Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design was so thoroughly permeated by a sector of Christians  trying to reserve some scrap of Creationism that it became unreliable even  when individual parts of the argument were quite solid. I believe there were people who were trying to sincerely look at ID objectively and even give them credit for doing pretty well. But those were so thin on the ground that it became not worth my time to try and identify which were which. If I missed a great truth, I thought, oh well, I've missed a lot of them before. In a finite life, one has to play the percentages on where good information is going to come from.

So it has piqued my interest that the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel agreed with neither Intelligent Design nor its opponents.  He did not believe in ID, but neither in materialism.  We discussed it this week at the CS Lewis Study Center where we are about 80% through Miracles at present. It looks like Mind and Cosmos is the important volume here, and I have never read it. I am not sure the people in my current discussion understood it fully themselves, for reasons I won't go into, so I am seeking information elsewhere, including two philosophy professors from St Anselm College who are in my other book group.  If you know something, let me know.  I will try to be an open vessel.

Jesus and Omniscience

In my group Bible-study experience, the question of Jesus's omniscience comes up often.  There are places in the gospels where He seems not to know things he could if he were indeed God. He even says so about the timing of the last days, and has to ask in the crowd "Who touched my garment?"

The omnipotence of God is a greater emotional and logical barrier for people. There is always The Problem of Evil  which looks to many to be incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent God. CS Lewis thought it was better to look at this as  The Problem of Good. Why does good exist?

But Jesus's omniscience is less emotional a topic even if it is just as much a puzzle. Jesus says to Nathanael "I saw you under the fig tree," and knows where the disciples will find an ass in Jerusalem, but not those things mentioned above.  It seems contradictory. I have mentioned before that some of His words suggest that he knows things as he sees them but not before, as parents can see in a children's game "The only way that ends is if someone stops it or someone gets hurt," but magnified a thousand times. This would explain people coming up and saying things that surprise him but he responds perfectly. Until the centurion comes up he does not know a centurion is coming.  Once the man speaks, he reads the situation instantly. 

Yet even that does not get around the contradiction above.  This week in class the instructor used a metaphor I had not heard before but makes sense to me.  We are studying Luke, and he has noted that whenever that gospel mentions that Jesus prayed, it signals a change in the ministry. They fit under the general category of an unfolding of the ministry rather than a change of direction. He contrasted this with being able to dip into his source of omniscience for answers, relying instead on listening to the Spirit. The latter seems to be superior, but as with other abilities, Jesus shows that he is able to be omniscient, in order that we might believe. He has omniscience available to him, but chooses to limit himself and not use it.

In all likelihood this is is some heresy that was fought over in the first few centuries and resulted in a particular line in the Athanasian Creed that I never paid much attention to.  But until I hear otherwise, I'm sticking with this explanation of omniscience as something that Jesus had available, but chose not to use.

It would imply that we should do the same, relying on the Spirit. That doesn't make trying to figure things out a sin, and consulting with wise others is even better, but pray and fasting are best of all.

The Truth About Climate Change

Okay, you know how nervous I get when someone puts the word "truth" in their title, but I am also intrigued when a person used to hold one opinion, yet changed it significantly after looking at things with fresh eyes.  So Daniel Koonin, a theoretical physicist who was a Dept of Energy Undersecretary during the Obama Administration, has modified his views for a recent report to the Dept of Energy's current chief. Madeleine Rowley at The Free Press (no relation, but a W&M grad) reports on that controversy, and also links to what he said about the cause of the California wildfires.

Koonin has not done a 180, but believes that ideologues have exaggerated the dangers. As this is about where I have been for decades, I probably have more sympathy and am less critical of this opinion than I should be.

 One of the purposes of the report is to present agreed-upon facts. Ninety-five percent of the report is sourced from the UN report, so we’re not denying anything. We are simply emphasizing some parts of the UN report that don’t get a lot of public play.

Skip to the end, he believes starting with small nuclear is encouraging on the way to getting to more use of nuclear as the need for electricity is expected to increase sharply because of AI data centers, but cautions that it takes a long time to rework an entire energy system. 

