Good afternoon from a crisp, sunny, early autumn day in
Minneapolis.
We spent a
few days on the south shore of Lake Superior, in Bayfield (WI). Bits and pieces:
Mid- to
high-end artisan shops/boutiques are pretty much the same across the
country. The foci of landscape painters vary;
Sedona is not Bayfield is not Naples.
Pottery is similar everywhere.
(By saying that I don't denigrate it; we keep seeing lovely pottery
that, ten years ago, we would have purchased.
Because we need nothing in the way of pottery or other material goods,
and because we're in the decluttering phase of life, not acquiring, we only
look, not purchase. The same is true for
paintings and glass.) There is an
enormous number of very creative people working with wood, glass, acrylics, and
so on, but in the larger picture, these places are alike.
There is
not a lot to do in Bayfield and the surrounding area. There aren't even any state or national parks
within a short distance. So we walked a
local trail and sat and looked out at the lake and Madeline Island. A three-hour sunset cruise of the Apostle
Islands was scenic and great fun. I had
no idea these islands are as big as they are.
The cruise captain, who gave us a running narrative, told us that
Manhattan and Madeline Islands are approximately the same size; the major
difference is that the population of Manhattan is roughly 1.5 million and the
population of Madeline is roughly 1.5 hundred.
Nice line. (According to World
Population Review, in 2018 Manhattan is actually 1.63 million, and several
sources say Madeline Island is 302, but those are minor quibbles.)
Some of you
certainly saw in the news—I don't know if the tragedy received national
coverage—that four members of a family died when kayaking from Madeline to
Michigan islands (in the Apostles). The
parents, with three young children, set off about 1:00 Thursday afternoon for a
4-mile kayak trip between the two islands.
At some point the wind came up, the kayak took on water, and they all
ended up in the lake. Only the mother
survived. What's a little creepy for us
is that our sunset cruise went fairly close to where the accident happened—and
the family was in the water at the time.
We didn't see them, of course, and I'm not sure we were close enough to
where it happened that we could have even if we'd been looking (unless we had
high-powered binoculars). There were a
swarm of rescue vessels sent out to find the father and children, but that wasn't
until later (and almost assuredly too late, given the temperature of the
water). One guy we talked to about the
accident was sharply critical of the parents:
who would take three kids on a kayak across four miles of open water in
Lake Superior? It's a dangerous lake and
the weather and wind can turn almost instantly. (Others have expressed similar
views in the succeeding days.) You know
how I have felt since Krystin died; I can't begin to fathom how that wife and
mother must feel. She's going to need psychotherapy
for a long time.
I do have
to recommend highly one restaurant in Bayfield, the Fat Radish. It's a "farm to table" place, and
the decoration is mildly funky, but the food is marvelous. We ate there twice. The food and wine prices are reasonable, the food
is ample and the wine glasses are filled generously. I confess that I have not ordered a Salad
Nicoise for many years and had forgotten what you get. I wanted a light dinner because I was still
somewhat full from a late lunch. My
goodness. I think I ordered the menu
item that delivered the most food; the platter—and it was a platter—included a
small bowl of Kalamata olives, 3 large shrimp, greens, sweet grape tomatoes,
blue cheese, hard boil egg, baguette slices, white radish, grilled asparagus
and carrot, salmon, bruschetta, and potatoes.
Kathy took pictures before and after.
This is not
a part of the country in which I would like to have lived 150 years ago. It's beautiful now, at the end of summer, but
the winters and life are harsh. Without
plumbing, heating, and easy transportation, life was hard. Living as a logger or one who cut sandstone
is this climate doesn't appeal to me.
(Of course, those jobs wouldn't appeal to me in *any* climate, but that's
beside the point.) Maybe I am just a 21st-century
wimp.
I was
reminded once again what a lonely life the lighthouse keepers led. The Apostles have several lighthouses
scattered across them, each of which had a keeper in the 19th and
early 20th centuries. At
least the lighthouse keepers on the East Coast, and places such as Prince
Edward Island, lived where they could get to the local town or village for both
supplies and human interaction. Those
who lived on islands were truly isolated.
