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. 

 

Badger's Law

Rational Wiki has an entry about Badger's Law, which was named in 2016. We have discussed the concept here since the beginning in 2005, that anything with the word truth in its title is more likely to be opinion that they don't want to have to defend. 

Ironically for a site named Rational Wiki and doubly so for a discussion of truth, the link above does not include any liberal sites as having a problem, though Truthout certainly qualifies as opinion that discourages discussion, and Truthdig, Citizentruth, and An Inconvenient Truth are specifically mentioned as exceptions. 

Good Genes

Almost everything has been said, and said better by others.  I will note for the context of our long-standing discussions here that mentioning genes at all is the third rail, as it imperils the worldview and the vested interests of many people who believe that environmental influences, and legislating according to environmentalist presuppositions should be where we spend our money. 

One piece of evidence for this is reflexively raising the specter of eugenics in order to shut down any discussion for social and political reasons. The science has gotten away from them, the culture is getting away from them, and they have to blame Trump as part of the two-minute hate every day. 

History of the Hippies

 This was not available when I wrote my posts in 2012

 

The Happy Wanderer

 

Wrack

 As if to specifically reassure me and prove Grim right, WRACK was one of the entries on Octordle today.

Nature Boys From 2012

I will be gone for a few days, and I wanted you to have plenty to entertain yourselves with. Steve Sailer mentioned the German Pagan origins of some parts of hippiedom, so I decided to look into in in 2012.

Natural  A warm-up for the discussion of the spiritual value of "Natural" things. This viewpoint has bothered me for a long time, well before I started blogging.

Natural Vs Artificial  The post is of normal length for me in that time, but would be long now.  I start to dig into the German origins of what eventually became hippie culture. I no longer recall what the video was.  I wish I did. 

German Pagan All-Natural Origins.  This one has Gypsy Boots, Eden Abhez, and many other links, a few of which no longer work.  I'll see if I can figure out where they went or find some approximation. Fabian Society.  The three Mother Earth News links still work. For people my age, especially Jesus people, there are a lot of interesting associations with this material.

And another way of looking at that. Mutants

Is This Selection Bias On My Part?

In my newsfeeds and what social media I see, the thing that seems to excite Trump's opponents most are the protests against him. They are positively giddy to read about large crowds saying insulting things and want to let you know how much this proves...something. It seems a sad thing to take your life's encouragement from, counting up how many and how often people come out to hate the person you hate.

Conservatives by nature or habit protest less often, so I don't have much idea if this phenomenon plays in reverse.  Or rather, I note that it doesn't play in reverse, and wonder if that means anything. 

Posts From 2012

What would we do if aliens invaded? Post 3700 - Alien Contact.

Playing Whack-a-Mole about the miraculous powers of healthy diets. For openers, you have to count the dead people.  Fewer Moving Parts. 

Mole Trivia 

ABBA and Sex Education 

Doolittle Raid. I feared this would be a too-obvious point, but someone still objected to it.

I Hold Your Hand In Mine

I should take my turn on choosing a song by the recently-departed Tom Lehrer

 

Empathy Again

 Abstract people are so much easier to be kind to.

 

Magnificent singing by Cheryl Barnes, BTW.  After a brief film career she became a piano teacher in California, staying there even when professional friends encouraged her to come to New York. A quick look does not reveal what happened after.

Good To Eat?

Well, that always comes back top how you were raised, doesn't it? I remember people tripe and onions from my childhood, and you can still find a few people around who will still have it.  I used to like chicken livers wrapped in bacon. 

But I think I would have a hard time with maggots.  Anthropologist John Hawks links to recent papers Neanderthal fondness for maggots, because rotting meat attracted nutritious insects, which in turn left larvae.   Bizarre foods: Neanderthal edition. One of the papers verifies the information by tracking what indigenous tribes eat world wide now.  Sort of proof-of-concept for maggot-eating. 

 “Indigenous peoples almost universally viewed thoroughly putrefied, maggot-infested animal foods as highly desirable fare, not starvation rations.”—Melanie Beasley, Julie Lesnik, and John Speth

Sounds great, but You First.  No, come to think of it, even that wouldn't be persuasive to me. I can't even stand to be near egg salad. 

Gracie Allen and George Burns

 

George, reading the paper:  Gracie, it says here that most accidents happen within a few miles of home.

Gracie: Gee, do you think we should move? 

More at Graph Paper Diaries about Health Care

Is Life Expectancy the Right Way to Measure Health Care Success? bsking is back, baby. A thorough post with graphs! And more graphs! 

There’s a actually a few different ways to calculate life expectancies, and the exact details of what you’re trying to do matter quite a bit. But one thing most ways of calculating it have in common is that they are all impacted quite a bit by people who die young. This is an issue a lot of us are familiar with when looking at historic life expectancies, which tend to be weighed down by the high number of children who died before their 5th birthday. This is a big enough issue that the UN actually looks at both life expectancy from birth and life expectancy at age 15, just to account for both child mortality and mortality at older ages.