Parable of the Unjust Steward

When I read the second paragraph of this NY Post story about Lee Zeldin's claim about where $20B designated for climate issues went, I was reminded of the Parable of the Unjust Steward

Luke 16: He also said to His disciples: “There was a certain rich man who had a steward, and an accusation was brought to him that this man was ^[a]wasting his goods. ² So he called him and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward.’

³ “Then the steward said within himself, ‘What shall I do? For my master is taking the stewardship away from me. I cannot dig; I am ashamed to beg. ⁴ I have resolved what to do, that when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.’

⁵ “So he called every one of his master’s debtors to him, and said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ⁶ And he said, ‘A hundred ^[b]measures of oil.’ So he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ ⁷ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ So he said, ‘A hundred ^[c]measures of wheat.’ And he said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ ⁸ So the master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light.

Someone To Watch Over Me

A lot of excellent covers of this Gershwin song from an obscure musical in the 20's "Oh! Kay!"

I've been putting up a lot of songs from musicals lately. I think at least one more after this.

 

AI

An atlatl is not an arm. That's my current view of the state of things, and I still regard AI as Assisted Intelligence. There is no reason to push my analogy further, stating that an atlatl could never become an arm. That might turn out to be the case, but we can't know from here. 

The Doctrine of the Trinity

The doctrine of the Trinity, in and of itself, is evidence (not proof) of the existence of God. No one would have made it up. Are we accepting the explanation that ideas of gradual development of the concept from the life of Jesus recorded in Scripture, percolating through a widely disparate but semi-organised part of Mediterranean culture for three centuries account for the doctrine being accepted by the church as a whole?  If not, what other explanation do we prefer? When confronted with such puzzles, the Hindus and other polytheistic cultures just kept inviting in more gods. Ancestor worship merged with most other religious arrangements, as this reinforced the existence of the tribe and the importance of it. You might get a father-son god from that, but it's hard to figure out where a Holy Spirit would come from. The Zoroastrians (were there other dualists?) pictured two opposed gods. That doesn't look like it would grow into three interconnected gods in any way. I suppose a Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis concept might come in that way, but if anything synthesis is farther from being a personality, not nearer.

Whenever we encounter some paradox or the impossible, rather than merely rejecting it we have to consider what the other choices must be and choose what looks most likely.  As with whether light is a wave or a particle, embracing the paradox is often the only way forward. 

Building the Stonehenge Tunnel

The question of why Britain "can't build anything anymore" would not be of interest to most Americans, except in that it was similar to the inability of Western nations in general to get important works completed, including ourselves. But this is about Stonehenge, fascinating to many of us. My posts on Stonehenge years ago remain among my most-read. A group opposed to the Tunnel, having lost the political battle over years, applied for Judicial Review of whether all the steps had been completed.

Between a Rock and a Hard Case, 

 Put another way, the Stonehenge Tunnel was struck down by a court because a civil servant failed to put a piece of paper on the minister’s desk.

The law requires that the effect on every object be considered. The Stonehenge area is enormous, and includes Durrington Walls, The Avenue, the Circus, and hundreds of small sites within it.  They were all considered but the report given to the Secretary of State to sign did not include them all specifically. The Judicial Review ruled that the project was therefore a nullity.

In other words, JR is fulfilling two very different user needs. The user need of the court (if you can call it that) is to uphold the rule of law. The user need of the claimant is to try to put a stop to a decision. For the court, law is law; for the claimant, law is politics by other means.

The next sentence will be immensely controversial to lawyers, and common-sensical to everybody else. The overriding objective of JR should not be upholding the rule of law, but instead enabling good government. At least as far as government is concerned, the rule of law ought to be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

It's an interesting debate. We believe in the rule of law, and often technicalities matter. But for me, the fact that one side was acting in good faith and the other wasn't matters.  The project that the people of the area and the nation wanted, was considered by the requisite committees in entirety, was passed by Parliament and funded, and approved by the Secretary of State is now not going to happen. 

