Worship

Worship is going on at all times, whether we are aware of it or not. The whole creation praises its creator. When our local church has a worship service, it is not making something that would not be there otherwise. Our services provide an opportunity for the people of God to join in the worship already proceeding. It is not something we build, but a door into a building that already exists.

Oops

I have neglected to mention that Ben's new site, Ten-Four Films, is up on the sidebar. It includes his blog, but now includes his films as well. Love the home page. Enjoy.

Rapid Language Development

There are lots of genetic and cultural foundations to language that likely developed in spurts over time. Yet some final genetic piece seems to have been a tipping point that sent communication from primitive to complex very rapidly. In the first place, any improvement in communication between tribesmen conferred such an advantage in exploiting an environment that each of them must have spread rapidly. That some last piece also did so may seem odd to those accustomed to the evolutionary narrative of slow, almost imperceptible improvement, but it is likely anyway.

The evidence for this is not archaeological but from events occurring in our lifetimes. A simplified, stripped-down, invented language becomes complex as soon as a generation of children grows up with it. A pidgin language is such a stripped-down item, invented by adults who come in contact with each other for trade. "Pidgin" may in fact be a corruption of "business," as the language Tok Pissin was originally a "talk business" language. But when infants come into the picture, learning the language from birth, it develops word-order, declensions, and subtler distinctions within a generation. It becomes what we call a creole. A creole is a real, complex language, as subtle as the other 6000 languages in the world. It sounds primitive to the speakers of the original language because the new speakers seem to just plain have it wrong, and use mispronunciations and simplifications as foundation pieces. Yet it has its own internal subtleties.

All this happens in a generation. The kids just do it. No one tells them they're supposed to make up a sophisticated language, but they make what they need, and their communication needs are complex. They have a full genetic pre-loading to make a language if the building blocks are placed in their hearing. There is even a Nicaraguan school for the deaf where the children spontaneously made up an enormously complex sign language based on the few signs adults brought to them. No one told them to. When men invade and take local wives who speak a different language, the children of that village will develop what they need.

As I noted, for this puzzle piece to have a dramatic effect it had to have been undergirded by a host of other cognitive abilities, each of which developed in their own time. The FOXP2 gene (pronounced forkhead box 2 not "fox") is often nominated as that last puzzle piece for language. While the story is fascinating and something similar may indeed be the key, FOXP2 doesn't yet have the explanatory power to sustain its popular reputation. Still, it is a good illustration of the concept of "final genetic piece" language.

The first fully complex languages around 60-80,000 years ago may not have been as fully sophisticated as current human languages. There have been cognitive improvements in humans since then, two of which have been identified at 37,000 and 6,000 years ago. Don't jump to Edenic conclusions on that last improvement, though. But the improvements were so dramatic that these speaking peoples outcompeted and displaced everyone else quickly. We are all descended from them.

We are also watching an example of this dramatic drive to language complexity - also driven by the young - happening under our view. Internet communication is developing complexity to keep pace with its needs. For content-heavy communication we still use standard English. But for electronic social communication the needs are different. Words are stripped down to initials (ROTFL, FTW) which seems an uber-efficiency to communicate phrases and sentences. Yet these phrases and sentences are often only social signs, light on content but meant to express mood. Emoticons and punctuation repeats serve a similar function. One can view them as highly efficient ways of communicating nuance with a few strokes. But one can look through the other end of the telescope and see them as mostly content-useless, formulaic conventions. Both are true. Kids are both simplifying and complicating the language at the same time to meet the specific needs of electronic social networking.

No one told them to. They just do it. Same as thousands of years ago. Once a few children had been born with the necessary genetic pieces in place (and so likely siblings or cousins) they would have made a language. The other children in the tribe would have had the smarts to imitate a lot of it, even if they didn't get it all, and this would create an even larger pool of speakers. When those children grew to adulthood, that tribe would kick butt.

Racism

In the comments section of a recent post of neo's there was an interesting exchange between Occam's Beard and gcotharn (scroll about a quarter of the way down). Both had gone to lefty sites trying to illustrate the illogic of many racism charges by accusing good liberals there of being racist on the flimsiest of evidence. But instead of the light dawning, the accused protested solely on the basis of being a good person. These were, significantly, people who had demonstrated logical abilities in other conversations. Why then were they unable to even consider making a logical argument against the charge, instead reverting to character defense?

