.” The reality was that they could suffer no harm from this, whereas if I gave the wrong answers, I could lose my case and I just had to keep control of myself. I knew we had the law right and the facts right. I knew that anger was under the surface. I knew I could have responded and destroyed them – I could have said, “You’ve asked me a question that demonstrated you have not read our statute. How dare you question what I do?” . . .
Some parliamentarians, and surprising ones, a Nationals MP, says “Come and give us a seminar.” Another one asked me to come up and work in parliament with the members of a particular committee that she was on. Terrific! But they listened to me and do you know, the response of some of them was, “Well, we had no idea Australia had signed up to these treaties. We should withdraw from them!”
I’ve just turned 70 and I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m so confident about the law and about the evidence for the law not being respected that I feel very sure-footed in going forward on these other issues. My resilience and determination and experience for a long time in the law give me the determination to get through the remaining 15 months to continue to speak out. When you see that you are being bullied by people who you know are not coming from a good place, you know you don’t have to give in to them. They are cowards and the moment you stand up to them they crumble, and they did crumble. And several now have been seen off long before me. They’re not used to a woman aged 70 standing up to them. They can’t quite believe it. If I were 40 looking for a career opportunity, I probably wouldn’t do what I’ve done because it would have queered the pitch for me professionally. But why do I care now? I can do what I’m trained to do and they almost can’t touch me. And I’ll continue to do that work when I’ve finished with this position.
The whole interview is a reminder of how lacking in balance these people are. Read the whole thing. Quite a revelation in the mindset of the left.
Delusional
Ignorant to an extent never seen before in a major world “leader”, we have this from Obama today:
President Barack Obama boasted of his legacy during a town hall in Britain, asserting that he single-handedly saved the world during his presidency.
“Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good,” Obama bragged when asked by a student in London what he wanted his legacy to be.
He recalled that when he visited London in 2009, the world economy was in a “freefall” because of irresponsible behavior of financial institutions around the world.
“For us to be able to mobilize the world’s community, to take rapid action, to stabilize the financial markets, and then in the United States to pass Wall Streets reforms that make it much less likely that a crisis like that can happen again, I’m proud of that,” he said.
What made the difference was the TARP that was put in place by his predecessor. A reminder since it is now so long ago even Obama seems to have forgotten:
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. It was a component of the government’s measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis.
Obama’s contribution was the stimulus that came immediately after, which has made America’s recovery for all practical purposes non-existent, along with everyone else’s. As if a law professor turned community organiser would have the slightest idea about how an economy works. But if he doesn’t even remember who put the TARP in place, it might be a consequence of his choom-gang youth, which from other news also today we learn:
Using marijuana earlier in life is linked to poorer psychological health, and that can contribute to more health problems down the road.
“It is well-established that if you begin using at an early age and use a lot then, there are significant negative outcomes particularly in terms of mental health. . . .
Earlier cannabis use is linked to cognitive problems. Hills said, “One 2012 study showed early, regular use of marijuana – the kind of level they describe in this study — led to an eight point decline in IQ over time.”
If Obama really thinks he had much if any involvement in stabilizing international financial markets after the GFC, he must have been somewhere else at the time to be so unaware of what was going on.
Make this make sense if you can
Here is the headline: Pope Francis reneges on offer to take in Christian refugees, and here is the story:
A Christian brother and sister from Syria felt blessed to have been among the dozen refugees selected to start a new life in Italy — but now say their savior, Pope Francis, abandoned them on a Greek island, according to a report.
Roula and Malek Abo, who had been housed in a refugee camp on Lesbos, said they thanked their lucky stars when they found out the Vatican had selected them during the pontiff’s visit to the island last week, the Daily Mail reported.
Their dreams were shattered, though, when they were informed the following day that they would not be traveling to Rome. Instead, three Muslim families were taken.
The only sense one can make is if I make some kind of assessment of in whose interests the Vatican is being run. And those interests do not look like the interests of Christians.
Tell me again how you can make an economy grow by wasting money
It’s not particularly apt but I like it because it shows Keynesian economics is becoming the metaphor for stupid.
Died: April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
It was exactly 400 years today that William Shakespeare, once a well-known playwright across the English-speaking world, shuffled off this mortal coil. I therefore thought we should mark the occasion. How I will do it is by noting that I picked up a secondhand copy just yesterday of Lytton Strachey’s Books and Characters: French & English which has a wonderful essay on “Shakespeare’s Final Period”, although the reason I actually bought the book was because it was dedicated to John Maynard Keynes. But what I found so interesting about the essay was that it assumed intimate knowledge of about a dozen Shakespearean plays of which for me, anyway, many were way off my own most important dozen. I have to admit I am almost entirely unfamiliar with Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale or Timon of Athens although with the others he discussed I was pretty au fait. I suspect few enduring a modern education would even recognise these titles never mind know a thing about the plays. I, on the other hand, am from a different era. Today it is Tony Soprano rather than Titus Andronicus anyone would be more likely to know.
But this short post is about Shakespeare’s death and the article was about whether he had become more content with life even as he aged, which apparently was a common view in 1906 when the article was written. Based on an ability to properly date the order in which the plays were written, which had been discovered just around that time, Strachey thinks it is nonsense and goes about showing there is no genuine sign that Shakespeare had entered upon a serene and contented existence as his life drew to an end. If anything, he says, he just got bored with trying to write about real people in real circumstances and therefore went off on various imaginative excursions so that he could write beautiful poetry but didn’t have to worry whether his characters were realistic and the plot lines made sense. The Tempest, as he says, ought to be play about Prospero’s revenge but ends up being mostly a love story.
Anyway, however Shakespeare spent his final years, they ended on this day four centuries ago. It is a miracle that so many of his plays have been preserved and one may only hope that 400 years from now there will be others to commemorate and honour the anniversary of his death.
The most politically incorrect letter ever written
This letter was a hoax of sorts, or so it says at the start, posted somewhere on the internet as a response from Oxford to students attending as Rhodes Scholars to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor Cecil Rhodes. Here’s how the letter begins.
Dear Scrotty Students,
Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.
This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”
Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.
And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been as near as damn it to zilch.
And then it gets worse.
Law of Markets 