Learn something new every day

I lived there for some time, but never realized(*) that Liberia grew its own coffee variety: "quite different (and somewhat superior) in every way compared to other species, including Arabica and Robusta". It's a bit rarer and pricier, and has a "more complex flavor profile with distinct fruity and floral notes."

The main growers are now Malaysia and the Philippines, not Liberia.

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(*)Of course I hadn't acquired a taste for coffee then. Nor have I now, though if there's nothing else to drink or I need to stay awake ...

Medical technology

They warn you that an MRI makes very strange and loud noises. That's ignorable.

Your body position is a bit cramped. For half an hour, that's OK.

They warn that it's a tight space, and not for claustrophobes. Close your eyes to keep the lasers out, and you won't notice a thing.

The personalized mask tries to clamp your head into position, pushing on the base of your nose. That gets old in seconds. I don't know about other people, but I felt like I had to be proactive about breathing through the thing; it didn't feel natural or easy.

No surprises, which was good.

At the end of the Exodus

At Bible study this morning, the teacher noted that during the exodus, the Israelites had been eating manna, and at the end they are starting to see fruit. Maybe not the first time, but they'd have had to trade for it before, and the description in Exodus doesn't describe a lot of opportunities for trade. What would the land's bounty have looked like to them?

Once they got into the land, what were they to do with it? Herding they knew. Planting and harvesting--more theory than practice. Whatever their grandparents may have taught them wouldn't be entirely relevant to the new environment, which had different landscapes, different watering, and different crops.

Though the book of Joshua talks of expelling all the existing inhabitants of the land, that's clearly not what happened, as seen in Joshua and Judges and Samuel. So it's a safe bet that the Israelites learned from the locals how to plant and harvest. And what sacrifices you needed to make.

Scarlet or white ribbon?

Youtube tossed up at me a video claiming that the Talmud recorded a change in the scapegoat ritual at the Temple at about 30AD. I didn't watch the video; typically there's little addressing of ambiguities in such things.

The ritual of the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement is probably, if not familiar, at least known, to anybody who has read Leviticus. As part of it, the priest took two goats, cast lots for them. One was sacrificed, and the other driven into the wilderness.

The Talmud and Mishnah and Epistle of Barnabas and Tertullian mention a couple of modifications, not spelled out in Leviticus.

A red ribbon was divided, part tied around the scapegoat, and part {retained in the temple/tied to a rock near the cliff}. The scapegoat was then {driven out of the city/taken to a cliff and pushed off}. I suppose that as the area grew more populated, wilderness as such got to be harder to come by. Whichever, when the scapegoat died, the retained part turned white, presumably representing the purification of sins per Isaiah 1:18.

I hadn't run across that before. From the Palesinian Talmud:

During all those days that Shim‘on the righteous was alive, the scarlet ribbon would [always] turn white (malbin). After Shim‘on the Righteous died—at times it would turn white (malbin) and at times it would turn red (ma’adim).

Shim'on the Righteous was "a semi-mythical high priest whose period of activity is roughly dated to the third century BCE and who serves in rabbinic literature as the ultimate embodiment of a forlorn golden age"

The Babylonian Talmud is similar; except that instead of sometimes turning red it sometimes "did not turn white."

It should be noted that in another tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (Rosh HaShanah 31b) the same passage appears with somewhat different wording: “Forty years before the Temple was destroyed the scarlet ribbon would not turn white, but would turn red

A slightly different citation, from the Babylonian Talmud:

It was taught: Forty years before the Temple was destroyed the [flame] of the western candle would die down, and the scarlet ribbon would turn red (ma’adim), and the lot [with the Name] would come up in the left [hand], and they would lock the doors of the Temple hall in the evening and rise in the morning and find them open. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai said to it: Temple, why are you frightening us? We know that you are destined to be destroyed,

Taken by itself the latter passage's symbolic connection to Jesus is obvious: temple isn't needed anymore. But the presence of the other references makes it ambiguous.

FWIW, The Torah.com notes a number of pagan uses of red thread and scapegoat-like ceremonies (e.g. "Now, any evil of this camp that has been found in person, cattle, sheep, horses, wild asses, or donkeys—right now, here, these rams and the woman have removed it from the camp. Whoever finds them, may that population take this evil plague for itself.")

I draw no conclusions from this, except that even things that seem to be clearly prescribed may have unexpected accretions.

A heads-up about Multi-Factor-Authentication

You can still be phished.

The malicious link leads to the attacker’s proxy server that, thanks to the phishing-as-a-service toolkit, looks identical to the real Google login site (except for the URL displayed in the address window). The user then enters their username and password.

The proxy then forwards the credentials to the real Google site. Google will then send the proxy server an MFA request, and the proxy server sends it back to the victim, who is expecting it since they believe they’re trying to log into the legitimate Google page. The victim then sends the MFA code to the proxy server, which sends it to the real Google site.

Studying war and learning?

Commander Salamander wrote about US fixations about how to fight wars; how the idea that "Both graduated pressure and rapid decisive operations promised efficiency in war" had tangled and crippled us both in Vietnam and in the later wars we're fought in. "The conviction that technology offered a panacea not only impeded U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to begin with but also slowed the ability to adapt once the true nature of those wars became apparent."

I've been somewhat immersed in WWII Pacific history recently, and see parallels with the Japanese decisive naval battle doctrine with which they hoped to beat the USA. One great victory cripples your enemy's fleet and leaves control of the seas to you. That Mahan's theory didn't quite apply in this case (the US could keep building ships even if the Japanese controlled the Pacific), and that technology changes rendered the doctrine much less relevant, didn't seem to ever sink in.

