Can't Let Go

The idea of Alison Krauss singing with Robert Plant offended me so deeply that I never listened to any of their album. Yesterday my son assured me that it was a great album, that Krauss had pulled Plant in her direction more than he had pulled her to his. So I tried it.  I think I'd like it better without the visuals, but this is a good song.  Let me know if there others I should be paying attention to.

Unconscious Influence

We seem to like the idea of unconscious influences that make people - mostly other people - do things. The Hidden Persuaders came out in 1957, even before the age of Mad Men, discovering the outlines of naked women in ice cubes. Significant effects have also been ascribed to subliminal advertising, which also burst on the scene in 1957.  Individual movie frames saying "Have a Coke!" beneath the level of conscious detection, were supposed to spike sales of Coke.  Or of some beverage. Or of something. They didn't. The whole concept of priming is still very big in psychology, despite the lack of evidence that it has even negligible effects. Reading the extended discussion of effects that have been discovered, there is some weak evidence that it may cause people to do something they were going to do anyway a few milliseconds quicker. There are other results that look oh-so-tantalizing to researchers, rather like alchemists who believe that the lead was briefly, under certain conditions, turned to gold. 

The whole concept of Implicit Association and bias is entirely dependent on the idea that small differences in automatic responses to photographs are evidence that people are less like to hire a black man or go along with a woman running anything bigger than a bake sale. But such evidence has proved...elusive. Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge promises to change the world with little interventions by the powerful to get the unwashed to do good things for themselves. But the things that actually work are not persuasions, but restrictions imposed on you without your consent that no one bothers to even notice anymore, like withholding your income taxes. 

I get it.  We all get it.  I was thrilled with the idea that opt-out versus opt-in organ donation had large effects, and disappointed when it came up almost empty.  

We are always half-convinced that "unconscious "inputs control our conscious behavior. This seems possible to us because we do sometimes do things and don't know why - and when we think about them, we can see some plausible reason that seems to be related to our past experiences or patterns in the way that we were brought up, or suggestions that happened to us earlier in the day. But these have all proven very hard to pin down with any real evidence, even though we've spent decades at it starting with Freud, if not before. There is just too much noise to isolate things like that, but we like explanations and stories so we pick something out of the noise and say "that's it. That's why I did it." Or that's why you did it or that's why they did it. 

Your default position for any of this should be probably not, but make your case. 

Let me now talk out of the other side of my mouth and say that we do seem to respond to buzzwords in our politics, don't we? Mamdani has said that Defund the Police is a feminist and a queer rights issue. He doesn't say that any more. Defund the Police is still a hot concept if one doesn't use the buzzwords, but it's all about playing notes on the synthesizer that elicit a particular response. I would be stunned if there is evidence that feminists would benefit from decreased enforcement of rape laws, or that trans people will have less difficulty in public if the police go away.  It is just adding on to the general "police do bad stuff to Cool and Marginalised people" sentiment with a "feminist" or "trans" murmur in their ear,s so that they think he really gets it.  He is for your people. The distinction would be that all of these hot buttons are already in place.  The suggestion is not creating them, but just carelessly brushing those nipples on the way by. 

 

Megafauna Extinction

Greg Cochran has put up one of his rare posts, King of the Beasts about megafauna extinction on various continents.  Most of it wilol not be strictly new to those who follow these things, but it is considerably more complete in a few paragraphs than longer essays. 

He includes at the end a Samuel Goldwynism I had not heard for years and those are always a delight in themselves. Look for it in the essay, then follow the link here.

Bookstore

We went to the used bookstore in Montague, MA, the Book Mill.  "Books you don't need in a place you can't find." That's close to true, but we did find it, and we each bought a book. Finding a book to buy is not usually a problem, but in ultraliberal Connecticut Valley, home to Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire, and UMass-Amherst, one has to search a little harder. The Christianity section specialises in heresies, for example, or things that don't even rise to the level of heresy. They have some good atlases, but I am no longer in the market.

There were a lot of books by women who were emphatic that they would not be silenced. It seems that lots of folks everywhere like to publish such books.  Someday we may be able to declare the problem solved.

Angry Drivers

I have been driving Massachusetts highways and seeing a lot of angry, aggressive drivers: tailgating, cutting people off.  I don't mind the speed so much if I can see them coming and they leave room for others. I would like to blame drivers from the Commonwealth, but an unfortunate number are large pickups from New Hampshire. It's the same back home. Sports cars used to be the main problem, but pickups and very expensive cars seem to be the deal now.

