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. 

Well, I'm Impressed

 I was looking for something else but was mesmerised by this.

 

MAGA Fury

Do the WaPo and NYT describe everything that conservatives complain about as "fury?" This time it's MAGA furious at Bad Bunny being picked. Are they?  Football fans are pretty used to not liking the Super Bowl halftime show, because it tends to be someone who is supposed to attract the semi-fan, often female, who doesn't watch that often. They want those extra eyeballs for the commercials. I haven't seen it mentioned on conservative sites yet.  I suspect there will be some grousing. 

Fury. Well, I'm sure there are some people furious about Bad Bunny who are big Trump supporters, but I'll bet they get over it. Are their opponents trying to conjure it, trying to make people believe it, or projecting how they spend their mornings onto other people's screens? 

113

I put up 113 posts in September, well above my previous record.  I have exceeded 90 only twice, and only gone above 80 less than ten times.  I don't know why, because this was also a month with many links posts of about five each. Those total 74 more, so that is 187 for the month. In 2014 I only did 209 posts for the whole year!  I don't know why that was either.  One month had only five and another only six that year.  I am still reprising links from 2012 and should get to 2014 soon enough, and maybe I will figure it out then. I don't recall an especial busyness. 

Links

Grim did compile a list of likely effective gun control measures a few weeks ago, and ones that Second Amendment purists could sign off on.  But I still think this is funny from a decade ago. Yes Virginia, There Is Some Effective Gun Control. 

The baby bust and partisanship 

Strong female partisanship is an important part of the story. In the United States, women have stronger partisan identities than do men. Women are also more polarized than men in their partisan affect, liking their own party and disliking the other more strongly. This gender gap is wholly caused by white female Democrats, however; black women and men show no differences in polarization, and Republican women and men show none, either.

Communal Narcissism  Rotate the traditional definition of narcissism - I am the smartest, most popular, most dominant - ninety degrees and you get the communal narcissist - I am the most moral, the most helpful. But are they? Do they walk the walk?

When I was a boy, my social studies book would call them Laplanders, or Lapps, a remote exotic people that somehow lived off reindeer herding. Now my son knows a few Sami in Norway, where dried fish is as important as reindeer to their sustenance. Nomads to Natives tells their ancestry

From the Arthurian site I linked to about a week ago, The Northern Arthur. He dismisses the theory I had repeated about five years ago that "Arthur" was a title rather than a given name. Bernard Mees is coming at the historical record as a linguist, noticing differences in endings and spelling that are usually overlooked, and using these to place Arthur in region and time.

When I Was Twenty-One

I did not consciously choose this to go with the previous post.  I'm not sure there is any connection beyond both being about the early 1900s. 

"Put on you gingham gown, dear..."  I didn't think of gowns as being made of gingham that much. Maybe in 1911 that was more common - or maybe the meter just had to scan and the alliteration was nice. It comes from a Malay word for striped cloth.

I have noticed with the pre-1940 songs that they often have longer introductions than we are used to now.

A Time of Gifts

Book group is finishing A Time of Gifts and moving on. It is travel writing, and some consider it the peak of the form, of an older man recalling with the aid of his diaries his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933, when he was but 18.  I have found it difficult, and eventually decided this is because it highly descriptive, and I have little gift for visualisation. As I think I have mentioned, I even dream in dark sepia tones. Conversation I can recall. Ideas I can recall. I get outside references, though unevenly.  I can be remarkably unaware of the obvious. ("Oh, their names are George and Martha!  How did I miss that?") I have read enough in my time that I can recognise something that is supposed to be a telling detail, like a clue going by in a mystery novel, but the detail tells me nothing. I'll bet people point to this section as an example of good writing.  

One of the other members had read the book before, liking it the first time but growing irritated this time. He found the author to be unrelenting in showing off his vocabulary and knowledge of the arts. "Okay I get it!  You've read a lot." The first time around, the reader might be eager and even grateful to learn new stuff. The second time through one would be more concerned with what deep understandings this had led the author to,  and Fermor does not pay much direct attention to this.  The reader has to intuit this from subtler cues. I guess.  I didn't bother, myself. 

So I cannot recommend it myself, but I can say for those who like this sort of thing, they will like this. There are some remarkable incidents with the people he meets. 

