Palindrome

Reviled did I live said I as evil I did deliver.

 

I had not seen that one before 

AI Recipes, or from an English as a Fifth Language Source?

Easy Grilled Yellow Squash Sweet C s Designs

Place an infant in a box. Load the box with blankets and also maybe a plaything or two. Set it on fire!

 

I find this concerning. 

 

Mushroom Poisoning A Risk When Relying on AI Generated Field Guides

Concern has been growing that new foragers might eat a poisonous mushroom if relying on foraging guides written by artificial intelligence (AI).

Growing?  I would hope it had already been very high.

 

 

Letters to the Seven Churches in Modernity

Occasional commenter Earl Wajenberg has a site of his own, Wind Off The Hilltop. (Hmm.  I should put that on my sidebar. Only five years overdue.) He is part of my Thursday Pub Night and has both wide general knowledge and some specialties.  He is both a tech writer and a writer of science fiction. An old friend of his unearthed a piece of his from decades ago which he has just put up  Letters to the Seven Churches in Modernity A sample:

To the angel of the church in Suburbia write:

The one who brought division and scandal says this: I know you have kneaded the gospel into the bread of the nations, making it part of custom and law, and that you have quietly and slowly spread the good news through the generations.

But I have this against you, that you have made my name a label, not of righteousness but of respectability. Instead of making holiness your custom, you have called your customs holiness. You have sought reputation from repetition of prayers you have emptied. You have dinned the gospel in your ears until you no longer hear it. You have become lukewarm, fearing to scandalize the scalded.

Therefore repent or the gospel will depart from you and the praise of the world will be your only reward, quickly lost.

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who overcomes will be blessed for the sake of my name when he is cast out of the assembly.

 

Mystic Liberalism and Mystic Conservatism

I have a liberal Christian friend who is of mystical bent, and a conservative Christian friend of mystical bent. The former goes to sweatlodges and has a wealth of life-advice that she swears comes from Native Americans, such has having both hawk-vision (seeing the big picture) and mouse-vision (seeing the immediate and personal). I would bet that if you used that metaphor on a clever Patuxent in 1630 they would pick up the meaning and approve of it. But it is the type of abstraction I have never seen in any discussion of Native Spirituality. I would bet just as much or more that it is not NA wisdom. It's a bit New-Agey modern interpretation of the world. My friend, who I will call C, also continues to believe in recycling even when told that most items lose money, and the environmental impact is near-invisible. The effect of weird chemicals on our food from the plastics is much greater than whether we melt them back together versus putting them in the ground.  The ground is large, our bodies are small. Yet she is sure that Nature is grateful to us when we make such efforts on her behalf and treats us more kindly. She had all sorts of bins all over the hospital for various materials, which she would carry to her car and drop off. Interestingly, she deeply objected to the idea of doing this for Gaia, because she was Roman Catholic and saw that as worshiping a false god. I refrained from telling her that recycling is an environmentalist sacrament. She is a nice, nice person and it would hurt her.

The conservative Christian mystic, who I will call S is "very into prophecy." She grew up NewYork Italian Catholic. She just knows that some of what is predicted in modern books about Daniel and the Revelation to John are true and can tell you which ones are not, because she discerns their spirits. I have known her long enough that I have seen these change over the years. It is always somewhat paranoid, but who the forces are behind these evils has shifted. She has been in a true cult, the Boston Church of Christ, and even when in trinitarian churches has gravitated toward those with at least some heterodox views. She is thrice-married, with each of the husbands greatly influencing her theology at the time.  The first two were abusive (I don't know the details), so she left them. While she could show temper and quick judgement at times, she was basically the sunniest, warmest, least-judgemental friend you could find. When I first met her in the early 90s, she was lavishly pro-Israel because of its role in end-times prophecy. She was quite anti-Catholic. As the focus of her paranoia slowly changed, I wondered if she would get around to blaming the Jews. In the meantime, she eventually started going to Catholic women's retreats because of a cousin in New Jersey and decided that they did retreats the best. Her third husband was an older man who had been a fundamentalist preacher in Georgia. He tolerated her Catholic flirtations, but gradually convinced her that the Jews today were not the same as the Hebrews in the Bible. 