The more I thought about it, the more revealing this became. Most people think of "racist" as a fairly objective term. The line may vary from person to person, but the idea that a charge of racism must be founded on some actual evidence of treating one race differently seems rather obvious. One refutes the charge or admits to it on the basis of tangible evidence. Put this baldly, it would seem silly to use any other meaning of "racist."

Yet I admit I understand it, at least in its milder forms. Perhaps it is left over from my days as a liberal, but it seems to me mere politeness to take a bit of extra consideration with anyone who might have historical or cultural reasons to be a bit touchy. We adjust our speech much as we would adjust our physical contact for a person with a sunburn. In my recent exchange with Elisheva I chose my words carefully, not because I did not want to look antisemitic, but because I did not want to give unintentional offense. People who don't make this adjustment are seen as rather boorish. "Never speak of a rope in the family of one who has been hanged."

Most people don't mind in the least treating all others with extra consideration around selected topics. It just seems kind. But most of us also have defenses that cause us to resist someone presuming on that kindness. We capitulate over small things, yet reach a point where we consider others' demands that we change to be a boorishness of their own. We set limits on what others can demand of us in extra consideration. We refuse to be held hostage by a person who takes more favors than deserved.

But how if we believed the other person's deserts were unlimited? How can I deny the request of one who saved my very life? Or, I betrayed her years ago and will now do whatever she asks to make it up. We might then feel that the failure to meet a demand was indeed a want of goodness on our part. Imagine if we did not have the defense of limit-setting and proportion, or had voluntarily relinquished it? The objective standards of what would be acceptable social interaction would then not apply. If people cut in line or took more than their share we would no longer stop them.

Put another way, if the police in your town protected you in great danger and saved your life, you might acquiesce in any ticket they wrote on you, even if you weren't speeding. If a fire had wiped out many of the merchants on the street but spared your shop, you might intentionally not notice their cheating you, even if the fire was not your fault.

Progressives may have convinced themselves that the victim claims of numerous groups are so unlimited that any accusation must be acknowledged as fair in its own way.

Post 2100 - Best of July 2006

It's been over a month since I did one of these. Do the math. At that rate I would never catch up.

The month was very big for book reviews and commentaries, apparently. I complained about Freakonomics. I had some praise for the language book The Way We Talk Now. I liked Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left Of It and had some further comments on Virginia Woolf.

I even discovered a similarity in the relationship between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and between Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell while reading The Narnian and The Rivals.

It's hard to believe that few people believed there was a Religious Left just three years ago, but the conventional wisdom was exactly that. I had a lengthy, rather irritated post arguing that there is indeed a powerful Religious Left. Don't read the whole thing, just browse it.

I wrote of yet another example of how Monty Python provides absurd situations which actually turn out to be true in politics, comparing Middle-East negotiations to The Cheese Shop.

Why cultural values are more worth preserving than ecosystems.

And the obligatory linguistics post summarising Merritt Ruhlen's list of words still identifiable from mankind's original language.

Evolution and Young Earth Creationism - 2

It was pretty clear what I was driving at with the contrast between the National Geographic 2M+ years impression of the origin of humanity versus the Genesis impression. For 97% of that 2,300,000 years, those creatures didn’t have sophisticated language as we know it. You can define humanity by tool-making, I suppose, but I don’t see why you couldn’t just as arbitrarily choose upright walking and go farther back, or choose complex language and go farther forward in development for the arrival point.

Necessary tangent: I will do a separate but short post on why complex language did not develop over tens of thousands of years but sprang up rapidly once a tipping point (probably a genetic one) was reached. There would be some foundation, certainly. It would have been more advanced than the communications of baboons, presumably. But the change would not have been gradual.

Nor are we stymied at the 50-60,000 year range of having to unreservedly call them people just like us either. I personally think that language is a good dividing line, but if someone wanted to get stickier – get more technical – there are a lot of things about that group that still aren’t like us. They don’t have permanent dwellings. No domesticated animals or agriculture. No metalworking, living in villages. No trade as we know it, or getting along with groups larger than one’s own band. We are seeing some interesting stuff, however: in addition to the spears they’ve had for a long time, we’re starting to see bows and arrows; they are not only throwing furs around themselves for protection, they are even beginning to sew pieces together with big bone needles to make garments. Something like art, music, and religion might be developing. Once you know our history, they are clearly becoming us. They are significantly different from other animals. But where we put the finish line is an interesting question.

