A long-running struggle in my house has been teaching children that if I ask them to relay a message to someone, they should not stand where they are when I’m talking to them and shout across the house. So far I’ve managed to progress to where they will walk several feet in the direction of where they think their sibling is and then yell.

I’ve recently discovered that if I ask them, “please walk over to where [your sibling] is and then tell them [message],” they actually do it.

Sometimes it’s weird what works.

It’s been a while since I wrote about all-cause mortality for the USA, and I’ve been meaning to write an update. With the curious incidence of the omicron variant (if that’s what’s responsible), this has become more timely. So, first, here’s the most recent all-cause mortality data for the USA:

And let’s zoom into the last year and a half:

As you may notice, the average and upper-bound threshold lines are thicker than they used to be; this is to better represent the statistical uncertainty involved in them. Please note that the last two weeks are almost certainly under-reporting of deaths, because the USA is bad at reporting all-cause mortality until about 4 weeks later (a week only makes it onto the chart when the last day in the week is 10 days ago, but even so the first few lines on the right always under-count, though by how much varies). I’m not sure why we’re so bad at it, but we are, so that’s the grain of salt with which to take those last numbers.

Looking at these graphs, it seems like not much is going on in the last few months. Mortality is slightly raised from normal, but not by very much. It’s still the case that if you scales the y-axis not to the highest number of deaths per week but to the US population (329.5 million, as of 2020), the weekly all-cause mortality would barely be distinguishable from the x-axis, i.e. you wouldn’t be able to visually tell that anyone is dying at all.

Now let’s consider COVID-19 statistics (also from the CDC):

As it says in the graph, the red line is the 7-day average for daily new cases, and the orange line is daily new hospital admissions for COVID-19. Let’s also look at the daily deaths the CDC attributes to COVID-19:

The orange line is the same daily new admissions for COVID-19 (and thus the same line). The red line is 7-day average of deaths attributed to COVID-19. As I’ve mentioned before, this is intrinsically a less reliable number since reasonable people and indeed reasonable medical guidelines can differ as to what the cause of a death is in the case of multiple interacting causes. To give an example, if someone has COPD and catches COVID-19 and dies, which killed him? He’d have eventually died of the COPD, but died earlier than if he hadn’t caught COVID-19. Both answers are reasonable, and the logic behind them is lost when these are aggregated into statistics. That’s why all-cause mortality is so important—everyone diagnoses death itself the same (the exceptions being statistically irrelevant).

All that said, the CDC’s statics on COVID-19-attributed deaths are still interesting to look at, over time, since the judgement as to the attribution of the cause of death is likely to be the same, over time. It’s not guaranteed, of course, but it is likely in the absence of large cultural shifts.

These various graphs are interesting, but the one I find the most interesting is the bottom one—COVID-19 attributed deaths vs. COVID-19 attributed hospital admissions.

Naively, you would expect the two graphs to look very similar but with a slight right-shifting of the death line since people tend to be admitted to the hospital then die some number of days later. Similarly, once the prevelance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the population goes down, you’d expect the admissions to start going down and then the deaths will start going down a bit later as the people who were already admitted who are going to die, do so. And we in fact do see this relationship from roughly September of 2020 until about March of 2021. It’s wider than we’d expect to see—somewhere around a month—but it’s there. The line of deaths that we’re looking at is a 7-day average, and the hospital admission line is too smooth to not be some kind of average, so possibly the horizontal distance between them is partly just about how the statistics are collected rather than reflecting the real day-to-day numbers.

After March of 2021, the relationship we would expect to see breaks down. Around April of 2021 we see a spike in covid-related hospital admissions while there is a decline in covid-attributed deaths. In June through august of 2021 we see the relationship seem to come back, but the distance between the bars is now bigger, and the lines no longer have the same basic shape. Hospital admissions also spike much higher relative to the previous trough than do deaths (bear in mind they’re not on the same scale, so their heights can’t be directly compared, only their shapes can be compared). Then the falling in admissions actually lines up, for a while, with the fall in deaths, which it shouldn’t. After that, there is no apparent relationship between the two.

If you look back at the graph of daily cases, the hospital admissions actually coincides much better with it’s 7-day average daily-cases line. I don’t know of a great explanation for that; it’s just interesting to note that hospital admissions track positive COVID-19 tests far better than they track deaths. (Again, the y-axes are very different so you can’t compare the lines and hospital admissions are a drop in the bucket of positive COVID-19 tests so you can’t attribute the rise in positive COVID-19 tests to increased hospital admissions.)

As before, my main conclusions are that the USA’s all-cause mortality data is hopelessly laggy and that the other data available still doesn’t support any obvious conclusions. We’re very clearly not facing any kind of existential threat and anyone who tries to take emergency powers appropriate to an existential threat should be thrown out of office as soon as possible. Beyond that, I think that SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 continue to illustrate how little we know about the natural world.