Estimates of Each Other

Where do we think these false pictures of each other come from? Word of mouth? Movies? Written news or video news? School materials? The 24-hour campaign? 

I will say that at minimum, these impressions "how many of X" are what one would get from entertainment media and video news. So the deeper question becomes "Who would like you to think so?" and "Do those those people know the real answer themselves?" 

You could make a whole week of civics class out of discussing "Why do we think this?" one at a time. 

 

Censorship

People do not censor because they fear that false information will come out, they censor because they are afraid true information will come out.

They might ignore false information, dismiss it, or not select it for their presentation, not even to refute it. But censorship is the choice when they know the jig is up.

Update:  Censorship is not proof that it is true, nor even evidence of truth. But it is evidence that some authority fears it is true, 

Ethel and Fozzie

 A great pairing for this one.

Coming Out

 

- Approved Posture

Read on Substack

 

 

Dead Language Society

Dead Language Society is a fun substack.  I believe I have linked to it before.  I may add it to the sidebar.

Middle English  

Gradually, however, the English language regained its prestige, as the ties of the new English nobility to France weakened, both through their long stay in England and England’s gradual loss of territory in France over the course of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).

This had an effect on the life of the upper classes: in the year 1362, for example, English replaced French for use in Parliament and the courts, which had earlier used French and Latin.

 Old English  

What we think of as Modern English was actually formed from a mixture of dialects in the Midlands and East Anglia, and in the great churn that was medieval and early modern London. The dialect of Old English you learn in textbooks, however, is a different dialect altogether, one conventionally called West Saxon.1

What’s more, we can prove this even without knowing anything about the history of England. Merely by comparing textbook (West Saxon) Old English with Modern English, we can prove that there’s no way for the one to have developed into the other.

Dating Men in the Bay Area

Among this year's Book Review Contest entries at ACX is Dating Men In The Bay Area.  (Read what follows before you come back to it.) I circulated it in a group email with some approval. Bsking immediately pointed out

my point of disagreement was: this is a single person hanging out with single people trying to figure out why they’re still single. I am a married person hanging out mostly with married people noticing that a bunch of men I know possess all the qualities that she claims “locks men out of relationships”. 

How can you possibly determine this without comparing them to married men?

Well, she had me there. This and other comments set me on my heels a bit wondering why I had liked it pretty well. I am a sucker for a woman, especially a young woman, recognising that life can be hard for men. It is just assumed by many of them that women have it sooo much harder. Everyone knows that. GK Chesterton taught me to immediately suspect "what everyone knows."  It is usually a culturally agreed on cover for something is not demonstrated by facts.  No facts, because everyone has agreed not to study it. 

 

This song has been covered a lot.  I'm just saying. So when I see an exception, I get this halo effect and think the woman has great wisdom.

Now that I've undermined her, go back and read her and see that she does actually have some good things to say.  And as another female friend pointed out, the girl can write. 

Government

My uncle used to argue with me in the 90s and 00s that journalists were generally objective because that was their job.  That was the reason for their profession, so they just did it, like a nurse taking a temperature. He acknowledged that people had points of view and likely shaded one way or the other, but could not let go of the idea that because they were supposed to be that way, they approximated it by definition. He was referring to "real" journalists, from respectable outlets, not untrustworthy bloggers. Lots of people still feel that way, but the mask is pretty much off that this was true of only a percentage of journalists even in the Golden Age - whenever that was. 

Socialists and even the few communists when I was young used to make a similar argument. Capitalism was about individuals getting ahead.  It was every man for himself, dog-eat-dog competitive.  But socialism, now, socialism was about everybody being taken care of. That is still how many people view it, that socialism takes care of everyone because that's what it is. That's what it was designed to do, dammit. 

This expands into Barney Frank's statement that "government is just a word for things we decide to do together," a rather frightening irony once you know what Barney Frank decided to do together with other people. As with my uncle and the journalists, even big government advocates will acknowledge that government can get things wrong and need to be improved, but they retain the default assumption that getting together some sort of government program to fix something will be much better than not having a program.  Sometimes it is. It's not the default setting, however. Government is not automatically, or even reliably, the greater good.