The Location of Evil

A commenter at Cat Rotator's Quarterly reminded me of this passage from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. 

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.

And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

You will notice that it improved rather than hindered his ability to face down evil in others. 

Rowling and Emma Watson

 I am not an especial Rowling fan.  I read the first of the Harry Potter books and liked it well enough, but was not excited. The new magic was too dense.  People were doing magical things everywhere.  In the older fantasies the magic was often more of a poorly understood natural ability with actual magical events ancient and accumulated, brought forth for a purpose into essentially non-magical worlds. Still, she was clever, could write a good combo fantasy/school story and my family loved her.

I have become more of a fan in recent years when she has come under attack for cultural and political reasons. She has struck the balance between firmness, even harshness, and graciousness and sticking to reason rather than fashion.

Ann Althouse ran a post about her this morning which is among the best I have seen on the topic. Now that the Harry Potter stars have become adults and have taken to a very showy form of trashing the woman who made them famous, Rowling has subjected them to adult treatment. I doubt they will like it.

Time Travel

David Foster and I were trying to remember a joke today to tell to Jean, known to some of you as The New Neo. We kept screwing it up and couldn't get it right.  I finally figured it out.

 A man is given the gift of time travel for one event.  He decides to go back and kill baby Adolph Hitler.  He comes back discouraged and his friend asks him "Didn't it work?" 

 "No," said the time traveler "I couldn't find Adolph Hitler anywhere.  I had to settle for killing Woodrow Wilson."

 

His friend looked puzzled. "Who's Adolph Hitler?"

Deep River

 

I wouldn't have thought I would like this version

Sunday Links

I'll be having lunch with David Foster of Chicago Boyz and Jean of The New Neo in Epping today at The Holy Grail. If I recall, they have Old Speckled Hen there.

Science Fictions has Insectageddon, trying to figure out whether we really are in danger of losing bees and other insects. 

Tune in to hear how, in exactly the same way as they affect our episodes on psychology and psychiatry and medicine, really difficult issues of measurement are at the bottom of the entire debate.

Google Admits to Censoring YouTube content, and that the Biden administration pressured it to, but maintains that the two are unrelated. Snopes accepts its reasoning. I wouldn't. Snopes is better than it was a few years ago, but still not on my completely reliable list. This follows Zuckerberg admitting approximately the same thing in August.

Also at the Chicago Tribune, some letters about dogs in restaurants. I am opposed, but it probably based on a professional bias of hating the ridiculous claims about some unapproved "emotional support animals." 

AI Isn't Replacing Radiologists,  with dramatic graphs

I was a paid subscriber to Rob Henderson but no longer am.  This one with Louise Perry looks intriguing enough that I might try again. A lot about intra-elite competition.

Comey Mistake

According to Powerline, this was not the indictment of Comey that we wanted, and it might not fly.  Thanks to Maggie's Farm for the link. 

YouTube

It keeps giving me feeds of punks getting beat up because they deserve it.  I must like that more than I thought.

The Sword of Freedom

Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad, has a book out, The Sword of Freedom. I have only read a few excerpts. I used to read a lot of spy stuff, both fiction and nonfiction. I would have been a terrible spy myself, but in the pre-computer days I would have been a good cryptographer. I don't know what use any intelligence agency would ever have had for me.  Maybe I should have gone and knocked on the gate at Camp Peary when I lived down there and see what they had. 

Update:  Also new from Free Press Born Lucky by a son with High-Functioning Autism whose dad shepherded him into adulthood.  Excerpt here 

 But my dad knew that there wasn’t a teacher or therapist who could step in and suddenly make me fit in. The world wasn’t going to adapt to me, and he wasn’t going to try to make it. There would be no therapists or accommodations. If I was going to succeed, he would have to adapt me to the world.

Skeletons

Seen on FB: We shouldn't use plastic skeletons for Hallowe'en, they are bad for the environment. We should use all-natural locally sourced skeletons instead. 

Try a Little Tenderness

I had not known it was an older song before Otis Redding sang it.

