Update on "Spiritual Warfare"

 Douglas2's comment has been added. It goes in a different direction than the rest of us.

Wednesday Links

Is Donald Trump a Socialist? Tyler Cowen is a libertarian economist

The Origins of Homo longi and the Denisovans. This is available only to paid subscriptions of Razib Khans, but an underdiscussed point jumped out at me. Who has access to a fossil remain is often quite contentious, with some researchers holding a specimen out from circulation for years, even decades until they feel they have finished all they are going to do with it. There is a big push among younger researchers to make everything available as soon as possible.  It is the sort of thing that occupies a great deal of the time and energy of those in the field, but does not make it to the science reporting that shows up in the popular press.  I remember something similar, but even more extreme, has happened to the Dead Sea Scrolls

The very informative power of a single fossil, and the scarcity of remains, has often generated human drama in the field. Berkeley anthropologist Tim D. White took 16 years to finally publish his team’s analyses of Ardi after its 1994 discovery. Toumaï, the name for the human-chimp-gorilla common ancestor discovered in Chad in 2002, has already engendered a couple decades of controversy with disputes over who should be allowed to analyze the remains. The scarcity of high-quality fossils owes both to the small number of hominins alive at any given time before agriculture, and to the fragility of our skeletons. But this scarcity means that human fossils are a precious commodity whose control and distribution can make or break careers; the re-possession of the original “Hobbit” remains in Flores by Indonesian researchers from its Australian discoverers was initially nearly as big a story as the diminutive humans themselves.

Why Did Slaves Rebel? There is a parallel to revolutions, where it was not the poorest who rebelled, but those who had more status and believed they were unfairly deprived. Modern parallels of resentment of elites or "the 1%" have some similarity.  Those angriest at the 1% are those who believe they should be the 1%.

I Will Quit if Zohran is Elected.  Lots of New York is bright blue, and has been in high dudgeon*  over the layoffs and stoppages of federal workers.  I wonder how aware they are of indirect losses like this?

*What is low dudgeon?  No one knows. 

The Five Stages of Grief in Fantasy Football

Wikipedia: According to the model of the five stages of grief, or the Kübler-Ross model, those experiencing sudden grief following an abrupt realization (shock) go through five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Though widely used, the theory is empirically unsupported, potentially harmful, and of limited practical value.

Well, I'm glad that people are finally catching on that this model is less than helpful. People who grieve have a variety of emotions at different times and do not progress through stages. It can actually screw them up to convince them that they are at one stage and should be progressing to the next stage.

However, I have found that this model does apply to Fantasy Football, when the players you drafted in the first few rounds aren't doing well.  This is based heavily on the Ringer FF podcast this week.

Week One: Denial. It was only the first game of the season.  It takes a while for the offense to gel.  

Week Two: Anger. The QB isn't throwing to him enough. He needs to get more carries.  

Week Three: Bargaining. Maybe I could trade him while he still has value. Not everyone in this league is paying attention.  

Week Four: Depression. Nobody is going to want this guy.  I'll have to bench him.  

Week Five: Acceptance. I can't cut him altogether because he might come back.  I'm stuck with him on my roster for the rest of the season.

Gun Violence

The Free Press is holding a debate about whether we would be safer without the Second Amendment.  In announcing it, Isaac Grafstein writes the following:

Among wealthy nations, the United States is an outlier. Our rate of deaths from gun violence is about seven times higher than Canada’s and nearly 340 times higher than that of the United Kingdom. No other country at our level of prosperity faces the same level of risk from gun violence.

I tire of having the same argument repeatedly.  I have to assume that the writer has at least been exposed to the idea that the important number would be the overall rate of homicide, not those specific to guns. In other countries, people blow things up.  They stab people with knives.  They run over bystanders with vans. Yet somehow this does not stick in the mind, even among those who are specific gun control advocates. The idea just hangs on that if there hadn't been guns available to the killers, those people wouldn't be dead. It's ludicrous.  I used to say that I knew almost a dozen people who murdered or were accused of murder, but when I counted it up it's more like two dozen over the years. I don't know the means of death for one of the ones who killed his father, but of the rest, none had used a gun. I know my sample is unrepresentative, as all had some mental health involvement and all were white, but still, that's a remarkable percentage.