I got irritated when I knew them, but not often. Lovely, dear people who deserved the best I could bring. In my frustration I would drop the occasional hint, which they almost invariably misunderstood. I have had some mystical experiences, but very widely spaced.  I am suspicious of that approach to God, however much it is recommended by people who are much nicer than I am. Mostly, I am merely bemused.

Judging Limericks

Isaac Asimov had advice for how to judge a limerick contest: Read them all and laugh. Then take a black pen and start again, eliminating all the ones that are off-color.  Award the prize to the one that is left.

I actually did date a girl from Pawtucket for a few months. 

Terrence Tao and Research Dollars

On August 2, local time, Fields Medal winner Terence Tao posted several posts saying that the US government recently suspended almost all federal funding to his University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) through agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and his research team was also affected.

"The suspension of my personal funding has had some impact on me, particularly as my summer salary is now in limbo (which I had previously deferred in order to support several of my graduate students with previously awarded NSF funds), leaving me with few resources to continue supporting my graduate students," Tao wrote.

According to Science magazine, on July 31, local time, the NSF notified UCLA that nearly 300 of its grants would be suspended "until further notice."

Terrence Tao is the real deal, perhaps the smartest person alive at the moment, at least in mathematics. I will not question the importance of his research nor stamp my foot about what the practical applications of it might be.  It's math, Jake. Practical applications lie dormant for decades and then change everything in a decade. So I waive any objection there.  I wouldn't understand the explanations anyway. Yet there is a missing piece in his argument, amplified rather than corrected by the reporting on his complaint. He is working for an establishment that is breaking the law WRT discrimination, openly and defiantly.  

I don't think it pays to be an absolutist.  Terrence Tao is not responsible for everything his university does wrong. In a large workplace, we all have had occasion to shake out heads and think "I wish they wouldn't do that. They're going to get caught some day and there will be hell to pay." OTOH, when that hell comes to pay, it might splash over on to you, and the question of whether you were an innocent bystander, morally negligent, an abettor, or even an accomplice to the act. There were always things going on at my hospital where I wondered whether I should be minding my business - which people will always say I should - or reporting misconduct - which other people will always say I should. OTOOH, at what point does it kick in that you are a simple machinist doing your job, but it's fixing the trains that send people to the Gulag? UCLA is not the Gulag, nor are they just ignoring parking tickets. I dislike being sold the idea that the infractions are so unimportant that people who work there bear no responsibility.

I don't know where Tao's complicity falls in this situation and I will not even attempt to figure it out. I can notice things, however.  When an agency is looking at money or power being taken away, they put the most sympathetic causes forward. There they go taking money away from the most vulnerable among us again. I have an automatic suspicion about this now. What are they spending money on that they aren't mentioning? No, there's no communists here, boss.  No one here but us agrarian reformers. Tao could work wherever he wanted. UCLA's deal must have been the best on offer. And perhaps all the R1 universities are so compromised that there is no real choice in terms of corruption. But at what point do the all-stars use their celebrity to effect changes?

Cheese

 More from GKC, on a lighter note.

Common Accusations From Christians

Update below. 

You will see lists on social media along the lines of "Jesus never said to love people only if they look like you. Jesus never said to love the stranger only if they have the right papers. Jesus never said to feed the poor only if they speak your language."  

I resent it because it is a deceitful political statement masquerading as a command from God.  I have discussed here Reflections on the Second Commandment and there is the much better Meditations on the Third Commandment by CS Lewis.  The short version is that while we are commanded to teach, we are forbidden to put words in God's mouth.  A phrase I use is that we cannot forge God's signature under our ideas. When speaking about public charity, which is related to but different from private charity, people muddy this distinction, I think to their peril.  And to my annoyance, as I said.

Next, there is the implication that we are not doing this already, or that some people want us to do none of it. This is not so. America gives a great deal to its poor, welcomes more strangers by far than anyone else, and protects them much better. The reason we think otherwise is that we have many more strangers than other nations and it is getting difficult to keep everyone safe and avoid stealing jobs and services from our own citizens, especially the poor. So lecturing other Christians that they are not obeying God about feeding the poor or welcoming the stranger ignores the physical reality in favor of an imagined better political reality.