Isaac Punts

This guy is obsessed with the kicking game and special teams, and this is a good time for it. There were 8 field goals over 50 yards this week and one for 64. There are also new strategies for blocking kicks. A few punters are able to reliably back the return game way up and average 50 more yards/game in field position. But it's kickoffs where you are going to see new strategies for a while until it gets sorted out which one is best.  This knuckleball style kick looks promising. It looks like a nightmare to field when you know large people are running at you quickly.

I am not allow to embed, so I will just link to his channel.  It's great fun to pay close attention to a part of the game that most of us miss. 

We Want Them Punished

Punishment is often just, and good for the maintenance of society. We have had the discussion before about the Christian understanding that mercy is superior, though I always provide the qualifier that mercy does not exist except upon a foundation of justice. We should not try to be more merciful than God.

But that is not today's subject. I want to contrast justice not with mercy, but with practicality and usefulness. When I worked with sexual offenders (or supposed sexual offenders) one of the difficulties was getting the staff to keep focus. Staff would want to punish them, or as the prisons do, allow them to be punished by the conditions and other inmates, because they were horrifying people who deserved no better. One difficulty of this is that when one staff member moves to punish, another will move to rescue. That will in turn set off balance/counterbalance effects, especially with personality disorders. From this comes shift wars, department competition, challenges to authority and other ills.

A speaker at a conference described the more important problem succinctly. Your first job is to protect the public. He went on to point out that if we punish offenders until we are bored or spent, and some rescuer intervenes to give them added freedom or even discharge and they reoffend, then we have failed in our primary task. I have heard nurses mutter about castration for child molesters.  But even the castrated can still molest. The desire to punish may be just, but it may not be the best choice.

I am seeing a lot of this on the right in politics and culture these days. I understand it, and it is often just. People who deceived us, got rich off us corruptly, or insulted us deserve punishment. But the more important task is to get those agencies functioning correctly, so they do not do further damage.  If we punish all the bad guys at the DOJ, the CDC, the ATF, and EPA but they just just lay low and start again - or their replacements capsize the boat on the other side, we will feel deeply satisfied for a while, but we are not better off. Sometimes punishment is the best choice.  Sometimes not.

Keep focus.  This is a Keep Your Eye on the Prize era now. 

True Crime Replication Crisis

Just to get you in the habit, Graph Paper Diaries has the second entry in its True Crime series The True Crime Replication Crisis.  I did not see that fusion of topics coming.

Two Lessons

Grim, who knew little about Charlie Kirk before his death (as did I and many others) offers that we are learning two lessons, "one from those who loved him, and another from those who hated him."

Wednesday Links

Over at N-N-N, Police Killings: Perception Vs Reality 

Many believe US police kill hundreds or even thousands of unarmed Black men every year. The real number is about a dozen.

The American Boy  by Theodore Roosevelt. We don't get many uses of the word "pluck" in context these days in the US.  

Toward a Sociology of Unmasking by Jason Manning. I had a cartoon on my office door years ago of an old man on a beach chair looking out to sea, saying to the old woman next to him "I've come full circle.  Things are what they seem." We love being in the know with hidden information, known to but a few.

Peer-Reviewed Research: Men find looking at nearly-naked women distracting But have they proven it really? The men were distracted from their card games. Are we sure that generalises?

No link, but just wondering what Trump's continued turnaround on Ukraine means. The simplest explanation is that Trump believed he could negotiate a deal with anyone, but has decided that Putin is impossible and is saying "screw you." 

The Age of Arthur

A site to keep you up on the latest research. The Age of Arthur. I am currently reading about the Picts.

Update: Bernard Mees is a strong believer in the historical existence  of Arthur, with contemporary record of him leading the battle at Mount Badon in 516 and his death in 537.

E.A. Poe "Alone"

 

  "Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. " The Philosophy of Composition.  

It certainly seems that way when you are under its spell. It looks different from the outside. 

Poe did not publish the poem in his lifetime.  It was discovered after his death.

"I Am the Only Martyr"

Althouse puts up the video of Steven Colbert claiming he is the only martyr in late night. She thought using the word martyr was ill-advised given current circumstances.