I don't know how one even has the discussion if one of the key facts does not even penetrate. There is something sticky in some minds about the idea that those people wouldn't be dead were it not for gun availability. And that's not even counting the "lives saved" part of the equation. Male suicide probably go up because of gun availability. The rest of the deaths don't seem to by any measure. 

 

Bring It On Home To Me

So many good versions, but I had never heard this one.  R&B foundation, some country, some Dixieland.  Nice mix.

 

Experts

Phantoms...who had faced the journey to the bus stop-perhaps for them it was thousands of miles-and come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs , the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the "haves," what they thought of them.  CS Lewis The Great Divorce Ch 9

I am hearing too much of this anger against experts and authorities not because they have been wrong nor even because they have lied or slyly deceived, but because they are perceived as arrogant - and some of them certainly are. I believe in disruption, but not all disruption.  Bilbo thought that an invasion of dragons might be good for the people of the Shire, but in the end only indirectly upset their applecarts. Are we silently cheering on RFK Jr only because he is making The Experts uncomfortable?  If you think you have better reasons, what are they?  He is more arrogant than they. When challenged he changes the subject and counteraccuses. When he says that relying on experts is not science, that is "a truth that people use to lie with," as a psychiatrist friend of mine used to say. Those words are true, but he expands that into "I don't have to listen to anyone," like a schoolgirl slamming the door to her room. Science means trying to get it right, not just mocking experts.  After all, if you are the experts now, what is to stop people from mocking you when the dead are counted, with even more justification?

He has the facts largely wrong.  Even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while, but when challenged on medical knowledge he will respond that Big Pharma contributes lots of money to politicians.  He is providing the explanation for why they would be wrong if they were wrong, but has evaded the part where he shows they are wrong. Maybe the setback on deaths from measles or rubella will not be extensive.  Perhaps the number of people who died needlessly will be small, with only a few unheard people carrying tragedy for the rest of their lives. Maybe we bounce back quickly. 

I worked with doctors and researchers my whole career, and a lot of them are arrogant and know less than they think. They can be disdainful. If you are not prepared they can make you feel bad. I don't know that much about experts in other fields, but I have seen the acrimonious, even career-destroying arguments between opposing camps in a half-dozen fields. Childish, illogical, unfairly argued, corrupt - and somehow we have more knowledge about many things than when I was a boy. How did that happen? Was all of it from tearing down and disrupting?  Did that fix everything?

Maybe I'm just reading the wrong people. 

Spiritual Warfare

Jordan Peterson is not doing well physically, and his daughter has announced that the cause is A, the cause is B, or maybe even spiritual warfare.  Then predictably, she says "Boy is sure looks like spiritual warfare," because that's how people introduce the topic.  As a 70s Jesus Person, and early evangelical culture observer from the 80s, I have heard lots of people claim that their troubles come from spiritual warfare. I came to reflexively reject that, even though I do believe in spiritual warfare. No, your parachurch ministry is going down because you have increasingly become grandiose and see yourself as the center of Last Days preaching. No, you are being attacked because you have not exercised control over your staff (or yourself), and accusations of infidelity and even abuse are hitting the news. You have promoted your idiot wife/children into positions of authority. You are not exempt from the law of averages on trials and tribulations, dude. Or more generally People are calling you a loon because you are, in fact, a loon. I liked Peterson's first book, whatever that was, for its inspirational quality for young men not to feel beaten down but to display confidence and proudly do the little, character-building things brick-by-brick. 

But I was uncomfortable with his Jungianism, which I believe is an attractive set of ideas that somehow always leads people away from the faith into a mystic, symbolic interpretation of life.  I think it is good as a dessert, but not as a meal. It is nutritional only by accident.