Being the father of a little girl I am more aware of Disney cartoons than I suspect most men my age without a daughter are. Due to this knowledge, I couldn’t help but notice that a common theme in Disney princess movies is how some woman or other tries very hard to be “perfect” but can’t be “perfect” and needs to find out how to be “loved” in spite of being “imperfect”.

I’m using the scare quotes because they keep using these words, but I don’t think they mean what they think they mean. (Princess Bride reference.)

As far as I can make out, the concept of “perfect” that they are using is, roughly, “completely convenient.” It tends to be phrased in terms of “doing what she’s supposed to” except this isn’t meant in a moral sense—it is never used to describe being a saint. Instead it seems to be something along the lines of, “never disappoints anyone.”

By contrast, as saint tends to disappoint a lot of people because the saint lives according to God’s will, not according to human wills. Of course, by the same token, the saint also doesn’t need human beings to love them. The saint can pray for people who are busy stoning the saint to death because the saint really disappointed them.

This is, incidentally, what made Frozen such a shockingly Christian movie. Elsa gives up trying to be a “good girl” and becomes the villain, then repents when she realizes that both were mistaken and the real answer is love—in the sense of agape, the generous love of God (to will the good of the other for their own sake). I’ve no idea how they accidentally did that, though. It is very much the exception to the standard Disney plot. The typical Disney movie tends to focus on some overbearing figure in a girl’s life with too many expectations of her, and after she rebels, the authority figure eventually relaxes and only presses on her expectations she can actually fulfill. Then they get along.

This is an improvement in a relationship, so it’s not wrong. It’s a little disappointing that its sights are set so low, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is roughly the counterpart fantasy to the boy into whose lap adventure and heroism falls, and then he’s regarded as a hero and people now treat him with respect. In both cases the fantasy is about life (by which I mostly mean the people around one) magically getting more convenient.

It would be nice if they could use words correctly, though. “Perfect” does not mean “useful” or “convenient.” I get why the authority figure might misuse these terms—to cover their own imperfections—but it would be far better if the heroin would repudiate this mistake rather than ask the authority figure to not reject them despite them not being maximally convenient with the words “love me even though I’m imperfect”. But Disney is not a Christian company so I can’t really expect them to make Christian movies.

It was really cool that they somehow did, that one time, though.

I’d like to wish everyone a merry Christmas today, so: merry Christmas!

Also, here’s my favorite secular Christmas song:

If you haven’t heard it before and have 3 minutes to listen to it, I hope you enjoy it, and either way, God bless you and yours.

F.r Ronald Knox (of Detective Decalogue fame) wrote a number of detective stories. His first, The Viaduct Murder, might best be described as a serious satire on detective fiction. It was interesting, in a way, but not, frankly, satisfying. To some degree it was really more of a very long-winded attack on the Historical-Critical method than a detective story. After that he wrote a far more conventional detective story, The Three Taps.

Even there, while it was a more conventional story, it featured an unconventional detective, Miles Bredon. The first unusual thing was that the detective worked for an insurance company. Humorously, it was called The Indescribable Insurance Company (i.e. “The Indescribable,” for short). Here’s some of the initial description of him:

…[T]he Indescribable retained its own private detective. This fact was not advertised; nor was he ever referred to in the official communications of the Company except as ‘our representative’. He carried neither a lens nor a forceps—not even a revolver; he took no injections; he had no stupid confidential friend, but a private detective he was for all that. An amateur detective I will not call him, for the Company paid him, as you would expect, quite handsomely; but he had nothing whatever to do with Scotland Yard, where the umbrellas go to.

It’s also quite fascinating how F.r Knox described Miles Bredon being married (some paragraphs down, after talking about how he was lazy but very capable when his interest was roused):

He was well thought of, in fact, by everyone except himself. For himself, he bitterly regretted the necessity that had made him become a spy—he would use no other word for it, and constantly alarmed his friends by announcing his intention of going into the publishing trade, or doing something relatively honest. The influence which saved him on these occasions was that of—how shall I say it?—his wife. I know—I know it is quite wrong to have your detective married until the last chapter. But it is not my fault. It is the fault of two mocking eyes and two very capable hands that were employed in driving brass-hats to and fro in London at the end of the war. Bredon surrendered to these, and made a hasty but singularly fortunate marriage. Angela Bredon was under no illusions about the splendid figure in khaki that stood beside her at the altar. Wiser than her generation, she realized that marriages were not ‘for the duration’; that she would have to spend the rest of her life with a large, untidy, absent-minded man who would frequently forget that she was in the room. She saw that he needed above all things a nurse and a chauffeur, and she knew that she could supply both these deficiencies admirably. She took him as a husband, with all a husband’s failings, and the Indescribable itself could not have guaranteed her more surely against the future.

