Ventilator Patients Died?

 Do we know this to be true? Heartbreaking.

2014 Links

Halfway through 2014 already. With the internal links also being interesting, perhaps I should have divided this into two parts.

 

Revisiting the Bicameral Mind and the followup months later about  Circular Time.  Pastor Dave Denis suggested that Helical Time was a better description than Circular Time, and I think that is astute. Seasonal time is also a good descriptor. Linear Vs Circular Time is one of my most-visited posts of all time, if you like following that concept.

Social Justice.  Upon further review, I think my original call on this, and the internal links, are peak AVI. If I rewrote it now I would likely ruin it.

Changes In Prejudice. 

Needles Thoughts about anti-vaxx sentiment, long before Covid.

The Way NH Used to Be.  I so wish I could remember what those latter images were.

A Dog Called Kitty 

Removing the Means of Suicide  I later learned that the numbers were way too high, but the phenomenon still solid.

 

Right in the Mouth

It was thirty years ago that I first caught an glimpse of my grandfather in the mirror, and have have seen each of them from different angles a fair bit over the last decade. Neither was unsightly, but also, neither were particularly attractive men. My aging seems to be accelerating the last 3-4 years. I have always thought age had a certain respectability that is nice, and I believe I am less bothered by the reality of aging than the average man.

But the next guy who tells me you're only as young as you feel is getting it right across the mouth. 

Sistine Chapel Exhibition

Tracy and I went to the exhibition in Cambridge of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes. Definitely recommended if it comes near you. Close-ups, many life-sized, all in context and described. Portrayals and techniques used for the first time are highlighted. There was a lengthy video to go with the text and audio about The Last Judgement, pointing out features one would not have immediately noticed.

 I included this view to give size context. 

March Madness

 ...has come a long way.

 

Sumer Is Icumen In

The descriptions in this song sounds more like Spring than Summer, and in fact they are. People thought more in terms of two seasons, summer and winter in the 1200s. They would make the distinction for Spring and Autumn if the occasion called for it, but not reliably.  Those of you who do genealogy or otherwise work with colonial American documents can see that persisting into the 1700s. A new year began on the first day of Spring, even in official records in many places. You will see your ancestress Elizabeth born in 1718-19 and wonder "Didn't they know?  Didn't anyone keep track?" If the month was June it was in 1718.  If it was February, it was in 1719. Old habits die hard. 

This is a nice version I had not heard before. I like that it contains the translation - and the correct one, not the bowdlerized version.

 

The Mystery That Makes Us

 AJ Swoboda, The Low-Level Theologian, starts his essay about Scripture and mystery, paradox, and seeming contradiction with an anecdote about GK Chesterton, appropriately enough. The Mystery That Makes Us,  reminds us that we are not to come to the scriptures in any arrogance, demanding immediate clarity, but in humility, trusting that God has spoken to us in the best way possible, and it is up to us to adapt if we do not understand.

To genuinely engage with the story of the Bible, it is critical that we learn to work backwards from what seems reasonable. Too often, we are prone to believe that the biblical text is credible only if we have come to understand or agree with it. What we have to learn to do is come at it differently. We must come assuming it is true. We must first accept it as it is—as truth and reality—and then work backwards from there. Reading Scripture correctly requires us to reverse-engineer our understanding of reality to what is revealed in Scripture. We don’t start by assuming our experience of reality is true and that the Bible must fit into that; rather, we begin with the assumption that everything in Scripture is true and trustworthy, and we learn to adjust our view of the world around it. 

There are twinned errors which complicate this.  One is to remain literalist and insist the earth must be square because the Bible says it has four corners.  The other is to make everything Bible so metaphorical, believing that to be spiritual, that it no longer has any definite meaning. The Swedenborgs and many New Age Christians are sometimes lovely people, but a faith that relies entirely on mysticism can quickly go awry. 

Such As... 

Holding The Center

The Evangelical Covenant Church strives to have unity in essentials and freedom in debatable matters.  Easier said than done, obviously as there is debate even about what matters are essential. Currently, the American Church and the American churches ae increasingly split along political lines. Paul Stewart writes in the denominational newsletter about the need to remain in discussion with each other even in disagreement in Holding the Center. I would go further. Remaining in discussion - how we get to an answer with other Christians - is likely more important than the answer itself. One can push that too far, abandoning standards for the sake of pretend niceness, but divisions that look clear in one generation become more mixed in the next. The central questions of the Covenant founding were "Where is it written?" and "How goes your walk?" I think those remain solid.

 From our beginnings, the Covenant has resisted making every secondary conviction into a boundary marker of belonging. That instinct came from the pietist belief that the Christian life is deeper than intellectual alignment and that unity in Christ can survive real disagreement. These are not incidental features of Covenant life. They reveal the shape of a people who have often chosen the harder, slower, more human work of staying together over the easier satisfactions of ideological clarity.

Ryan Burge's Graphs About Religion, which we have discussed here including recently, mentions more often than the denominations themselves do that the clergy, especially at seminary and headquarters level, are more politically liberal than the laity. This is true in the ECC as well, and it does have effect.  When there are books for discussion that circulate in denominational programs, they are much more likely to be from a liberal POV as a default, even if the discussions are real. 

I have heard angry and unfair things from both liberals and conservatives in my congregation, and this is ongoing. But we hold the center at the moment, and you can see bumperstickers of many types in the parking lot, both on Sundays and during weekly programs. 