Old Man River

There were objections to the use of "white man boss," even though that was the original lyric from 40 years earlier. The Temptations threaded that needle beautifully, changing it to "rich man boss," but performing it in such a way that there was no question that this was racially infused.

 

In Defense of the Amyloid Hypothesis

Scott Alexander at ACX noted that in science commentary, the Amyloid Hypothesis of Alzheimer's is dead in the water.  Everyone is now panning it, claiming that the research is fraudulent and Big Pharma just wants to keep on making money off it until they can find something new to sell instead.  However, mainstream researchers are currently standing by it.  So Scott asked for someone from the Amyloid buildup school of causation to defend the case.  This is one of the things I have liked about the site from the beginning.  (I confess I am finding a few repeated themes a little tiresome, and suspect that some of the reasoning is motivated by some cultural preferences. Well, even the best of us, after all, and I can't rule out that it might be me who has the problem.) Wait, is this really true? Or are we getting ahead of ourselves here.  Let's look harder.  David Scneider-Joseph: In Defense of the Amyloid Hypothesis.

The Heart of the Gospel

In the last few years, I have read a Lutheran pastor telling me that non-violence is the heart of the Gospel. I have heard an Episcopalian priest tell me that creating a society, by building a system that cares for the poor is at the center of what Jesus taught. Similarly a pastor from my own denomination and a nice Methodist minister have assured me that without striving for justice in our communities/nation/the world, our other "Christian" works are meaningless.  One meant racial justice, another meant economic justice, I am sure there are lots of other justices to be sought. Myself, I yearn for cosmic justice, which is foolish this side of heaven. I don't recall reading anyone saying that confessing corporate sin is the heart of the gospel, but I think I've heard some come close.

The marginalised get invoked as the center, and James tells us that true religion is caring for widows and orphans, very specific examples of that. I have even written in online conversations comments sections that I partly agreed with them about the marginalised, noting James's comment, only to be greeted with steadily growing anger if I try to put them first on the list as Scripture does. [No, no, no, I don't understand.  That was because in that society the father was the one who supported the family, but today we do things differently, and the marginalised means...] I notice that the biblical examples are things you mostly do yourself, or perhaps give money to a church warden to do face-to-face, while modern examples are increasingly in the direction of supporting policies, getting society to do things, and ultimately not giving tax breaks to the wealthy.  

There is a widespread belief that one can only become wealthy by cheating or at least gaming the system, so that leveling the distribution of goods is in itself a form of justice. If you are rich, a taint of evil attaches to you.  Interestingly this works in reverse as well.  If you are seen as a good person who cares about the poor, then you are not viewed as wealthy.  Bernie Sanders. Nancy Pelosi. The Clintons and Obamas. If you ask some Christians if those are wealthy, they will suddenly remember that yes, yes they are. Yet somehow it doesn't stick. They have sort of Jedi mind-trick about it. These are not the wealthy you are looking for.

From another direction, I have heard that when one is a Christian, Bible study should be the center of your life.  I think immediately of a Baptist church I knew that had a table with an open Bible on it where an altar would be in other churches, a spotlight shining down on it. Others will say it is prayer that is the heart of the gospel. Forgiving others has been nominated frequently, as has evangelising, or more generally "leading people to Christ." When I heard about the concept of a one-word sermon (as if) I mentioned it to a wonderful pastor I knew when I was first a Christian, who excitedly told me he knew exactly what he would preach for that. "PRAISE!" Another focuses on discipleship. 

Across history some have advocated that poverty is the key that turns the lock, or contemplation, or obedience. CS Lewis noted wryly that Christians will tell you all sorts of things are most important, including taking the sacraments or dying to self. Yet in another place he had a go at it himself, suggesting that grace is the heart of the gospel.

I have mentioned Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through The Centuries a half-dozen times here. Well, that's another score of Jesuses, each a heart of the gospel in its time. There is enormous overlap among these multiple hearts*. (Ugly metaphor. Sorry.) They are all rather true, interrelated, and worthy of contemplation, but some are farther from the center than others, when one puts them all on the buffet table at once. 