It’s interesting that the detective is married, and especially interesting that Fr. Knox actually addresses this in a way that breaks the fourth wall. “I know—I know it is quite wrong to have your detective married until the last chapter. But it is not my fault.”

Fr. Knox wrote The Three Taps in 1927 (or, more accurately, it was published then). This was fairly late in the golden age of detective fiction, though as I’ve noted this was a thing almost from the beginning. In A Study In Scarlet, Holmes comments on C. Auguste Dupin, as well as Monsieur Lecoq. (Lecoq was a fictional french detective published in France in the 1860s, though available in English translation.)

I really don’t know what to make off all this; none of Fr. Knox’s stories were really great, and his detective is not an exception. Miles Bredon is clever and does the deduction which the plot requires. He figures out the story in a flash of brilliance after playing a complicated game of solitaire (“patience”). But he feels almost as if his author was careful not to make him great. There seems to have been a convention in the golden age that detectives must have as many drawbacks as they have traits to their credit; in consequence they were often ugly, rude, or clumsy. The only real exception I can think of is Fr. Brown, who was a really great character and whose only balancing handicaps were being short, a roman catholic priest, and bad at remembering where his umbrella was.

Fr. Knox seems to have thought that if his detective was brilliant and capable of keeping a wife he couldn’t also be interesting or it would be too much.

I can only say that I once made a similar mistake in a novel I never published (or, strictly speaking, finished). Afraid of having the character called an author self-insert I made him completely unlike me. This meant, among other things, that he had no interests that I found even remotely interesting. The consequence, once I put it like this, is not surprising: I found him extraordinarily boring. This is not a good way for the author to relate to the main character of the book.

Perhaps a detective who is brilliant and capable of keeping a wife and also an interesting person is too much for this world, but for all that he’d be much more interesting to read about.

It may be that Fr. Knox didn’t really want to write detective fiction. That his first novel was a satire on detective fiction with only one joke in it does suggest this. However, unlike G.K. Chesterton—who did not write conventional detective stories either—Fr. Knox did not go off in his own direction. In writing Fr. Brown Chesterton had a positive vision for what he wanted to write, and wrote that. He did put it within the detective genre of his time, if only barely, but he pursued his own ends. Fr. Knox seems to be pursuing neither his own ends nor anyone else’s, and only sticks to convention, if in general he tries to stick to the edge of it rather than the center.

Fr. Knox was a man of no small accomplishments, and given that he took the trouble of writing up his detective decalogue and of being a member of the Detection Club, I can’t help but wonder why he went this way.

An overlooked cause of the Great Depression is the move from agriculture to industry as a source of employment. In the USA, something like 25% of the population transitioned from being farmers to being factory workers in a decade or so, and the great depression was, in part, the working out of the readjustment of the economy to so large a fraction of the population changing occupations.

Something that was just pointed out in a TIK video (BankWars Episode 1) was that during World War 1 governments created a massive quantity of weapons and in order to do so paid large wages for factory workers (in arms industries) while hurting the price of farm goods. This was a significant stimulus to people moving off of farms and into factories during this time. I’m not sure—I need to do more research—that this happened as much in the USA as in Europe, but this is an intriguing piece of the puzzle to fit in.

I had mainly attributed this move to falling prices for farm goods due to an increase in efficiency due to mechanization (things like large, powerful diesel powered tractors, for example). I’ve no doubt that this is a significant part of the move, as further mechanization of farming has resulted in even more people moving out of the farming sector while more food is being produced in the US than ever. (It’s been more than a few years since I last looked it up, but I believe that only about 5% of the population of the US works in agriculture.)

However, this transition being massively speeded up by government interference would certainly help to explain it happening so quickly as to cause a great depression (which had, at its peak, something like 25% unemployment). The timing is a little iffy for this; the great depression began in the late 1920s while the great depression ended in 1918. I really need to do more research to see if this actually fits in. (Another place I need to look is how things were going in Europe because the Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon with interlocking problems caused by international trade collapsing.)

Most calls from strange numbers don’t leave messages, and of those that do, few begin by saying anything other than my car’s extended warranty is about to expire. Today was an exception.

Hi Christopher, good afternoon, this is [name] calling from Reader’s Magnet. Chris, your book has the potential to become the next best-seller. Because of that [long pause while she finds her place in the script] we plan pick you and your book to be featured in the special edition of Publisher’s Weeklies [unintelligible] Anniversaries featured authors, this coming April 19 issue. We are in lookout for books with great stories to tell. As Publisher’s Weeklies special edition highlights on uplifting and edgy stories. And your book has also been selected to be displayed in the Tucson Festival of Books and Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. These are also especial events as these two book fairs are the first to reopen since pandemic started which means the fairgoers to these events will likely be doubled. So do not waste this chance to be part of this momentous affairs as this comes limited to a few chosen. To join and for more details, call me at 619-514-[redacted] extension 3119. You can reach me before 7pm Eastern Time Mondays through Fridays. Bye for now and stay safe always.

