Unforgettable

 

Banned For 100 Years

I was surprised that a new comment was not accepted at "Matriarchal Blessing" on Substack even though I had liked the original post and said so. The reply rules told me not to be insulting.  I didn't think I was. 

From "The Long Game"

 A Race With No Finish Line Some nuance to the discussion of selection, of a principle that was discovered fifty years ago and resisted at first. Parasites and hosts co-evolve in a dynamic and asymetric situation.

 Imagine you have a rare MHC variant. Circulating parasites have not yet adapted to evade this particular variant, so you are going to benefit from that relative rarity. This fitness advantage enables the variant to become more common - those with the variant will have more offspring - so then the parasites adapt to avoid this variant. The variant is now less useful and the advantage moves to whatever variants are rare. No variant remains useful for long, and the set of effective variants keeps changing. This is called frequency dependent selection.

Data Centers

The linked post is about both the effect of data centers and the limits of persuasion. Can the Truth Convince People to Like Data Centers? by Cremieux Recueil

 The unique thing in this poll was that the pollsters sought to see if they could change people’s views. They wanted to test if they could unravel people’s misinformed views about data center harms by telling them the truth. Unfortunately, people don’t tend to believe the truth, even when you present it to them directly: they don’t think data centers generate tax revenues, that they make AI more widely available, that they create high-paying jobs, power modern business applications, or—critically—that they actually don’t use very much water.

Medical Breakthroughs in 2025

From regular columnist Saloni Dattani at Works in Progress.  Some rare conditions, some common ones, plus a little historical review of what medicine was in 1950.

Deifying the Suicidal

 Eve Barlow, from "Blacklisted" on Substack 

Before I go on, I want to make something clear, because I am a journalist – a real one. Deifying someone who just committed suicide is incredibly dangerous. The Samaritans guidelines themselves instruct journalists and content creators to strictly avoid sensationalizing, glorifying, or romanticizing suicide. That specifically includes blaming anyone’s suicide on a simplified cause such as “the media”. Samaritans media guidelines are free. Anyone is able to look them up online. But I guess it speaks to online commentary these days that none of the thought police thought to do so. 

Imagine Squirrels

This was the background music to my son Ben's sixth-grade science project in 1996, where he had filmed squirrels encountering various types of bird-feeder barriers, trying to discover which was best. So imagine squirrels falling off bird feeders into the snow and running away, only to come back and try again.

Female Risk Aversion

(Note: I also published this to Substack.  I worry it will take over my life.) 

"When the big ones are gone, the big ones remain." My friend Gerry used to say this a lot, speaking not only of work problems, but family and political problems. The meaning is that when one problem is solved, another rises to take its place, seeming just as large. It is like those old cafeteria stacks of plates in a cylinder with springs. When you took off the top plate, the next one rose to its exact level. There was an illusion of endless plates, though at the very end there was a different look and feel that the last one was coming. 

A lot of women, especially young women are angry at everyone right now, and everyone is angry right back.  The women feel uniquely put-upon and disadvantaged, while the rest of us look on in astonishment. Sexual assault diminishes every year.  Discrimination against women now exists mostly in subtle ways, while their societal advantages are quite public. If the attitudes of men in the dating market and into the realm of marriage are bad, were they not much worse thirty years ago, sixty years ago, ninety years ago? Have you never talked to your grandmother about her life, and her own mother's life? Have you never read a biography of a woman before Oprah?

Tangent:  I mean a real biography, not one of those Facebook blurbs about Felicia Elderflower, who wanted to go to medical school after saving thousands of soldiers in the Civil War, but her father forbade her, threatening to kill her cat. But she and Mr Whiskers set out for the West and worked a silver mine, where she developed new techniques that were stolen and she was never given credit for. She made her fortune and founded the Nevada Medical College for Women, which has produced four Nobel Laureates. Her brothers eventually had to kiss her feet when she went back East.

Yes, yes, I am being snide and unfair. I am one of the astonished ones. 

But because of that, I thought it better to look at all this mechanistically.  Let's say that women have a pre-installed level of suspicion about men and the world in general. This fear was developed in worlds in which however dangerous your own village-boys and even husbands were to you, the men from the next tribe over would abduct you, kill your children and sell you. That was not an irrational fear, and a patriarchy run by brothers was at least a step away from servitude or death. Even as things improved throughout the Middle Ages, when women slowly acquired the right to inherit property, or inherit guild status when widowed, or veto marriages for themselves and their daughters, privileges that look meager now were hard-won and deeply treasured then. By current standards it may all have been embarrassingly bad, but in Asia, Oceania, the New World, and Africa it was far worse.  And still is. There are still slave markets in Libya. 