I notice that visiting the sick and imprisoned is not mentioned. Could that be because those are things they would have to do themselves, rather than farm out to the government? You can't kick other people's politics on those.  The self-righteous tone is looking a little thin at the moment. 

Next I would like to look at the "just because they don't have the right papers" part. This makes it sound like it was some technicality, that they just forgot them on the counter when they left for work this morning.  Oh, you wicked other Christians! Can you not see that this makes no difference to Jesus?  How can you be so hard-hearted? If we were talking about a person God had put in front of us in real life - a mother with a baby, a child that is lost, an old person fallen in the street, a neighbor whose house has been flooded - I would pretty much agree with you.  But when you are talking about united political action, you have crossed over into giving other people's things away.  They are not yours to give without consent.

If you "just don't have the right papers" you aren't married. If you have lost them or they have been destroyed, you can get new ones.  It is not the papers that are the issue, but the underlying reality that the papers testify to.  If you don't have the right papers, you don't own your house.  If you don't have the right papers your adoption is a kidnapping. If you don't have the right papers you aren't a graduate.  If you don't have the right papers you are not a doctor, or a policeman, or a union member...or a citizen. Those are paper contracts based on social contracts we have agreed to as a group.  You are not allowed to confer an MD on someone just because you think it would be nice if they got to be a doctor.  Citizenship is conferred by a society. We usually do this through some kind of government, such as tribal elders, but it is ultimately not for a splinter group of tribal elders to confer. 

If someone who wants to be a doctor or a policeman but isn't is hungry or being mistreated, by all means, help them.  But welcoming the stranger, as in Numbers 9:14, has interesting follow-on effects. A foreigner residing among you is also to celebrate the Lord’s Passover in accordance with its rules and regulations. You must have the same regulations for both the foreigner and the native-born. The foreigner is welcome, but is no longer free to be outside the community expectations. If you wish to join, you may join, and God has commanded that we must welcome you.  But you have to join.  You have to enter into the mutual obligations of our society. Different societies have different rules for how this is to be done and this can get complicated.  I hate it when people regard this a simple - so simple that they feel free to speak to other Christians in such condescending tones.

Some of the people I see this from are committed Christians, personally generous, intelligent and often thoughtful. However, they surround themselves with Christians who are like themselves - quite the irony, really - who have agreed on what should be done politically, and so gradually move to believing that this is what Jesus commands. Thus, now I will choose a Scripture verse: "Do not take the name of the Lord in vain." Do not forge his signature under your politics. 

Update from a link by Althouse. A person very critical of Jesus does in fact shed light on the questions that some who oversimplify from the leftist side are accusing. 

Immigration Complaint

On our Boothbay Harbor trip I sat next to a couple about 40 on the puffin boat. The woman was speaking to another woman on the other side of her husband, quite irritated that a younger woman she knew was having trouble with immigration, and how deeply foolish and unfair this was. She was working so hard on her PhD that she forgot to renew her status.  She's a really nice person, really smart, and exactly the sort of person you would think that Trump would want to be here.  

She forgot to renew her status. Do I have to pull this car over? 

Revival of Virtue Ethics

At my CS Lewis discussion of Miracles on Tuesday, Elizabeth Anscombe predictably came up. There has long been a controversy about her debate with CS Lewis at the Socratic Club, causing him to give up philosophical debate forever after. From this she acquired a reputation in uninformed circles as some liberal female theologian who was determined to take the great man down, haha! Neither she nor Lewis ever thought so.  He thought her criticism excellent, sat down and wrote out a more complete explanation of his thought very much in the directions she suggested.  The second edition of Chapter 3 of Miracles reflects a great deal of her influence in this.  It is pretty stiff going, with arguments hinging or such careful defining of terms as distinctions in the use of the word because.  What is often not known outside of philosophy circles is that she was a powerhouse herself. The Wiki will tell you the list of praises from other philosophers about her. As for her her theology she was a Catholic convert and a Thomist. As for seeking to overturn established Christian thought and structures, she was fond of pointing out that perhaps that would be unlikely in a Catholic wife with seven children, which the accusers seem not to have taken into account.