To Improve The World

We are reading Kaplan's Revenge of Geography, which quotes Hans J Morgenthau's 1948 Politics Among Nations with reference to Thucydides 2,400 year-old The Peloponnesian War.  

The world "is the result of forces inherent in human nature." And human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos). and honor (doxa). "To improve the world," writes Morgenthau, "one must work with these forces, not against them." Thus, realism accepts the human material at hand, however imperfect that material may be. "It appeals to historical precedent rather than abstract principle and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good."

I don't want to pretend to be wiser than Morgenthau - actually I do want to pretend that but have an immediate caution that this is likely ridiculous - but I don't think that is quite what is happening. We do take those forces into account, but each of us allows any one of them to blind us to the other two.  We focus on the bent sense of honor in Moslem countries, or their fear or self-interest, but never it seems, on all three at once. As we likely need a three-legged stool of motives to convince ourselves to do something, leaving out one of the motives above opens up a slot for us to zip in one of those absolutes and pretend it is not a cat in a dog family among the others. Honor has elements of desire for not only praise, but justice. Self-interest is nearly always loyalty to a larger group, and thus includes selflessness. Fear includes caution, planning, counting the cost. Thucydides' motives are the abstracts, applied at a discount among fallen mankind.

The abstracts reflect the sun too well, not too poorly, and we cannot bear to look at them directly.  Certainly not three at once, without tarnishing them back into something manageable. Yet the New Testament does instruct us to look at them directly, using the language of searing brightness at every turn. 

Paul Erlich

I had a girlfriend in 1971 who was assigned The Population Bomb in some (HS) sophomore social studies class and was very excited to tell me about it.  She became seriously ZPG and did in fact never have any children. Neither did her two brothers, so her two brilliant parents from Nebraska ended up having no grandchildren.  (Note to Jonathan and Ben - this was the girl who I competed with for a month over who could memorise the most decimal places of pi.) Erlich was on everyone's lips in those days, including enough career-first people, male and female, to have a significant influence on the fertility crisis which was already invisibly underway.

To be fair, he might have only provided a convenient rationalisation. 

He joined the Prometheus Society  in the late 1980s*, when it still had over a hundred members worldwide. He was fawned over, as was Marilyn Mach Vos Savant, another person with name recognition.  He is perhaps the best example I have run across of what IQ is and is not. I don't know which of the several entrance requirements he met, but reading his interactions (he wrote no articles for the journal), he was clearly quite intelligent.  Plenty of candlepower. But he was unable to deal with the slightest criticism and dug in immediately when challenged, often using condescension and credentialism as weapons. Some of his main assertions in the book had already proved overstated and perhaps simply wrong by 1989, but he gave not an inch. I did not have any direct arguments with him, as I felt my role as president required as even handed an approach as I could manage. He had not yet lost his famous - okay, nerd-famous - bet with Julian Simon, but his critics in the society were already pointing out that the was just about to lose not only lose the overall bet on the combined prices of five commodities, but on all five commodities individually. 

I used the analogy of being physically powerful enough to forcefully twist in a screw that is cross-threaded to his ability to make an inaccurate theory look plausible by sheer intellectual force. I still like that metaphor and am annoyed that it never caught on.

*It not only still clings to existence with about forty members, but gratifyingly still lists me as a previous officer.  Best figurehead honor I ever had. Amazingly, I am one of the longest-serving presidents, which is less prestigious as the last few have resigned or died in office with no visible diminution of cultural presence for the group. It will look great in my obituary as long as no one looks beyond the most superficial level of what, precisely, was entailed in this international power.  Rather like being Winter Carnival King in 1970 or voted Most Self-Actualised in the year I barely eluded arrest. I think I have collected other worthless honors over the years.  Dare I look any closer? 

Best Ever?

 I saw in a Free Press subheader that Whitney Houston's National Anthem was the best ever, so I had to have a listen.

 Super Bowl 1991,  ten days after the start of the war in the Persian Gulf, for context.

 

 

Bureaucracy Preventing Cures

Ruxandra Teslo reports cases of people willing to fund and develop experimental treatments themselves being unable to get permissions, even with active cancers.

 Around the same time, writer Jake Seliger faced a similar situation while battling advanced throat cancer. Like Sid Sijbrandij, he was willing to try anything that might help. The difference was that Seliger was not a billionaire. He could not hire a team to navigate the system on his behalf, and he struggled even to enroll in the clinical trials that might have offered him a chance.

A system originally conceived to safeguard patients has gradually produced a strange and troubling outcome: the mere chance of survival is effectively reserved for the very few who possess the means to assemble an army of experts capable of navigating its labyrinthine procedures.

One of these treatments was a personalised mRNA vaccine on a dog. Veterinary medicine has nearly as much bureaucracy as that for humans.

Two from Aporia

 Earliest Firemaking. It is difficult to detect the difference between using natural fire and anthropogenic fire from archaeology, but the difference for humans is great.  Being able to cook food on demand, especially meat, is a big step forward in reliably improving digestibility and energy availability. This find pushes the evidence back to 400,000 years ago.

Indirect Measures of Racism and Discriminatory Outcomes.  Direct reporting of what people say their attitudes are explains almost all of the variance. Unconscious bias is present but accounts for very little of the variance.