So the point is, if you’re in a developed country and you want to understand why your life expectancy looks like it does, the first thing to take a look at is what kills your young people. So what kills young people in the US? Guns, drugs and cars. (Emphasis mine.)

When we look at American culture, including the number of immigrants we absorb, it jumps out at you that we are different from other developed nations in terms of guns, drugs, and cars. You can blame that on American attitudes or the legal system, or the kind of immigrants we take in, or the disequilibrium of having large percentages of multiple races and ethnicities, or any number of other things: bad education, bad housing policy, factory farming...keep going...

WRT the many charts, consider what nations we are being compared with. Other developed nations.  Picture the populations of those nations in your mind for about ten seconds each.  They don't er, look like America, do they?  Might there be some differences in the childhood death rates of various groups, and specifically guns, drugs, and cars? Some yes, some no, but there is variety. Lots of variety. Maybe it matters. 

But guns, drugs, and cars are not the fault of the health care system, are they? So right away we should be recoiling from solutions that involve changes to the health care system.  It's just looking for our keys under the street light instead of where we dropped them. 

Bethany also put up a post about Gell-Mann Amnesia with specific reference to believing things on TikTok. 

Arresting the Fertility Decline

 Storks Take Orders From The State, by Cremieux Recueil

Many people are very critical of the government’s ability to pay people to have children. The skeptical position is so common that, when fertility benefits are mentioned, one invariably earns a retort along the lines of ‘They’ve been tried and they don’t do anything.’

But that is not true. I believe there are at least two key errors supporting the belief.

Well, he's right about part of that.  I would have taken the skeptical position until I read this essay. The key is not whether there is still a decline in fertility after government measures are taken. Even if there is continued decline, we have to get some estimate of what would have happened without the government measures.  If the decline is 5% over some time period, but would have been 15% without them, then we can call them successful.

Lyman Stone stresses that this is a marriage problem, as the number of children to the married and the unmarried have both remained relatively stable since the end of the Baby Boom, but the percentage of people married had plummeted. Yet these two theories do not have to be opposed to each other.  They can both be true and addressed separately or together. 

Bookmark

Ann Althouse quoted someone using the phrase "rack and ruin," which I immediately thought should be wrack and ruin, following the word wreck. I looked it up on the excellent Phrase Finder website, which I recommend bookmarking. While what I believed was based on a true story, wrack has been obsolete for 400 years, and rack has been in use since 1599.

Changing Elves to Wolves

 Chaucerian mystery solved as scientists decode lost English legend after 800 years. 

In the Middle Ages, the Song of Wade was a widely-known folk tale, and was believed to be a "monster-filled epic". But a pair of researchers from Cambridge University believe the tale is actually a chivalric romance...

They argue the only surviving piece of the Song of Wade, which dates back to the 12th century, has been “radically misunderstood” for the last 130 years, and that the manuscript refers to “wolves” rather than “elves” as experts had previously assumed.  

Well yes, I can see how that would make a difference. 

Justice and Mercy

We are going through Luke in adult Sunday School and last week we were in Chapter 6. We had some fruitful discussion on the interplay of justice and mercy.  Sometimes being merciful to one means being unjust to another.  Yet we are commanded to exceed justice by being merciful.  I mentioned that CS Lewis had discussed this distinction between giving up our personal rights and the rights of the community, which are not ours to give.  A woman in the class who is familiar with much of Lewis asked where she might best find that.  I thought for a bit and was going to suggest Mere Christianity, and I would get back to her on the section, and some of the essays in God In The Dock. 

I decided it would be better to contemplate the various episodes in the Chronicles of Narnia where these two approaches are illustrated, rather than relying on absorbing the abstract principle. I think the conflict between the two comes up in every book. Someone should write a book about it, or at least a long essay. Justice and Mercy in Narnia. 

T-Ball Makes Parenting Worth It

I saw a short on YouTube and it reminded me of days 35 and 40 years ago.  Your child's first game of T-Ball is one of the great moments of your life. Remind young parents of this. 

 

 

The Rise In Disability

Credit Where Credit Is Due.  Unfit For Work, by Chana Joffe-Walt at NPR. This includes the type of anecdotal reporting that NPR has long specialised in and drives me nuts. Give me numbers, give me trends.  A story may be gripping and tug at out heartstrings, but if it is an atypical case and the typical case is quite different, then it is ultimately misleading. When I read anecdotes, I don't immediately think "This is the real story, because this is a real person."  I think "What are they hiding?" As the human-interest side seems to drive journalism, I am apparently unusual in this.

But this one's got numbers, it's got trends.  It does have a suspicious amount of "Okay, I haven't researched this but here's how it looks to me," writing, but on the whole it is actual reporting. It points out complications in the common narratives, it gives evidence for a different way of looking at things.  And as one who was deeply involved with disability applications for the mentally ill for decades, it's right in my wheelhouse. What does disability even mean? Some psychiatrists would reason "I she can't get her expensive medication she's going to be disabled. So it's a paradox that we apply for disability in order for her to be able to work, but it's a good paradox, because now she's working." True.  Entirely true.  I can still remember specific cases.