A lot of black people and a few white ones were martyred in the Civil Rights era, and everyone has been trying to look just as oppressed and endangered since. Martyr carries an extra implication, that you are being sacrificed not just because of who you are and what you have done, but because you represent a group.  "I'm doing this for all of you," is the secret message being Colbert's declaration. They hate all you wonderful people so they are punishing me." Trump didn't use the word, but said something similar a couple of years ago telling the crowd "In the end their not coming after me. They're coming after you - and I'm standing in the way." When it is a killing, and there is a fair connection between the victim and a cause I can see the justification. But not every Hispanic who is killed is being killed for that reason alone, or even mostly. Losing your job?  Okay, that's a bad thing, though with celebrities it doesn't inspire pity, just anger. 

We have martyr inflation. People want to look like they are just as brave, their cause just as noble, and their enemies just as evil as more traditional martyrs.  

The Battle of Maldon

 A reading of JRR Tolkien's translation of The Battle of Maldon. 

Tylenol

...does not cause autism. That's it. 

I had been neglecting to read Cremieux Recueil, one of my favorite stats guys.  But I was cued to check out his latest on the HHS dropping their declarations of what causes autism. It's just madness.  There is decades of abundant evidence that there is no connection, and we can go back and relook at the data old and new with fresh eyes and see the same thing. Vaccinations do not cause autism. This nonsense is already causing the reemergence of measles and it's just starting. Ann Althouse is taking a "you made your bed" point-of-view that this is an opportunity to demonstrate Tylenol safety, because we are going to have tremendous before-and-after numbers with many participants. I think that is overly-optimistic.  They are already ignoring clear information now, more information will not change their minds. 

Death will change other people's minds. Eventually.

Update:  Douglas2's objection noted.  And ad hominim is a bad sign, yes.  Cremieux's belief is that the increase in diagnoses follows from increased funding to treat that diagnosis, something cynics have been suggesting for at least a decade.  I would put it differently.  There would not be a clamoring to fund for ASD diagnoses if there were not something happening at ground level. The increase in 25% in a year likely includes some pent up demand, and some shifting of special needs children to slots where there is money to treat them.  But the money does create demand.  The beds at my acute hospital were very few and very expensive.  If we opened a new unit of 24 beds, it would be about 6 months of sighing with relief before we were bursting at the seams again with a waiting list just as long.  

With all that said, the choropleth map below does seem to fit with the idea that one year your kid had "autistic traits," and the next was diagnosed with autism. That is not a cause of autism, but a cause of society's response to the symptoms. Put part of the reason we are having a panicked search for causes, even minor and indirect ones, is that there seems to be so much more of it. We notice the symptoms more, it seems different from what we remember from our own childhoods, and we learn that there is significant genetic influence, which we can't fix.  So we look for things to blame that we might have some control over.

 

Are You Washed In The Blood?

Notice that Earl Scruggs is on guitar here, not banjo. He's pretty good.

 

Brain Training

Science Fictions just did a podcast on Brain Training.  I have some things to add but will also use a lot of their info here.  Not a full summary, they've brought more out of the pantry there.

I wonder if our belief in brain training is conditioned by our analogising it to physical fitness. Challenging your muscles making them stronger is called hormesis.  We know it works for muscles and Nicholas Nassim Taleb believes it works for a variety of systems. We have an idea that it works on cognitive abilities because it doesn't look that different from ordinary development.  Fifth grade is more difficult than first grade. But in practice it is hard to differentiate between people who get smart because they challenge themselves and people who like challenging themselves because they are smart. We are comfortable with the idea that challenge makes us smarter but the evidence for that is surprisingly weak. Doing crossword puzzles definitely makes you better at doing crossword puzzles.  There is mild evidence that it makes you better at other word puzzles, the more similar to crosswords the better. This is why the programs and books have names like Brain Gym and Brain Training.

But what we want is for there to be brain exercises that help us think better in general.  Something you can do that sharpens your focus, staves off dementia, improves your memory.   Lumosity claims to imnprove memory. Processing speed. Problem solving.

William James believed brain function could be improved, and tested his theory on himself and his students in a fairly solid way, long before experimental psychology developed procedures. Quoting from Science Fictions' episode on Brain Training "...back to William James. After many days spent memorizing Milton's Paradise Lost, he observed no savings in memorizing a different set of 158 lines from (Victor Hugo's) Satyr at 57 seconds per line. Admitting that he was tired from other work for his second bout of memorising, he recruited four students to repeat the experiment, two of whom showed savings and two of whom did not. Given such weak evidence, James held to the view that one's native retentiveness is unchangeable." 