What I had not known was that she was an enormous influence on Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot, the central figures in the revival of virtue ethics in the 20th Century, and influenced by them in return. The three were very close in age, being born around 1920.  I never picked it up because I thought of Murdoch only as a novelist, and Foot was an unattached English name from post 1950. I pass this along to you so that you will have heard of their importance as well.

Recent Links (from other sites that link)

 Raising the minimum wage increases homelessness. 

The Great Cognitive Advance.  Peter Frost is usually quite fascinating. "On a per capita basis, the highly intelligent became ten times more numerous in England between 1000 and 1850."

China funds American climate activists to reduce our competitiveness. 

Universal Basic Income Not Really Effective. 

Holly Mathnerd explains the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis.  In everyday society, the reaction is "Hey, interesting!  Might be true, might not, but worth talking about. And researching."  In academia and specific research fields, you are not allowed to talk about this.

The Fallacy of Success

 

If you prefer the text, The Fallacy of Success.  The phrasing seems a little formal and old to us, yet the idea is still spot on, one hundred years later. Many self-help books have the same faults today.

The text version has footnotes as well. 

Atlantis

I knew all the words to this because...because they were there and other people didn't know them.  Sort of like reading cereal boxes. Even in 1969 I knew this was ridiculous, and certainly never performed it. I doubt I even sang along with it on the radio.

But there it is, part of my life forever whether I wanted it or not. 

 

More Cremieux

 Cremieux Recuiel  just an interesting substack if you like statistical looks at issues.  

Currently up on his front page, just to entice you

Bad Drugs Get Pulled Fast
Safety issues usually get identified and acted on quickly

A Modest Proposal To Turn Canada Into a Narco State
Americans want cheap drugs and Canadians wants loads of money. I smell a deal.

Go Ahead And Have Kids
Depopulation won't stop climate change, but your kids might 

You Can't Just "Control" For Things
Statistical control usually doesn't make an analysis causal and it can easily mislead

Columbia Is Still Discriminating
Columbia's admissions department has been hacked, and we now know they're still practicing affirmative action

Vaccines

Cremieux, one of my favorite statisticians, posted this on X

More than 5.6 BILLION people took the COVID vaccines. If there was a mass dying wave, miscarriages and stillbirths, cardiac issues, or anything else, we have more than enough data to show those things. But they never happened!  They're not real, they're a neurotic delusion.

 The person who sent it to me further observed

I’m enjoying reading some of Alex Berensons stuff but this continues to be where I get hung up. He just had a whole thing about how maybe getting 3 or more shots is slightly changing the life span of those with pancreatic cancer. No. If there was any major effect we wouldn’t have to subgroup it out that much.

The word subgroup should jump out at you. It refers to p-hacking, slicing the data in many different ways until you find - or more properly create - something that looks significant.  When a particular supplement has been shown to be associated with fewer bunions in Hispanic women over fifty, but all other categories show no effect, you can tell you have come across a statistical accident, or at most, a very weak effect that should prevent you from spending your money. 

Conservative sites that have been very critical of government responses to Covid - often for good reason - also fall into this reporting studies that mean very little or nothing at all.  They have small sample sizes.  They haven't controlled for some important variable. There is an association with no indication of causality.  Up against this is 5.6 billion injections, a devastatingly large sample size. Pregnant women were worried about get the shots, and it's very much worth being cautious. Other women were worried about future fertility, and again, it's good to get all the information you can in that situation.  It's a big deal. They had every right to resist pressure because there was little data on pregnancy and none on long-term fertility at the time. 

But one site linked to a study that showed that one version of the vaccine disrupted menstrual cycles in a small percentage of women. From that the site (though not the study authors) concluded that fertility was obviously affected but it was being covered up because of Big Pharma. The commenters agreed even more loudly. That would clearly be something worth studying further. But because of the huge number of women who were pregnant or are in age-bearing years that did get the vaccine, it would now be blindingly obvious if their miscarriages were up even 10%.

