HIV Vaccine

 Jean-Michel Connard on X: "In my lifetime HIV will have gone from a death sentence, to a chronic condition, to a vaccine-preventable illness. We do incredible things when we apply ourselves."

Great Divorce Episode

A friend mentioned this section at the end of The Great Divorce.  It seemed so unfamiliar to me that I wondered whether it was really in the text, but he assured me it was.  Even attentive readers can only see what the are looking for, or at least, understand, perhaps.

AND SUDDENLY all was changed. I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women. Then vertigo and terror seized me and, clutching at my Teacher, I said, "Is that the truth? Then is all that I have been seeing in this country false? These conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts- were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago?"

"Or might ye not as well say, anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things? But ye'd do better to say neither. Ye saw the choices a bit more clearly than ye could see them on earth: the lens was clearer. But it was still seen through the lens. Do not ask of a vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give."

Leaf Bags

 I don't think I have bought a leaf bag in eight years.  There is always a better one at the dump.

Proxy Wars

Having just mentioned them WRT Ukraine, noticing that the Middle East seems to be awash in groups sponsoring wars in which people other than them will die to achieve their ends, and reflecting on the centrality of proxy wars to the Cold War it occurred to me why they often go wrong. The people you are arming and sponsoring have different goals than you do. Everyone knows that in theory, but larger or richer nations keep thinking they can choose their battles and influence their "buddies" far more than is actually the case. You can pretty much count on it.  "Okay, stop now." No, we want to win this territory back. "Keep fighting." No, we've got 2/3 of what we wanted and the subgroup we hate most over there has dropped out anyway. "Invade the mountains." You first. It reminded me of something, I couldn't tell what...

The game activates at about the 2:40 mark.

Not A Marriage

David Foster over at Chicago Boyz passes on the observation by Bill Ackman that an election is not like a marriage, however much we might feel that electing someone has the same exclusivity and persistence in out lives. We do not have a universe of choices, so that we may indulge ourselves and focus on whether we like the person, respect them, or believe we could have a beer or a cup of tea with them.  We have two choices, at most three in an American election.

Crazy

It is actually a Willie Nelson song, written early when he was mostly a drunk DJ trying to sell songs. Patsy Cline's husband talked her into picking it up to record. Linda Ronstadt released it well over a decade later, when it had dropped out of popularity after being a standard in country music in the 60s.

Ronstadt was remarkably good at noticing songs like that, ones that should be brought back for a second or third independent life. As she could sing many styles, she covered many artists.

Proxy Wars

Those of you looking at the war in Ukraine as a proxy war for the Americans, and see tit-for-tat relationships to the Iran-Israel war will be interested in Steve Hsu's analysis of the last month's current events over at Manifold. Seeking Truth From Facts. He pays particular attention to the upgrade in Iranian missiles as changing the whole dynamic. He goes on to talk about Europe's economic and technological decline and how it seems past the point of no return compared to America and China.

Post-Liberalism

James links to an article in First Things that describes the modern twist that has been put in the definition of fascism.

Collective Feminine Wisdom

When I hear about people not supporting Kamala because she's "a" woman, as was said about them not supporting Hillary because she is "a" woman, with the often explicit statement that if she were not a woman, she would be running away with this election, I note that this smuggles in the idea that because female wisdom is untapped, that the first female president will somehow inherit all of it, and all this neglected wisdom of the generations will be available to her in a way it is not to males.

Men have made a mess of things, why not give a woman a try?! is an equivalent statement to Any woman will know things that are not available to men.  

Really?  How so?

Revisiting Planet Narnia

Michael Ward's hypothesis that the Seven Chronicles of Narnia each have an atmosphere and plot reflecting the Seven Astrological Influences of the Middle Ages remains controversial, as I learned (again) at the conference. People who know more than I do express strong opinions, and I am hesitant to make definitive statements either way.  I have both supported the theory and been opposed to it at different times.  It helps to listen to Ward himself defend it, as here.

 

Yet people I have some respect for reject it as "completely bogus," as well. 

