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. 

Crow

 

Keffiyeh Fashion

 Why the Keffiyah is a Timeless Accessory from Al-Aniq.  Okay, everyone's gotta make a living, right?  I shouldn't be so critical.

The keffiyeh/shemagh is a must-have for your wardrobe, as it can be effortlessly styled with everything. It will always stay in fashion and is easy to maintain. It will elevate your outfit and make you stand out in style.

BC/AD; BCE/CE

I got into an argument that Jews and Jewish scholars, however much they may have resented the preference in Western society for BC/AD, it was now more an issue mostly for secular academics who did not want as strong a religious foundation for our dating system. The issue is now that it is religious, not that its use is perceived as antisemitic. I based this on both online and live discussions, with both everyday and academic Jews, who tended to shrug off BC/AD. They do not regard it as antisemitic.  They likely would if someone were to make a big deal about it, such as if Donald Trump were to declare that all government documents, no matter the context, were required to be in the old form. That would arouse suspicions.  I am guessing about that, but I think it likely.

My disputant stated that BC/AD was considered antisemitic among Jewish academics.  The argument went to related places but we did not go much longer on that in specific. I felt he was not understanding a distinction I was making, but no matter.  That bears on this discussion only slightly.  He is an academic and knows more Jewish academics than I do, and it would come up in his specialty.  I know psychology researchers, med school researchers, and online I have heard academics in genetics, history, literature and other liberal arts. His numbers would be greater.  

Yet it occurs to me that even outside of the cross-understanding, I may have been wrong in my original premise.  What do you know from your own experience.  Granted that it may have been Jewish scholars who originally pushed for the change and both secular and practicing Christians who led the acceptance, what is the situation in 2025?  Is there any energy in popular intellectual or academic discussion on the topic now? 

 

I kept thinking of the ban on Brown Bag Lunches because they were supposedly offensive to black people because of the exclusive clubs where you had to be lighter than a brown bag to get in decades ago.  No black people actually made that association, it was white people showing off. I may be imposing that fraud on this unfairly. 

Armenian Script

Before I research it myself, I wanted to put this out there in case any of you already knew the answers. We were at the cemetery today and because we entered by a different gate, took different routes to get to our 6 sites (13 relatives) to plant flowers. This brought us by headstones we had never seen before.  A large mill-city cemetery is interesting as it exposes you to previous names and burial customs from groups you know little about. 

We saw this and neither of us recognised the script.  At first glance I suspect it is not how it would have been written on paper, but based on letters made more angular for ease of carving. It is not Greek but I wonder if it is related. Latin seems farther away. I know that Cyrillic is related to Greek letters, but this looks farther away.  I know there is a Coptic alphabet, but I can't recall ever seeing it, and this Armenian alphabet does not look Arabic to me. I guess that fits the geography and the trading routes pretty well. 

Take your guesses, and if you actually know something, so much the better.

Best rabbit hole so far: The Zok language. The Caucasus has an unusual concentration of languages, largely because it is mountainous and here are so many adjoining valleys that have little contact across the ridges.  They go downstream to larger communities to trade, and have contact there, but are just as likely to trade with someone from the city, or any of the other valleys that flow into it. Though descended from related languages, they are isolated from each other and do not influence each other much, becoming unintelligible to each other over time. 

The above may be in the Armeno-Turkish script, daughter to Armenian.  The last three letters could be "-yan" and -ian is a common ending for Armenian surnames, so that fits. The letters before that might be the -dz- sound, which would fit with the cymbal makers Zil-djian, who were Armenian. Work in progress.

Update:  Nothing much to add. The first letter might be a T, but there is also a related script where it's an R.  I learned a lot about Armenian scripts and headstones, but nothing further about the two together.  Before WWII, most Armenians coming to America came to the northeastern cities, especially NYC, Philadelphia, and around Boston. In Massachusetts they spread to other mill towns.  After WWII Los Angeles became the destination of choice. 

Update: The letter that occurs 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 6th is the same vowel. It does not seem to be a dipthong. 

When I go back I will have to find it again and look at the other side rather than just stopping by the road.  There may be other Armenian stones nearby that give a clue.  I have seen occasional Armenian names growing up here, but never the old script.

Graph Paper Diaries

Bsking's blog has been inactive for three years, in which time I have taken it off my sidebar. She has a new post up comparing wait times and health outcomes under the medical systems of English-speaking countries.  Some NHS thoughts on the 4th of July. She has a great deal more information on the subject and I hope she will continue along these lines. If so, back on the sidebar she goes.

I am also hoping she will weigh in on the Karen Read case - she sent me the link I just posted, and one of her commenters has already asked for a COVID stats retrospective now that the dust has settled. We'll see if she nibbles at either one.

Varied Links Again

 Would you be nervous if your son were dating a girl who reads so much of this?