I suppose one could have called mRNA vaccines "experimental" at the time, and complained that we hadn't done enough research to put the shots out there, but now that ship has sailed.  It's not experimental anymore, it is one of the most widely observed treatments in history. 

First Amedment Auditors

There are people going around filming in public places who call themselves "First Amendment Auditors." They annoy people and are rude, provoking them. They claim to be providing a public service by educating people about the right to film in public places.  This is unlikely to be true, but something similar is true.  They are educating people in how to deal with narcissists.

There are at least two separate things happening in the interactions, and conflating them to the confusion of the people they have taken by surprise is how they get attention. First, they are largely right about the law. The right to observe or even film from a public area is largely protected. They are broadly right on the law.

And we want them to be.  In a pinch we want to be able to expose police misbehavior, or bad service from government officials.

It is the second piece, where they are breaking the social contract but not the law that provokes people. Civil liberties attorneys will tell you that often the only people willing to push an issue forward are pretty obnoxious and difficult to work with. (Some of those attorneys are as well.) That usually doesn't impact the legal issue at hand.  I am painting it in black-and-white pictures for clarity. In the actual situations sometimes the auditors do overstep and break the law.  They intentionally seek out areas where people don't expect they have the right to film but actually do, such as entrances and lobbies of police stations and public buildings.  Even the police and other government officials can get this wrong. The auditors are intentionally pushing the limits.

They are also intentionally being rude - interrupting, making general accusations, being insulting, intruding into gray areas.  They have plausible deniability that they are "just" exercising their constitutional rights.* Yet imagine if no cameras were involved.  Imagine they were just standing on the sidewalk in front of a business and staring into it. Then the shop-owner or policeman would have greater clarity what is up. The person is "behaving suspiciously," and questioning should proceed differently. But the camera triggers them into thinking that this must be illegal somehow and should be stopped immediately. It doesn't. You have time. Relax. 

If someone is behaving suspiciously, they should expect to be addressed in sharper tones. That is where we get into the social contract of what we expect from other people.  Societies function because people recognise what is within norms and needn't be worried about, but devote more attention when something is awry. If we had to investigate every action we encountered, no one would have time to buy groceries or or teach a class. Suspicious behavior calls for us to waste time that might be better spent because we want to bring help or prevent damage when things "just don't look right over there." The auditors get off on the attention you have to pay them. 

When I started at the psych hospital, the idea was to meet force with force quickly when someone was threatening. Over time, better methods prevailed.  One of the first things is to remove their audience as much as possible. This would seem impossible if they are filming for TikTok and their audience is remote, but you can take away their audience by being boring on camera. Brilliant replies to them only deter them for a moment. What you want is to be invisible. 

 *Whenever someone says they are "just" asking a question or "only" looking around you can bet they are actually doing much more.  But they usually construct the situation in such a way that they can make it sound, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-their-mouths, as if the "merely" is defensible. It's a tactic.  Don't get sucked in to arguing about tone, because even when you are 100% right you'll have a hard time proving it. 

Nuclear Reactor On The Moon

 I have no idea whether this is a wise use of money. None. But this is immensely cool, the sort of thing I thought we would devote ourselves to when I was a boy.

Ashkenazi Origins

The theory had been, and I have put it forward here, that the rough outline of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage is Near Eastern males mating with European females, mostly in the western Mediterranean before moving to the Rhine. A new study that comes out next month in Human Gene finds that implausible, showing evidence that both y-haplogroup and mtDNA founder lineages come from the Near East. The European mtDNA of the females came later and gradually. Distinguishing between founder and host population mtDNA lineages in the Ashkenazi population. The study also provides a nice "highlights" box at the beginning, even before the abstract. People like me with low attention span love these.

 This study presents a method to distinguish between founder and absorbed mtDNA lineages in contemporary Ashkenazi Jews. Adjusting the sample size, absorbed lineages appear as singletons, while founder lineages show multiple occurrences. Our analysis found that less than 15 % of current Ashkenazi Jews carry absorbed mtDNA, consistent with patterns seen in many founder populations, where absorbed matrilineal lineages outnumber founder ones. However, this does not support a non-Jewish European origin for the founding generation.