They had to make their supply runs count!
Our one
regret on this little venture north was that we missed the Testicle
Festival. Yep, we saw a sign for it
driving from Bayfield to Cumberland (where we were joining my brother and
sister-in-law at their lake place). Here's
what Wikipedia tells us about these marvelous events (that are held in many
locations!):
A testicle festival is an event
held at several small towns in which the featured activity is the consumption
of animal testicles, usually battered and fried. The oldest such festival takes
place in Byron, Illinois, and features turkey testicles. Similar festivals are
held in Deerfield, Michigan; Olean, Missouri; Tiro, Ohio; Oakdale, California; Ashland,
Nebraska; Huntley, Illinois; Stillwater, Oklahoma; Salmon, Idaho; Clinton,
Montana, and Dundas, Wisconsin some of which feature cattle testicles. The
Montana State Society has held an annual 'Rocky Mountain Oyster Festival' in
Arlington, Virginia since 2005.
Ewwww.
* * *
A couple of
friends wrote in response to my approbation for Mr. Simon's characterization of
Mr. Trump and friends as evil.
On whether Trump is evil -- I think
much of what the administration is doing and seeking to do is wrong-headed and
selfish and elitist, but I don't think I'd put things like terrible
environmental policy and attacking Obamacare in the same "evil"
category as separating parents and children and putting the children in
camps. I think there can be legitimate
policy disagreements about the way markets work, about the extent and impact of
environmental regulation, and about the best way to provide health care so that
I'm not quite ready to condemn those actions as "evil", as
fundamentally immoral and demonstrating the total absence of human
compassion.
This friend, for whom I have enormous respect, is someone
with whom I rarely disagree. I do on
this point. For example, one recent news
headline read ""The Trump administration revealed its new coal-plant
pollution rules yesterday. The document, the so-called Affordable Clean Energy
rule, acknowledges that the plan would increase pollution and lead to 1,400
premature deaths a year." Knowingly
condemning people to premature death is evil.
I agree that there are legitimate disagreements about public policy, and
which alternative will do the most good or the least harm. But adopting a policy that will knowingly do
harm, without identifiable gain, is evil.
So also with attempts to restrict access to health care, or make its cost
prohibitive for many. Mothers and babies
will die because of a lack of adequate maternal care. That also is evil.
In cases
where lives are not directly at stake, or where the impact of available
alternatives is unclear, then I concur:
choices are not evil. How to fund
transit, or what transit should be funded, or how to provide affordable housing
(or not), how to fund education and to what level, the extent to which military
spending should increase or decrease, how to resolve disputes about network
neutrality—there are legitimate arguments on several sides. No decision will knowingly lead directly to
human suffering and death.
Another
friend wrote that evil is "intentionally harming another person for one's
own satisfaction" and went on to observe that there is "plenty of it
around." She clarified: "I think 'harm' can be done in many
ways, not just physical. . . . Racism,
xenophobia, greed, etc. -- all are harmful and provide some kind of twisted
satisfaction to those who exhibit them, I suppose mainly by making them feel
superior." I agree that these
characteristics do harm to many, in some cases in ways I can't fully understand
(as a white male), and from what I recall from Lutheran confirmation classes,
don't conform to Christian teachings.
When harmful effects flow from beliefs, I don't believe it illegitimate
to call those beliefs evil.
* * *
From Quartz Obsession:
23.5: Pounds of head lettuce consumed per capita in the US
in 2000
15: Pounds of head lettuce consumed per capita in the US in
2016
I wonder why the dramatic drop—and whether it's correlated
with the increase in obesity.
* * *
A friend took issue with my wish
for a magic (suicide) pill.
I think the "magic pill"
idea is problematic because there are too many people with undiagnosed
depression who would appear rational under your scheme. They're in possession of "their
faculties" but that doesn't mean it would be wise or even kind to give
them such an easy way "out."
