Jeez, guys, am I the only one who remembers?
I can’t be the only one who likes to blow s*** up.
Jay Manifold
The American Gift of Forgetfulness
Presuming the residual antipathies Lex quoted in I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot to be characteristic of UK media figures, we have one more reason to regard tasteless American ahistoricity as a feature rather than a bug, because endocrine-system reactions to “Roman Catholic” are, I believe, just about inconceivable here, and certainly not because we’ve all translated into a higher plane of flawlessly nontheistic rationality.
I was going to make this a comment on Lex’s post but then realized that I wanted to pile on the links, which would choke the comment-spam filter faster than a Greenpeace activist on a tour of a nuclear power plant. So away I go with a barrage of autobiographical details, which is the price of a post written by me that’s anything other than hopelessly abstract. Gosh, you’re thinking, I can’t wait to see this!
Notch Up Another One
3 Americans Awarded Nobel in Economics — and one of them is “Roger B. Myerson, a professor at the University of Chicago …”
This makes, what, about 900 of our guys?
UPDATE: U of C News Office release here.
Millennial Boyz
I’m on a mission from Lex. On Thu 12 Jul at 5:34 PM CDT, he wrote me:
> Are the Millennials Different?
>
> I know you are a fan. Any response must be cross-posted on CB!
I can think of nothing better to do on a fine Bastille Day evening — having missed the concert by virtue of being 400 miles to the southwest — than consume modest quantities of ethanol in the form of Boulevard Lunar Ale and compose a rambling post for infliction on the readership here. By way of my usual thinning out of my prospective audience, graze on over to Arcturus for what has become known as the Baby Boomer Apocalypse post, which will 1) impart what I think is the most important aspect of Strauss & Howe’s model and 2) very likely cause you to decide you’ve got better things to do than read the rest of this.
Genes and Culture
This is, in part, a review of Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (hereafter SV&C), which I am carelessly posting here without even checking to see whether actual smart people, notably the ones over at Albion’s Seedlings (to say nothing of Gene Expression), have already written it up, mainly because they’ll have done a better job than me. Notice: “in part.” The book doesn’t take long to summarize, so after the genetics I’ll wander off into culture, including but not limited to linguistics.
Warning: spoilers. SV&C is, in a sense, a series of cliffhangers, and I’m going to reveal the ending.