Culturally, this suggests that the Western Mediterranean Jews did not arrive mostly as individual or father-son-brother groups of traders who settled and took wives willing to convert, but that a greater percentage of them arrived as families or sent for their families quickly. For an American context, this is the same as the colonial Virginia pattern of individual males arriving to seek their fortune versus the Pennsylvania and especially New England models of the arrival of whole families.

Please note that this does not support anything like the Khazar Hypothesis.

Grazin' In The Grass

I have no story to go with this one, only that it came out when I was a freshman and friend in the neighborhood who was an excellent trumpeter kept working on it until he felt he had it right.

 

Noyes Pattee Whittemore

This relative from the 1800s married Augusta Stark, a grandniece of General John Stark, famous in his lifetime for the Battle of Bennington in the Revolutionary War ("Tonight our flag flies over yonder hill, or Molly Stark sleeps a widow"), but now chiefly remembered for Live Free of Die. Death is not the worst of evils. Johnny Stark was prosperous, and large sums went to many descendants. Noyes married Augusta and proceeded to gamble away her fortune, which must have take astounding bad luck and determination in Litchfield, NH in the 1800s. The town didn't get over 500 citizens until the 1950s. There are still a few people with the Pattee surname in the Scots-Irish sections along the rivers in NH, but it was more common then.  Even though I have his mother's and father's lines back a few generations each, I can't see that Pattee was brought in to commemorate any of them. The Whittemores go back through Haverhill to Salem, MA, and my batch lived largely along the Merrimack in Londonderry and Litchfield.

At least, that's the way the story came to us. "One of Harriet's brothers married a Stark girl and he gambled his way through her fortune." I can't find record of it now, not even a suggestion. It doesn't ring as coming from my childhood - even scandals much nearer to the living were hush-hush in those days (such as my grandfather's father abandoning the family when he was four, changing his name and moving to Dayton, Washington around 1900). It must stem from my mother's comments in the 1980s, as she had a remarkable memory for family information. NP Whittemore was the brother of Harriet Whittemore, my great-great grandmother who was a schoolteacher in Londonderry. There is a room dedicated to her at the Londonderry Historical Society, which two of my cousins have taken considerable interest in and provided lots of personal items for - clothes, books, dolls, schoolteaching supplies, a large painted portrait. 

Noyes must have been thorough, as he ended up at the Poor Farm in Goffstown. Before the poor farm, the town would pay the low bidder to watch after each of the impoverished elderly on a yearly basis, but the farm came in in the 1840s. He was born in 1830 and died in 1904.  I go by the Hillsborough County Cemetery, Grasmere, NH (part of Goffstown) on my rail trail walks, but the stones are only numbered, not named. About 600 of the 710 stones are linked to names, but Noyes isn't one of them. My closest cousin is coming over tomorrow and I'm going to show him where it is. 

I talk to dead ancestors, but he's not going to be one of them. 

 

Eating Disorders

Also from Rob Henderson, some research showing that intrasexual competition is the main driver of eating disorders.

The stressor that had the biggest effect on women’s disordered eating—the strongest predictor of developing an eating disorder—wasn’t men or attention from men. It was the presence of attractive women, of perceived romantic rivals. (source here and here).

I worked with lots of women with eating disorders, but was often kept at arm's length by other staff. We had a fair balance of male and female psychiatrists, but the MD's who handled direct medical were much more likely to be male.  Those males were involved of necessity, but in the other departments the bias toward women practitioners was overt.  Nurses and social workers are usually women anyway, but even in that context men would get elbowed out.  Female social workers would quickly volunteer - or insert themselves - if an eating-disorders client fell by luck-of-the-draw to me. Male nurses and psychologists would quietly note this to each other, but we all knew it just wasn't worth challenging.  Female clinicians get very energised about this and will elbow you out. For years I vaguely reasoned that I didn't know much in this area anyway, and these women by their energy gave off that they had paid a lot of attention to the disorders and knew a lot. It took a long time for me to notice that success was hard to come by in this frustrating area, and battles royale involved lots of angry people all quite sure that their approach was better.  