If only that had been the end of it, but James was one of the originators of the myth that we only use 10% of our brains, and our capacity is shamefully underused, which fits loosly with the brain exercise model.  

Starting with physical activity itself, might help during testing simply because of blood flow. The evidence for some cognitive improvement is not good, but there is some for regular activity sustaining what you have. The reason that it looks like improvement is that inactivity decreases the flow of blood to your brain, but only a few percent, and once you have that circulating, you don't get more improvement. There may be some small effect of having that blood flow often, but it is small, and this is one of the areas where publication bias is strongly suspected.  No one wants to hear it has only negligible results, so if your study shows that, you don't even submit it.

The health journal from Harvard Medical School  assures us that different kinds of activity, like journaling, musical instruments, or dancing are what do the trick. If you read closely, you will see that any proof beyond "A lot of smart people think so" is curiously lacking. "You have to always challenge your brain in order for it to grow."  Grow. What do you mean grow?  Like a muscle?  Like a tree? This is very much in line with the reposted article I just put up about Experts. 

As for stimulating different parts of our brain, that is also related to an older model of the brain, that various abilities are contained in discrete areas of the brain. fMRI's show clearly that the whole brain network is involved constantly in every kind of cognitive activity. There are differences, but your whole brain is used at least a little, unless something has gone wrong. We have been down this road before, with the Graduation 2010 program in Daviess County in Kentucky.  Every child in the public school system was taught chess, a musical instrument, a foreign language, and folk dancing for 13 years, to see if it created any overall improvement.  It didn't.  Disappointing News. 

Here are the claims from Verywell Health, Verywell Mind  and if you like your unsupported speculation to have a lot of scientific temps in it, California Learning Resource Network will tell you about "synaptic plasticity" and "cortical reorganisation." These are the things that would be affected if this mental decathlon worked.

We have seen a similar example of the effect of these interventions for decades, back to TV commercials in the 70s.  These training modules are part of a complete breakfast. Or they contribute to improved circulation.  Or they encourage heart health. 

They are selling you Lucky Charms as healthy food.  

 

Experts

I had a post about Experts in 2016, based on a cautionary opinion from Nicholas Nassim Taleb. This was pre-Covid, before we polarised about the very word "experts." I think he makes a good distinction that experts really are good at what they are good at, but become no better - or perhaps even worse than the interested amateur - when they start guessing. You can follow it up at the link, but the basic idea is that because they spend a lot of time speculating in their own field, they produce not only new insights, but also shared errors that need to be unlearned before they can improve. 

The great Indian mystic Yogi Berra once said "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice.  In practice, there is." There is also the story about the economist who saw something working in practice and ran hurriedly back to his study to see if it worked in theory. 

I have linked to the post instead of reposting it because the comments are good. 

 

Clustering Small Adventures

I used to be comfortable driving long distances, driving down to southern colleges or military installations for family, going five hours each way for a day conference, that sort of thing. As I have gotten older, sharing 20-25% of the driving has become more important. I can daydream just as well or even better, but sleepiness slows me down with stops. I like driving medium distances now, and actively look for occasional excuses to do so. Small adventures look promising but not enough to drive far.  Helvetia, WV is a small Swiss-founded village that has a Swiss restaurant in season and some old Swiss-influenced buildings. Nearby Pickens has a maple-syrup festival in March. But we have lots of maple syrup events in NH, so the latter is not much of a draw. At most it might choose my date for a Helvetia adventure. 

I ran across a Russian Orthodox Monastary that keeps silence 9am-9pm and is available for retreats and spiritual direction.  It is even farther into WV, on the border with Eastern KY. As I have only driven through WV on Interstates, getting into the mountain roads looks interesting. But not interesting enough to drive 13 hours, because we have back roads in the mountains here in NH, and silent retreats an hour or two away - though not together.  The skiing areas have Swiss-looking chalets, also.