To cut to the chase: when do we see this suite of behaviors that tells us okay, those are humans as much as we are, we can no longer deny it. Anyone? Intergroup contact increases during an Ice Age about 18,000 years ago. Dog domesticated, 12,000; other animals over the next few thousand years. Semi-permanent dwellings, agriculture, surplus and trade, about 8,000 years ago. I don’t think we want to put the finish line that close. Certainly we don’t want to put it at the development of writing, or cities, or the like, as there are cultures now that don’t have those things and yet are indisputably human. But we are in Genesis range, aren’t we? We are 99% of the way from Olduvai to today just to get some cooperation beyond the level of the tribal band.

Our Martian landing today, looking at the humans talking, writing, spread out over the whole planet, building cities, making electricity, would love to have the data from our scientists about exactly when these changes happened, and would no doubt reject the Genesis 6000 years as a suitable time frame. But if our current secularists tried to push the issue too far, trying to get him to go up and speak before the United Nations and put all those myths to rest once and for all he might demur. He might look at the first few chapters of the anthropology textbooks and say they were technically correct but essentially misleading. To counteract the myth of gradual progress, he might recommend that children read something like Genesis, just to get the basic – and perhaps more important – concept of how quickly and recently this all occurred into their cute little craniums. (No, it shouldn’t be crania. Singular forms that have embedded into English take English plural forms, not the plurals from their language of origin.)

There are three major objections to the Genesis story: time scale, location, and number of original humans. I think I've taken care of time scale and will move on to the others. You might begin to guess some of my points.

Evolution and Young Earth Creationism - 1A

I'm still working on the next section. For now, just keep thinking of that man from Mars dropping by every 100,000 years and seeing no change for a coupla dozen visits. Last two journal entries, at 200,000 years ago and 100,000 years ago:

21. No change to report. This batch got smarter than the other apes and then stopped dead. I think we should drop them.

22. There might be some hints of progress here, but I'm probably imagining things because I want to see it. Hope springs eternal in the Martian gazorninplat and all that.

Or, if 100,000 years is too big to imagine, think of it in 10,000 year increments - hundreds of them since the Laetoli footprints - with no change. That is, if grant money for Martian academics survives that many disappointments.

335. Worst career choice ever, studying humans. Mother told me to go into retail and I should've listened.

Evolution and Young Earth Creationism

Impressions Versus Science

If you bing, google, or yahoo up “first humans” you get a collection of estimates of upright figures who lived somewhere further than 2 million years ago. Artistic images from the Olduvai and Laetoli discoveries likewise show bipedal creatures, a bit hairier than us, heads a little different, but clearly meant to emphasise their similarity to us. They hold hands. They look off to the horizon. I will call this the National Geographic impression, as that is the popular-culture representative of the textbooks and educational videos which teach that view.

In contrast, what I will call the Genesis view is of figures that look a good deal more like us. They are in fact usually healthier and better-looking than we are, a sort of Platonic ideal of the human form. As most of the artists depicting them until recently were European, they used to look more European than Semitic. That has been changing over the last few decades. They look rather Mediterranean now.

The impression created by the National Geographic view is that humans emerged 2.3 million years ago, in East Africa, from a large population. How large? That varies greatly, as it seems to depend on the time snapshot focused on. But the impression created is of many small bands of humans over a limited area expanding eventually to a population of many thousands ancestors of wonderful us.

The Genesis impression,drawn directly from the text, is that the first humans were two people who lived about 6000 years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

In one sense, and the most common, the science is all on the side of the National Geographic view. I am an evolutionist and accept that science. I believe in Lucy and Olduvai Gorge and stone tools having a great deal to do with our origins. But I am concerned at the impressions created by the National Geographic view, impressions that accord more with a particular worldview than with the actual science as we know it.

Because Young Earth Creationists (YEC) limit the discussion to the last 10,000 years, and because people in general tend to have large numbers run together in their heads, any discussion of hominid creatures from say, 230,000 years ago tends to be immediately rejected by YEC's and immediately accepted as anti-creationist evidence by evolutionists. Yet 230,000 years ago is only 10% of the way back to 2.3 million. We miss that because our brains just read "Big Number," which to evolutionists means "proves my point" and YEC's means "can't be true."

