Maggie's Farm

Checkbook? Credit cards? Expired membership cards? Business cards? Town beach pass? Dry cleaning slips? Tax receipts? An old condom? Concealed carry permit? To-do list? Money???

I'll go first:

$143, 7 of my business cards, two credit cards, my ATM card, my Triple A card, my carry permit, my medical insurance card, driver's license, supermarket bonus card, Costco Card, a mini-copy of my latest EKG showing my harmless PVCs, a list of phone numbers which aren't entered onto my cell, a small photo of my kids, and my hunting license. Pretty boring, really.

What's in your wallet?

Tell us in the comments.

Guy made a foolish mistake. He should have stayed home, down under, where the people live upside-down.

I think the prosecutors are reaching, but that is what prosecutors do in the US. Big cases are their scorecards, and the heck with justice, fairness, or reasonableness. Beware of ambitious prosecutors.

(Note: I do not play online poker, but I have been known to play a game or two with friends. The stock market is the real online gambling, imo. It is legal.)

At the Canada Free Press, The Media Loses Readers and Viewers to its Own Radicalism: The problem with the American media is that it doesn't speak to Americans. One quote (but read the whole thing):

The left’s hijacking of American culture has turned institutions into rags and rubble, and it will only get worse. Because the left does not know when to stop. Does not understand that it should stop. That is why left wing revolutions that do succeed, eventually culminate in multiple levels of purges that exterminate many of the original revolutionaries, or send them off to fight and die somewhere else, turning them into convenient martyrs who look good on blood-red T-shirts.

Obama’s vision of the media was as purveyors of his talking points. To that end he kept it at arms length, even while using it non-stop to promote himself. By turning the media into his publicists, he helped accelerate a rapid slide that had already been under way, ending any real distinction between news and celebrity news, between opinion and reporting, and between the liberal media and the liberal government. And when Ezra Klein tried to occasionally draw a line between themselves and the politicians they cover, it was a line that was no longer there anymore, because the media had found its mission in the advocacy of liberal domestic and international policies, of convincing the public that their political way was best.

1. The WaPo is sad because the EU is failing in its collectivist goals.

It does not sadden me, because I view the EU as just one more misbegotten attempt to create a European empire. The Romans started it, and people have been trying ever since, whether with armies or with ink. This motley crew will never see eye to eye.

2. The Aussie election is still up in the air. Hey, you upside-down folks - we do care.

From Mead on The Greening of Godzilla:

...on issues the public follows closely, the scientific consensus keeps changing.  Margarine was introduced as the healthy alternative to butter; now experts tell us that the transfats in many types of margarine are the worst things you can eat.  Should you eat no fat or the right fat?  All carbs, no carbs or good carbs? How much vitamin E should you take?  How much sun should you get?  How much fish oil should you swallow?  How should you divide your time between aerobic and non-aerobic exercise?  On these and many other subjects, expert opinion keeps changing.  Perhaps the current consensus will last; quite possibly, it won’t — but the experts can’t tell you what will happen.

Nobody trusts experts to be right, except those with no scientific education at all. Furthermore, real experts are humble about things.

I mean totally. Look at this: Waiting for Mr. Obama. They must inhabit a separate reality:

MLK was a life-long Republican. The Dems hijacked him and twisted his message. I do not know how they did that, but I do know why they did that.

Also, The Media's Racist

I see nothing post-racial happening these days. I wish I could say I did. I see more racism charges flying around than I have seen in 30 years. Readers know that I am sick of the topic of race, and hate the concept. Your character, culture, and manner of living, on the other hand, are of interest to me...assuming I have any interest in you at all. I am of the Imus view of people: "What do you bring to the table? Ya got sumthin today, or ya got nuthin?"

Every office has a whining nut like Milton, and every office has a prick like Lumbergh.

I had to add this one, at the beach, afterwards:

Economic picture to get bleaker. 

It looks like a good economy for the repo-men. O supporter Zuckerman says The Most Fiscally Irresponsible Government in U.S. History.

From Viking's post (I agree):

It's long been my position that Social Security was meant to help elderly workers who could no longer do the labor of the Depression era. We're not a nation of ditch diggers and washwomen anymore. The government has set up a system where (with today's life expectancies) we subsidize a third of a lifetime in retirement.

Yes, it is crazy. Retirement should be by economic choice, or for the disabled. It is crazy for the young to subsidize the golf of the grey folks like me who have more wisdom and experience to contribute to the workplace than the dopey kids.

Nothing against golf, mind you. Nothing against sitting on the beach reading and smoking, either. There is a time for every purpose under heaven.

Via Patriot Post Humor:

I recently submitted a building permit application for a new house.

It was going to be 100 ft. tall and 400 ft. wide with 9 gun turrets at various heights and windows all over the place and a loud outside entertainment sound system. It would have had parking for 200 cars and I was going to paint it snot green with pink trim.

The City Council told me to forget about it.

So, I sent the application in again, but this time I called it a Mosque.

Work starts on Monday.

From the CT Post:

The first major feature of Obamacare is being launched, high-risk health insurance pools, which cover citizens previously denied insurance due to prior conditions.