I such situations I have a trick which has served me well.  I look at who is fighting fair. People can show poor judgement, little tact, or tone that is too familiar or too formal and I can work around that. Theoretically, I can get past poor logic as well and supply somewhat better arguments than the person has made themselves, but this is more unusual. Poor logic usually results from fighting unfairly, though the offender does not often notice, let alone concede that. Unacknowledged self-interest has a dishonesty at its core. Overliteral readings or declining to reverse the situation ("How would you feel, if...) might result from Aspergery symptoms and have some innocence as an excuse, but that is still a pathology, not a variant of logic. Everyone must eventually come to a point of asking Am I being fair? Which often involves a second opinion.

Tangent: These are not beyond autists, but it sometimes takes extra work, even a lot of extra work. The story of the boy who learned to connect via Disney movies - he is not the only one - illustrates it, [Ed. Section removed.  See comments.] They absorb the socialising at one remove. Try to make a coherent distinction between that and reading fiction or watching more "realistic" movies. Readers and watchers pick up cues from a lot of places.

Back in line: So applying that standard, I think those who dislike the theory are misinterpreting what is claimed.  They argue against a cartoonish version of the hypothesis, that Lewis made out some sort of spread sheet that said Venus:  must get copper in there, sex and fertility; Moon, Lunar:  lunacy, silver, I have a picture in my head of a man striking a chair with a sword.  Let's make it a silver chair. Let's make him insane, or considered so, or unpredictable in some way. Jupiter:  It would be cool if someone said "By Jove," and there should be wine and feasting.  

Instead, they contrast this to Lewis liking the planetary influences, but these just flowing naturally out of him when he thought of Saturn or Sol. A particular Greek philosophical thinker occurs to him.  A quote flows out from him. They hate the idea that this was planned, somehow, as if that invalidates it and makes it artificial. I think they are in fact arguing in favor of Ward's idea with this. Lewis frequently quotes inexactly, suggesting he is doing it from memory and not bothering to look it up exactly. (Not only in Narnia.  Everywhere.) He thinks it would be fun to do a fairy story with a Jovial air. The very idea sets off a lifetime of literary and mythological reactions.  Some are rejected: Yes, an eagle is part of that picture, but I'm not seeing it drop in anywhere.  I'm not going to force it.  No need.  A jovial air will take care of itself. Lewis is in fact influenced the way the medievals believed all events and people are. Not controlled by the stars, but nudged, even pushed a bit at times.

I don't think we are influenced that way myself, I think it is all poetry capturing a variety of atmospheres in compressed form.  Yet I don't reject it because the cartoonish version is scientific bosh, I accept it as metaphor.

Ah well, I just wanted it said.  Lewis started with LWW and I can't tell whether Jupiter was along before page one. But elements of that planet show up quickly, and by the end he has thought of pictures and outlines of a few more. No need to redo Jupiter - war suggests Mars. Even then there does not need to be a plan to force all seven into exactly seven books. The idea must have occurred to him early on, but to those who create things, as I have in a small way, one sees at once that you cannot force things or it all falls apart. You try things on, you hope they work.  Sometimes they don't. In The Horse and His Boy the influence of Mercury is present but much less strong.  There is swiftness, dividing and combining, yes, but Castor and Pollux, who are associated with Mercury show up with the many twinning elements.  Cor and Corin, Aslan harrying them from both sides. The tale, and its structure, grew in the telling. 

Flavors and feelings are part of music all the time, and they often run true.  They are in one sense imposed, but it is more correct to regard them as experienced. This is widely accepted, and a painter restricting himself to a particular palette for a single work is as well.  Somehow, folks just don't like it for Lewis and Narnia - perhaps like it less for children's literature in general.

Tyler Interviews MP Tom Tugendhat.

Quite the resume, as you can see at the transcript. Cowen likes to warm up both the guest and the audience with unexpected questions.

COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?

TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.

Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.

But Tugendhat gets into much more serious stuff, including upgrades to the UK nuclear arsenal, what ten years in the military (mostly Afghanistan) taught him, and why it's version of representative democracy works.