If we start at 2.3M years, we have these First Humans. They. make stone cutting tools by artfully chipping away certain types of rock. If we move forward a hundred thousand years, we find them doing the same thing. Two, three, four hundred thousand years on, same tools. No improvement. At six hundred thousand years forward, about 1.7M years ago, there is a slight improvement in the stone cutting tools. That is a very long period of time. Have these First Humans improved in other realms - in social organization, housing, variety of diet, anything like that? No, no, no, and no. Do they sound like any human beings you have ever heard of, going thousands of generations without the slightest improvement, even by accident, of the way they go about living?

The National Geographic supporters, seeing where this is going, will object at this point. Wait, we never said they were just like us. We don't call them human beings so much as hominids. We know they were different and there was development. You are misrepresenting us. No, actually, I'm not. The first exercise in this essay was to google up "first humans," and those folks that lived 2 million years ago are consistently called humans in biology textbooks, Science Channel specials, the New York Times - in all of the popular science culture. You ordered it, you eat it, as the saying goes.

Scientists do not, as some YEC's believe, emphasise this time-span just to stick it to Christians. That motive seems to be pretty dominant in a few, and a whole lot more go out of their way to keep mentioning that these humans did not live just a few thousand years ago, but millions. But there are more innocent motives for the emphasis. First, when people know that they have got the right answer - which in one sense the evolutionists do - and someone else has got the wrong one, they tend to return to that sticking point pretty often. If someone says the Treaty of Utrecht was 1638 instead of 1648, I might not bother to correct them. It doesn't matter so much at this juncture. But if they keep saying it's 1548 or 1748, or worse, say it was in 648 AD, then I'm going to move to correct that thought pretty emphatically, because the understanding of much history is at stake. If they keep getting it wrong I will grow strident. That's just human nature, not an especial vice of evolutionists.

More innocently still, we humans like to try and imagine ourselves as closer than we are to just about anything. We talk to pets and pretend we understand their feelings. If we read about a crime in Los Angeles we think of people we know there, or the time we went there, and try to see if there is some connection between ourselves and the event. We want a connection to be there. Thus, artists for National Geographic are trying to capture similarity, trying to identify with, trying to project their own thoughts onto the creatures whose bones we have found. It's a nice feature of humanity - it just leads us a bit astray in this case.

We left off at 1.7M years, still in East Africa, still with thousands of hominids running about. At 1.5M, no change. 1.1M - in the evolution "his halve cours yronne" - nothing different. Man from Mars dropping by every 100,000 years isn't seeing any difference in these humans. 900,000 years, 500,000 years, still the same stone tools, no improvements. No change here. At about 200,000 years ago we might start to see some subtle changes if we knew exactly what to look for, but really, we have to get well under 100,000 years ago before anything you'd notice pops up.

At about 60,000 years ago, these bipedal creatures develop language. Maybe it's a little more than that.

Now just a cotton-pickin' minute, AVI! You've been talking about these hominids, these humanish creatures who have been bopping about in Africa for over two million years, that National Geographic says are humans and they don't even TALK?

Well yeah, pretty much. They must have had some sort of verbal communication - a fair number of mammals do - but there is good reason to believe that there is some threshold element to language, and once that point is reached, sophisticated language develops and spreads very, very rapidly. So, evolutionists might call them human beings with some legitimacy, and they certainly did exist and are our ancestors, but if you want to say that this first 97% of human beings weren't really human beings, using language as your standard, you've got some justification for that.

We'll leave this hominid group right here for now, so you can start to absorb that the contrast between the Genesis impression and the National Geographic impression isn't quite as advertised by at least one measure.

Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH)

I received a mailing from my congresswoman asking for my opinion on health care reform. There were about 10 highly slanted questions, designed so that the answer made no difference to what she would vote for, but merely gave you a sermon of what she thought were the main issues. Has anyone in your family ever been denied coverage because of a preexisting condition? There was a teeny space for additional comments.

Revealing slant and perspective are one thing (they all do that) but this is active deceit. Someone had to intentionally design questions that were not questions to give the impression that constituent opinions were being sought.

Large moral questions do not exist independently of the more basic moralities of honesty, reciprocity, and respect. Boring old virtues are not a different, optional morality but the foundation of any morality.