But now that she's on disability, the temptation to just not work at all becomes more intense. You have less money than if you worked on one of the part-time programs, but your kids still have food and shelter and you have medical benefits. You have a sense you'd feel better about yourself if you were doing something productive, but it's not strong enough to do anything about it today.  Tomorrow for sure. So what was the right answer?

The medical director took a different approach, but did not insist other psychiatrists follow his lead. "Putting this young man on disability would be the end of his life.  He is still developing, still becoming an adult, still learning to adapt. Going out into the workforce in his condition is going to be hard.  He might fail.  He might just give up.  He might become a criminal or even kill himself. But most of them find some sort of life.  Most of them find a way. He can go on to have some sort of job, some feeling of worth, have a family.  We can't take that from him." He's right, but I'm the one explaining that to his mother who he lives with but can't afford him and is afraid he'll die if she kicks him out.  So what's the right answer?

Look at Harold.  He's just as sick as his cousin but he found himself two part-time jobs and rents that room above the store. Well, sure, but there aren't enough of those jobs and rooms for everyone anymore.  It's musical chairs where he's the last one, but the others have nothing. We don't like for context to be a big factor in disability.  We want things to be a clean slice. But there's no way around it. 

Gaming the System

In 2018, the "evidence" was that the Clinton Foundation was on the up-and-up, despite the accusations. It was (and still is) nearly perfect score rating on charity evaluation sites, and an investigation during Trump's first term, trying to show that it was a pay-to-play scheme to sell access while Hillary was Secretary of State, had been unable to prove anything amiss. There was in fact pressure that an announcement be made to that effect, to punish the evil, politically-driven hit men who had dared besmirch Ms. Clinton. No one has said much about it since.

But this may be because there is not much need to anymore. Since 2001, the Foundation has transformed philanthropy through programs that develop leaders and accelerate solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.  Sounds like a description on your resume of your last job. Develop leaders. Accelerate solutions. The world's most pressing challenges.  Yet that is not the problem. In its heyday up until 2016, while Clinton was SecState, the fund took in $250,000,000 per year in donations. The next year, however, contributions fell off 90%, to $20M/year. I guess those donors were no longer interested in developing leaders and accelerating solutions for some unknown reason. Over half of the private interests Hillary met with while Secretary were foundation donors. 

She has a long history of this, getting the FBI files of her political enemies while in the White House, ostensibly to arrange seating at important dinners, for example. She and Web Hubbell refusing to let the FBI into Vince Foster's office after he turned up dead*. Gaming the primary system to take the nomination away from Bernie Sanders, having an insecure email account to make wedding plans and yoga scheduling. And whenever she had to testify, her supporters loved it, not because she refuted the charges or successfully explained her actions, but because she artfully dodged the questions. Aha! She led them on a merry chase, she did, but they couldn't touch her! As if powerful people not answering questions were a good thing. "I'm sorry, I don't recall," repeated a hundred times. "Wipe, like with a cloth?"

We have seldom had people as good as the Clintons at gaming the system. Obama might have been as good, but he just wasn't on the scene long enough to rack up the career numbers.

Now Trump is doing the same thing, though nowhere near as successfully. Partly that's because he's outnumbered in Washington, but also because his skill was in gaming business transactions, not reputational ones. Also, he ended up on the pro-life side of things, perhaps by default. I don't find evidence he cared much about the issue 20 years ago, and it does not figure prominently for him now except indirectly, because of SCOTUS nominees. But that remains the wine and wafer of Democratic women, and they will forgive any Kennedy, Dodd, Clinton, Sanders, or Edwards any behavior against women up to and including negligent homicide. So someone like Trump, who is boorish, unempathic, and unstylish to boot will just grate on them the wrong way. His gaming the legal system - and he does - arouses fury and amazement. 

I do a mild version of it myself, not in excusing bad behavior if there is no "proof" even when there is, but in just forgetting about it when it's someone I perceive as being on my side of a cultural or political divide. That's not dramatic, but it's not a heckuva lot better. I guess that is also gaming the system, putting my thumb on one side of the balance pan. I don't visibly shrug, for that would give away my hypocrisy, but inside I shrug, forever noting that the other guys are worse.  

And I have proof. Proof, I say.

*Just in case you forgot how long the FBI has been rolling over for Democratic presidents.  

Empathy

Another reason why empathy isn't always a good thing. Sociopaths have a very effective version of it.

Empathy is about co-feeling what you think others feel - and maybe you do!

Compassion is about what you do, regardless of how you feel about it. 

 

Screwtape again: Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Russia Hoax

A liberal friend expressed horror a few months ago that Trump had believed Putin's claim of noninterference in the 2016 election, even when our own intelligence services had reported that it was true! She was further surprised when I nodded and said that while I didn't trust any statement from Putin, it was certainly true that the three-letter agencies were out to get Trump and could not be trusted on the matter either.