So he is a food faddist and increasingly alt-health, but he is failing because of...spiritual warfare. I will be a bit snarky here and say that perhaps Satan would be more likely to go after an actual Christian, rather than someone who believes the Bible is remarkably fascinating and unfairly criticised but has a host of symbolic lessons to teach us. I wish him well despite my disagreement with him.  I think I have mentioned him only twice here, both times positively but with some reservations. 

Tuesday Links

 Why Warm Countries Are Poorer Tomas Pueyo.  Lew Kwan Yu used air conditioning to develop Singapore. The sunbelt didn't develop until air conditioning came along. 

David Foster linked this over at Chicago Boyz, and I realised I had seen several others link to it in the last couple of months. What Caused the Baby Boom? I figured we should at least have this out there to talk about, as declining fertility has been a topic here.  Sometimes it is good to ask the opposite question, not "Why is there evil?" but "Why is there good?" Not "Why are people poor?" but "Why are they rich?" Thus, not "Why have we stopped having babies?" but "Why did we have lots more babies for 30-40 years?" Unmentioned was the aspect of status of making enough so that your wife could stay home, which I recall was a big deal. It was a sign of having made it, perhaps even more so for immigrants. 

The Free Press is going to be free in the other sense for a week.  It's a good time to read some back articles that intrigued you. 

The Psmiths* review Paul Fussel's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System from 1983.  Earl Wajenberg from Wind Off the Hilltop has referenced it a few times over the years. It's a clever idea to even think of reviewing it, and they have a fascinating and well-written take.

Taxes on the wealthiest Until they sell their stock...or invest it differently...or die...they pay less than the 45% rate of the rest of the 1%. That's still quite a bit of coin, and not the 0% that often gets asserted by critics.  The money does not lie around as coins in their basement that they can dive into like Scrooge McDuck. It's not static. In a lot of cases, it didn't even exist until they made it. Are a lot of them selfish, arrogant, jerks?  Sure.  Get over it. It doesn't affect you.  See also what is meant by "Working Families."

*Does anyone recognise what this is a reference to? 

 

If Everyone Just

 "If everyone would just recycle one more used bicycle tire a year, we could save the Perito Moreno Glacier and the Dragon of Patagonia stonefly wouldn't go extinct." I jest, but this is the sort of argument that shows up for environmental causes all the time. The idea of everyone doing just a little bit is very attractive.  It doesn't seem to be that onerous and look at the wonderful benefits! When I pointed out to my brother that mandatory recycling is a kind of forced labor, he rolled his eyes. I see his point. Most things are pretty simple.  You throw it into Bin A instead of Bin B.  Maybe you have to rinse it out.  Maybe you have to check the little markings to see if it is eligible for your local recycling. Societal shaming if you won't do that little thing is the way we have always operated in any culture. Show up for church Christmas and Easter, it won't kill you. Wipe your feet before entering to save the hostess some work. Buy whatever the cub scouts are selling this year, it's good for the town.

The reason people like this is because it scales up!  If we could find 350M more bicycle tires to recycle, it would make a difference.

You know what else scales up?  The things that you ask people to do. Over the course of the week, mandatory recycling in my house adds up to less than half an hour.  Wait a minute, breaking down the corrugated cardboard and taking those to the dump takes more than that. And when we've got more cardboard than usual, that starts to add up.  As the amount of required time and effort increases, people start to question what it is all about. So this plastic won't break down for 10,000 years? Do I even care about the landfill a hundred years from now all that much? Shaming me by calling me short-sighted and not caring about posterity might set me off on a rant about the national debt ten years from now. You don't care about the fact that your grandchildren are going to have to deal with that with major lifestyle changes? Oh, you don't even have any grandchildren? So no problem, then, right?  Go back to worrying about plastic in 10,000 years. 

What's the tipping point on cultural changes? There are lots more children born into single-parent families now.  Is that worse than plastics?  Am I allowed to think it's worse than plastics or carbon fuels? 