I will not for a moment pretend that Republicans, lobbyists, bloggers, and everyone else has not engaged in slant and even deceit in this matter. But this small matter struck me as notable because it was immoral at its core, not simply deviating as it went along.

Misty

If one goes over to youtube, one can find Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Julie London, or a dozen others singing this song. I hoped to like one of those better and post it, to show that I am one of the cognoscenti who knows more about music than the rest of you clowns. Nah. The others are great - Mathis is better.

This version was the one requested by the female stalker in the movie "Play Misty For Me." I got spooked after watching that film, thinking that a girl I was dating was potentially like that, and I'd better get out fast. Just my overdramatic victim imagination, though. She was pretty normal, I was far more screwed up than she was.

Hey, I'm sorry, okay? You think boring old AVI was never a self-absorbed twit? I was a musician, remember? Sophomore year of college wasn't my most stable.

Hank

According to Ben, there's a new TV show called "Hank" with Kelsey Grammer. There was an old show called "Hank" in the mid-60's. It was about a college drop-in trying to go to school for free. I'm one of the few who remembers it, apparently.

He's up with the sun, and he's got the college ringin'
As he goes about another swingin' day.
With jobs to be done or errands to run
He's A Number 1 okay.
He'll dry clean your coat, be a butler or a porter
If it means another quarter in the bank.
He'll get his degree, his Phi Beta key
And get 'em both for free.
That's Hank!

Sad ending, it seems. Dick Kallman, who played Hank, was murdered by a drug addict in the 70's.

State Contract

I am not a member of the state employees’ union. I was years ago, when it was a local affair and not affiliated with SEIU (via AFSCME), because I am not opposed to the idea of unions per se, just the current incarnation of many American unions. I haven’t followed the negotiations with the State of NH, and I don’t know the details of what was proposed about furloughs versus layoffs. Thus, I may be leaping to unwarranted conclusions. But I find it ironic that all these good government union Democrats, who vote for people who want to “spread the wealth” and just voted for a president who specifically said that to a plumber, voted that a few be laid off rather than everyone have furlough days. It has a sort of penguin near the water feel to it. That we selfish conservatives and libertarians, rapaciously out for our own good rather than general beneficence, would take such a position is hardly surprising. I thought progressives were kinder and gentler than that.

Thought Experiment: Genesis and Science

If the first eleven chapters had somehow gone missing for centuries and were only recently rediscovered, it would be academics telling Christians they should accept them gladly, and the fundamentalists who would resist this most strongly. Genesis has got lots: the first intentional crops date from around 8,000 years ago, Genesis has the Cain-and-Abel conflict a very few miles away between settled growers and hunter-gatherers about 6,000 years ago – pretty good estimate for a people who had no archaeological science or written history; the beginning of mankind is associated with language and the naming of things – with choices, forethought and afterthought; the gradual creation; the storing of food against times of want; the flood at about the right time and place; the invention of wine at something close to the right time and place; the cultural interactions of receiving strangers and making covenants; confirming the existence of whole tribes of peoples and tells us something about them. Historians and anthropologists would be insisting, dude, you have got to claim this. This book is great. Christians would be more wary, especially the literalists, who would look askance at all this six days of creation and people living for centuries stuff. Sounds pretty much like stories handed down, thanks. We like our Bible nice and literal, word-for-word and tightened up. No messy God for us, thanks, just a neat predictable one. We said nyet to the Apocrypha, remember. I believe in the work of the Holy Spirit, and that after decades of rancorous debate the church would recognise the missing chapters as Scripture. Just not at first.

Once this is understood, the literalists look rather like the old fable of the monkey with its hand stuck in the jar, unable to let go of the treasure. If the little ape could let go, it could pull forth its hand and then pour out the treasure. Refusing to release its grasp, it is stuck forever with neither hand nor treasure.

I’ll be displaying some of this treasure shortly.

My Uncle, and Michael Moore

My uncle sent me the recent Michael Moore letter to Obama about the Nobel Lifetime Pre-Achievement Prize.