To cut down on driving I could fly into Pittsburgh and rent a car and still have plenty of back roads.  Yet Tripadvisor is not showing me a lot I want to see in Pittsburgh. Any decent art museum will show you things you can't get elsewhere, which makes them good secondary stops wherever you go. Ditto small specialty museums. But even though the National Lighter Museum, the National 4-string Banjo Museum, and the Frontier Drugstore Museum are all only a half-hour outside of Oklahoma City in Guthrie, the only other draw would be to watch the Oklahoma City Thunder play basketball. Which they do in Boston once a year anyway. If I were in OKC for some other reason, those would be good add-ons.

I could see the Red Sox minor league stadiums in Salem VA and Greenville SC, and if I were driving that, I would be passing through Grim's territory and add him to the adventure.  But Grim has talked about his own adventure coming here, and we read each other enough to be in frequent contact anyway. Plus, that doesn't connect that well to the West Virginia visits, unless I decided to do an entire 10-day Appalachian tour. Which I might.  I have friends in the Shenandoah Valley as well. 

So these are separated half-adventures and quarter adventures that don't add up to a whole reason to go, but hover in the background in case some other half-adventure comes along to attach to them. But for the moment, they look like a lot of money to spend for an uncertain payback.

We will drive up to Quebec City next month.  That's a whole adventure for my wife and a half one for me.  

Compassion

There was an article about some of the nurses at my old hospital having gone through the shooting death in the lobby in 2023. They talked, as psych nurses do, about the self care and care of each other that is needed to just get through but still "be available" for their patients. One supervisor told the others "You can't pour from an empty cup." I think that part about caring for each other is true. I am suspicious of self-care, however much it is on everyone's lips these days.

Perhaps the opposite is also true, or more true. It may be that we can only pour from an empty cup. The cup-filling, cup-pouring analogy might lead us away from the truth. Scripture uses the analogy of an overflowing cup, but also one of being an empty vessel.

More Empathy

Ann Althouse has a post about UK police invading a woman's home in order to see her underage daughter's phone.  If you watch the video, you will empathise with the mother and be horrified at the police. But when you get the other side of the story, that the video has been edited, leaving out the part that the daughter is not suspected of merely viewing inappropriate material, but of committing an actionable crime against another girl. Your empathy might shift to the police, who have a victim out there to protect.

A third possibility is that you may still think the police acted wrongly, even if legitimately investigating a crime, and not empathise with either party very much. 

It shows how easily empathy can be manipulated, and why it is dangerous. 

Decathlon

I used to follow the decathlon as a boy.  Not too many 5th-graders knew who CK Yang and Rafer Johnson were, but my obsessional qualities were showing even then. My interest waned over the years, but it does still catch my eye. World's Greatest Athlete is true, but it doesn't translate well to spectators. The greatest athletes in sports could likely have been good decathletes.  Calvin Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Bo Jackson would likely have excelled there.  Today, someone like Mookie Betts would be a good nominee. We think that Decathletes might be stars in other sports if they had specialised, but I wonder about that. Competitive sports do require some all-around ability, but each sport requires a few particular abilities at not only the 99th percentile, but 99.9th.  I suppose that is true of any ability: writing, music, leadership, organisation.  The best all-around musician might not be a star, and a star might have some things they aren't superlative at, offset by the few things they are.

I enjoyed this enough to watch it all, but that's probably enough for a year for me. 

 If Garland hadn't faulted in the javelin it would have been even closer.  He didn't seem to unhappy about the overall, though, just glad to have medaled.

 

 

Wind Off The Hilltop

When I added Earl to the sidebar (Wind Off The Hilltop), we both noticed that his was not one of those sites that automatically bumps up the latest post when it is on a sidebar. He thus promised to let me know when he had an update so I could note it. I don't know if the list is long because he gathered a lot of things and put them up just now or if he suddenly remembered he was going to send them to me. 

It gives a security risk notice because of the site certificate, but I just clicked through with not problem.  If you are worried about it, you can go to his home page and then track them down. 