The big ones are gone, so now there are new Big Ones. A hundred years ago, women depended on men for a lot more than just status and social expectations. In an agricultural and industrial world, they were much more reliable sources of long-term resources, especially with an eye to your parents dying before you. Death and disability came more frequently, but playing the percentages, a girl could look around town and see that the future was bleak as a single woman alone. It was better in the cities, where there were teaching and millworking and secretarial jobs, but the cities also carried a much higher risk of sexual assault, especially by the men from other groups. Survival was in question, and two together had a better chance than one alone. Humorously, Garrison Keillor reversed this when talking about hard times among the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers in Lake Wobegon: "Some of those guys are even considering getting married. Marriage: the last refuge for a guy who can't make it on his own." This is also true.

All that is much better. Women have better jobs, public order protects them more, domestic abuse is no longer a forbidden subject. But the level of fear remains, so it moved down to the next plate in the stack, and then the next one. Men still have the desire to protect, but that is less necessary. There are still some groups of men that are dangerous, but women are no longer afraid to go out most places. However, because of 24/7 news covering wider areas, rare dangerous events look more common, feeding the need to keep danger alertness at the same level. The existence of some safe places highlights that some places are not. And...they are not safe because of men.

A common complaint from the angriest women on reels is that men haven't fixed other men. The idea that good men have always been needed to protect you from bad men is no longer accounted or credited. Men are now seen as contributors to dangers even if they are protectors. Yet in a pre-installed level of evolutionary fear sense, this isn't crazy. It's just moving on to solve the next level of problem. 

Consider the true crime narratives, the Karen Reads and Lyndsey Clancys, that obviously guilty pretty white women can't be the guilty ones.  Something about it just doesn't feel right to other women. They feel sure that something must be wrong in this situation.  It must be the husband or the ex-boyfriend, somehow. Incredibly unlikely scenarios are believed, with rumors of suppressed information. Handsome single men get the same treatment. I give you Luigi Mangione, or the Tsarnaev Boston Marathon bombing brothers. Well sure they are guilty, but...they just haven't beeen understood properly. Black women don't get these fan clubs, they get the bog-standard, who-cares wheels of justice with appointed lawyers in small courtrooms. 

The dating/marriage narratives and true crime narratives are tied together by evolutionary inheritance. We are still in danger.  But who does the danger come from?  Who is next in line?  There is also heightened suspicion of what we would call male-coded spaces. When the danger was the males on the other side of town, the arrival of the police was a cause for relief.  But now they are the ones who are suppressing the evidence against the guilty men, and if that man has some police connection, that just proves it. 

I have mostly left out men's genetic programming and how it plays out in changing society.  Society is always changing and the male and female programs are built to be somewhat adaptable. There is a different set of discussions about where all this leaves men, especially young men. I don't think I've covered that much in the last couple of years. I should have another go at it in light of this new information. But part of it is in the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche research of Why Men Take More Risks.  

 

 

Throwback

A throwback from the deep past, even before my wedding fifty years ago: there was 3/4's of a cigarette in the parking lot, and I reflexively considered it a terrible waste. I thought I should pick it up and save it for later. I quit smoking over fifteen years ago, and haven't pick up used butts since early college, when they were 39 cents a pack but I didn't always have 39 cents. Padding my supply with a minor treasure like that would make the day easier.

Well of course it's revolting, you don't have to explain that to me.  The surprise of that long-buried response is the reason I'm telling you the story. 

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

I just saw a bee chasing a hummingbird away from a flower - and the little SOB was sticking with it, not letting the bird sneak back from another side. It makes entire sense, but I had never seen it before.

Jason Arday

 ...found dead. It's sad. 

50th Wedding Anniversary

Tracy and I were married 50 years ago today at St. Mary's of the Nativity in Scituate, MA.  This was the Recessional

From the Sidebar

 What Part of Britain did King Arthur Come From? Competing claims. You also get to learn where Lloyd Alexander's Gurgi comes from.

Americans: Rich and Short-lived? Our shorter lifespans are often mentioned, but obesity is not the largest factor.

Beyond a Reasonable Coincidence  More True Crime Meets Statistics from Bethany. When all answers are unlikely, unlikeliness is no longer a strong argument. 

Unlikely Medical Hypotheses  Because of the accents, it sounds like Monty Python Discusses Mad Medical Ideas.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

 

Cultural Vs Physical Anthropology

Physical Anthropologist Robert Lynch over at The Laughing Ape" highlights some of the extreme deterioration of evidence-based scholarship in his field. We have heard stories like this, but it is interesting to see how some sectors are much worse than others. How Anthropology Lost Interest in the People it was Founded to Understand. 