The information released by Tulsi explains that the intelligence services did in fact find there was nothing behind it, but the report was spiked by higher-ups, known to the Obama White House and Clinton campaigns, which quickly made an opposite claim.  

I am again no expert, and have to rely on who I think is fighting fair and who is not. But my prediction is that we are now on a course of

The hoax never happened

It happened but was completely different 

It mostly happened like you said, but was unimportant

It happened, but it was good that it happened

Let's move on

 

Dear Wormwood

More of senior demon Uncle Screwtape's Letter 6, advising his nephew about the intersection of politics and Christian obedience.

 Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy

It is easy to pretend to feel affection for someone on the other side of a government program, or indeed, even your own private charity at a distance. In contrast, it is difficult to even pretend to feel affection for your physical neighbor - the person currently before you - if they are the sort which cracks his egg on the wrong end. I don't say a true feeling of affection is impossible in the first case, only that the expressed love for that person is going to look a good deal more like duty than like affection. As I mentioned recently, such affection is directed at what is largely a product of our own imaginations.

Bungalow Bill

“I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave, not because I think of the shooting, but because you could — you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people. They were coming for us,” MacFarlane continued to quiver. “If he didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us.” CBS Reporter Scott MacFarlane about being present at the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

The Beatles were on this years ago.

The children asked him if to kill was not a sin

"Not when he looked so fierce" his Mummy butted in

"If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him."

 

In War (or Even Political Argument)

As regards his more general attitude to the war, you must not rely too much on those feelings of hatred which the humans are so fond of discussing in Christian, or anti-Christian, periodicals. In his anguish, the patient can, of course, be encouraged to revenge himself by some vindictive feelings directed towards the German leaders, and that is good so far as it goes. But it is usually a sort of melodramatic or mythical hatred directed against imaginary scapegoats. He has never met these people in real life—they are lay figures modeled on what he gets from newspapers. The results of such fanciful hatred are often most disappointing.  (C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters, Ch 6) (Italics mine)

Now let the names drift by you. 

Trump...Putin...Biden...Khamenei...Zelenskyy...Netanyahu...Starmer...Musk...Harris...

Thompson, blog

I haven't been over to David Thompson's site for months, and the first entry did not disappoint.  He rescued some impressive bits from the archives.

Feeling Puckish

Is quilting an art or a craft?

What do you think the gender breakdown would be on the answer? 

Linear Pottery Culture (LBK)

 

"The LBK might be named after it's pottery, but they'd be better-defined by their buildings."

I had not run into this prehistory channel before, but have liked the other offerings I have tried as well. Dan Davis History. 

The "1939 Project?"

I had not heard of this, not even informally with no name. I have heard rumblings, and throughout my postliberal days have run into anti-Israel conservatives. But this new development is alarming.   

I will make some distinctions right off the bat, because this is an area where people of good will might misunderstand each other, largely because people who are not of good will are shoving them into corners. There is an entirely reasonable point of view that says Israel is one nation among many, whose objectives sometimes coincide with ours and sometimes do not, but American policy favors them more than is strictly necessary for our own interests. My objection to this is not to the idea itself, but to the reality of listening to a large percentage of these people who rapidly reveal that there's something they just don't like about Jews. Whether they are lying to themselves or to me is not something I am going to get into here, I only note that it shows up in surprising places. 

The first clue is they regard those who disagree with them as having been bamboozled by Jewish interests, by Jewish media influence and Jewish propaganda. Whatever facts you counter with, they remain convinced that no rational person could want America to favor Israel's position in the Middle-East unless they had been tricked.  It becomes a circular argument, where every point is dismissed because its source is poisoned, and we know the source is poisoned because their facts are wrong. There are sites on my sidebar that have regular commenters who believe this.

Let me assure you that if your default is to regard me as someone who has been fooled you are going to have to marshal a good deal of evidence on the point, not merely accuse me smugly. There is an evangelical/fundamentalist core of support for Israel that is founded on end-times and prophecy theologies, that Israel is about to become the center of the final conflict and we had best be on the side of God's Chosen.  One can disagree with that theology, but it wasn't given to them by Jews.  In fact, lots of Jews are uncomfortable with it. It is also counterbalanced by an opposing tradition of antisemitism among American evangelicals and fundamentalists.  Think Jimmy Carter.

As for media influence, American Jews have had a lot of intelligent writers.  It's called persuasion. If you think their persuasion is overrepresented in media, then write your own counterpersuasion, don't just accuse me of having been fooled or not seeing the obvious reality. It may just be uncomfortable for you to acknowledge that your arguments just aren't that good.  The pro-Israel Americans assert that they are deserving of our allegiance because they are the most stable, reasonable, and Western nation in the Middle-East. The counter is often that they aren't that great, they are deceptive with us at times, and there are other considerations, such as oil, positioning, territory, and waterways that should influence us to favor other nations at times on a case-by-case basis.