Monday Links

This is the History of the West you thought you knew. How the West Was Wrought by Razib Khan.Then suddenly, you are looking at things from a different perspective.

I had not heard the term "nut-picking," but I have seen the phenomenon many times. I like the term and will try to remember to use it. 

How Wikipedia Became a Propaganda Site.  Its founder left years ago, but has some ideas how to fix it. Behind the paywall, but the intro is worth it. Elon Musk has his own idea, an xAI competitor called Grokipedia.  It doesn't look like much of it has been built yet. But Gizmodo already hates it, which is a good sign.

Therapy by the Numbers We don't always look at whether an intervention "works" in the sense of showing at least some improvement. Psychotherapy works well for some things, not so much for others.  But it helps somewhat for even the lowest-scoring disorders. Good to know.

The Product of the Railway is Always the Timetable.  Benedict Springbett. We shouldn't care about train networks in America as much as they should in Britain. But we do have some, we could do it better and we just like the idea of them.  The reality, not so much. 

 What matters is a passenger’s ability to get from one point on the network to any other point on the network as quickly as possible. This is quite a different proposition from speed on the individual lines that make up the network.

Speaking of things we like the idea of but are disappointed in the reality, socialism is a lovely story. Unfortunately, it is fiction. An author can make her characters say or do whatever she wants: the brother apologises, a child (or a raven) can speak preternatural wisdom, the inspired troops go on to victory. But re-enacting the scene precisely in real life guarantees nothing.  In fact, it may bear no relation to the results at all.

 

Fosbury Flop

I learned the Western Roll from reading sports magazines in the 1960s, and it was enough of an advantage that I outjumped better athletes up until about 9th grade. We jumped into sawdust pits then, and not very much sawdust. Dangerous stuff.  But that was why the flop was so surprising. The first time I saw it it looked impossible. Not even all colleges had good foam landing areas. If you didn't have the proper landing area and someone to coach you, there was no way you were going to learn Fosbury's technique. 

I know. I tried and hurt myself a few times before giving up. That was crazy, I could have killed myself, and the knuckleheaded adults at the Y overnight camp - including a couple of high school track coaches - didn't stop me or even caution me. They didn't understand it so they ignored it.  

Miss Hardcastle Quote

I haven't put this up for quite some time.  It is more true than ever.

 “Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.” CS Lewis That Hideous Strength 1945

Links From 2012

 Early D&D Was Rubbish

Remember when we were sold the idea that the nonwhite vote in general was hugely Democratic? Oh yeah, that was 2024, right up until the end. You can see the beginnings of the three-card monte back in 2012, Running the Numbers. The Hispanic and white votes were almost even that year. (Male-female and married-unmarried are bigger divides)

The death of Jacques Barzun at 104. I never did reread the book, and I know I won't now. I may have given it away by now. 

Stereotype Accuracy.  They ain't perfect, but they are a good deal better than nothing.

Norski ER - Anecdote Son #4 had a visit to the ER which reveals a seldom-noticed difference between American health care and the countries we are told to imitate. And maybe we should, but it is seldom as clear-cut and simply as we pretend.

Conspiracy Theory. 

Empty DNA

I remember listening to a genetics podcast and being puzzled by all this talk about "empty DNA."  Was it related to what we used to call junk DNA in any way? Searching for it on DDG revealed nothing.  When I went to the trouble of going back to the transcript the mystery was solved. It was mtDNA. 

That's just an anecdote with a tenuous connection to my actual topic.