I won’t tell you any secrets, but I suppose the one secret that I can tell you that some people just won’t believe me is: Conspiracies are unbelievably difficult, and I just don’t believe in them anymore. I believe in cock-up. I believe there’s huge numbers of mistakes that happen, and people are constantly misjudging things. That, I believe in, and that leads to very, very unpredictable outcomes in some circumstances. But the conspiracies, I’m afraid, I don’t believe in them.

A very fun interview.

Barcode Placement

Sometimes it matters

Till We Have Faces - Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Postmodern?

Update:  Back from the conference.  There wasn't much that intersected with this question, and I think I will write about what was stressed first.  I am still sorting it out. 

 

I have a post started on the above topic. Yet I figured I had better go to the conference this weekend first, so I don't have to retract everything next week.

I am otherwise devoid of inspiration at present.  Preoccupied with house guests and medical concerns, my own and others'.

Programmed Meat Machines

Steve Hsu has fun with - but answers quite seriously - whether we are just meat machines programmed by evolution to believe we have free will or similarly, to be religious. The first part of the interview is about education, especially in a Chinese-American context, the rigor of physics and mathematics versus other disciplines, and the censorship of many voices, not just conservative ones, by wokesters in the academy.

There is a transcript to the interview for those who prefer that.

Missed Covid Lifesaver

 Via Insty.

Plasma Therapy Could Have Saved Thousands. from Johns Hopkins. At the highest level, admittedly something that could have happened only in hindsight, over a million could have been saved.

Convalescent plasma is a therapy derived from the blood of individuals who have recovered from an infectious disease, rich in antibodies against the pathogen responsible for their illness. This plasma is transfused into patients still fighting the infection, with the goal of leveraging the immune response of the recovered person to help accelerate their recovery.

Well, now we know.  If you get a serious virus, they may be after you to donate. I hope mine would be acceptable after the babesiosis I had in 2023.

The Secret to Long Life

It seems every time I listen to The Studies Show that I want to post something on it, without giving away too much information and infringing on their product. This week they talk about Blue Zones, where entire areas have an unusual percentage of people living to be 100. The short version is that they don't exist, none of them, and in fact some have lower life expectancies. So the directions to eat walnuts, eat more fish (or less fish), drink only water, drink mostly wine, eat frequently with your extended family, or find meditative alone time are mostly just made up ideas that people like and think will work, and get a contract with Netflix to make a documentary about it.

They speak very highly of a paper by Saul Newman which discovers patterns highly suggestive of clerical error and pension fraud. "The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian (110+) records."

His recommendation for long life? Don't have a birth certificate, don't have a death certificate, and you can be any age you like.

New Epitaph

"Speaking of digressions..."

The Knowledge

Reposted from 2016.  All the disaster in WNC made me think of it, though that isn't quite the same situation. 

*********

I forgot to mention how much I liked Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World From Scratch. It's an instruction manual of how to leap over centuries of dark ages in the event of some apocalyptic collapse of civilization.  It bypasses the usual survivalist and sci-fi dystopias of riots in the street and starvation in the first few months, picking up in some more stable period of small societies of less than 10,000 trying to get on with building a civilisation.

For example, simply knowing germ theory, how to make a good anesthetic from nitrous oxide and ether, and allowing dissection of corpses for training, you can get up to the equivalent of 1900 in medicine very quickly.  Dartnell adds in how to quickly get to x-rays and weak antibiotics and voila! We're pretty much at 1950 already.

Other things will be harder.  Stored petroleum has a shelf life, and we've already accessed the easy oil out of the ground.  We'll be able to scavenge metals from abandoned cities, but mining the easy stuff has already been done. We'll have to go to charcoal or ethanol-based fuels, so Dartnell gives directions how that works.  There are chapters on how to make glass, four-field rotation farming (that helps us skip centuries of trial-and-error), paper and ink, wind and water energy, clothing, and chemistry.  Lots of fun, though toward the end I skipped the second halves of some chapters, as the details weren't so interesting as the overall concepts.  The details would be plenty interesting to people who actually needed them, I imagine.