If Israel were in the middle of Europe I would say that is spot on. The French or Italians sometimes deceive us, or each other, and we them. Nations do not always play straight with each other and we balance that in our considerations.  But Israel does not border Switzerland.  It sits among tribal, aggressive low-IQ nations that found oil and have shipping lanes. This is not a tirade against Islam, BTW.  I think that area remains essentially tribal and Islam has had some unifying moral effect. However, there is still too much shame culture that it's not wrong if you don't get caught and loyalty to clan transcends any permanent moral claim. A lot of the 70's evangelicals who became pro-Israel because of Hal Lindsey remained pro-Israel because their basic sense of of decency and fair play was activated when they paid attention. 

I will again say that if you are one who says "But it's gone too far.  Israel does terrible things as well and its enemies have some valid complaints," then we can weigh one thing against another in our discussion of American interests.  You might move me to your point of view and remind me of things I should have remembered.  Make your case. Just be ready for the counter that your own arguments sometimes betray more of your real intent than you are willing to admit. The door swings both ways.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum

The promotional video has only women in the museum, often giggling. It's a serious scientific endeavor, though.

Car Talk

Just for nostalgia. Both these guys went to MIT, and their first business was creating a space with tools where you could come in and work on your own car for a fee. That is very useful in the city.

 

 Is this real, or is this an excellent storyteller?  Either way.

Negotiations

 I still read DeepNewz and prefer it. Every time I go to the page I see more about Trump threatening to do A or B, interspersed with stories that he is now willing to negotiate C and D. The complaints that one day he says this thing and the next day he says that seem to fundamentally misunderstand that this is all part of the negotiation. 

He likes negotiating.  He is sure he is very good at it.  Is he very good at it? We will never know until later. But do not look at this as a strategy on his part so much as something he just likes doing, and so easily talks himself into the idea that he is good at it.  Obama had something similar: he liked getting everyone together so that he could listen to them all and then make a decision.  If people didn't go along, he made them do it anyway, by any means necessary.  In his mind they had their say and now it was his turn - even when other branches of government had a role, he didn't care. But it wasn't a strategy on his part as much as he just liked it. He liked getting everyone together to talk, then going off and doing what he damn well pleased.

George Bush thought he could reason with everyone.  Was he good at it? Meh.  Sometimes. But the point is that he liked trying to solve problems by reasoning with people. You can have a try at every president on this. Reagan liked persuading people with the golden generalisation. Clinton liked giving the person in front of him what they wanted and tricking his way out of the contradictions.  I don't know what Biden liked doing, other than getting up and talking about things and taking credit while other people did the work.  I think he was like that before becoming demented. The dementia just accentuated it. You might have different descriptions of what all of them did, and your assessments might be better than mine.

But today's insight is that these things are strategies primarily because the presidents are comfortable solving things a particular way and feel on weaker ground doing it any other way.  They are going to go back to what they believe is their strong suit.  At this point in their career, whether they succeed or fail at that method doesn't matter to them very much.  They will revert to form. 

Reunions

Brief observation from back-to-back reunions: when people are asked to give a summary of what they have done, it is further schooling, careers, (current) spouses, and number of children, in no particular order. When you speak with them live, it is children, where do you live now, and "do you remember?" Careers were seldom mentioned at one, not at all at the other.

Who Knows Where The Time Goes

 

I had completely forgotten that it was Sandy Denny who wrote this.  A female singer at my college mentioned it when she sang it herself one night at Uncle Morris Coffee House.  I thought it was very cool that the Fairport Convention girl had written it, and filed it away for later - like 52 years later.

Armenian Script Revisited

I went back to the cemetery for unrelated reasons and but took the time to locate the headstone with Armenian Script again. There were Armenian names on the surrounding stones, but nothing on the back of the one I saw.  However, lying flat behind the stone and to the left was this stone

So it was a T, not an R.  I had only said vowels, not diphthongs for letters 2, 3, 5, & 6, but if you had forced me to choose I would have said I, not O, which looked too impossible, so I evaded the issue. So... Tootoonjian, Charles M 1858-1933. There are some Tootoonjians in NH who look to be one and two generations later, and two in Massachusetts as well. There are Tutunjians on Long Island who may have simply had a different recorder at Ellis Island or something. If I remember it while I am the city library sometime, I will look them up and see the street addresses for the three. I am betting it will be South Manchester. 

For those who like this sort of old Manchester history, Charles is not far from Milton and Plato Canotas, who started the Puritan restaurants, some of the centers of old Manchester culture, and still prominent, even though I never run into people there like I used to.  

Empathy Revisited

It seems to be the flavor of the month, or perhaps the season, on the internet at present. As disagreements often are, this is about the meaning of words. When people are coming out against "empathy," they are not coming out against compassion, but they are being treated as such. It may even be true of some of the accused - there are still some social darwinists among us.