Karen Read Did It.  "What I want to do in this last post is explain, comprehensively and for posterity, why Karen Read is one of those lucky 10 guilty people who gets to go free." It is long and very thorough.  The interesting question is why so many originally uninvolved middle-aged women supported her vehemently, frequently mentioning how pretty she is.

The Hit Job  The NYT covers Skrmetti and gender transitioning clinics for children.

Orwell on Gandhi  I must have seen parts of this, as a few sentences seemed familiar.  But I am quite certain I had not seen the whole thing.

 

"Prioritising Moral Posturing"

From Aporia, by Bert Parlee and Keith Thompson  Communal Narcissism. 

A great deal of this resonated for me from what I saw working in Human Services since 1976. There is a brash, obvious narcissism which grates on nearly everyone, but there is an equal and opposite narcissism that is certain it is not narcissistic at all, because its self aggrandisement is more subtle.  In some individuals it is not at all apparent because it is suave, it does not need to raise its voice, its rudeness is condescension and disdain. 

Of course, the pathological aspects of the new condition announce themselves in markedly different words and gestures. It had previously been assumed that these characteristics were healthy—unlike the well-known characteristics of overt narcissism so readily apparent in people like Trump. Remarkably, the experts nearly missed telltale signs of what they would go on to characterize as communal narcissism (“communal” indicating that individuals seek validation and admiration through their perceived contributions to social groups or communities, rather than through personal achievements). To our surprise, and that of the researchers themselves, communal narcissism turns out to be the equal and opposite variant of the self-centered overt type in which individuals boast about being “the best”. 

Many of the cultural figures, including politicians, who are regarded as humble, tolerant, and welcoming grate on me worse than Trump. Donald is the kid you wanted to smack in hall in high school, boisterously challenging and insulting others.  These others are the ones who cut you effectively in front of your prom date while smiling, because they were hoping to get into her pants. 

Life Isn't Fair

 From tonight's pub night.

 

Empathy Continued

The comments under the previous entries have been good, but I want to bring the topic out into the light, beyond just a few of us advocating our positions, so I when a new piece occurred to me, I elected to make it a new post.

 Most cultures have beast fables, such as Anansi in West Africa and the Caribbean, Chanticleer in medieval France, Panchantantra  in Sanskrit, Aesop in Greece. But the design of these stories is not to tell us what animals feel like, but to use animal characteristics to teach us something about humans. Even in the time of Lewis Carrol the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat are disguised humans.  

Yet in the present day the animals in stories are in movies, and we are increasingly imposing human characteristics back onto them, so that we believe we understand what their lives are like, and are encouraged to sympathise with them via empathy. Fish don't really have family lives and go on adventures, but they have been expanded from one-dimensional lesson examples to beloved friends. Many animals are still just animals in Snow White.  All animals in modern Disney films are fully conversational and emotive, even literate. 

We think we know what their lives are like, but it is all projection. I suggest that this relates to Grim's worry about empathy leading us astray in dealing with humans.  We think we know because we have feelings about the lives of others, based on identification rather than sympathy. 

I should mention, not for the first time, that much of this underlies environmentalism, as opposed to conservation. 

The (Not Very) Good Old Days of Education

From 2012 - I had had strong opinions about education before this, but doing the remembering, research, and more than anything thinking bout the topic then crystalised my approach.  I have added much to this over the years, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, but this remains the foundation.

Part I - (Regarding the CCC in the 1930s. Italics mine.) Approximately 55% of enrollees were from rural communities, a majority of which were non-farm; 45% came from urban. Level of education for the enrollee averaged 3% illiterate, 38% less than eight years of school, 48% did not complete high school, 11% were high school graduates. At the time of entry, 70% of enrollees were malnourished and poorly clothed. Few had work experience beyond occasional odd jobs. 9 comments

Part II - No, we had hours of penmanship drills – not very useful even then.  We copied things a lot, and not always as punishment. A “beautiful hand” was much admired, and usually harder to read than the ugly writing, as anyone who has tried to read archival records can attest.  And we learned recitations – often the same one for everyone, and had to get up in front of the class and say it, one after another.  That’s useful.  And maps to color after labeling, and children in ethnic costumes to color, and lots of natural science to color.  Shop Class and Home Ec.  We scrubbed our desks.  We lined up and waited a lot, and sometimes marched to music.  We diagrammed sentences – kinda fun, sometimes, but not as helpful in composition as one might think.  We learned grammar, much of which turned out to be wrong, and most of which was not focused on improving our writing, but in shaming us out of using slang.  Spelling drills. Somewhat useful – not huge. 4 comments

Part III - My younger brother had a special program in elementary school - they put his desk in the hall.  In the tracked classes he was put in the bottom track of 17.  He wasn't badly ADD, but it was compounded by being only three weeks short of the age cutoff for his class, and his poor fine-motor skills.  He went on to teach college, after a long and winding road. 4 comments 

Cursed Film

Story at The Hard Times: Everyone who worked on the film "Nosferatu" has died.