Congratulations, Republicans!

Yes, Republicans, because expansion of high-risk health insurance pools was the central element of the GOP's common-sense alternative to the grandiosity of Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act (ACA)...

Cornell today?

One student is quoted as saying, "I wish my classes were more supportive instead of being so difficult."

Houston, we have a problem. Somehow along the way the kids got the idea that higher edumacation was a Montessori nursery school.

(Surnames Part 1 here)

Your surname means next to nothing genetically or geneologically. Furthermore, if you are of English or French descent, you are almost certainly some sort of relative of Charlemagne.

Taking our surname topic this week a bit further into the math of geneology, one quickly realizes that the surname or family name one ended up with is close to random. After all, how many c. 1500 AD ancestors do you have (around the time when surnames became fixed and inherited), each one an equal contributor to your genetics?  

Well, just four generations ago, you had 32 living great-great-great grandparents (2 to the 4th power), all probably with different surnames. If you have a Mayflower ancestor, they were one of your mathematical 65,000 great-something grandparents 15 generations ago. The simple math, depending on the areas in which your 1500 AD ancestors lived, (your ancestry pool at a given time), indicates that I have up to a theoretical 4 million great-something grandparents who were living in 1500 (with ancestors doubling each generation of 25 years).

But, beyond the 4-10 generations back, those large numbers aren't possible, given the population pools in different local areas and the lack of mobility for most people at the time. (The population of London was around 50,000 in 1500. It is thought that the global population in 1500 was only around 300 million.)

Thus there must be abundant redundancy in our geneologies and tons of marriage and child production among cousins, in-laws, and other family members. This site, Redundancy in Geneology, takes a clear look at that subject.

The technical term for this is "pedigree collapse," wherein our ancestral cone has a narrowing due to various forms of inbreeding, as it were. That collapse may have peaked around the year 1200, and in New England, there probably was another mini-pedigree collapse due to the small size of the population in the 16-1700s:

It's still safe to say that I had thousands of c. 1500 ancestor great-something grandparents, and I happened to end up with just one of their recently-given surnames. Luck of the draw.

(If you are from England, you are still probably in some way related to almost everybody else in England. That's why we call our Brit fellow bloggers "cousin".)

Ultimately, of course, we all trace back to Mitochondrial Eve. She was certainly a cutie pie, and she must have had lots of kids.

Photos:
Upper: Holy Trinity Church, Long Medford, c. 1450.
Lower: Church of St. Peter in Great Haseley, Oxfordshire, c. 1200

I was curious about when English surnames became fixed in time by inheritance rather than being individual descriptors of convenience which were only used for one's lifetime.

First, we have to go back to the pre-surname era. In pre-medieval England, the population was so small, and most villages so tiny, that, if your name was Merthin, everybody around knew who you were. Then the Norman Conquest Frenchified England. Many or most of the colorful old Anglo-Saxon given names (like Aldwyn and Odelia and Theomund)  disappeared and were replaced with names of French origin like these four:

It has been estimated that almost 50% of the male babies born by 1200 A.D. were using just four common first names: William (15%), Robert (12%), Richard (11%) and Henry (10%). Such percentages show the need, even by the Middle Ages, for a second name of identification. As a result, patronymic naming conventions came into play whereby sons were named after their fathers, and sometimes even after their mothers.

As with traditional Scandinavian names, patronymic surnames are not fixed but are labels of convenience: they change with each generation. "Which John do you mean?" "Oh, John Robert's son.") Robert Richardson's son John becomes John Robertson. (Shifting surnames, of course, persists with women still generally taking on their husband's surname.)

The Medieval Warm Period saw a rapid growth in the English population, with the growth of market towns and cathedral towns, often with thousands in population. Descriptors became necessary: John (who lives on the) Hill, William (the) Carpenter, Jack (who came here from) Aisnley, Roger (the) Knight. By late Medieval times, descriptive (but not fixed) surnames were fairly universal except in small farming villages. These were, generally speaking,

Place names
Occupation names
Patronyms
Descriptive or nicknames

Thus we had Christian (given) names, and descriptive, non-hereditary surnames. As best I can tell, literacy and record-keeping led the way towards fixed surnames around or slightly before 1500 (although they were probably implied before that among the land-owning aristocracy: eg William, Lord of Westmoreland's sons were probably forever Westmoreland in some way unless the King punished you by taking your land away, or cutting your head off.) As Wiki says:

In Britain, hereditary surnames were adopted in the 13th and 14th centuries, initially by the aristocracy but eventually by everyone. By 1400, most English and Scottish people had acquired surnames, but many Scottish and Welsh people did not adopt surnames until the 17th century, or even later. Henry VIII (1509 - 1547) ordered that marital births be recorded under the surname of the father.

Ah yes, there's the answer: government edict, no doubt for control and taxation purposes.