I can't tell you what everyone means.  I can tell you what I mean.  Empathy is dangerous because it is an imitation of compassion and generosity. Putting yourself in another chap's shoes might be a spur to helping him, and expressing your understanding to him might help him to feel less isolated and forgotten. Those are good things. But just feeling someone else's feelings is not actual help. For one thing, you may have it wrong.  You may think you understand when you actually don't. I am remembering the anti-war people who identified with the Middle-easterners hating Bush (or whoever) because they hated him too. Except Americans like Michael Moore hated him for unrelated reasons of their own, that the Middle-easterners were barely aware of.  He empathised, but it was false.

Then also, what if the material help is never produced? What if empathy just stops at the feeling? James 2:16 You shouldn't just say, "I hope all goes well for you. I hope you will be warm and have plenty to eat." What good is it to say this, unless you do something to help? Those I hear insisting on empathy seem also to be insisting that this must mean political response they prefer, else you are no Christian. Does that seem an unfair accusation, that I think that might happen?  It already has happened. A lot of energy from one side of that argument is spent in loudly condemning the other side as heartless and uncharitable. "You saw me hungry and naked, and cold, yet you did nothing." "But Lord!  Didn't we tell those others that they were hypocrites?  Didn't we tell 'em and tell 'em and tell 'em at the top of our voices that they were unworthy of you?"  "Yes, but they gave more than you. You spent your energy on self-righteousness."

There are those who will argue that private charity is not enough, we must influence those we can to behave toward the poor as they should, because it feeds more people.  It is more efficient. That is not a terrible argument, and I have some sympathy with it.  Justice in a land is important. Forced generosity and mercy is a bit trickier, as it involves giving away other people's treasure (like citizenship, a not inconsiderable treasure that belongs to the people to bestow). Yet even that might be worked around, compromised on, hammered out among those who disagree. I admire efficiency, and I admire us all be in this together. Yet if you are so big on the bare fact o feeding more people, isn't the free market the best engine we have yet discovered? It is imperfect and always will be, but is anything its match? The countries that have robust safety nets, such as the Scandinavians, are not especially socialist in all things. They make their money with strong work-ethic capitalism abroad and distribute that to their cousins back home. 

Balancing that can be a fruitful discussion. Bring it on. The US is already quite redistributative. How to target that, modify that, improve that is on the table. But if one side cannot acknowledge any good on the other side - and I have heard that in Sunday School classes and private conversations, it's not just the most extreme people on Instagram or YouTube - then they are clearly interested in something other than helping the poor. I think I know what that is, but leave that off for the moment. It is enough to point out that the phenomenon is there. If you reject some proven solutions out of hand, then something other that fixing things is your primary objective. 

Empathy is a way of convincing ourselves that feeling good is enough, because it focuses on what we feel, not what the other person needs.
 

The Undercurrent

Natasha Burge writes at The Undercurrent on Substack.  I liked this as it went by on a feed and went over to read her.  She seems to be a British Catholic feminist writer in her 30s with a PhD who describes herself as a rogue academic currently living in Saudi Arabia. I liked her stuff 

 

I Can't Grow Peaches On A Cherry Tree

 I have sung this one to myself for many years.

 

Recent Links

 The Return of Trade-Offs. Not just in economics.  Trade-offs apply in everything. Also, you can't always fix things.  Trading up is sometimes the best you can do.  And that's fine.

Mass democracy does not create prosperity. In each case, political liberalization came only after state institutions had been established, the economy had become diversified and a broad middle class had emerged. Democracy was not the engine of development. It was the outcome. Something similar happened with gun laws. Europe's homicide rate declined long before the restrictive gun measures came in. 

 Everything is Palestine to the European left.

Physics demonstrates that increasing greenhouse gases cannot cause dangerous warming, extreme weather, or any harm.   Lindzen of MIT has been saying this for years, Happer of Princeton I had not heard of.  I don't have the chops to tell you whether they are completely right, partly right, marginally right, or complete cranks. I only point out that they exist, they have excellent credentials, and to my generalist brain their arguments seems coherent. Related: We can't really think in climate scale, but we talk as if we do. 

Aging

 A young friend thought I might say something like this.  He knows me well. 

 

Part III - But could something just as bad be true?

I now move off the area where I have some experience in sorting through the scientific claims about whether some newfangled thing that we haven't fully thought through is going to cause some people to lose contact with reality. (Answer, for those who haven't read Part I and Part II: I would bet heavily against this. We've been down this road many times before and are only at the "horrible anecdotes" stage.) Whether there will be some other psychological danger from ChatGPT and its cousins I have no special insight into.  I do have the general Assistant Village Idiot card of looking at the obvious and seeing if we have checked that out thoroughly. 