 

Varied Links

 Spider Robots for Surgical Interventions.

Empire State of Mind. 

America's Incarceration Rate is About To Fall of a Cliff.  Very interesting numbers, but I wonder about dynamic effects.

"Dog" is a weird word.  It appears out of nowhere about 1200. I am going to go lose some time on this website.

Cremieux knows how to revive America's dying malls. 

CS Lewis on Prayer

 

Subtle Slanting

The Free Press writers split fairly evenly 3 ways in the last election, Harris - Trump - 3rdparty/none, according to Bari Weiss. That's encouraging, as it reduces (though does not eliminate) the chance of reading someone on your side or another who is not completely starkers. It always has a few articles about everyone simmering down and trying to be gracious. I am not a subscriber, and you will only see the first few paragraphs, as usual. You Don't Need the Same Politics to Surf Together. The author is trying to be fair, low-key, even affectionate about his brother-in law. Yet look at the choices made and not made in the descriptions. His brother-in-law is described as vaccine skeptical, but he does not describe himself as vaccine obedient.  Perhaps that would be too strong, but it is there. Not even "vaccine advocating." It just sits there that he believes the default, his brother-in-law is the one who is a bit unusual.  He describes the other as Joe Rogan-listening, but does not put forth any similarly controversial or stereotypical figure who he listens to that might allow others to slot him negatively.  He mentions that his brother-in-law is an electrician, fine. He "mentions" that he wrote for the Obama White House (at 24!) and went to Yale.  Not college, mind you, not a political speechwriter, but at the White House.

So are we all, I suppose, and I likely notice it more coming from one direction than another. Yet I think such things are more persuasive in the long run because they slide behind our intellectual awareness to our social sense of who are the best people, the right people, the ones we want to be part of. When I was a child, "batteries not included" was a joke illustrating that we were smart enough to have seen through the advertiser's pitch on TV.  Direct propaganda we defend against more easily. When it is under the radar we are tricked into thinking that we have figured all this out ourselves, that no one has put one over on us.  We are independent thinkers, after all. 

Cosmic Justice

The issue is not whether you think Harvard (or Columbia, Cornell, etc) or Trump is a greater force for good in the grand scheme of things, the issue is whether Harvard broke the law, and if so, how badly and how consciously; and whether Trump is breaking the law in what he is doing to them. The verb tenses are important because one is a determination about a series of set facts that have occurred.  Trump is mercurial and might modify his actions against Harvard a few times before he is done.

I don't write this to call other people stupid.  I have been guilty of focusing on the cosmic justice rather than the actual legal issue a few times in my life.  It's hard to give up the grand cause. 

America Party

Well, if Democrats were worried how they were going to get back in power, Musk forming a new party likely has them relieved. They wouldn't even have to pivot to the center or learn how to talk to young men.

Climate Emotions

Via Instapundit and Just the News*, a study in The Lancet about how worried young people are about climate. This came up in relation to a discussion of Greta Thunberg and her mental health issues. She had a sense of foreboding before she became involved in climate affairs.  She and her parents discovered that her symptoms were reduced when she was allowed to dramatically tell others what to do about climate. As she adopts other limelight causes this becomes more apparent.  If it were not climate, it would be something else.

Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events 

I suggest that The Lancet has the arrow of causality reversed.  As with paranoia and depression, anxiety usually precedes its eventual focus.  Feelings of anxiety in response to events is more properly thought of as nervousness. You can see that the once-respected British medical publication has begged the question right at the outset in the abstract.

 Climate change has adverse effects on youth mental health and wellbeing, but limited large-scale data exist globally or in the USA. Understanding the patterns and consequences of climate-related distress among US youth can inform necessary responses at the individual, community, and policy level.

The possibility that they were going to be nervous anyway apparently did not occur to the authors.  It might be an interesting question to ask why young people settled on climate as the thing to be unsettled about. That question would lead us to examining what young people had "emotions" about before. Whether adolescents are more anxious now than they were in 1825 we do not know.  We develop a sense of that from correspondence, diaries, and the arts, but we do not know. My belief is that young people are about equally anxious in all eras.  They quite naturally become more nervous in the face of war, famine, disease, or being orphaned. We are evolutionarily wired for a certain level of anxiety, likely modified by the environment activating programs we already have on disk.

 *As predicted by one of my rules of naming, a site called "Just the News" is going to in fact be highly slanted. I am wary of the word "truth" in a title, or many uses of the word "just" as in We were just trying to educate the public about their right to photograph the police. We were just hanging out near the girls' locker room. The site is indeed slanted rightward.