Of course, this does raise the question: Is this problem their aggression or my bad driving? 

Icon Museum and Study Center

I had never heard of it. The Icon Museum and Study Center is just about an hour away in Clinton, MA, with over 900 icons, mostly Russian, plus a few hundred other Eastern Christian works of art. It used to be called the Museum of Russian Icons.

I think this one, which shows events in the life of of St. Nicholas of Mozhaisk, enlarges to show significant detail, but the one at the site itself enlarges even more.  You need to be prepared for significant detail and regular visitors bring their own magnifying glasses, mostly the kind that you use at a distance. But you could get use out of a glass to lean in close to see dense detail as well. I find it tiring now.  It might be best to break it up with visits to the tea room and lunch nearby, and maybe a walk on the town common across the street. 

I had no idea that there were so many types of icons. I am used to the Christ Pantocrator and the Virgin and Child expressions and knew there were other common subjects, but I didn't expect the revetments, triptyches, miniatures, wood carvings, and extended panels. There is a tea room with antique samovars and what would otherwise be called a medium-sized collection of Matryoshka dolls. There are activities for children and exhibits showing how icons were and are created. I would have expected to like the oldest examples best, but an exhibit on contemporary iconographer George Kordis captured a lot of my attention.

It's All Random

Because of Joseph Henrich's (The WEIRDest People in the World) spirited defense of cultural evolution, I have come around to the the possibility that both biological evolution and cultural evolution operate. Prior to this I was thinking of nature-nurture in simplest terms, admitting the idea of epigenetics in theory and reserving some space for free will, but going hard against the idea that what we usually call the environment has much effect except during the time it is being exerted.  You have an effect on your children while they are at home.  It declines progressively once they leave. My view would be that the biological, genetic evolution is the ground floor. It is usually quite flexible and adaptable because that's what  it would have to be for humans to survive.  We have to have a lot of emergency plans hidden in the junk DNA, and whole disks of backup plans for when the well goes dry.  But it still exerts pressure on what happens in our lives even when we pay no attention to it.  Cultural evolution would be the next floor up. It is also flexible but not infinitely flexible. For an excellent example of this, I recommend the story of cassava processing in Section 6.2 at the link. The next story above that is probably randomness. It is also called unshared environment in discussing development, those chance happening that affect your sister but not you, because she has different friends, went on different field trips, and happened to be on the ski lift when it stopped while you were in the lodge drinking cocoa. 

I was explaining this to an old friend who smilingly interrupted to say "It's all random...You think genetics isn't random?" Well, she had me dead to rights there.  If you were conceived 0.4 seconds later you'd be a different person, even 50-50 you'd be a different sex. 

I was going to go on about clan or family action, local action, and individual action, but it seemed pointless after she had summed things up so nicely, so I will just leave them as words of incantation here.  Someplace we get to the idea of free will and whether there is a lot of it or none of it.  With that many filters influencing our behavior at invisible levels, I can see why someone might declare there is no free will just to be free of the burden of figuring it out. Sticklers for reductive materialism will say there is none and everything is caused, but with that much randomness operating in the system there would not have to be more than a trace of free will for there to be enormous (though not fully predictable) effects. But then also, I can see embracing an idea of free will only because that is the how we all act and it hurts our heads to imagine what we would all do if we stopped believing it. That is the world in which we live and move and have our being. 

 

The Four Yorkshiremen

And of course this discussion about how easy things were in the old days puts me in mind of The Four Yorkshiremen.

Uncertainty

I am listening to a Boyscast interview with Rob Henderson.  I had not heard of them,  and expected it to be rather Joe Roganish. I might be unfair to Rogan on that, as I have only listened to fragments of a few of his shows. The interview is smarter than that, perhaps because Henderson is elevating it. He brings evolutionary psychology, intrasexual competition and the sexes policing themselves and the other sex both, and contemporary culture trends. I'm about halfway through and liking it.  I think women will find parts offensive, but I think some of it is fair observations put in a provocative way. The other episodes of the show do not look promising. They are all 1.5 generations younger than me, and this is deeply reflected in their comments about "men," "women," "expectations," and the like. 