I was in a civil argument in a comment section about Cheddar Man. After some scrambling, we found we were both patiently explaining the same thing to each other. No harm done. The popular press, especially in the UK, is fond of relating the story that a local schoolteacher is related to Cheddar, which proves that people haven't moved around that much in England, or something. 8,000 years later, there are still descendants hanging around the Gorge.  Except that's not what the relationship is at all. To oversimplify, they both have a mitochondrial DNA haplogroup of U5. That is the mother to daughter to granddaughter line of descent. You can find U5s at low concentrations all over Europe (and European descended). That they are both U5 doesn't mean they are that connected.  It just means they have a common female ancestor 25-35,000 years ago.  It's actually not quite that bad. They may have a similar subtype which arose only 17-27K y/a. But still, even though it is technically possible that Adrian Targett, the modern Englishman, is descended from some near relative of Cheddar's, it's a long shot.

To take my own example, I have  mtDNA U3.  U got named "Ursula" in The Seven Daughters of Eve that came out in 2001. Thus I have at least one ancestor in common with all the other U's in the world, wherever they may be. That one ancestor was over 6000 years ago and was somewhere in Western Asia, likely in what is now Iraq, Iran, or the Caucasus.  A whole lot of gypsies (36-56%) have U3, and a fair chunk of Berbers (10%) as well.  It is otherwise rare. But nothing remotely Roma, Berber, or West Asian shows up in my DNA, not even trace amounts.  That is the maternal line, and I can trace that to SE Sweden in the 1700s. Not a gypsy in sight. They only arrived in Poland-Lithuania after 1500, so someone got herself sold, captured, or inveigled into Sweden within the next few generations. That's only a few hundred years ago, not 8,000, but it would still be silly to say that I am descended from gypsies. Or Berbers. 

As for Mr. Targett, there are people all over Europe who are also U5, and by law of averages, lots of them are more closely related to Cheddar Man than he is. Interestingly, he himself is quite mystical about this, believing that the artist's re-creation of what the fossilised gentleman looks like resembles him remarkably. 

 

 

Meta-analyses

We fear that the study we are depending on will turn out to be a one-off, and not a good basis for choosing action.  Especially when a majority of the studies seem to point in a direction we like, but there are these pesky other studies that show the null hypothesis or even the opposite of our desires.  If only, if only someone could look at all the studies and put them together, to see what they say in aggregate. Then, then we would know what the answer is. It sounds like not only an answer, but, well, a meta-answer. 

Yeah, if only.

Let's start with inclusion.  The hundred studies we want to put together are not of the same design.  WRT the bees I just mentioned, some of the studies measure only bees.  Others measure all insects.  Other measure land insects or water insects. Some are point-in-time, one shot.  Others measure populations over years, but not in the same places every year, to get a sampling of the whole county - or even the whole country.  Does a decline of all insects in Denmark 1980-2000 deserve to be in with all land insects in Spain 2015-202?  Out of the hundred studies we end up picking only six might fit our criteria closely enough, and even those aren't identical. 

Is depression worse now than it was in the 1950s? Well, there's nothing like relying on the memory of 80 year-olds of whether the adults seemed depressed when they were children, eh? But if a study gets linked to at a popular online site, that's exactly what you will get in the comments, with people getting steamed up about it, too.  So you go for some objective criteria.  How about suicide rates? Eh, coroners didn't always write "suicide" even when they thought it was, out of kindness to the family. How about calls to suicide hotlines? Do we go by whether people describe themselves as depressed?  How about a 1-5 happiness scale? What if people lie about that? If one study has N=1732 and another one has N=47 college age females, how do you combine that?  Let's devise a test that gives us a number at the end and compare numbers. Okay, there are twenty-'leven depression tests, each asking similar but not identical questions. And that's just the single tests themselves. Now let's try to gather all the tests together and combine them.  What could possibly go wrong?

Publication bias can destroy just about anything.  What if you are studying political hatred and you find out your test shows that people who didn't hate anyone when they were 20 still don't hate anyone when they are fifty? No matter how you frame that, it's going to be hard to find a journal to publish it.  So you don't try, and neither did sixteen other colleges studying something similar that decade. What will get published?  All the studies that show that hatred changes significantly over time.

When you see the word "meta-analysis" do not be relieved or encouraged. It doesn't mean your questions are answered, it means you have new questions.  Even worse, people with biases they don't notice will find this magnified when they go meta.