A Book Without Covers

I read some time in the 80s that men are better at remembering exactly when and where they learned something, while women are more likely to "just know it." This fit a popular idea of gendered brain differences, which turn out to be minimal, if they exists at all. As I could usually identify with some precision where I had run across a fact, to the point of remembering where it was on the page, I kept it in my back pocket for a few years, but it eventually went into a trunk in the attic. I did a rough comparison questioning a few people I knew then and found that there did seem to be some male-female difference in remembering the provenance of an idea or fact. I wouldn't bet the farm on it, however. 

I think that ability has deteriorated in me over the years. Making up a plausible explanation on the spot, it may be that when we are young our knowledge is more atomised. Facts sit alone in a few folders in a drawer. As we grow older more facts go on each page, more pages go in each folder, each drawer receives more folder, on up to Borges The Library of Babel. The network becomes more important than the folder.

I have found a strong exception to this theory in myself, however, and in two of the subjects I know best. I have noted for years that I care little for chapter and verse in Scripture compared to other Christians, and remember concepts rather than filing system. I can tell from wording whether something is Gospel, Epistle, Wisdom, History, Prophet, etc, aided by how the concepts connect, but which prophet or which epistle I usually have to look up if there are not other contextual clues. As in reading music versus playing by ear, it is better to have both, but people do just fine leaning entirely on one

This is also true from my knowledge of CS Lewis. I can nearly always identify which work of fiction something is from and where in the story it goes, but I often cannot even narrow things down very well if I can't find some cheat clues in the context.* In discussion, I will think of an applicable Lewis phrase but be unable to recall whether it is from Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, or The Four Loves. I might narrow it down to being from an essay, but be uncertain whether it is something from God In The Dock, The Weight of Glory, or Of This and Other Worlds. Owen Barfield wrote "what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he thought about anything." The interconnectedness of his thought still astounds me. It is not quite a cylindrical book in my mind, but the dividers are few.

 

*It is the same with Lord of The Rings. Sometimes I can't remember if something was said by Gandalf or Elrond, Merry or Pippin, but the others are clear.

Christopher Scalia

 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but probably haven't read)  new by Christopher Scalia.  I had not realised he went to William and Mary until I heard him on the Great Books podcast a few years ago, discussing "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." This list goes back to the 1750's and I like that approach of a true overview, not one or two older ones followed by a bunch from the 1950s on. 

He took a course in Scottish Literature in 2002 and has been fascinated ever since. 

A Calling-On Song

My wife and I sang this in the car with great gusto for many years. The children did not chime in, preferring to teach themselves to read with Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes books.

This is a live version, not the one you know from "Below the Salt."

 

The Power of All Media

Update:  Being There should fit into this somewhere, but I never saw it and can't find a spot. 

I have had many conflicted opinions on all media.  This may be because I myself have been powerfully affected by things I later concluded were not good for me.  I downloaded the TikTok app only a couple of months ago in order to watch my daughter-in-laws videos. It rapidly became something I pointlessly devoted too much time to, and today I simply deleted it. Because the algorithm keeps showing you what you want, you get the impression "Gee, there are way more people concerned about this than I thought," many of them knuckleheads. TikTok does not just show you what you like, but what you hate and can't resist looking at and getting steamed. You also are exposed to people you would seldom meet in real life, who have formed their opinions about various groups and ideas from TikTok and social media itself. I find myself thinking Wait a minute.  I know hundreds of people in that group in real life.  I can think of examples who fit your stereotype of them, but mostly not. You simply have no idea what you are talking about. Related: Gell-Mann Amnesia. 