They were discussing homeowning, and the interviewer brought up a statistic that 40% of 30 year-olds in the 1950s-70s owned homes, but only 14% do now.  I can't vouch for those numbers and they look more extreme than I would have guessed, but point taken.  I think there is a lot to that. Henderson had not heard the statistic but immediately had the same thoughts I did. People were in not in school as long and married younger. Even when I graduated high school in 1971 there were classmates who had dropped out before graduation because they had a mill job or construction or trade job that they were never going to need a diploma for and decided to just get started.  They would have had fourteen years experience as a mason or hairdresser by age 30.

For the others, the expectation of "house" was different as well. People bought older, shabby houses just to have a house of some sort.  The term fixer-upper was common.  I don't hear it much now.  Bethany thought that condos might be the equivalent now, and you don't fix up a condo and add to the value in order to move up. Having any kid of a yard matters if you've got kids, too. They got into the whole discussion that we just had here about whether older generations had it easier or harder than today's young people. Something was missing, but I couldn't tell what. They discussed AI coming to take white collar jobs and how that was different from the fear of robots taking blue-collar ones.

Then these very intelligent young men (the interviewer Ryan Long is a comedian) whose objectivity I respected came to a conclusion that jumped out at me, and I thought "That's it. That's what's missing."  They both agreed that numbers don't convince anyone of anything, and what is different now is the uncertainty. And I immediately knew that was crazy, but understandable to think so.

Looking back on the stories of people buying houses for $10,000 in 1951, working at job, fixing up the house, rising in your career, upgrading with a new mortgage five or ten years later, houses rising in value - it all looks smooth, regular, predictable.  Heck, it looks that way to me looking back, and I was present then, with a life that didn't look like that. My wife had a nice predictable looking childhood in an upper-middle-class suburb and a father who had a very good business installing laboratories, it now looks rather idyllic.  For her, it was.  Only as an adult did she learn that her parents took out a second mortgage to keep the business afloat at one point. What we look back at as normal was the survivor bias of those where things did not go horribly wrong. If someone had a terrible accident, or your spouse became alcoholic, or the factory/mill closed in a one-industry town, or you got drafted to Vietnam and died, you fell out of the memory of what was usual.  My mother remarried and I reentered the usual progression in late childhood. In our turn my wife and I bought a terrible fixer-upper that I didn't much fix up, we bought a larger house in the same market so the selling/buying price was not a problem, we both worked and didn't spend any money.  Adopting children set back the finances, but mostly just put prosperity on hold for a decade rather than ruining it. In retrospect our lives and our parents look like a nice calm progression with some struggles.  But predictable.  Once things have happened, they look as if they had to happen that way.

Yet our lives did not look predictable at the time, and uncertainty followed us as well. Not as much as it did our parents, who had been through the Depression, WWII, and Korea, but still plenty of uncertainty to go around. 

That may be driving a lot of the complaints.  The data driving their expectations is driven by survivor bias out of all those "exceptions" who ended up with harder lives. And every generation has its own anxiety, which is not visible to succeeding generations. Even I do it, looking back at my parents and grandparents.  Their survival to old age with some sort of a house and comfort looks like what was always destined to happen, because it was a "normal" life for their generation. 

I even look at my own life that way. I had nostalgia for my youth, as many of us do, forgetting how anxious I was then about finding a wife, finding a job, and just generally not screwing up. 

Empathy

So two social workers come out of a bar and see a person in the street, beaten, bleeding, maybe unconscious. The first one says "We have to find the person who did this and get them some help."

Fascism, Eugenics, Racism

"The dark night of fascism is always descending on the United States yet lands only in Europe" was attributed to French socialist Jean-Francoise Revel by Tom Wolfe, though I don't believe any source has been identified.  Wolfe added another story about Gunter Grass to make up for it. 

So here we are again, the nice Danes.  I like them.  Everyone likes them. But Scandis as a whole really really want everyone to get along together by being just like each other. What a nightmare for the Inuit not so many years ago. Who would sign off on this?

It seems to be better now. 

I certainly hope so, because son #4, Christian Andrew is applying for Norwegian citizenship. I'm betting they don't have many citizens who were Transylvanian shepherds at age 6 before being sent to an orphanage, adopted to America at age 13, and in the USMC before moving to Tromso. The set inside each of those circles has got to be very small, and as a Venn diagram he's likely unique. It will be his third passport.