You will still get some new information, and it might be useful. That is all. 

Off the Beaten Track

I walk the rail trail into Manchester, and the border is the approximate beginning of where some homeless try to stay. It is in an inconvenient place for either police department to check up on them frequently, about a half mile in from either side.  It is right along the river, as RT's often are, so there is water. It is lightly wooded, and untamed, so there is underbrush. This type of homeless person usually has tents and lives in a group of 2-4, not near another tent or part of a little village, as we sometimes see elsewhere. They are good at being unobtrusive, though not invisible.  You don't hear them, you don't notice them. They aren't a high priority for law enforcement unless they cause some other problem.  

People are in and out of there on little side trails off the main trail. There's not much point in going down the trails, as they just peter out after a few hundred yards, usually at a place where one can fish, have a fire without being easily noticed, or draw water. You seldom see people, but you see signs of people at the beginnings of those trails - bags of trash, usually. Looking ahead on the trail, you can see small groups suddenly disappear off to the side. There was a sign of some sort barely visible out in the woods.  I figured it was one of those "No camping, no fires..." signs put up by the town. But it had a face, so I wondered if it was a political sign that had been moved. 

 A little further on was another poignant display.

 

Further still was a tent, looked recently abandoned.  It is getting cold at night. There was an upside down shopping carriage, not that near any paved area, also newish. A fenced in area with Danger! signs, but the fences had been bent and cut through.  I know from the geography that no one was staying inside there, it was only a way to cut through to get down to the riverbank below the dam. A small fire circle with a dog's bowl. 

All this a stone's throw from where a few hundred people walk every day, many more on weekends. It's a different and parallel world with more sadness than ours.

Tooter Turtle

Help!  Mr. Wizard! 

I'm not sure I watched this one regularly.

Bees and other things

The bees are in trouble, but the story of it illustrates the danger of listening to environmentalists for solutions rather than just diagnosis. The data on hive decline was spotty and ambiguous. When we think about how difficult it would be to measure the number of insects in a given area and then globally we see why.  Do we vacuum them out of the air and count them up? Do we try and figure out how their predators and prey are doing? What if there are just as many insects of a certain type but they moved to the other side of the river for some reason? What about good years and bad years, like squirrels and acorns?

Still, putting it all together, there does seem to be a decrease. The environmentalists assured us it was the neonicotinoids, climate change, and habitat loss, and we had better get cracking on fixing those things. All of those things did turn out to be a fairly small part of the problem.  Real, but not the main event. The main problem turned out to be a parasite killing the bees. 

There was an additional problem from bee history. The European honey be is roughly a farm animal in America now, with hives moved around to pollinate important places. There used to he a hundred types of pollinators, but now it's more of a monoculture and the many minor pollinators are even more minor. This gives us less flexibility in the event of a bee parasite taking out the main tribe. 

Environmentalists know many things and they should not be ignored. But they have this tendency to assume the problem is fossil fuels, or plastics, or habitat loss.  All of those things are real, and it never hurts to check. But it is analogous to the anti-vaxxers who assume the symptoms are from the vaccines rather than the disease, or the purveyors of supplements who claim that we don't get enough supplements in our porridge. Hammer, nail.

The Preeminence of Justice in the Church

We live in one of the most just societies in history, arguably the most just.  If you want to put forward the Canadians or the Swiss I wouldn't argue too much, though every country has some exceptions to justice that might be fairly pointed out if we were going to be competitive about it. Why, then, are the church conferences and publications focused so dominantly on justice as the primary issue before the Church in America in this era? Are we really that unjust that we must drop the traditional 

I think it should be one of the issues. Justice should always be one of the issues of the church in every era, however much we might get into arguments about whether this is personal justice, government justice, cultural, economic, or group justice. That's all fine to be in there. But who decided that justice should be the main focus of my denomination? (And mine is a rather mild example to boot. The usual mainstream denominations seem to be even more obsessed.)