I presume that they’re trying to sell me author services, though it could be a credit card scam. The woman’s first language was clearly not English and in the age of voice-over-IP she could easily have been in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US despite having a US phone number. (I assume the 4 digit extension is to seem more legitimate.) That said, since predatory author services are perfectly legal while credit card fraud is not, I’m more inclined to guess the former.

I think it’s a nice touch that she doesn’t even mention which of my books is poised to become the next best-seller.

Something interesting I learned from several videos by TIK History on the Soviet Union before, during, and after WW2: Marxism in the Soviet Union was largely factory workers vs. farmers. This got me thinking about Marxism more generally, and the implications of class conflict being central to Marxist theory.

On a surface-level reading, Marxism is about pitting workers against owners. This is evil since all people should love each other, of course, but more relevant here (because it’s not so obvious) is that the owner-worker distinction fails to capture a large fraction of humanity. A great many people are neither the owners of someplace other people work, nor workers in a business owned by someone else. There are, of course, children, which Marxism utterly fails to deal with (except by, in effect, putting them into childcare/indoctrination factories). There are people (mostly women) whose primary work is raising their children and doing other domestic work. And there are people who own their own means of production.

In this latter group are—during the time of much of the soviet union—farmers. Family-owned farms are still common even today, despite the predominance of large factory farms, but they were extremely common in the Soviet Union for various reasons relating to the state of technology. It is true that there was a major push to collectivize the farms, but this only got so far, especially since the collective farms so often failed miserably. Part of the problem is that farms are intrinsically large and so people simply have to be spaced out enough that they exercise their own judgement. Farms also are not factories—you need knowledge (both general and local) and to exercise judgement to farm successfully.

The upshot is that farmers simply aren’t like factory workers. They have different interests. And factory workers desperately need what farmers produce—food. Factory workers—or those concerned with them—are also necessarily removed from farmers, since the factories tend to be located in or near cities. It is easy for factory workers to view farmers simply as a nuisance. The more food costs, the less money factory workers have for other things. And farmers are remote and their concerns unreal to city dwellers with extremely different concerns. Moreover, under any even slightly socialist system factory workers cannot earn more money by working harder or longer. Their income is fixed; only their expenses vary. In consequence, they only benefit (so far as they can see) the more farmers are squeezed.

And factory workers fit the Marxist model far better than farmers do. Farmers will always have independence and some degree of ownership, at least if you don’t want everyone to starve to death. Farmers can very naturally own their own means of production, but also be the laborers. Non-collectivized farms simply break the Marxist model since they are owner-workers. The perennial temptation, then, will be for Marxists to hold that these owner-workers are evil in virtue of being owners and thus are exploiting the workers who buy the food the farmers produce.

Since something like 60% of the people in the Soviet Union worked in agriculture, especially in the first half of its existence, this meant that a minority of the population was oppressing a majority of the population in the name of preventing that majority from oppressing it.

Curiously, if you look at Marxists today, they tend to want to do the exact same thing—to oppress the majority in the name of protecting themselves from oppression, while saying that they’re on the side of everyone.

I suppose a tiger doesn’t change his stripes after all.

Something that has been fashionable to complain about in the last few decades is “extremism”. What is actually meant is something that is extremely out of the mainstream, but the problem is that it’s well known that the majority of people can be quite wrong. Indeed, given how recently deep racism was the mainstream in the United States (and analogous things can easily be found elsewhere, such as anti-semitism in Europe), simply accusing people of being a minority is not viable. So this is done under the cover of claiming that the problem isn’t that the person is in a minority position, but that his views are on the extreme of some spectrum, making them wrong, since truth always lies in the middle of all extremes.

The thing is, this is—to put it mildly—extremely stupid.

The truth is not always in the middle. This is very easy to see by just considering cases where no one is a moderate today. Everyone is an extremist about how much slavery should be allowed. Everyone is an extremist on whether the human race should be extinguished (most people hold an extreme ‘no’, some people hold an extreme ‘yes‘, but no one holds a moderate position). You will find exceedingly few moderates on the subject of whether the Jews should be wiped out.

This gets even clearer if you consider cases where no one was ever on the opposing side. Should we build as many nuclear weapons as possible and detonate them over all of the landmasses of the earth? The correct position is not a moderate one between “yes” and “no”. Should we salt all of the farmland on the earth? Should we beat people who go out in public? Should we mandate dragging a 500 pound rock if a person leaves his house? Should rape be legal? Should rape be state-sponsored, with generous bounties paid to rapists?