Yet this is also why I have long considered movies dangerous as well.  They give you the impression that you know things that you don't, in insidious fashion. You believe you have thought this up yourself, with your sharp discernment of those around you, when you have actually been led by the nose.  When they convince you that it was your own idea, they might have you forever.  As far back as the 80s (or more) I could tell that people's opinions of Christians, especially the  fundamentalist/Southern Baptist/evangelical/Pentecostal/born-again varieties, could not possibly be based on folks they had met in great numbers in New Hampshire.  They are thin on the ground here now, and were scarcer then. Yet the people I talked to at work, and even the people in the mainstream denominations spoke authoritatively, as if they knew exactly what was up with those folks. 

Or not the movies.  Books and magazines told us stories as well, and we become confident we have seen the world more clearly than others. My wife once got so involved in a character when she had read too far into the night and had to make herself go to bed that she prayed for his coming day of decision on the morrow. I cannot accuse. In the summer of '73 I stood in my backyard and was filled with intense longing to walk toward Middle-Earth, if only I could know which direction it lay. Into these discussions people swiftly include the power of the theater, and then in almost hushed tones that storytelling around the fire is most powerful of all, able to unite tribes over generations, huddled together like the rabbits in Watership Down. Where else would we learn about life and how to live it? Without a scaffold of narrative we can't even observe much around us with any understanding. I think of my brother as more media-created in his personality than I am, but it is the household my children grew up in that sounded like a wisecracking sitcom every evening and every ride in the car. 

I have always been a little sheepish about how much TV I watched every evening in high school, when I was supposed to be conquering the world with my vast intellect but instead watched three episodes of Gilligan's Island every weeknight, including two of the same episode. I have now decided that the near-mindlessness was the point. Leading up to my senior year of college I would come to panic wishing that my brain would simply turn off for ten minutes to give me a rest. I wasn't watching television then. There are many kinds of meditation, and even the early Buddhists considered watching fish in a pond could be meditation.  Sitcoms activate just enough of the brain so that you can't think about anything else very long. You can give yourself over to its spell.  When I try to be silent in my own head the noise gets louder, as my own radio station takes over.  But Gilligan could capture the stage and keep it, giving me my moments of peace.

We consider Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney to be a novelty, but where else are we to learn about the world, really?  They are all dangerous.  

Augury

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace.
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go.
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living.
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day,
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay. 

I haven't heard it in years, but it came to mind recently. I had always wondered how such easily-disproven augury had survived, but as there is high variance in everyone's behavior, especially children, I suppose you could talk yourself into most of it. There were days I was full of woe, and days I worked hard. The rhyme only goes back about 200 years, so I then wondered if it was just supposed to be a bit of English charm without much attempt at accuracy. But people took these things seriously even three hundred years earlier.  And the list was a little grimmer, likely due to harder conditions. 

If a man-child was born on a Sunday it was believed that he would live without anxiety and be handsome. If born on a Monday he was certain to be killed. Those born on a Tuesday grew up sinful and perverse, while those born on a Wednesday were waspish in temper. A child born on Thursday, however, was sure to be of a peaceful and easy disposition, though averse to women. Friday was supposed to be the most unlucky day of all, it being prophesied that a child born on this day would grow up to be silly, crafty, a thief, and a coward, and that he would not live longer than mid-age. If born on a Saturday, his deeds would be renowned : he would live to be an alderman, many things would happen to him, and he would live long.

I don't think augury was the point, though they certainly looked for signs in everything in Merrie England*: the behavior of flocks of birds, the birth of deformed animals, dreams and other spectral evidence. Such augury was twinned with grammarye, in which people hoped to make such things come into being if they were hoped for, but seldom referenced if they were not until near death, when Fate had done its work. Speak it into being, or not.

There is also a fatalism in it, a teaching for children and all hearers that life could be hard and there might not be much one could do but endure it. Good looks and good temper might be your lot - notice that prosperity is not included in the lists - but woe and hard life come to many. 

*A period which began, ironically enough, just after the Great Plague, when people almost frantically began to have regular celebrations according to the liturgical holidays, but clean up some of the impiety of them from the dark and unknown past. It was at that time that a spirit of egalitarianism grew up around Europe, as people saw that the wealthy had fared little better during the catastrophe, surprising heirs came to inherit lands, and laborers or craftsmen became more valuable.