Why would the church in a society that is very healthy decide that health is its prophetic call? In a beautiful country, why would the church suddenly decide that it should deemphasise all its other callings to focus on challenging the society to promote beauty even more? If a society's churches were highly observant of the rules, wouldn't we think it strange that the new trend in the seminaries was to make it even more observant? When the Ladies' Aid is the most forgiving group in town, why would you send people to scream at them to be more forgiving? I don't say eliminate that teaching altogether.  We always need reminders of that. But what does it say about such a pastor who preaches it to them three weeks out of four?

In the Screwtape Letters we have the demonic strategy for making the church useless in every time and place.

All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.

Libertine eras should be warned against the dangers of prudery. Impoverished areas should be cautioned against the dangers of riches. An educated church in a wealthy suburb should be constantly reminded of the importance of reading widely in the fashionable areas of the culture so that they might "witness" to their neighbors, never mentioning that this will increase the ability of their neighbors to witness to them about secularity. Would we preach patriotism to extreme nationalists? The importance of family to those sectors that never divorce and have ten children apiece?

Actually, that's exactly what the church tends to do. But it ain't good. 

Well...well...we know why this is a focus. For those in the seminaries, the denominational colleges, the publication arms, and the general headquarters, talking about how other people are unjust is what they are good at. It gives them jobs and status. It doesn't meet the Church's need or the society's need.  It meets their need. They can keep their secular friends with little obstacle.

Social Injustice Warrior

Nathalie Martinek, PhD at the site Hacking Narcissism was in the comment section of the Communal Narcissism link I put up October 1. She looked interesting, so I followed her link to Introducing the Social Injustice Warrior. She has set herself the specialty of various types of narcissism and has thought a great deal about the topic.  It will take a while, as the internal links to her other discussions* are each good-sized posts in themselves, but I think it will reward your effort. 

Before 2011, the term social justice warrior was used as a compliment to describe someone who genuinely cared about the disadvantaged and wanted to advocate for change. Since then, the term became more of an insult.

According to Know Your Meme, a social justice warrior is:

a pejorative label applied to bloggers, activists and commentators who are prone to engage in lengthy and hostile debates against others on a range of issues concerning social injustice, identity politics and political correctness. In contrast to the social justice blogosphere at large, the stereotype of a social justice warrior is distinguished by the use of overzealous and self-righteous rhetorics [sic], as well as appealing to emotions over logic and reason.

In other words, a social justice warrior is synonymous with an unreasonable, hostile, outraged, and self-interested internet user with a progressive agenda.

 Well, yeah.

This fits with our recent discussions that empathy is not a virtue in itself and can be easily abused, and plenty that I have written over the years about working in a helping profession and its peculiar temptations.

*Communal narcissism; knowledge vampirism; grief, shame, and vengeance; grooming and trauma bonding with the Oppressed they pretend to represent.

Labelling

 A pastor friend who is retiring is calling it "free agency." He still has plans.

Making Antibodies as Ubiquitous as Aspirin

A longish history of serum therapy, with recent advances: Making Antibodies as Ubiquitous as Aspirin at Works in Progress 

Diphtheria, the strangling angel, was one of the great killers of children in the 19th century. The infection owes its lethality to a potent toxin released by the bacteria Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Diphtheria toxin destroys the heart, lungs, and liver. In the late stages of disease, the infected are suffocated by a buildup of dead, grey, tissue in their throats. Most victims were children under five; before modern treatments, as many as half of infected babies and toddlers died. There was little parents and doctors could do against the scourge, until biotechnology provided the first answer.

And 

But it was just in the past decade or so that the technology matured enough to give us multiple new approvals per year; the FDA only recently approved the 100th monoclonal antibody drug. To turn antibodies into a scalable technology, as we had done previously with small synthetic molecules, we needed to stack many improvements in manufacturing. With these advances, came synthetic processes that made far more diseases treatable.