The correct position on all of these is not moderation.

By the way, I just happened to pick examples where the correct position is an extreme ‘no’. One can easily come up with examples where the correct answer is an extreme ‘yes’: should babies be suffered to live? Should we permit people to breathe air? Should we appreciate beauty? Should we love people? Should we try to be good? Should we be honest?

The correct position on all of these is not moderation, either.

Now, if you point this out to the people who say that the problem is extremism, they will get angry at you because this isn’t what they meant. And, indeed, it’s not. The problem is that it’s what they said. The reason that they’re getting angry is that they don’t like being called out on the fact that they’re lying to you. They are actually complaining about people being outside of the mainstream despite knowing that that isn’t a valid criticism.

Curiously, liars always seem to think it rude to point out that they’re lying.

There is an exception to the above, by the way, and that is what amounts to a heresy. It is always a mistake to take a single virtue (that isn’t the all-encompassing virtue of love, as in agape, the love of God) and to value only it at the expense of all other virtues. Thus courage is good, but not to the exclusion of honesty, mercy, faith, love, etc. Mercy is good, but not to the exclusion of justice, honesty, etc. This is not normally how people use the term “extremism” as a critique, but if they were to, that would be a valid critique. It would be better to criticize this as a heresy, since the idea of a heresy is that it takes one or a few parts of orthodoxy and leaves the rest, and this is what picking a virtue and valuing only it to the exclusion of other virtues is doing. But it is also going to an extreme, and a bad form of doing so, so the word would not be inapplicable.

As I said, that’s not what people normally mean by using “extremism” as a derogative, but if anyone does, my critique above does not apply to them.

From many years ago, back when The Onion was funny (warning: colorful language):

It’s really quite accurate, and possibly even better than Charlie Booker’s version (warning, colorful language):

I can’t help but think that the days of this sort of news broadcast have to be numbered, if for no other reason that the median age of people who still watch TV news is probably 75. The damage that news has done to society and to the people who watch it is incalculable; I hope that it does end soon and that it isn’t replaced by something worse. (Not everything is replaced by something worse, after all. That only happens quite often, not every time.)

This is a profoundly stupid lyric in an otherwise truly great song. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s Blowin’ in the Wind by Bob Dylan. He sang it first, but it was covered by nearly all of the folk singers of the 1960s, and pretty much all of them sang it better than Dylan sung it. My favorite version is by Peter, Paul, and Mary:

I should note that this song is truly great if it’s taken as a lament of sin; if the questions are rhetorical because the poor, we will always have with us. And I do think that this was—not, perhaps with perfect understanding—Bob Dylan’s intention:

There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind — and it’s blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some … But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know … and then it flies away.

The answer to all of the questions is, “when everyone becomes a saint,” and indeed the answer is readily available but people won’t pick it up.

The one question in the song which cannot be taken as anything but an infantile cry for mommy and daddy to make everything better is the line I quoted in the title. The first and most obvious reason it’s just an infantile cry is: who will ban the cannon balls, and how will they enforce this ban? The only way to enforce a ban is by force, so in a direct sense whoever has better weapons than cannon balls can ban them. Nations possessing nuclear weapons could impose a cannon ball ban, for example. This is directly opposite to the intention of the song, but it is in fact the only possible answer.

Except that cannon balls were obsolete long before Blowin’ in the Wind was written. Cannon balls were a military weapon that answered the musket and pike formation which superceded bows on the battlefield. Musketeers were very slow, but a lot of them, shooting in alternation, could be fast. Because they were individually slow they were very vulnerable to cavalry, who could close the distance to musketeers before the latter could get off a second shot. The answer was to keep the musketeers close together and defend them with pikemen. Pikes were, basically, very long spears, which were good at keeping horses at bay.

The answer to the musket-and-pike formation was the cannon ball. An enormous ball of iron traveling at high speed would do enormous damage to a dense formation of men, as it would roll through them injuring or killing everyone in a straight line. This is why it was a cannon all rather than a shell; the rolling was integral to how it was used.

The answer to the cannon ball were the wide lines that were only 3 men deep which characterized infantry battles in the 1700s. With the lines being only 3 men deep, a cannon ball would injure at most only a few men as it rolled on (unless the lines made the grave mistake of maneuvering perpendicular to the enemy’s cannons). Cannon balls were a specialty item, and as military tactics adapted to them, they ceased to be used. Things like exploding shells with shrapnel, “grapeshot” (basically loading cannons with shrapnel rather than a single large projectile) etc displaced the cannon ball because they were better suited to the new military conditions.

Cannon balls were on their way out during the American civil war and were not used during World War 1 or World War 2 or the Korean war. They were most certainly not used during the “police action” in Vietnam with which much of the 1960s protest movement was concerned.