It's pure sport for someone like me.  I'm not likely to survive any apocalypse long, so it's all just the intriguing imagination game.  Still, I'd like my descendants and younger friends to be among those who survive and prosper if worst comes to worst, so I'm showing it around and started circulating a copy in the family.

Old Folkie

Also from 2009. I look the same but fifteen years older now. Good comments. 

"Notre Dame, My Mother"

From 2009.  Even more pertinent today. Copithorne in the comments.

*******

Lacy Dodd has a thoughtful article over at First Things about Notre Dame's intention to bestow an honorary degree on President Obama. Ms. Dodd has some right to be heard. She was unmarried and got pregnant while a senior at Notre Dame ten years ago. She gave birth to and kept the child. There were disappointments:

My boyfriend was a different story. He was also a Notre Dame senior. When I told him that he was to be a father, he tried to pressure me into having an abortion. Like so many women in similar circumstances, I found out the kind of man the father of my child was at precisely the moment I needed him most. “All that talk about abortion is just dining-room talk,” he said. “When it’s really you in the situation, it’s different. I will drive you to Chicago and pay for a good doctor.”

I tried telling him this was not an option. He said he was pro-choice. I responded by informing him that my choice was life. And I learned, as so many pregnant women have before and since, that life is the one choice that pro-choicers won’t support.

That accusation is a bit broad, of course. There are prochoice people who rejoice in a woman's decision to carry to term. Yet where I work, I am struck by the number of women who shake their heads disapprovingly at decisions to carry to term if there is any reason not to. If your boyfriend isn't going to be supportive, if you have a crummy job, if you have a really good job, if you are less than 20, if you are over 40, if you aren't in perfect health - any one of these is considered not only a sufficient, but a necessary reason to abort. There are often narrowed eyes and real spite if there is any indication that some religious person "got to them," and "guilted them into going through with it." This absent any evidence that the religious person in question did so - it is assumed.

Ms. Dodd concludes:

I’d like to ask this of Fr. John Jenkins, the Notre Dame president: Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama—the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk?

RIP Luis Tiant

 Luis Tiant, Red Sox Hall of Famer, dies at 83. If you are an old baseball fan, you will be seeing lots of stories on him this week. My favorite was the thickness of his accent getting him past the censors on TV before they had time to react. "I hay boolcheet for stuff today, but use aw mye dick* to geh by." While sitting in the locker room naked except for a cigar. The part referred to was reportedly impressive.

*Equivalent Cuban Spanish slang, I am told.

The Last Word on Moral Philosophy

The Last Word on Moral Philosophy, over at Grim's begins with Marcus Aurelius's quote "Waste no more time debating what is a good man. Be one."

In his situation, one at least has the comfort of knowing I am exactly where God wants me to be, and doing at least approximately what I should be doing.  Whether I do it well or ill, with good grace or bad, is still unknown.  But I at least have that.

Community and Government Cooperation Misinformation

 From Thomas Doubting, over at Grim's, comes this link about who is doing what in Western NC.

Austin Texas Representative Gerald Daugherty

"The last Republican in Austin" retired in 2020 and did not seek reelection.  Remember his wonderful ad from 2016?  A lot of people on this blog can relate to this guy.

Hive Mind and Neanderthals

We have discussed here before how IQ (which Steve Hsu wisely calls a colloquial term) is a good group tendency measure, but no better than a moderate predictor of individual success. If you compare a hundred people with IQ 100 and a hundred people with IQ 110, the latter group will have less crime, more years of education, higher incomes, more stable relationships and better overall health.  But in both groups of 100 there will be a lot of variation.  The book for this is Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, by Garett Jones. He embraces the seeming contradiction rather than avoiding it. He stresses the greater patience and cooperativeness of those with higher IQ, even though those are more modest, have a greater cultural impact than the usual cognitive measures we associated with g-factor intelligence.  Even though his ideas for raising national IQ do not look that promising to me, I'm likingthe book for other reasons.