 

Switch to Facebook

I have bragged about my daughter-in-law's many TikTok followers, but she has been on Facebook and YouTube as well.  I am assuming Instagram, but don't know. I just learned she had not bothered as much about TikTok lately and has put her energy into FB, because fake creators have been stealing her stuff and putting it up, so she doesn't get paid for it.  Apparently FB pays better anyway, and she is up to 2,000,000 followers there. My son would like her to do more YouTube, which pays even better, but the filming and editing requirements are more difficult.  Anyway, Pinay sa Alaska, Pinay sa Alaska It has changed from salmon smoking to salmonberry picking recently.  

You can learn how to make candied smoked salmon. 

Obvious Racism

 Racist reference to eugenics, with a threat of violence

 

The Kenji BLT

Reposted from 2023. We crammed half a dozen BLT's into last August and September, and will do the same this year. Then no more until 2026. This has also expanded into other tomato dishes I have been uninterested in for 70 years. 

******** 

I have not been much of a tomato fan, and thus not a BLT fan.  I usually have cheese instead of tomato, which people seldom notice, but when they do, it is with disapproval.

But it's Kenji, and when he said the sandwich should be conceived of as a tomato sandwich, not a bacon one, I figured I would give it a try. He starts out saying not to even bother until the good tomatoes come out in August. Now that it's August, I thought I'd put this up.

Best BLT I have ever had, by far.  I recognise that this is not saying much, but I mention it anyway.

 

Theorbo

I sent out the hurdy-gurdy link to a few friends, and one sent back the idea that he should jam with this guy,

 

It Finally Happened

 

Hoarding

 Bethany at Graph Paper Diaries has a new post up about Hoarding.

Autism Opinion In a Different Direction

"The Spectrum" How Autism was Hijacked by Narcissists by Hannah Spier, MD at Psychobabble.

The comments are long but include some good talking points.  There are plenty of people with nothing but angry and ignorant opinions (on several sides of the debate), but there are also some genuine disagreements from people who have some evidence and persuasive reasoning on their side.  And there are some who are both angry and knowledgeable. 

From the essay: 

When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group.

From experts, instead of raised alarms or calls for serious public health investigation (as would be expected for any other childhood disorder) we get calls for inclusivity and a self-congratulatory attitude toward their advancement in diagnostic understanding and tools. Another example of ideological capture of psychiatry by cultural sentiment.

A few commenters with some solid points disagreed with nearly every part of that statement above. Of particular interest to me was a reference to the pioneering work of Grunya Sukhareva in the 20's and 30's, who identified autism and described what was clearly the same pathology quite differently. I will have to look into this. Stay tuned.

I will warn you that you will be entering a world of accusation, counter-accusation, and ill-will. So of course my comments will spread oil on troubled waters. 

NC Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish

I noticed for the first time at the Wyeth collection in Rockland Maine that NC Wyeth was similar in his later, serious painting to Maxfield Parrish.  As both were illustrators before they became renowned painters, it struck me that this might be the connection.  The storytelling of illustration, gradually liberated because they had made enough money to be able to paint as they pleased. Putting them in this category brought Norman Rockwell to mind, another illustrator who increasingly became a serious painter as he went forward. All three ended up in rural New England settings.

I wondered if anyone had ever put any effort into the similarity before, assuming that some graduate student in art history had given it a go, and threw the three names into the search engine.

Well, well.  There is an exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in from now through January 4th, Illustrators of Light: Rockwell, Wyeth, and Parrish from the Edison Mazda Collection. I seem to have read some sub-zeitgeist pretty well.  I would go this Tuesday but I think my family, especially my wife, might feel left out.  Soon, though. With the difficult scheduling, maybe I'll go twice, with different batches of friends and family. There are other illustrator-painters in the exhibit as well. 

Three examples that I don't believe are in this exhibit:

 

 

Addictive Instrumental Song

 

Palindrome

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

 

I had not seen that one before 

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

Easy Grilled Yellow Squash Sweet C s Designs

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

 

I find this concerning. 