Essays (collected humor):

Pluto Tells All by John Scalzi

Whale Removal by Dave Barry

The Em Dash Responds by Greg Mania

Poems (collected):

For the Last Wolverine by James L. Dickey

Burning Bush by Chris Benders

my troubled lovely by john roedel

And Everything Begins by David Hirt

How to Be Hopeful by Barbara Kingsolver

The Muse of Atlantis by Clark Ashton Smith (prose poem) 

The Statue of Silence by Clark Ashton Smith (prose poem) 

Sphinx and Medusa by Clark Ashton Smith

The Great Dance by C. S. Lewis (prose poem)

Story:

Breath, Spells, Tears by Earl Wajenberg 

Burying a Horse

Sometimes events come together in remarkable coincidences.   Good friends had a horse, Wylbur, who has been frequently sick. The five children and some of their friends were quite attached to him. He had colic, his intestines all tangled, and died this week. Everyone was worried how the children would take it, especially Willow, the 7th-grade daughter. They decided to have a funeral for Wylbur, and a few people from outside the family attended.  Getting a hole big enough for a horse is a project, but the Dad shares a backhoe and a hole was dug. 

We hadn't heard anything, and worried what was up. One of our sons saw the children at youth group on Wednesday and asked how they were doing.  They didn't get what he meant until he asked about the funeral, whereupon they started laughing about it telling him. Shortly before the scheduled funeral, they realised that no one had figured out how to get Wylbur INTO the hole. Where he was lying wasn't that close. So the Dad looked it up online and found that someone had successfully lifted a horse with ratchet straps.

So he ratchet strapped the horse to his tractor. Then he drove for the hole.

"The parts of the horse that were ratchet strapped came with it, but the rest of the horse just dragged behind." The children started screaming because it looked like Wylbur was going to lose his head, but Dad kept going and managed to get all the horse into the hole. The children decided afterwards that this was all really quite funny and have enjoyed telling the story. It's probably a bonding moment they will share on holidays when they are old.

 

Today at the library program one of the last NH commercial fishermen gave a talk about his new book of reminiscences. One of the best ones was bringing a net with whale goo all over it to the dump, which tried to refuse it. I thought immediately of the Dave Barry story about the exploding whale and associated it with dragging Wylbur across the landscape. As I was wondering what I was going to do about all of this, Earl Wajenberg sent a bunch of new links from his site which included...Dave Barry's story about the exploding whale. I am not linking to it here, but you will be seeing it presently. If you have any other funny stories about dismembered animals, now's the time.

I am including the film of the exploding whale here, because putting it in Earl's list from Wind Off The Hilltop would distract your attention from everything he put there, including some serious writing.

    

Vikings As We Imagine Them

Please do not bother me with your pedantic accurate history. All available records tell me my ancestors from the area were commercial fishermen and small householders of mixed farming. Bah. It's all a lie. This woman and these guys are my real ancestors.

 

Safety Tip

 My wife remembers that the first lesson of chem lab was "hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass." An excellent bit of information to have.

Let me add to it: "Hot cast iron looks exactly the same as cold cast iron." 

Gurwinder

I will be adding Gurwinder to the sidebar. This post of his, and the conversation that follows, is a good example why. It begins 

In a 2022 newsletter, I gave one reason why I think leftists are more likely than rightists to celebrate opponents’ deaths...

Some people try to keep their sidebars thorough, as a friendly nod to the many writers they find stimulating or agreeable.  I have been increasingly weeding mine, limiting it to people I actually go and read. I derived great pleasure from Dwarkesh Podcast for a few months, but seldom find the interviews all that engaging these last few months.  I have learned so much from Manifold and Conversations with Tyler over the years that I am reluctant to remove them, but I click through and listen only about 20% of the time that a new episode drops now, and I don't listen to those all the way through.

Please go and check those two, looking at the recent topics BTW, to see if the interviews attract you. Talk me out of dropping them. I don't know if it is because they have used up their best material* or that my dilettante mind has just tired of their favorite topics. I dropped Maggie's Farm during Covid because of too many annoying people in the comments - too much of a temptation for me. But I go there all the time, so it is went back on.  Just be warned about the comments.  Even the people I agree with I skip in irritation now.  

Even Astral Codex Ten seems less gripping. Yet ironically, because of that I will be adding it on. I have enthused about it so often that I resisted plumping for it further, as I have a couple of issues on which I disagree sharply, and didn't want to fully endorse it.  Now that it is lower down my list, the objections bother me less.

When I go to a site I like I often check out their recommended list as well.  I am far more likely to do this if the list is short. Also, I know your time is short and I want to put my best goods out front. 