Additions, Stability, and Prosperity

A good way to keep track of financial conditions in mid-century America is to start from the knowledge that the percentage of people below the  poverty level was 49% in 1940 and 40% in 1949. This would be the end of the Great Depression, to the early years of the Baby Boom.  Prosperity did not start immediately after the war. There were not enough housing and jobs for the returning soldiers and sailors - women had a lot of them, and until they married and their husbands found work they would be foolish to leave them. Therefore rents were higher and wages were lower. This gradually improved because there were lots of men with high confidence and maturity who were willing to do things for themselves, having just done something for the rest of us, and women who had both more skills and more confidence, combined with a desire to get married and have what was considered a stable, normal, life.  

People my age immediately mentally fit their own childhoods and their parents into this.  To a lesser extent we consider our grandparents' experiences. Yet in both cases, we know much more about how those stories ended than how they began. We are fairly automatic in comparing those national norms to the families in our towns and neighborhoods, and perhaps our cousins as well. Yet even when we were there, we don't get the full picture.  As Garrison Keillor once wisely pointed out in his story "Hog Slaughter," we believe times were simpler then because we were children, and our needs were looked after by others.  But it wasn't simpler for those others, not a bit. 

There is a lot of online complaining these days of how easy the Boomers and Greatest Generation had it financially when one compares it to today. House prices look so low! Well, yes, but lots of people lived in apartments, mobile homes, and even boarding houses and tenements, remember?  If houses were so cheap  and wages were so comparatively good, why didn't everyone have one? Housing prices went up dramatically in many places around 2020 and remained high. To young people, it must seem as if the goal posts have been moved. But the ratio of housing prices to wages was comparable to now from 1978-88, and was even much worse 1980-84.  There was another peak 2004-07 nearly as high as now. Three things are driving the false impression of unprecedented high house prices: not understanding overall inflation clearly, failing to account for interest, taxes, and maintenance, and surprisingly, the historically low, affordable ratios from 2010-2020. That really is enough to account for the resentment, but I have some things to add.

Those houses built in the 50s - 80s aren't the same houses now.  They have additions - garages, bedrooms, dormers, porches, whole floors, outbuildings, pools, paved driveways, bay windows, fences and stonework, breezeways - and that's just the exteriors. They have refinished basements, kitchens that are not just maintenance replacements, but significant upgrades, better bathrooms, better heating and especially cooling systems. A woman a little older than me remarked to her daughter-in-law recently that she could tell the neighborhood was stable because so many of the houses had additions. I had not thought of that, but it is true that people add on rooms for living there, not for resale. Stability is also a kind of wealth. Related to this is what I noted at the beginning.  We all know the later story of our grandparents, parents, and even our own houses, and this is true for our children and grandchildren as well. They may not expect a house as good as their parents', but they do want something that is about halfway along the progress line right out of the gate.

Let me add that I have lived in terrible houses and driven terrible cars. It doesn't much matter. 

 

Early Version of Mere Christianity

 

I first read Mere Christianity in 1976, just out of college. It was bracing, and I was immersed in it quickly. I had taken enough psychology and anthropology to know that the accepted view among intellectuals was that morally "it's all relative." Trying to retain some crumbs of foundational morality was considered a fool's errand.  All of that had been overturned decades ago - by someone, somewhere. This was reinforced powerfully but indirectly in the theater, where we rejoiced in offending the bourgeoisie. I considered myself a rearguard defender of Some Things Being Right, though in retrospect I had given nearly the entire game away and was a milk-and water Christian.

Lewis quickly exploded this, noting that people would deny a universal morality but in the next moment complain at you for violating "something that every decent person knows."  This radio program(me) is different from the book chapter, but the same in its essentials. 

Cracker Barrel

I don't think I ever noticed there was an old man leaning against a barrel, and because the colors are the same, I don't think the new logo is that different. I always thought of it as a hokey restaurant that was an okay change-of-pace, and was pleased that my son in Houston could sometimes get Moxie and Ale 8 there. 

Ale 8 has a new flavor, by the way - Pawpaw, "Kentucky's tropical fruit." I'm not sure when I will be in Kentucky again to try it.  My granddaughter was considering Asbury, where her parents went, but it doesn't have an engineering program. Also, she doesn't want to go that far away now. She's visiting RPI this week, and if she ends up going there I will make the effort to learn how to spell Rensselaer. 

Back and Forth In Time - After Five Years

The show is powerfully written, though confusingly at first.  The play begins with Cathy lamenting the end of her relationship after five years, while Jaime's scenes are of their first date and him falling in love. The time switches narrow and then reverse over the course of the script, and this final song is her remembering their first date ("Goodbye Until Tomorrow") while Jaime looks back on their failed marriage ("I Could Never Rescue You.") It's perfect for a nostalgic time traveler like me. 