Into this mix comes some interesting support. Over the last few decades we have revamped our thinking about Neanderthals, that they were more intelligent than we had credited, created art and used tools more variously, and contributed some to our ancestry. I said here last year that perhaps we supplanted them because we were just meaner.

Neanderthals had larger brains, so were unlikely to be less intelligent.  Their tool-making is more individualistic, suggesting that each tool-maker was more creative.  What would cause that?  Necessity. If you lived in larger groups, which in turns had contact with other larger groups, sharing genetic material (usually by exchanging daughters), then everyone didn't have to reinvent the wheel* themselves.  The group knowledge is a repository of memory.  Neanderthals were more likely to have autism-associated genes than our African ancestors. They lived in smaller, more densely related bands.

(Diagram from Razib Khan's substack)

In fact, Neanderthals are often not much related to other bands a hundred miles away, even over centuries.

So they may have each been smarter, more creative, but were less social, and less likely to have lots of shared memory, shared culture.  Homo sapiens were smarter as a whole, and thus exploited environments more fully.

And if it came to a fight, one side had a lot more people than the other.

I have been a loud voice favoring the view that genetic changes have created the cultural ones.  I am apparently wrong about that. David Reich's group has shown that genetic changes seem to lag behind the cultural ones. Not so very long, but noticeably. Once a practice has begun, such as relying more on milk products, genes for lactase persistence begin to be selected for. When you think of the math alone, this makes sense, and we will use lactose as our example. Waiting around for a single chance mutation, and then hoping that this one individual with that advantage reproduces is a bit chancy.  But if the cultural habit of using milk products for food, even if poorly digested and causing intestinal problems, becomes widespread in an area, then any number of small advantages will be called out. A mutation has a better chance.  I had never thought of it that way. The genes for lactase persistence actually show up a few thousand years later than the dairy use. But once they existed, they rapidly made their holders healthier and longer-lived.

*Almost literally

Missing Family Members on TV

When I first wrote this in 2009 it was less known, but now is recognised as a standard TV trope. I included a video this time, which I should have last time.

In the comments is the phrase "...kids, like jackals, sense weakness..." An excellent observation.

********

The stereotype is that 1950's television showed stereotypical two-parent, two-child families where nothing went wrong, and this was unhealthy for the attitudes of children growing up watching this. Leave It To Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet are cited as examples.

But more frequently, television killed off a parent somewhere and started the story later, with the bereft or even orphaned child adjusting to a new family situation. Rather creepily, Mommies got eliminated much more often than Daddies, though both parents getting the hook before the series started was also common.

Uncles taking care of nieces was big: Bachelor Father, Sky King, Family Affair. Dads left with the kids also seemed to be a big draw: My Three Sons, The Rifleman, Andy Griffith, Bonanza.

Circus Boy, My Little Margie, Danny Thomas, Gidget, Hank - there's dead parents everywhere. Or live parents nowhere might be a better way to put it. It's easy to see the sympathy draw, and perhaps the losing of a mother rates higher on the instant sympathy scale. Men taking care of kids also offered more opportunity for comedy. Still, it's weird how many moms they picked off here - maybe TV producers didn't like their wives or mothers or something. I can't think of any early single moms except for December Bride. Tough women left with the ranch out West came up though. It seems to be the reverse of the Dad-as-nurturer show - Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley winning against all odds.

Super-intact families were used more for comic effect in unusual situations: The Munsters, The Addams Family, The Flintstones, The Jetsons. Still are: The Simpsons, Family Guy. The Real McCoys and The Beverly Hillbillies both had multigenerational weirdness going, with missing relatives seemingly no problem. Maybe that was an Appalachian stereotype thing.

 

 

Universe

 Never look a gift universe in the mouth. GKChesterton, personal correspondence

How To Help

There is a fair overlap between this site and Grim's Hall already, but for those of you who don't visit there, he is currently overloaded as a first responder in the mountains of the west Carolinas. He can occasionally get internet and get a message out, and Starlink is reportedly solving that problem soon. He favors on-the-ground solutions, as do many of us here, and has suggestions how you might help if you've a mind to.