Tonics

I remember the place, but it was on the other side of town and we only passed it on the way to my great aunt's in Bedford. It was at what is now Second Street Plaza, near KC's Rib Shack. The photo is from the collection of John Patrick Jordan, who has a FB page of Manchester history. "Relishes and other condiments are provided by Heinz."

I post this to draw your attention to the sign on the left.  It says "Tonics," a very common word for sodas in 1941, left over from the early years of soft drinks in New England when they were marketed as health tonics.  I think it was my mother's preferred term when I was young but not later, so I can't be sure. The last person I knew who still said it died this year at 89.  There must still be a few. 

And yes, we said "bubbler" for a water fountain, which was only in New England and a small area of Wisconsin where the factory for the Bubbler brand name was.  

Fantasy Football Advice

Pick a basic ranking that you like.  Then when listening to other podcasts or reading other articles, raise the ones they are rating as hot ten spots - about one round. After about a month, you will have raised everyone ten spots. Hilbert's Paradox as applied to fantasy football.

I jest, but it actually makes some sense. Evaluators are looking at what will most likely happen if everything goes right. But everything goes right for only a limited number of people, in football and in life. If the quarterback who loves tight ends takes over after the third game, and if your TE's ACL heals properly, and if the new playcaller does what he did in Tampa Bay, then the TE12 will very likely become the TE4.

Men try very hard not to let their children think this way about life decisions, but every August demonstrate that they secretly hope the opposite. It's fair, really.  It's called fantasy for a reason. In this world your guy never gets injured but the other team loses key players. I once checked the win totals for NBA projections of the final standings and thought it was a mistake that the number of wins for the teams exceeded the number of losses by over 10%. But Upon Further Review, I saw this was sensible. We already know that our team is screwed if a star player goes out for the season.  That's not informative. We want to know how good the team could be if things go at least reasonably well.

Yes it's a terrible business strategy or military strategy. But it is the only worthwhile initial strategy for love. Reality can (and should) intrude later.

 

Move Everyone Up Ten Slots

Okay, maybe five slots.  But the middle distances are amazing worldwide this year, and there is more than one American in the hunt. 

 

Treating Drug Addiction

 I have been at many positions on this topic, There’s an Effective Way to Treat Drug Addiction—but You May Not Like It , but I will say that I have liked Sally Satel's reasoning in general, and I agree that reward systems tend to be effective.

There are at least two questions here, what is good for the individual and what works. I am mostly interested in the latter when it comes to public policy. This spiritual condition of an individual is the most important consideration, but that doesn't mean that the government should have anything to do with it. There is a difference between a government allowing virtue to flourish and trying to make it happen.

I have no need to punish or avoid punishing the offender. I think advocates in both directions overestimate how much effect it has. Punishing does not do half the good nor half the harm people think it does. This is why we have coaches, teachers, and leaders, because some people need to be treated gently and others need to be kicked in the butt - general rules have too many exceptions.

The answer may come from a proven nonmedical remedy. A Stanford team’s examination of 157 clinical trials of treatments for cocaine, including both psychotherapy and medications, found little clinical benefit with one notable exception: contingency management, a program that leverages motivational incentives, or “carrots,” to help shift an addict’s behavior. According to the Stanford analysis, these methods more than doubled the odds of someone testing negative for cocaine.

Methamphetamine — despite its reputation as being more addictive than cocaine and certainly more damaging to the brain — was shown to be similarly responsive to contingency management.

 Nothing works all the time, some things work more often than others.

Finding New Heresies

This one took me a minute.  I followed the wrong cue, that it was an attractive sports car, and jumped to a wrong conclusion.  It took me a while to start over and see it correctly.

But it is something many of us have said for years, including people who comment here. Chiliastic fellows arise, but lose their grip and slide over into Montanism; Bahai turns out to be Manichaeist dualism when you pick it apart.  

Contra and Contra-Contra

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its many subcategories are the dominant therapies now.  Whether you go to a "counselor," a "therapist," or any of the trendier titles for professional-who-helps-you-fix-stuff, you will most likely receive some version of CBT. There are exceptions. There are still a few people who go to some descendant of psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy, and trauma therapies in particular may have more physical interventions like EMDR or mindfulness meditation. (You can find lists of literally hundreds of types of therapy, but these fifteen are a good quick summary: Different Types of Individual Therapy and Their Evidence-Based Results. More than enough, really.)

Despite its ubiquity and longevity, CBT remains controversial. I have never been a therapist, though anyone in mental health is sometimes put in a position of intervening in a way that sure looks like some kind of therapy, even if you can't call it that. It is unlikely I would ever be good add it, no matter how much training and experience I had.  I am much too interventionist rather than letting people come to their own conclusions in their own time.

Here is a pretty good debate between people of good will who simply disagree strongly about whether CBT deserves its reputation or not.  Contra CBT by Josh Zlatkus over at Living Fossils.  The most scientific psychotherapy doesn’t understand science.   Josh believes evolutionary psychology should be more of a foundation of current therapies.  That is where I ran across him.

False Advertising #1: CBT is the therapy of reason. (Final paragraph: This is the recurring problem: CBT sees the inaccurate output but often misses the functional process. It pronounces defects before understanding design. For a therapy whose central promise is to improve how clients think, that is no small problem. In answer to one of the client’s most basic questions—“Why do I think this way?”—CBT’s answer all too often seems to be: “Don’t worry about that. Just think this other way instead.”) 

There are three parts to this.  It will take you a while, but it is very readable.

In answer there is Contra Contra CBT  by Unorthodox Psychotherapist, which will be in 3 parts though only two are completed.

If therapy would deactivate fear responses, there would be many more accidents. As I like to say: “People with too much fear end up in therapy; people with too little end up in the emergency room.” Emotions are adaptive, and fear is of vital importance. However, being adaptive in origin or average for the species does not make a response accurate or harmless for the individual. Evolution does not care about happiness for its own sake. Fear belongs to a regulatory system, and like fever, cough, and vomiting, regulatory systems can become disordered. When that happens, the system designed to protect a person from real danger can escalate and confine them to their home, as is the case with agoraphobia. 

The dueling summaries are about as good an introduction as you could get. I doubt that an entire Introduction to Psychotherapy full-semester course would be better. 

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. 

The update is that at least some of my comments remain up and I have lots of people liking them. Go figure 

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.