 

This will be the last show tune for a while.

 

Motte-and-Bailey Fallacy

The problem with all those Motte-and-Bailey instructional videos is that they are either abstract in an attempt to be neutral, which is boring, or they use examples of people in actual arguments which is infuriating. Because we have already switched topics in M and B (which we used to call a bait-and switch, approximately the same), opponents seem to feel free to switch topics themselves.  Critics refute trans defenders on the topic of biological sex versus gender identity and the topic turns to declaring a chicken female once we see her laying eggs.  But no, that's not a gender identity because we don't know if the chicken cries, or is more likely to commit suicide. Another YouTuber critiquing that refutation point out that Jordan Peterson uses the motte and bailey fallacy all the time.  Where did that come from? Jordan Peterson accuses others of using the M&B on free speech issues. The accused reply that words are violence, and of course we don't want violence!  We want everyone to be safe.

Let me add in a bit about why we miss it when it happens to us in real life and feel stupid and confused. It is not usually a sharp retreat, so that we are aware of a sudden shift in the footing. It comes in stages. Skilled practitioners zig and zag, staying near the topic but sometimes expand it, sometimes turn it back on you to see if you will bite for that, then take a prechosen example to push the envelope further. I swear some people seem able to do it naturally.

The Socratic method works quite well, but we seldom have the time to spin that out. My goal is usually to find a solid point in the disputed land that will work over time if the other person thinks about it.  If I ever hear of someone who thought about one of those solid points, I'll let you know if it works. 

 

Here's a nice fair abstract one with no examples. It's a little boring, but now that you know the alternative is being infuriated, you might like it.

Knowledge and Wisdom

In the mid-80s I recall being excited that Dungeons and Dragons might penetrate culture widely enough to return to simpler, earlier, magical times when our forefathers recognised that Intelligence and Wisdom were two separate categories.  This has not happened. There was a time 3-4 years ago when the regulars here discussed Wisdom because I kept bringing it up in the context of IQ and Intelligence. The objections to using IQ and recognising general intelligence so often center around excellent qualities that are not measured by IQ or are often absent in supposedly intelligent people.  Therefore, they reasoned, Intelligence must be Something Else, or not really exist, or at least not be very important.

At which point I would attempt some distinctions and clarity, but substantially agree that IQ is not the most important thing to have. "We might look at Wisdom, for example, as being more important." After all, Wisdom is praised in the Bible, intelligence only gets a few indirect or implied compliments. Admiration for something called Wisdom seems to be present in all societies, past and present and every continent. It is related to judgement, balance, respect and a half-dozen other standard virtues. 

Hey, I know! We could look at the Seven Cardinal Virtues of the Church! 

A lot of people would start eyeing the exits at that point.

No really. The Four Natural Virtues go back to Plato and Aristotle.. 

Clearing of throats, checking of devices, and rising and nodding.

The Three Theological Virtues are Faith, Hope, and Love/Charity. The Four Natural Virtues are Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.  If you have those, isn't that better than mere intelligence? 

Hey. Where did everyone go? The truth is, wisdom is hard and costs you something. As a culture, we don't really want to move off intelligence, good looks, being entertaining, connections, and respectability as our measures.  We just want to make fun of them as a way of leveling others back to us.

Orwell on Socialists and Communists

Rob Henderson has a new essay Orwell in the Gutter, about his experience of poverty especially in The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London. One can see why the author of Troubled would be initially attracted to Orwell and why his admiration for him deepened and he became an adult and a writer on his own.

“The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred—against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.  The Road to Wigan Pier, (1937) 

A longish essay, but an excellent reminder of some basic realities that George Orwell would not obscure that still ring true today. 

Onfim's Doodle

I had never heard of Onfim, the 7-year-old boy from Novgorod who doodled his conquering fantasy on birch bark in the mid 1200s. It was some sort of homework or lesson of practicing Cyrillic letters, but Onfim's mind apparently wandered to more exciting stuff.

 I think he would get along with the average 7-year-old boy today.

Shrinking Middle Class?

Steve Stewart-Williams is correct.  While it is technically true that the middle class is shrinking, this is because the upper class has grown enormously. You might not consider $100K in 2023 rich, but 87% if the people in 1967 would have thought so. You also might misread the lower part of the graph, thinking the light blue is a poverty rate. It is a low income rate. The poverty rate is about half that at 11%, and that is before those people have been given cash and non-cash benefits. I am not saying the poor do not "really" exist. They do and I knew them as a social worker. I wouldn't want to raise a family on $30K a year either. But historical comparisons usually reveal the opposite of what activists and young people with no clue want you to think.