No one knows how many times cannon balls flew in history, but by the time Blowin’ in the Wind was written, the number of times they flew before their use was discontinued was a definite, if uncertainly known, quantity.

But they weren’t banned. They were only put down in favor of better weapons.

As a curious historical side-note, the use of poison gasses on the battlefield was banned. But the ban was enforced by the threat to use chemical weapons too. So, in effect, the use of chemical weapons was banned by the use of even more chemical weapons.

Not the answer that the protest movement wanted, but very much in keeping with the rest of the song.

The answer is blowin’ in the wind, and people don’t stop to pick it up.

UPDATE: Thanks to Paul for pointing out that I used the wrong spelling of “cannon”.

One of the curious things about being a parent is that it raises a question about movies which really clarifies how good one thinks it is: is it worth showing this movie to my child?

Curiously, despite Gone With the Wind being one of the all-time classics, when I ask myself this the answer is a resounding “no”.

There’s only one scene in it that I can think of which is worth passing on (the first, roughly, 15 seconds of this clip):

Unfortunately, this scene lacks most of its power if you haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know that I’ll even pass this on. It would probably be more effective to just tell the kids about it.

This is not to say that I think Gone With the Wind is not a good movie. It is a good movie. I think that my problem with it is that its main theme is that if a person makes relentlessly bad decisions and suffers misfortune, they will have neither the consolation of virtue nor the consolation of pleasant circumstances.

Which is certainly true.

It’s just one of those things which seems to me obviously true and if you try to orient your life such that your primary concern is to be a saint, you hardly need this symbolically represented for over four hours. It is very true that the wages of sin are death. At the end of the day, I think my reaction is because (using the American generic “you”): if you need a movie like Gone With the Wind to realize that the wages of sin are death, you’ve got bigger problems than (I hope that) my children have. This could, of course, be wishful thinking on my part.

On the other hand, a lot of great art in the last 200 or so years was people rediscovering what, as G.K. Chesterton put it, they could have learnt in their catechism—had they ever read it. Much of the power of it was people asking the question, “but perhaps it is true after all?”

Just in a very limited sense.

I was talking with my parents, recently, about children and childhoods. My mother lamented that Halloween was on the wane, and attributed it, in no small part, to helicopter parents who won’t let their children roam the streets unattended. There may be some truth to this, but it struck me that the Baby Boomers’ childhoods were different in no small part because their generation was named for a very real boom in the number of babies. Here’s an interesting graph of the number of births in the US:

The population of the US has been far from constant, though, so let’s put that into context (births per thousand people):

One interesting thing to note is that the baby boom was only a boom relative to what came shortly before and especially what came after it. It was more common to have children in the early 1900s than during the baby boom, but that’s a subject for another day. The other key thing to consider, with regard to the baby boom, was that it lasted for a while. There aren’t hard edges on it, but it’s traditionally dated from 1945 to 1962, which is 17 years long. I think that’s significant in the experience of people like my parents, who were born in the middle of the baby boom.

Childhood, as described by people in their late sixties here in the year of our Lord 2021, was a fun time of independence and play, with children roaming neighborhoods without parental supervision. Part of that, though, was that older kids were expected (and usually did) look out for the younger kids. And I think a big reason why that worked out was that there were plenty of older kids around to do it.

Another thing that contributed to this phenomenon, I suspect, was the housing boom which happened (in America) after World War 2. Part of it was developments like Levittowns, but housing, in general, became much less labor-intensive as large machines and industrial processes replaced human labor with machine labor. The development of trucks (for World War 2) which could carry heavy things really helped with this, with more building materials able to be constructed efficiently then transported cheaply. We don’t tend to think of how trucks improve efficiency by separating things by distance but it’s far less efficient to make something on-site than in a place designed around making it.

There were also effects from the G.I. Bill which made it possible for many returning veterans to take out mortgages, which also helped to spur the market for cheap housing. That is often a cycle, as once a thing becomes cheaper you start getting additional demand from elsewhere. While that will drive prices up in the short term, it will also tend to drive up volume which (absent restricted resources) will tend to drive up economies of scale and to overall lower prices further.

When you put this all together it resulted in a lot of communities which were predominantly made up of people of child-bearing age, rather than the more normal age distribution one gets in stable communities. Baby Boomers who grew up in these communities would have experienced an especially large number of children around.

This will have effects on things like secular Halloween celebrations (Halloween is, after all, the celebration of the coming of All Saint’s Day, i.e. “All Hallows Eve”). When you have a ton of kids who will come out for candy, it becomes fun to stock up on candy and give it out. When you expected between 0 and 3 kids showing up, it takes a lot of the fun out of it. You’re just more likely to turn off your lights and pretend you’re not home.