 I was already used to the massive differences between the two wings of anthropology, and all the jargon (e.g. embodied subjectivity, intersectionality, structural violence, hegemonic knowledge production), but was still surprised when the cultural anthropology students went up one after the other and explained what they were going to find. Not what they were hoping to understand, or learn, or test, or discover, but what they were going to find. Here is an excerpt from a typical defense that was read1 to us called “Portside Synaesthetics: Sensing the Politics of Place”:

“Architectural models and projections in Marseille are experienced as uncanny, rather than as communicative… Based on the ethnographic evidence, I argue that there is progressive potential in taking seriously the impacts material ‘objects’ have on human ‘subjects.’”

 There were no questions. No hypotheses. No data to be collected, let alone analyzed. There were claims about arguments being “based on the ethnographic evidence,” but no evidence was ever cited. Conclusions were drawn from a series of assertions. It sounded like they were all already done and weren’t seeking to learn anything at all. I remember asking one why they were even bothering to go into the field at all.

This is not a political essay.  Most physical anthropologists are liberal as well.  The registration is 42:1 of Democrats to Republicans among anthropologists in general. 

Nicotine Works

Sebastian Jensen shows how a little nicotine really does boost IQ 3-8 points for a short period of time.

I believe it. The movie stereotype of the journalist who sits down at the typewriter and lights up was exactly my experience.  If I wanted to concentrate and think hard I pulled out an Old Gold. When I quit, the moments that I noticed the lack most were sitting at a computer and starting something difficult. My thinking just felt a little gummy and slow. Doctors and others would ask "Why do you smoke?" and I would point out that I loved smoking.  Smoking is a great drug delivery system, getting chemicals to the forebrain almost immediately. 

Of course, I also had sixteen other cigarettes every day even when I didn't need to think all that hard, and those were bad for my lungs. Detail, details.  It is very hard for schizophrenics to quit smoking because they already feel mentally slowed and/or disorganised. Being in hospital provokes a lot of extra anxiety, and feeling even more zombified than usual is tough to endure...especially if you think there's nothing wrong with you to begin with.

The Beauty of Settled Science

 Eliezer Yudkowsky made the case almost two decades ago. It was passed on to us by Scott Alexander at ACX. 

…and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.

Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention...

Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty...

A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid.

I stand convicted. 

Links From 2015

I have discussed taking the Lord's Name in vain since 2007. In 2015 someone asked where I had gotten the idea and I couldn't remember.  Readers, especially Earl and Texan99 discovered that I had gotten it from CS Lewis, which makes entire sense. Everything I know about the faith I got from Lewis. Please Exercise Caution. 

I sent two books to Ben, both humorous. I tell people about How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read often. 

In Polls We Trust 

On Being Rich It's difficult for the rich to make their children work hard.

Henri reveals his ennui. 

Recent Links

 Were Successful Insertions in the SARS-CoV-2 Genome common enough... Way beyond my full understanding, but if you fight through by context you can see what he's driving at.

Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes 

David Foster on Germany: What Happened?

Turns out it's bad Karma to GoPro your rape spree   

Paper is your best play.  Unless your opponent knows that trick. 

Willkommen

 After I put up the intro from "The Producers," this one has been running through my mind ever since.

When the movie came out, I thought it unbelievable that people could be so base and depraved as to find this erotic. I have lived to see similar work come to American stages.

Sources

Christian lifestyle books are a combination of evangelical standards - take time to be with God, read Scripture, pray with discipline - and a buffet of pop psych ideas from 10 - 40 years ago.

Misandry

What are little boys made of?
Snips & snails & puppy dogs tails
And such are little boys made of.

What are little girls made of?
Sugar & spice & all things nice ^[
And such are little girls made of.

Robert Southey, early 1800s 

Third World

The term originated because the democratic world was the First World, the communist countries were the Second World, and the Third World was the poorer, nonaligned countries that had to navigate their way through this dangerous arrangement, playing one off the other as well as they could. It soon came to mean just technologically poor countries, and by the time the Iron Curtain collapsed, the original meaning collapsed for good as well. 

It might pay to recall the original framing, at least for purposes of understanding the resentment that comes our way, even from third-world nationals who have come here. We are puzzled that Islamists and leftists make common cause so easily, and this is at least part of the answer. The belief is that the First and Second Worlds fought over them and used them, leaving them nothing. They were victims of the great powers, which ruined them. Now that one of the worlds has collapsed, there is only the West left to blame. For many, victimhood and resentment are permanently installed. They don't just want a seat at the table, they don't just want to start making money, they want revenge. One can find this all over the Global South.

The first thing to notice is that it is not completely untrue. We have much to be ashamed of. We might feel the same in their shoes, and even in America there are groups that cling to the victimhood narrative. 