Dear President Obama,

How outstanding that you’ve been recognized today as a man of peace. Your swift, early pronouncements — you will close Guantanamo, you will bring the troops home from Iraq, you want a nuclear weapon-free world, you admitted to the Iranians that we overthrew their democratically-elected president in 1953, you made that great speech to the Islamic world in Cairo, you’ve eliminated that useless term “The War on Terror,” you’ve put an end to torture — these have all made us and the rest of the world feel a bit more safe considering the disaster of the past eight years. In eight months you have done an about face and taken this country in a much more sane direction.,,

Aside from the moronic oversimplifications, creating an entire foreign policy out of two ideas (that peoples need to liberate themselves rather than have others do that for them – tell that to Western Europe, the slaves, and the Jews – and that bloodthirsty enemies of the US would be okay if we hadn’t mistreated them), there are a few interesting things in Moore’s logic that bear noticing.

In the first laudatory paragraph, telling Obama how much good he’s done, notice that all the accomplishments are mere words. They are things Obama has said, not done. Yet Moore seems pretty satisfied with those. His evidence is that “the world” feels safer. What is the basis for that statement? I know of no grand consensus of the nations that each of them feels safer. No one’s done that survey. There’s no data. If I had to guess, however, I suspect eastern Europe feels less safe, and that Hondurans, Israelis, Iranian and Chinese dissidents, and African Christians feel less safe. Just for openers.

There is also the upbraiding of Bush for the words “War on Terror,” and the attribution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to him. See Charles Krauthammerfor a review of the actual history. Yet even given the usual overidentification of any president with a war fought during his term of office, I find Moore’s insistence on this rather strident. He is trying to score rhetorical points rather than illuminate history.

Who, then, does feel safer? Current rulers, tyrannical or no, and the friends and sympathetic journalists around them. Western Europeans in general, but predominantly their elites and talking heads. American liberals. I guess to Moore, that’s “the world.” I would instead call it “his tribe.” If you bung that concept into the first paragraph, the whole letter makes perfect sense. As this is a tribe that by and large does not join the military, they were pretty safe already (okay, not the tyrants). Whether Iraq and Afghanistan made us, the actual us that is the whole country, safer is a question for another day, and I doubt it has a simple yes/no answer. What matters in this context is that to Moore, the answer an unmodified “no.” No pluses and minuses, just complete assurance that we would be safer if we just pulled out of Bush’s wars. Moore was physically safe anyway; UN diplomats were safe anyway; Norwegian committeemen were safe anyway. Why then would he feel specifically safer?

Because the only thing that is under threat for him is is worldview, and the personal stake he has in people like him having the whip hand culturally. It is humiliating for Moore and his supporters to have to live in a country where other tribes have any say. They spent eight years trying to distance themselves from that America. To not be the acknowledged Lords of Governance and Culture is what we call in the psych biz a narcissistic injury. His feeling of improved safety refers not to his physical safety, but his relief at the world heading the way it’s supposed to now.

I am sure they tell themselves it is physical safety, not only for themselves but for others, that they are concerned with. All, perhaps, have at least some real concern for this. Yet I still conclude such concern is secondary (at best), because of the frequency of Moore’s arguments in progressive discourse, however disguised and varied the form. It appeals to linear and simplistic moralities of what should occur according to theory rather than any cost/benefit analysis; it coincides very neatly with what would be good for them personally and politically; once it has identified a bad motive in its enemies it looks no further no matter how small a fraction it is, putting all explanation into that basket; it is focusesd on words, impressions, and symbolism rather than action. It is not how things are that matters, but how they can be made to look.

Real events and conditions abroad seem almost not to matter, except as chess pieces in the American culture wars. What percentage of progressives fit this unflattering description I can’t say. All are more affected by this blindness than they realise, certainly. Hopefully, the number of thoroughgoing tribalists, for whom the actual safety of America is only a minor consideration, is small.

It is a great irony that Moore’s closest rhetorical equivalents are the creators of bathetic patriotic productions, manipulating symbols, stock phrases, and the swell of music to evoke an emotional response which bypasses the intellect. That his politics are precisely opposite theirs is immaterial. They use flags, martial drums, and stock heroes, he uses stock villains and one-dimensional faces of oppression; they ignore America’s faults, he ignores her virtues; both have rhetorical styles reminiscent of William Jennings Bryan.

Simplifying

We are moving stuff out of my father-in-law's house as he moves to a small apartment. I was inspired to come home and tab another 50-100 of my books to leave our house.

My children may curse me for some things, but this isn't going to be one of them.