The fewer kids who go out, the more the children who go out are alone, too. It’s one thing to send one’s children out on their own when the streets are crawling with children. It’s another thing to send them out into the night with no one around. What I’ve discovered is that, in practice, young kids really don’t want to go out alone at night when “alone” means “alone” and not “surrounded by other people, many of whom one knows, just not one’s parents”.

I think the absence of young kids also tends to discourage teenagers. It’s one thing to show up when unescorted children are around; you’re at least partially escorting them yourself by your presence. It’s another thing to be a teenager and the only person within view and be asking for candy from adults.

When you put all of this together, I think that much of how baby boomers experienced childhood differently than later generations was at least as much because they were born during a baby boom—and during a housing boom that often concentrated child-bearing families—as it was because of cultural shifts. Yes, this was before the news did its best to constantly scare parents about letting their children out of their sight, and yes this was when parents tended to have more children so they didn’t worry as much about each individual child because they had spares, and yes this was before designer children and helicopter parents. There are many threads that go together to weave a cloth.

All that said, I think that the boom in babies is an often under-estimated factor in what life was like for baby-boomers.

I don’t know if people still complain about Christmas songs being played early; like most things about “people” I suppose it depends on who one talks to. Anyway, while I’m sympathetic to the idea of “keep the waiting in advent,” it has occurred to me that there is a reason that recently traditional secular Christmas songs are song before Christmas and not after: if you look at them, they are really advent songs. Secular advent songs, of course, but advent songs. (I’m taking the list of Christmas songs from XKCD’s list which I discussed earlier.)

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and Have a Holly Jolly Christmas both have titles (and main lyrics) in the future tense. Santa Claus is Coming To Town is technically in the present progressive tense, but all of the lyrics are anticipatory—primarily warning about present behavior in light of future rewards. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire is set on Christmas Eve, but that is still, technically speaking, during Advent (unless you’re measuring days from sundown to sundown, in which case I think that the present-tense of the song would have to be taken as anticipatory).

I’ll Be Home for Christmas, though I rarely here it played or sung, is another one clearly set in the future tense and thus an advent song. I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas would most naturally be taken to be about anticipation though it could, technically, be set on Christmas. That is, until you get to the later lyrics where he dreams of a white Christmas with every Christmas card he writes. It would be absurd to suppose the song is about somebody who sends out Christmas cards after Christmas, since their purpose is to wish someone a happy Christmas.

Rocking Around the Christmas Tree is harder to place, temporally. Its subject is a Christmas party, which I’m used to being held prior to Christmas but in 1958 when it was released it might have been the custom to have Christmas parties on Christmas day itself, though I am inclined to doubt it.

Blue Christmas (which, again, I never hear anyone sing and don’t hear played) clearly talks about Christmas in the future tense in the lyrics (“I’ll have a blue Christmas without you”).

Silver Bells could be set on Christmas or even after it. That said, it’s about Christmas decorations and such which are generally put up before Christmas, so the smart money is on it being an anticipation of Christmas.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas is another one whose very title shows it to be set before Christmas.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year is, like Silver Bells, not explicit, but it seems to be about the (secular) season of preparation for Christmas, placing it before Christmas.

The other songs on the XKCD list (with one exception) aren’t about Christmas at all, or at least not a present Christmas. Winter Wonderland, Let It Snow, Jingle Bell Rock, and Sleigh Ride are all just about winter. (So, for that matter, is Baby It’s Cold Outside, which is increasingly be played as if it’s a Christmas song.) Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is primarily about the time before Christmas, and culminates in Rudolph’s triumph on Christmas Eve, but al of this was in the distant past. Frosty the Snowman is about a magical snowman and has nothing whatever to do with Christmas. (Admittedly, the animated movie Frosty the Snowman is set on Christmas Eve, but that’s still anticipating Christmas.)

The only real exception on the entire list is Little Drummer Boy, which is actually set after Christmas. It seems to be based on the visitation of the Magi, which is traditionally celebrated on Epiphany, which for many years in the western Church has been celebrated in January. Since the song doesn’t reference anything that sets its date, it could be anywhere from the day of Christ’s birth (e.g. when the angels gave the good news to the shepherds) to months after the Magi visited. I suspect that no one pays attention to the lyrics of this song, though, since approximately 20% of them are “pa”, 20% are “rum” and 45% are “pum”.

So, all things considered, I think we have some of the reason why these songs are all played before Christmas, rather than after it—they are, in fact, (secular) advent songs. As Chesterton often noted, the common man often has his heart in the right place, even when it’s there for the wrong reasons in his head.