We read about people who came to see us differently, who had experiences which turned them around, but in general, those who grew up with this mentality keep it all their lives. Charts and graphs that show how much they benefited from contact, or illustrating it was their own leaders who took the money, or revealing how cultural attitudes prevented them from doing better often have no effect. There are cartoon images, movies, rumors, and myths that rule their minds. The Maya Angelou line is almost true: I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. The missing piece is that that won't forget how they did feel, but they will forget whether it was even 10% their own fault. They will forget everything but how they felt, and blame it on you.

It becomes an entire mindset of "if you succeeded and we didn't, you must have cheated." We believe that about sports teams, business competitors, and romantic rivals. Is it any wonder that people believe it of all billionaires, or the majority of the other sex, or political competitors, no matter how crazy that is in reality? Not to mention that it is sometimes true. 

This has resulted in one of the most bizarre inversions of my lifetime, that Israel must be oppressors because they have succeeded. Facts do not matter, only impressions, and the need to retain victimhood.  

Casting

Yuri Bezmenov. Jul 24
How To Subvert Subversion with Yuri Bezmenov

Sophie Cunningham should have been cast as Helen of Troy - the point that launched a thousand memes. 

Heil Myself

 When this came out in 1968 it was edgy.

 What is it now?  I have no idea.

Ideological Takeover

When the UU clergy isn't liberal enough for you and you have to purge its ranks, I am assuming you have something wrong with you. The Ideological Takeover of the Church I Loved, by Dr. Kate Rohde, who was booted from the UU clergy after she retired.  

Things began to change dramatically six years ago, when a latina Sunday school director complained of discrimination after a white minister was chosen for a job that she wanted. The Unitarian Universalists’ first latino president resigned in the midst of an internet storm and accusations of racism against his administration. No concrete proof was offered for any of the accusations. In a closed-door meeting, the national Board of Trustees declared that Unitarian Universalism harbored “structures and patterns that foster racism, oppression, and white supremacy.” No evidence was given for this assertion. This was a surprising self-evaluation for a group with a strong civil rights record, including the highest percentage of clergy to participate in the Selma Civil Rights March.

The essay was written in 2024, so I don't think I am going to comment there.  I am sad for the woman, and as frustrating as I find Unitarian Universalist positions on many things, I sense that I would get along with her better than her opponents. Admittedly, I am not hearing their side of the story, and additional facts might cause me to see things another way. Yet this is a familiar pattern by now, isn't it? I am increasingly convinced that for this level of extremism, the issue is never the issue: the Revolution is the only issue.  The sub-causes can be exchanged - we can go to war with Oceania instead of Eastasia without missing a beat.

For the Revolution, Hamas will be discarded, as will Islamism in general (though who will discard whom is always an issue). They could not care less about trans rights or disability rights. Heck, even billionaires as a class may be rehabilitated, as long as they are the right sort of billionaire. Racial grievance is too fertile a ground to stop harvesting, though the pattern of deciding who is black enough or Hispanic enough will only increase from here. The Jews are gone and the Asians are going from the fold unless they renounce and recant. Remember that the issue in 1984 was not whether 2+2=4 or 2+2=5.  In the end, the correct answer was "whatever you say it is."

But it is a bit fascinating that the UU's should be subject to purity reviews this soon. I read this woman's story and wondered what they had done to invite the vampires over the threshold. Near the end she reveals it unwittingly.

I have fought for justice against those who denied women equal rights, denied rights for African Americans, denied rights to gays and lesbians, against those who led death squads in El Salvador, and against those who bled the poor in Mexico. I’m old. I’m tired. I am fighting one last time for my faith, liberalism... 

She has fought for justice she says. but all her examples are of fighting against people. Fighting for something often does required fighting against something else, and that is usually a personified human agent.  But fighting the enemy is supposed to be a tactic, a necessary evil, not the point of the whole enterprise. Yet it seems this is where she invited the vampires over so many years ago. Hating became the point. When that happens there can never be victory, only a change of hatred. They finally came for her.

Old Saying

An old guy - meaning 20+ years older than me in 1970 - said something that was funny and cynically wise then. "Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play cards with a man named Doc, and never date a woman named Caprice."

No one has ever nodded and laughed at that line, so I stopped saying it. I finally figured out it is because the names are dated. This is what happens when one lives in one's own head and never considers that possibility. An updated version might be funnier, but people don't go into saloons to play cards with strangers anymore, and there are too many dangerous female names that are common words now. Destiny, maybe. 

Quote of the Day

"It might look like I'm sitting on my ass doing nothing but I'm actively checking my privilege." Tired Moderate