We don't know.  There's nothing obvious yet. We don't even have a consensus about harms of social media in general, even though every fifth-grader has had a device for fifteen years.  I do not neglect the possibility that this could be the one.  The world has to end somehow, and maybe this is The Beast, somehow, though I'm not seeing the connection to the Revelation to John just yet. I worry all the time that we are all going to be that stupid, missing the most important event ever through distraction. I just know I have worried that twenty-leven times before.

Yet do not despair. I have the arts and culture card to play.  I might see something that is being overlooked.

Why does this idea keep arising among us? In fantasy and science fiction, the more usual process of something outside you taking you over is slow, even centuries. Poul Anderson had 1950's sci-fi story "Call Me Joe" about disabled people controlling distant powerful monsters and eventually having their personalities absorbed by them.  Elrond warns It is perilous to study too deeply in the arts of the enemy, referring to Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring, the Mouth of Sauron has been a tool of Sauron for so long he has forgotten his own name, and the Ring itself exercises a horrible influence of the owner of whoever possesses it. Many characters in The Great Divorce have slowly given over control of their personalities for years, as did Scrooge, Milton's Satan, 

Yet we see such unravelings happening quickly in literature as well.  Eustace sleeps a single night on a dragon's hoard, Merlin's coinherence is immediate in That Hideous Strength. It does not take long in "Hamlet" for Ophelia to weep "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown." It is perhaps the time constraints of plays and movies that dictate the speed, but the idea that we have brief contact with something and our personalities are destroyed is common.

We see in the NT that demons can go out quickly and see Jesus sending them rapidly into the pigs, so we assume that they must enter us quickly as well, which is why we get nervous about Hallowe'en or Ouija boards. Are there examples in scripture of the long road of destruction happening to individuals?  That is usually reserved for groups of people who persist in disobedience.

We are ready to believe that personality destruction can happen slowly or quickly. Joining a cult, pornography, or role-playing games, we are quite flexible in whether those will take us down quickly or slowly.  Some of the slow-working ones we do not blame on the subject at all, but only on the person who has chosen the monomania. No one says "we have to regulate the study of WWII becomes so many are obsessed." Becoming obsessed with physical fitness, or collections, or train is on you. In those cases we would be sure that it is the vulnerable personality seeking a target. We suspect they were already OCD, or schizotypal, or schizoid.

The scriptures do say wherever your treasure lies, there will you find your heart. In the OT other gods mean deities, but in the NT Jesus expands it to Mammon and shortly after, the early church to greed for anything. (This can be back-traced into the prophets as well, mostly for groups, but the individuals are also noted.  It is now common in Christian circles to regard many things as little gods that we give our hearts to.  

I only mention this, I preach no sermon on it. For today, I am wondering whether there is something unusual about interacting with AI. I have read (about) studies which show that humans prefer AI therapists to live ones. More generally, we begin to prefer AI for information and slowly, slowly, prefer it for conversation. This is unlikely to unravel us quickly (see Parts I & II). But the long road of distraction that Screwtape reminds Wormwood of just as much a part of our imagination, and likely for good historical reasons.

British Accent

I learned today from John McWhorter at Lexicon Valley that British and American accents were indistinguishable during the Revolution. The American Accent Came First.  This seems impossible to me, given how different British accents are from each other, as far back as we can trace. So perhaps it means the type of British people who ruled and policed America up until 1775.  But colonists speaking to each other about the possibility of spies note often that they can't tell whether someone is British or American by listening to them. The British accent distinct from American did not start differentiating until after 1800.

Wouldn't the Scots-Irish and English Borderers in Appalachia sound different?  Oh wait, if the coastal accents of both countries were that similar, then people on the frontier would detect even less difference between them. I do recall hearing that the coastal colonial accent was consistent up and down the Eastern Seaboard.  I trust McWhorter, but I'm having a hard time getting my head around this one. 

Carol Burnett

 She did this a lot with her audiences, and was very good at it.

ChatGPT Psychosis - Part II

The story was originally published in Futurism People Are Being Involuntarily Committed... on 6/28/2025 a followup on an article they had run on 6/10/2025, People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling into Severe Delusions. It is a publication of the World Future Society which has been focused for decades on making us into a better society able to handle our technological progress. Like, um, all those other civilisations there are in the universe  They believe in measuring planets by the Kardashev Scale, made popular(?) by Carl Sagan.  So yes, they are cranks, but intelligent ones, and mostly harmless. It is a fun rabbit hole. We have not even made it to being a Type I civilisation yet, measuring out at a Type 0.72 planet.

Other publications that jumped on this quickly include Mad in America, an alt-psychology publication that is very much on the anti-medication side of things and written by people who disagree with the diagnoses and/or treatments they have received in the past; Public Health Policy Journal, a general anti-vaxx site; Entangled States, a physicist who is now Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island; Drudge has it; and then of course there is NIK from Part I. 

Such sources are the yeast of society. They are only occasionally food in themselves, but we need them to make the actual food work right. They believe many things that are highly speculative on inflated evidence, but sometimes they are right. At least they are right enough that we should be following those lines of thought. 