That's why assisted suicide, when made legal at all, carries with it
more safeguards than you suggest. My concerns aren't out of a "right to
life" commitment (obviously, I should think) but from other concerns.
I get the point. The
difficulty I have is that I don't like the state (i.e., the government) telling
me whether or not I can make my final exit.
I know, I accept and endorse the state telling me to do a lot of other
things (have to have a driver's license and insurance to operate a car, have
legal responsibilities as a parent, have to obey the many laws of Minnesota and
the U.S., etc.), but in those cases the requirements exist in service of the
common good. There is no service to the
common good in preventing anyone from committing suicide. (Well, I concede that there is in the case of
someone who leaves dependents without any means of support, or children without
surviving parents, in which case they end up being supported by the taxpayers. That's one reason why I suggested that the
minimum age for obtaining a magic pill without barriers be set reasonably high,
like 60 or more, so that the odds are greater that use of the pill will be
because of geriatric afflictions and the odds are less that dependents without
support will be left behind.)
Another
friend simply observed that "much opposition to suicide, assisted or
otherwise, is devoid of empathy or even sympathy as well as being downright
irrational, though possibly programmed into this branch of the animal kingdom."
* * *
I guess
this isn't really news, although I don't recall having seen research data on
the point. University of British Columbia
researchers found, through surveys, that "men assign less importance to
care-oriented careers than women do, possibly because men internalize different
values than women." As we know, the
number of women in STEM fields is far smaller than the number of men ("just
nine to 16 per cent of engineers and 21 per cent of computer programmers in the
U.S."), the number of men in HEED fields (health care, early education,
and domestic—and I don't know what "domestic" entails) is even
smaller ("only 10 per cent of nurses and four per cent of preschool and
kindergarten teachers in the U.S.").
The authors
ask if career goals are affected by "communal values—a focus on caring for
others" that women tend to hold more than men. "We found that men place less importance
on more basic communal values, such as how important it is to help others, and
that others are taken care of. . . . They
also tended to be less interested in very care-oriented careers, like nursing.
One reason that men, on average, might not be interested in taking on these
types of jobs is that they don't really fit the kind of values men learn to
pursue." Not surprisingly, men also
rated STEM jobs as worth more than HEED jobs (so did women, but by a smaller
margin).
The researchers
also note that these values vary across the world; in nations where caring more
valued, there are more men in teaching and nursing. It's difficult to draw a causal inference,
but also difficult not to conclude that culture plays a role.
Good luck
on changing American culture in less than a couple of centuries. The difference in representation wouldn't be
quite so obnoxious if the salaries were on par.
I've long thought that nurses and teachers should make about as much as
engineers and computer folks. But then,
I've never been particularly fond of letting "the market" completely
control salaries.
* * *
As long as
I'm on the subject of sex differences, this is an interesting finding. "Researchers reporting in the journal
Current Biology on August 16 have found an unexpected difference between men
and women. On average, their studies show, men pick up on visual motion
significantly faster than women do."
The discovery was serendipitous; they were looking at sex differences in
information processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Males evidence ASD much more than females, so
the researchers assumed there is some factor related to sex that affects its occurrence. They asked other researchers in the field to
test their findings, which were confirmed.
"We were very surprised,"
says Scott Murray at the University of Washington, Seattle. "There is very
little evidence for sex differences in low-level visual processing, especially
differences as large as those we found in our study." Murray, Tadin, and colleagues report that the
observed sex difference in visual perception can't be explained by general
differences in the speed of visual processing, overall visual discrimination
abilities, or potential motor-related differences. The differences aren't
apparent in functional MRI images of the brain either.
I doubt
this has much practical impact in the real world, although I wonder about such activities
as video games (which rely in part on visual motion). Are boys better than girls at video games
because of this slight difference in processing? One can also wonder if the difference evolved
from our hunter-gatherer days, when (theoretically, although the hypothesis is
open to doubt) men hunted animals and women stayed in the clan/tribe home.
Enough for
today. Enjoy the day and (where you have
them) the glorious days of autumn.
Gary
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