 

Mushroom Poisoning A Risk When Relying on AI Generated Field Guides

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

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

Letters to the Seven Churches in Modernity

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

To the angel of the church in Suburbia write:

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

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

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

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

 

Mystic Liberalism and Mystic Conservatism

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

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

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

Judging Limericks

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

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

Terrence Tao and Research Dollars

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheese

 More from GKC, on a lighter note.

Common Accusations From Christians

Update below. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immigration Complaint

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

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

Revival of Virtue Ethics

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

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

Recent Links (from other sites that link)

 Raising the minimum wage increases homelessness. 

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

China funds American climate activists to reduce our competitiveness. 

Universal Basic Income Not Really Effective. 

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

The Fallacy of Success

 

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

The text version has footnotes as well. 

Atlantis

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

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

 

More Cremieux

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

Currently up on his front page, just to entice you

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

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

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

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

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

Vaccines

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

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

 The person who sent it to me further observed

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

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

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

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

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

First Amedment Auditors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear Reactor On The Moon

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

Ashkenazi Origins

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

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

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

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

Grazin' In The Grass

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

 

Noyes Pattee Whittemore

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

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

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

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

 

Eating Disorders

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not All Experts Are Equal

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

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

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

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

They Are Already Being Eaten

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

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

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

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

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

Silver Wings

Some people just reinterpret songs well.  I think it tends to show up after the first few years of a career. Johnny Cash.  Ray Charles.  Frank Sinatra. They had an ability to put a new meaning into a song.

Ronstadt's arranger on this one slows it down, giving both the guitar work and the emotion of her voice more prominence. I like Merle Haggard's original version a lot, but I like this one better.

 

Starving

I don't know how much food people are getting in Gaza. But there is information about hunger and starvation in general that should be kept in mind when reading the reports.  Going on fasts for religious reasons provides pretty good evidence that a healthy adult who is hydrating can go up to about forty days without incurring permanent damage. That is taking in no food at all. With zero food, organ damage starts to set in and death occurs about 2-3 weeks later. Taking in some food, even below what is considered necessary to sustain life, can extend life much farther. Organ damage still occurs, but at a slower pace. During famine, people can be underfed for a year and still be alive, though they may never fully recover even when nutrition is restored. 

It is quite different for children. Zero food can mean organ damage in two weeks and death in three.  It is difficult to get good information on the organ damage and death parts because the organisations that keep the statistics are often focused on "food insecurity," or being "underfed" rather than malnutrition and death. It is a classic motte-and-bailey fallacy of trying to discuss starvation only to have them retreat into "well 1 in 5 children is underfed." Similarly there are questionnaires (and I have administered them) about whether mothers worried whether their children would have enough to eat at least x number of days in the past month. "Oh, so you don't care whether those children are hungry?"

Boothbay Harbor

We went up to take the three-hour tour out to East Egg Rock to see puffins and other seabirds and had a marvelous day for it. Misty, cooler days bring them out more, and I got to stand in in the wind and light rain on the way out. Puffins are smaller than expected and lots of fun to look at. Tracy added three birds to her life list.

We were on brand, running into people from both Transylvania and William and Mary while on the tour.  Wild coincidences are available if one only looks for them and strikes up conversations. 

We went to the Maine Wild Blueberry Fair on Moxie Day, then drove over to Wyeth Collection at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. We had exceptionally good gluten-free fish and chips and GF fried scallops at Shannon's on the road out of Boothbay.  They have been a roadside stand and are now expanding to have indoor seating, converting their garage. A workman was in-and-out the whole time we were there, so we felt like we were getting in on the ground floor on the changes. 

One of Maine's motto's is "The Way Life Should Be."  I don't fully agree, but they have a point. 

  

Wyman's Blueberries are not related to us, though my great-grandfather did grow them in Nova Scotia and shipped them to Boston.  But in Maine, Wyman's was one of the original companies for wild blueberries.  

 

 

We also got to see the young women rehearsing for the Miss Maine Blueberry Pageant and visit all the 4H exhibits at the agricultural fair.