Christmas 2018

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Newgrange  is  an ancient structure in Ireland so constructed that the sun, at the exact time of the winter solstice, shines directly down a long corridor and illuminates the inner chamber. More about Newgrange  here  and  here.

Grim  has an Arthurian passage about the Solstice.

Don Sensing has thoughts astronomical, historical, and theological about  the Star of Bethlehem.

Vienna Boys Choir, from Maggie’s Farm

Lappland in pictures…link came from the great and much-mourned  Neptunus Lex

Snowflakes and snow crystals, from Cal Tech. Lots of great photos

In the bleak midwinter, from King’s College Cambridge

Rick Darby  has some thoughts on the season. More  here.

The  first radio broadcast of voice and music  took place on Christmas Eve, 1906.  (although there is debate about the historical veracity of this story)

An air traffic control version of  The Night Before Christmas.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, sung by  Enya

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret Soltan writes about poetry for those cold dark late December days

A Christmas-appropriate poem from Rudyard Kipling

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Solzhenitsyn Revisited

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Cathy Young, writing in Quillette, has caused me to rethink Aleksandr. Solzhenitsyn: The Fall of a Prophet. I have long been an admirer, and even when his nationalism seemed a misplaced traditionalism based on a romanticised view of Russian history, I thought of that as quaint more than dangerous.  She was already making a powerful case that we should be grateful for his actions up until the Gulag Archipelago and his subsequent exile, but after that, no so much.  In addition to his anti-semitism (weakly defended by Sharansky and Wiesel), this caught me up short:

But to many of Solzhenitsyn’s former admirers, his wholehearted embrace of Vladimir Putin and Putin’s neo-authoritarianism in the 2000s was even more dismaying than his views of ethnic conflicts.

I hadn’t known that. It gives one pause.

Dating While Being a Trump Supporter, in Manhattan

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Pamela Garber write about her experiences.

What motivates the people who are expressing such rage about the President and his supporters?  While surely some of them have thought through the issues and come to their opinions through their own reasoning processes, I think that for many of them, the explanation can be found in a comment at this post, which is about the “progressive” anger at Israel:

Leftist political dynamics are, in my opinion, as clear an example of emergence (i.e, an apparently complex property of a collective possessed by none of the individuals, but caused by simple interactions between the parts) as exists. Like the schooling of fish, or the beautiful murmurations of starlings, Progressives can intellectually turn on a dime in the most amazing and – if you’re viewing from a distance – beautiful ways. While scuba diving, I loved poking my finger in a school of brilliantly colored reef fishes and watching the entire school turn in perfect simultaneity like the members of a North Korean dance troupe or dancers in a Busby Berkeley film. To achieve this level of perfection, each individual in the collective needs to know nothing about about the larger picture, only what the immediate neighbors are doing. From a distance, Democratic “talking points of the day” murmurations require no intellect, no opinions to “re-examine”, but are more akin to crystal formation on a window in wintertime.

Garber, who is a therapist, offers her own thoughts about the psychological dynamics at work in the anger.

Print the Legend

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“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So goes the line from the Jimmy Stewart-John Wayne tale, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Spread all over the interwebules this week was a hilarious account of how a slightly obsessed engineer revenged himself upon local porch-pirates by concocting a tempting fake delivered package and leaving it on his doorstep. Being technically quite adept, he booby-trapped the package with fine glitter, fart-spray and four telephones primed to record the resulting mayhem which was as hilarious as the Daily Mail always promises, but rarely delivers. Honestly, I think the man could go into business, providing those dummy parcels for customers to outfit with their own cellphones, can-o-fart-spray and glitter with which to discombobulate parcel thieves. The Deity knoweth that local police departments usually don’t get serious about this kind of petty theft: where the law can’t or won’t get involved, there will inevitably be an opening for creative vigilantism.
The other leading story this week gives even more cause for cynical amusement.

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Group Identification

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Cross-posted from Assistant Village Idiot.

I was listening to a podcast that included female pastors talking about Methodism, both noting with approval that John Wesley encouraged women as preachers, but both getting immediately sidetracked, one into Wesley not giving his wife any credit for their joint research, the other for two thousand years of men running things in the church and not including women. There was laughing, but it was not really good-natured. I thought again, as I have many times, This happened to other women.  It didn’t happen to you.  You are now complaining in anger at men who didn’t do this. Taking it a bit further this time, I thought Your experience has been closer to the opposite.  You are young and well-educated, and thus have spent most of your life at schools, which favor females strongly. It is in fact so foreign to you that you can’t even read about it happening in other times and other places without getting quite angry. 

That I don’t understand it, not about sex, not about race or ethnicity, not about type of grouping may come from always regarding myself entirely as an individual, which may in turn come from not being part of a disfavored group.  I had difficulties of poverty, of being stigmatised because of divorce, of being personally rejected by those who should have had more concern for me, but none of those was because of any group membership.  They were all my own burden, my own battle. Whatever prejudice the groups I belonged to experienced was not recent, other than the general prejudice against the poor. All immigrants experienced prejudice and some disdain, but Swedes and Nova Scotians had far less of that than others.

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