Not only was each school's adherents sure that they had the best theory, they were also convinced that the other camp's ideas were the worst and most damaging plans possible. So I wasn't too unhappy to be left out of those discussions. It often reduced to which female nurse could exert the most dominance, regardless of official hierarchy.

There was always some idea that one origin of the various disorders was that the idea that women should be thin had gotten blown out of proportion, and that the patient was not fully rational about this.  She had read too many girl's magazines or watched too many movies.  It was patriarchal expectations of men who wanted subordinate women.  It was her overbearing mother. It was the woman's need for control over her environment in other areas, such as sex, and was a red flag for having been sexually abused. I never heard anyone comment that perhaps it was because one or all of her sister's were pretty, though that would seem to be a thing people would notice.

I have written about intrasexual competition before, in late 2022, with the surprising revelation that we have long overlooked how much time women and men spent with only their own sex over thousands of years.  Lazily or unconsciously, we assume that our experiences over the last hundred or so years has been the norm for millennia. Not so. The idea that this is derived from a disordered version of genetic structures, perhaps set off by culture but not originating there, responding to other environmental cues such as who you live with and go to school with is intriguing to me.  So far it seems to be a strong association, but teasing out causation is going to be tricky.

Not All Experts Are Equal

 Mark McNeilly over at Mimir's Well* Not All Experts Are Equal.

 TLDR: Public trust in "experts" has declined—but the term itself is too broad and misleading. We wrongly lump together practitioners, analysts, and activists. Practitioners operate in the physical world with proven methods; analysts work with models and data; activists often push ideologically-driven agendas. To restore trust and avoid bad policy, we must distinguish between these groups and calibrate our trust based on method, track record, and truth-seeking intent—not titles.

Giving us a summary like that is a nice touch, but it is worth watching him make his argument at the link. I commented there and would repeat it, by my words were in the context of a further discussion and are not fully standalone. You will have to seek them there.

*Great reference.  It took me a minute, as it was familiar but hazy. 

They Are Already Being Eaten

We wonder at times how we could ever be happy if our old friend Deborah or our Aunt Frieda and Uncle Everett are not there with us in heaven. And having just reread The Screwtape Letters for book club it is grim to imagine another human being consumed as food for more powerful beings. Yet I am not sure Lewis's literary device is quite accurate.  We imagine ourselves being surprised, shocked at the vast change an arrival into heaven would be for us, however much we could perceive the threads of it in our previous life. It is rather automatic to imagine hell also being a shock.  Yet in other writings of Lewis he is equally chilling in describing how gradual our descent might be, so that we don't even notice it particularly.

I thought of a few people in particular whom I still pray for, though with little hope, and shudder at the thought of them going through anything as horrifying as being eaten in some sense. I love them still, even if it is a love for a person who used to exist and does not seem much like that now.  They have left, they have moved away emotionally into worlds of little love and only an imitation of giving of themselves, when once it looked like they would blossom into kindness and generosity. The goodness is attenuated, the meanness rather disguised but still revealed under even a little pressure.

They are already being eaten and don't know it.  They seem to be settling in uncaring, resentful than anyone might think they were wrong.  In another of Lewis's works, The Great Divorce, there is the husband of Sarah Smith of Golders Green, who is herself so full of life and joy one thinks it just has to attract him and draw him back.  But he has somehow given himself over to an artificial person, a Tragedian who pleads an insulting bad case on his behalf.

I have pictured this Tragedian as something out of Vaudeville or Melodrama at each previous reading, a stock villain bordering on the comic. Were I to perform him as a character that would have been my first thought. Yet what if he were being portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch or Anthony Hopkins, so that our hearts really were being ripped out by his imploring? What if we were barely able to see through the disguise to the person at the other end of the leash? The people from my past whom I mourn for bear less and less relationship every year to the bodies that inhabit the planet. We pray for and hope for a last minute rescue and these do happen. But the lower halves of them are already in the mouths of the monster, slowly being digested while the upper halves of them are unconcerned and even condescending to us outside.

Like Sarah Smith we might finally see that nothing has been lost, and everything that possibly could have been kept has been kept, in surprising ways we had not anticipated.