The supermarket tabloids are still out there, the National Enquirer, the National Examiner, the Star, the Sun, the Globe. These sources aren't those. But it pays to remember that these sorts of news outlets have existed for a long time whenever we get worried about how much worse this is today "with all that chatbot and AI and Lord knows what else those young people are doing today." 

Another parallel before I look at this particular claim of ChatGPT causing psychosis. We said this about social media, though more about depression and anxiety than psychosis. Before that we worried about video games stealing the lives of children and otherwise healthy adults. Easily accessible porn, Dungeons and Dragons, TV, Hollywood, and comic books have been blamed for much.  Romances have been ruining women for so long that we should probably just write all women off as unreliable at this point, right? All of these destructors have done evil on us, both as individuals and a society. None of them are as innocent as we pretend and they have sucked some life out of us. Yet none of them were as bad as feared, either. 

Something like the five paragraphs above goes through my head whenever some new thing comes along that threatens to o'erthrow us. Human beings have persevered through many terrible things that have done damage to our personalities but have not caused us to become untethered from reality. Is this worse than being invaded, watching your family killed before you? Is this worse than an unexplained disease that kills 90% of the village? I had patients who had been kidnapped for a year as a child, grown up with psychotic parents, or suddenly gone blind or paralyzed and they were indeed mentally damaged by these.  Yet not this. Not psychotic. Drugs or head injury might do it, directly attacking the brain, or some virus or combination of genes and prenatal effects, but not experiences.

Reading the above article it follows a familiar pattern. There is a frightening anecdote that would seem to have no other explanation but the theory that the reporter is putting forward. He was fine until this came along. He held a responsible job, she was a loving mother and talented artist, his twin didn't turn out like this at all. We are told that therapists and mental health professionals all over the country are suddenly seeing lots of cases like this - but no research numbers are included. Just lots and lots, though.  People are concerned and some politicians have gotten involved and are working on legislation for this. And here's another anecdote.  This could be you. 

The article does raise the question of whether this is mentally ill people seeking out AI Chat functions, and predictably, finds an expert to say "It's probably some of both." But that is only true in a small way. ChatGPT might turn out to be bad for us, and any extra strain on an unstable mind might be the thing that pushes it over. There are likely people on the margin who would not have descended into psychosis but for some unfortunately-timed or unfortunately-constructed incident.  There may also may be some of us who just escaped one of the few things that might have brought us down. Those with autism, or anxiety, or a fondness for weed might be more terribly susceptible than we anticipated.  But usually not. The circumstances surrounding a person's schizophrenia seem of key importance to the family. When that girl broke up with him it just destroyed him and he was never the same. Not He was becoming psychotic, so she left him.  

Part III will be But What if Something Just as Bad Were True? Science fiction and fantasy will be mentioned.

Teach This In Highschool

 ...and no one will forget it.  It's a good start.

 

Counteraccusations

I do not have all the facts and I am no expert. But I am wondering what we expect the people at the National Weather Service to do.  The first complaints I saw were that Trump's cuts had impaired their ability to respond. Then it quickly came out that no, they had extra people, and working extra hours. Their warnings were questioned.  No, they had major warnings twelve hours before and three hours before. Now the complaint is that they cry wolf so many times that people ignore them. So we want them to know a few days before that this is going to be the one where the river rises with unbelievable speed, and don't tell us about the others.

People in Florida ignore evacuation orders, or defy them, and even tell others "Oh, they always say that. I'm sick of evacuations. Did you know that sometimes people put themselves in more danger..." Up here, people make trips during blizzard warnings.  I've done it myself. Heck, I'm resourceful (not really). I can size things up in the moment pretty well. (Maybe average.) Tornadoes. High seas. So some people are always going to resist acting.  Others are going to panic and evacuate too easily.  Some are going to get sick of the warnings, some are going to insist they were never properly warned. Different people respond to different warning signals.  What is the warning schedule when the range of results is wide and people hear the same message differently?

What on earth do we expect them to do? 

ChatGPT Psychosis - Part I

 A friend sent the following tweet from NIK on X, wondering what my take was on the whole topic. I started small. 

NIK

@ns123abc

CHATGPT IS A SYCOPHANT CAUSING USERS TO SPIRAL INTO PSYCHOSIS  

"ChatGPT psychosis" 

> users are spiralling into sever mental health crises 

> paranoia delusions and psychosis 

> ChatGPT has led to loss of jobs and become homeless 

>and caused the breakup of marriages and families

> "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."

NIK's X account is mostly about what can go wrong with AI - how the CEO's are power-hungry jerks who haven't thought things through, how their decisions are going awry, how the whole enterprise is more dangerous than we suspect. As you can imagine, there's plenty of material out there for him to draw from. So I went looking for where NIK gets his news, and that led me to fields I used to wander in years ago but had mostly forgotten. 

The short version is that AI may turn out to have terrible effects on us, individually, as societies, and even as a species. It may be the downfall of us all. But it's not going to have this particular effect.