Because of this, it is difficult or impossible to trace non-aristocratic English geneologies much further back than 1500, when John Miller's son Jack the carpenter was named Jack Miller instead of Jack the Carpenter. Before that, there were minimal church records and either no surnames, or no consistency in them if there were any. Furthermore, it did not take long for every town to be filled with unrelated Smiths, Carpenters, Millers, Weavers, Masons, Brewers, Bakers, Hills, Fields, and Rivers. And Bankers (lived near a riverbank - there were no "banks") and Farmers (farm tax-collectors, not tillers of the soil). It's funny, but although they made up the bulk of the population at one time, Serf never became popular as a surname while Freeman did...

Perhaps serfdom isn't all it's cracked up to be, despite its European and maybe North American comeback these days.

More tomorrow, including why, if you are of English or French ancestry, you are almost certainly related to Charlemagne -

Still looking for good, tasty, 15-minute ceegars for under $7-10 per smoke.

I am trying these, this week.

What do our readers enjoy?

A useful term - a noun - for "a problem that severely tests the ability of an inexperienced person." More generally, a problem or challenge which will separate the bright and the perceptive from the not-so-bright and the not-so-perceptive.

"Bridge of asses." Donkeys do not like to cross bridges.

In mathematics, the term is applied to the problem from the first book of Euclid that if two sides of a triangle are equal then the angles opposite those sides are also equal.

Traditionally, the bridge of asses referred to Euclid's Fifth Theorem of planar geometry, the comprehension of which and the implications of which were and are a sticking point for less-bright students.

By the way, this is a good if somewhat challenging book: Experiencing Geometry. A bit of a pons asinorum itself.

From a review of Roger Scruton's new book, The Uses of Pessimism, And the Danger of False Hope:

Scruton identifies seven fallacies that he sees as underwriting false hope. Put briefly, these translate into a tendency to always look on the bright side, a belief that freedom is hampered by law, an unwillingness to countenance refutation, a belief that failure in one human quarter is directly connected to success in another, an inclination to impose solutions rather than letting them evolve over time, the idea that human history has an endpoint, and the tendency to assume agreeable concepts such as liberty and equality are mutually reinforcing.

In the final chapters, Scruton suggests these inclinations may be ineradicable, having evolved in response to particular dangers in hunter-gatherer societies.

This one is obviously for the gals only, since guys quit carrying handbags when pockets were invented. 

Only parts of the female body are more private to them than their bags and pocketbooks.

What do you gals have in yours?

Please tell us in the comments...and, if a handgun, make and model please.

Small plate dining seems to be all the rage these days. I like it. I am not the sort who can, or who likes to, eat 8 lbs. of food at the Outback Steakhouse.

Most middle-aged people do not eat, or want to eat, as much as they used to - most of the time. We just want it to be tasty, and we like variety.

Sushi was always small plates, and tapas were too. However, now it's taking over in all nice restaurants. It doesn't have to be just appetizers: you can make a meal of them. Gael Greene picked up on the trend in 2008.

Like Bird Dog, I have had small plate Venetian dinners in New York, also small plate Turkish, Indian, and northern Italian and, of course, many small plate dinners of tapas and sushi. I'm not sure whether American cooking, whatever it is, lends itself to the small and tasty format.

Article at The American.

It often requires a Left-wing government to re-clarify the issues. A quote:

The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.

and

Tocqueville pointed to another danger as well, the danger of what he called “soft despotism,” in which a seemingly benevolent government would channel citizens into docile obedience like a herd of sheep. But that danger seemed distant, even to Tocqueville, in an America whose dominant and more populist party, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, opposed government spending on public works projects and feared the power of a central bank.

Worth sending to kids and grandkids. This from Judith Cone's Open Letter to Students, via Minding the Campus. One quote:

I experience the hunger in the world for the privilege of creating jobs through entrepreneurship, and then I return to the United States, where I see something that troubles me.

Some students and professors reject business as a morally responsible way to spend one's life. The issue I have is not that some people would rather work in the public sector (government) or the social sector (nonprofit work), but that they assign a higher moral calling to these two sectors than to the private sector (business).

As a college student, you are attempting to gain the knowledge, skills, networks, and inspiration to live a happy, productive, and meaningful life. I like to think of each of you as one unit of creative potential. Looking at it this way means that faculty members are more than dispensers of knowledge. They are guides along your journey, teaching the subjects, passing along beliefs and biases, hopefully inspiring you, and challenging you, to consider the types of people you will become.

Some professors attempt to influence you toward those biases. Some think dismissively of business, for instance, as if society would be better off without it, or they assign pernicious motivations to those who lead businesses. Throughout history, social experiments to this end have failed. Every day, these professors use and benefit from the products and services of business: Google, bookstores, clothing, transportation, and the local coffee shop. They fail to differentiate between business leaders and dismiss the whole sector as greedy, uncaring, and destructive. Yet, even with much evidence of greed and wrongdoing in the public and social sectors, that same categorical condemnation is not present.

The whole letter here. I have seen that anti-business bias often, and it always confuses me because most of what we have and do in this life is thanks to the effort and risk of business folks and the people they employ.

From an economic standpoint, non-profits, government, academia, and even professional people like me are parasitic to the big engine of free enterprise.

I think they look down on it because they know that they are beholden to it, and that makes them feel ashamed. I think it's similar to the effete attitudes towards our military.