I’m a bowhunter who hunts in western Pennsylvania, so one of the problems that I face in the late season is keeping warm when it’s cold out. Much of this is pretty easy, and is the same answer as anywhere else—layers. The only difference is that the outer layer is camouflage. That said, this does not apply as much to the feet, since most people out in the cold are doing different things than hunters are. In particular, hunters need to walk to their hunting spot, then they sit or stand still in the cold for hours on end. That last part is particularly important, because they don’t generate as much bodyheat as someone moving does.

Before I get to that, I should mention that it also doesn’t apply as much to the hands, and I’ve found some very good hunting mittens made by Hot Shot Gear. They’re called pop top hunting mittens, and they’re both warm mittens but also allow you to slide your fingers out of the mittens in thin gloves, which is essentially for your string hand. I shoot with a trigger release, so I only need one finger, though a thumb release or traditional finger guard would require more fingers and this allows that. They’re warm and very functional for archery. As a bonus, the index finger has a tab on it that can work with capacitive touchscreens, which is very helpful for texting someone to complain about the deer not coming by.

Anyway, there are two main solutions I’ve been able to find to the problem of keeping one’s feet warm. The first are enormous boots which are both heavy and cumbersome. They’re tiring to walk in and they clomp noisily as one can only really step with one’s full foot in them; the best one can do to not clomp is a mild heel-to-toe motion. On the plus side, they’re warm and waterproof.

The other main solution are thinks like mukluks. Mukluks were designed for seriously cold conditions but they are also lightweight and flexible. The only downside is that they’re not waterproof. In the places where they were developed this isn’t really a problem, since below about 15F (-9.4C) water can be relied upon to be hard and stay hard (that is, to be ice and not melt) and so being waterproof is irrelevant because the only liquid water you will be exposed to is in your water bottle. My understanding of places like North Dakota, Canada, Alaska, etc.—where people really love mukluks—15F is spring weather and people tend to wear tennis shoes and light jackets in it. I may be exaggerating slightly, but they’re concerned with whether the boots are good below -30F, not 15F. (Moreover, if the weather is frequently colder than 15F, a warm day that gets up to there or even into the 20s isn’t going to melt any ice.)

In western Pennsylvania, though, winter frequently oscillates between being a bit below freezing and just above it. Even on fairly cold days it’s not uncommon to find mud in places where the sun hits for a few hours or leaves provide some insulation, unless it’s been well below freezing every day for a few days. We need waterproof footgear, but I really don’t want to pay the penalty of clomping around in massive, inflexible boots. So I got a good idea from this post: making a winter boot out of galoshes and a thick felt bootliner plus insoles. I tried it out and it worked extremely well. The results were light, flexible, comfortable, waterproof, and warm.

I’m a size (men’s US) 11 wide and ordered the boot liner true to size and the overboot sized to 11-13 shoes. The result had plenty of room inside without being too big, and comfortable fit me wearing a thick winter socket plus a second, even thicker winter sock. I absolutely loved their performance and feel.

To give a list of the particulars that I used:

• Overboot: Tingley PVC 10″ Workbrutes (note: at the time of writing they’re cheaper on Amazon)
• Felt liner: Steger Mukluks 9mm Felt Boot Liners
• Insole: Steger Mukluks Wool Felt Insole
• Thick sock: Darn Tough Heavyweight Tactical Sock
• Super Thick Sock: J.B. Felds Icelandic Socks

Something to note about this approach is that the total cost for the parts that weren’t the socks (which you’d have to buy separately with any boot) was $67.46 (not including tax or shipping) which is extremely cheap for a pair of insulated boots. With the socks it came to $113.36 (the Darn Tough socks were expensive, but in my experience Darn Tough socks are worth it, especially because they honor their no-questions-asked lifetime guarantee). For a comfortable way to avoid pain and possibly frostbite, I found it well worth it.

One thing I need to note is that this approach gives no “support” of any kind. I hate “support” in shoes because it mostly means some sort of uncomfortable rigid thing that prevents the foot from bending naturally and makes a natural gait extremely difficult. That said, I spent a year or two wearing vibram five-fingers, so I developed strong feet whose arch comes from the muscles and tendons in the foot, as it’s supposed to, and not from resting on top of something that pushes the middle of the foot up. If you haven’t developed the muscles and tendons in your foot to be able to walk naturally, you will probably not find this approach nearly as comfortable. If you haven’t, I recommend trying to do so. (If you can get them to fit your foot, or make do with ones that are too large as I had to, vibram five fingers are a great way to do this. Just take it slowly. You don’t want to walk through a large box store your first time out—concrete is very tiring to walk on naturally. After a few weeks, your feet will be strong enough that it’s not tiring anymore, but you have to walk a little before you can walk a lot. Once you’ve done this, though, walking is a lot more pleasurable to do, and it pays dividends for hunting where you can more easily use the ball-first walking style that allows you to feel if you’re stepping on a branch and pick your foot up, so you don’t announce to everything with ears in the forest that you’re coming.)