Relatedly, the memes you see comparing CEO salaries to average employees are extremely good examples of lying with statistics. The CEO of Starbucks received $96M for the last four months of 2024 after being hired away from Chipotle. About $90M of that was in company stock, so that he would have, y'know, skin in the game. It's not liquid.  He can't cash it in and spread it around. His employees "averaged*" about $15K**. Why doesn't the selfish bastard share all that money with his employees? For openers, there are over 350K of them and most of them are part time.  Part-timers get medical, dental, 401K and other benefits.  I'm not saying I'd like to work there, but it's not the salt mines.  Of the CEO money that is liquid, he could cash it in and personally give everyone in the company more that ten whole dollars this year. I don't know him from Adam.  He might be a miserable, greedy, abusive sonuvabitch that you would pay money not to have coffee with. 

*Don't get me started. 

** I actually doubt this one. But whatever it is, they only get another $12. 

The Nature of Divinity

God says "I am" but more often "I am the Lord." The two statements are identical and yet separate. The inert and the perpetually active are the same in Him.  

Vanilla Ice Cream

 I don't know the show at all, but this song was on a list and I thought it was a lot of fun.

Hide A Dagger Behind A Smile

 From the Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Competition Hide a Dagger Behind a Smile. 

 ...the bulk of the evidence suggests that collectivistic cultures compete more, and more intensely, than individualistic cultures. Collectivists are more likely to see competition as zero-sum, engage in social comparison, and base their self-worth on common standards rather than self-defined goals.

I attended a training about working together, and the presenters brought out comparative evidence from a paper-and-pencil test administered to people from many nations.  They very smugly announced that Americans had scored very poorly on the test, but those from communist nations had scored much higher. I raised my hand and said "Having been in Romania and having sons from there, I would question whether this test got at the right answer." She patiently explained to me that the communist countries did well because they had a culture of everyone working together for the good of the group, and lifted up those that weren't doing as well."  I told her with a bit of an edge that this was the opposite of what I observed, my native Romanian hosts who had often been to America believed, and my children had experienced. She thought it only looked that way because the Romanians didn't trust visiting Americans.  My supervisor's expression told me to stop this line of discussion NOW. 

I went up to the presenters after and told them that under communism, you learned to tell authorities what they want to hear, and recommended they get to know some people from Eastern Europe. 

 

 

 

Intelligent Design

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

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

Jesus and Omniscience

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Truth About Climate Change

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

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

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

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

Parable of the Unjust Steward

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

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

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

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

Someone To Watch Over Me

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

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

 

AI

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

The Doctrine of the Trinity

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

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

Building the Stonehenge Tunnel

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

Between a Rock and a Hard Case, 

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

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

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

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

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

Estimates of Each Other

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

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

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

 

Censorship

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

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

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

Ethel and Fozzie

 A great pairing for this one.

Coming Out

 

- Approved Posture

Read on Substack

 

 

Dead Language Society

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

Middle English  

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

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

 Old English  

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

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

Dating Men in the Bay Area

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Government

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

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

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

Old Man River

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

 

In Defense of the Amyloid Hypothesis

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

The Heart of the Gospel

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Book Without Covers

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

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

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

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

 

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

Christopher Scalia

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

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

A Calling-On Song

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

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

 

The Power of All Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

Augury

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Switch to Facebook

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

You can learn how to make candied smoked salmon. 

Obvious Racism

 Racist reference to eugenics, with a threat of violence

 

The Kenji BLT

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

******** 

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

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

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

 

Theorbo

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

 

It Finally Happened

 

Hoarding

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

Autism Opinion In a Different Direction

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

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

From the essay: 

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

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

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

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

NC Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish

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

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

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

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

 

 

Addictive Instrumental Song

 

Palindrome

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

 

I had not seen that one before 

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

Easy Grilled Yellow Squash Sweet C s Designs

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

 

I find this concerning. 

 

Mushroom Poisoning A Risk When Relying on AI Generated Field Guides

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

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

Letters to the Seven Churches in Modernity

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

To the angel of the church in Suburbia write:

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

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

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

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

 

Mystic Liberalism and Mystic Conservatism

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

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

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

Judging Limericks

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

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