*I suspect this is why The Great Books podcast shut down. When you are over 300 books you could do one more Shakespeare,  but the drive is less.

 

Imaginary Enemies

 Steve Stewart-Williams at N-N-N, Imaginary Enemies. 

The total sample size across the five studies was just under 5,000 participants.

Six Key Findings

1. Both Sides Exaggerate the Other Side’s Agreement with Extreme Views 

I think we knew this.  All of it. It's nice to have someone test it and put numbers to it. When I was young media voices were center-left.  Now media voices are among the most extreme. 

 

Symbolism Vs Evocation

Even authors that use symbolism come to deny it.  They get tired of people making tight allegorical claims. I looked up Piggy's glasses and got more than a half-dozen explanations - admittedly related. The first three explanations of what Robert Frost's "The Rabbit hunter" means were quite different, but all three were asserted confidently. Tolkien said he hated allegory even though he wrote one ("Leaf by Niggle"), because of the brainless symbols people kept finding. Beorn symbolizes the adaptability of man, his greatest strength.  I suppose that's not false. The short Father and Daughter that I just linked to has a first comment that tells us that the bicycle wheels represent the circle of life. 

Hemingway said in a letter "The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit." He did allow that people could find meanings in his work, though he seemed to be a bit grudging about it.  As he should. Writers evoke.

They Don't Work

Update:  Grim illustrates in the comments that I am at least partly wrong, in thorough fashion. Wonderful list.

I find myself saying this in my head often. Ideas for gun control.  They Don't Work. People are just sure that something - some "common-sense" gun control should work.  And if by chance it does occur to them that their idea won't work, then they are sure someone else's similar idea will do it. Educational ideas, a new crop every September. Sometimes they even look like they work, until we try to scale them up. But let the subject come up, and the same ideas get floated repeatedly, just dressed in different clothes. Mental health.  Poverty. Say those words over at Maggie's, or at Althouse, and you will sometimes get some better, or at least more original answers - but even there, usually not. Kids succeed if you have high expectations. If we didn't give tax breaks to billionaires, we could afford this. Other first world countries don't have this problem. Did you look under the seat cushions?  

Nothing more to say. Mostly just whining, but also grateful for the people here.  You're a smart group.

Father and Daughter

 

Charlie Kirk

I finally had time to go check for myself. One can find overclaims about him on both sides, though I have a strong opinion which strays farthest from the truth. His opponents claim he was mean, and abrasive, and provocative. Because he also supported Second Amendment rights they claim that he thus supported allowing people to be shot. This is the same as saying if we didn't have motor vehicles we wouldn't have motor vehicle accidents, but they get unwired whenever guns are mentioned and lose the ability to do arithmetic and engage is basic logic.  Guns equalize the weak against the strong and have done wonders for the rights of the weak, oppressed, and reasonable against the merely powerful. Even today More guns, less crime is not an enormous numerical advantage, but it is measurable and significant. 

This week I read "I am not in support of what happened to Charlie Kirk.  But Charlie Kirk was in support of what happened to Charlie Kirk." I don't recall Kirk being in favor of assassinations, so this can only mean "Well, he was a gun guy, he should expect this."  Horrifying. Try that on the dangers of skiing, or power tools, or walking downtown, or anything else you did today and see how the logic holds up. It'sjust a self-righteous way of saying "He deserved it."

On the other hand, his supporters have taken to saying "He was just going to college campuses and talking to people."  We recently covered in Stuart The Just what it means when someone is "just," or "only," or "merely" doing something.  It usually means they were doing more than that but are trying to back away from it now. Kirk was abrasive and confrontational. It is fair to say that "He didn't suffer fools gladly." 

Well, as Eddie Izzard said "Who does, really?"

 

Sometimes we should be abrasive and confrontational.  I'm not claiming that Christians should never go there. Yet in general, we are asked to suffer fools as gladly as we can, recognising that this is most of humanity and (gulp) sometimes includes ourselves. 

Warren Farrell

I had not heard of Warren Farrell, but his Top Ten Quotes  over at Nature-Nurture-Nietxsche are interesting

4.  “We always look at the ‘Fortune 500,’ and we say, men in power, but we don’t look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren’t properly supervised for safety hazards.”