We field amazingly sophisticated technologies--but the weapon count is low. The Houthis have been exercising our ship defenses, forcing us to chew through expensive systems faster than we can replenish, using cheap stuff.

I wonder: What lessons have our war colleges learned from the Houthis, Afghanis, Ukranians and Russians? And what will those lessons translate into? Are procurements driven by projected needs or by politics and "ooh, shiney"?

I'm not looking forward to cartels (and then others) starting to use cheap drones to attack law enforcement and judges in this country. I suspect it won't be too long. Do we have countermeasures planned?

Specificity

I got to thinking about confessions this morning, recalling a little earlier mention of such things, when I ran across a post on Anecdotal Evidence about "kitch":

"This insulation of kitsch from experience," Kimball writes, "helps to explain its peculiar abstract quality: Kitsch is always ready to sacrifice the particular for the general, the specific for the universal, the concrete for the abstract."

...

"Instead of attempting to communicate individual beautiful, true, evil, human phenomena, kitsch strives to incarnate beauty, truth, evil, and humanity without loss. Art is more modest. It sees the universal in the particular, true, but it does not thereby dispense with the particular; its gaze remains focused on the particular because it realizes and accepts that, for man, the world speaks not abstractly or all at once but piecemeal, in fragments, through this tree, this landscape, this face, this web of relationships in which I find myself."

It's way easier to confess to the generic sin than the particular. The memory of a particular instance of (e.g.) rudeness still has the power to humiliate me in a way that no general admission that "I was rude to some people" can.

We don't live among Forms, but specific instances. Love is generic, yes, but it exists--is incarnated--in a particular smile, in setting out the needed item before the loved one needs it, the unseen works as well as the surprise cakes.

Likewise with the sins. Generic "Sin" afflicts us all, particular forms beset us differently, but what curses us most are the instances of it we put in our lives. Instances we don't like to think about; abstractions are easier.

Instances are life; abstractions are disembodied. Maybe angels have some kind of life of archetypes; not us.

Church Music

AVI relinked his Church Music post(*), the one that generated so much discussion. apparently not directly. Oh well, read it anyhow I had a few views; this is where they came from.

Years ago we joined a large church in the area. It had good preaching, teaching, opportunities to serve -- but the music hurt.

No, I don't mean it offended my aesthetic senses, though it wasn't my favorite style; I mean that the first song was set at roach-killer volume (to remind people to stop talking?), and it only improved slightly from there. It was just too loud. I not only couldn't hear myself (the way musicians who use monitors can hear themselves), it hurt my ears if I sat in the wrong row.

I started to get quietly grumpy about that.

One day I got sat down and inaudibly interrogated about that:

You've got a bad attitude here.

Yes.

You don't like the music. You're starting to spread that dislike out.

I guess so.

I don't guess. Are the band players your enemies?

Well, not exactly. But.

What did I tell you to do with your enemies?

Oh. Love them.

And here that means?

Serve them.

I volunteered to do the monitor board. I dressed in inconspicuous dark clothes and went behind the curtain to run the giant thing during rehearsals and services, and whatever mix they wanted, I tweaked for them. I changed batteries, adjusted the lectern...

After a few years they started up a new service, with more traditional music, and needed people to run that--which is where I am now.

Several years of serving the teams trying to praise God with loud music didn't give me a great love for the style, though I understand it better now. What it did give me was a love for them.

All kinds of plastics

I'd been intermittently looking at microplastics in the body and some of their sources.

Recent events led me to look up do microplastics come from dissolving sutures?

Yes, they can; though the plastic is different: polyglycolic acid. Apparently you can get tiny shards as it decomposes, and they worry about cells ingesting them, but that's not what the bulk of the paper above is about.

Microplastics seems a wider topic than I thought.

On a related note, I wonder about the safety of biodegradeable plastics in general. Something that is "starch-based" is partly plastics and partly starch, and it is designed to "break down", i.e., be at least partly digested. But is this a little like soap? Does the digestible part bring the indigestible along with it into the organism? "Here's a little starch to sweeten the taste of the propylene fragment."

RFK Jr

We wonders.

Are the proposed bans on dyes based on solid risk analysis that was just held up for some reason? If so, what caused the delay?

Or are they subject to discretion--in which case, why does one man have that kind of discretion? It seems a bit arbitrary.

Africa is a big place

and stories that lump it all together don't give a very enlightening picture of what diets are like in any one place. You're not likely to get local Fufu (from cassava) and Fura (fermented millet) in the same place.

This article is about fermenting for preservation, not alcohol. Preservation matters: "The climate makes the preservation of fresh farm products such as milk, fruits, and vegetables very challenging, resulting in reports of over 70% loss of some products yearly"

That 70% sounds a bit high.

Francis

I'm an outsider in many ways here: not Catholic, not involved in Catholic disputations in the USA, and absolutely not involved in disputations within the Vatican. Quite a few things may have had a very different appearance when viewed from there. For example, I did not understand the why's that went into restricting the Tridentine Mass. I'm told there were worries about divisions, perhaps more visible in Rome than to me.

What the standard media reports about religion is generally ignorant down to the bone, and I gather that I cannot simply just trust Catholic social media either. I regarded some reported pronouncements askance (ignoring the political ones), but figured there was something I wasn't getting--sometimes the truth of what was actually said. I wished Francis well when he started, and wish him well as he goes before us--may the Lord have mercy on him and on us all. I gather he did a lot of good work, and that doesn't usually make news.

I am thankful that, despite the unhappy truth of Maxim 483 below, I don't recall ever joking about him being Catholic.

Maxims revisited

Going on from a maxim, I decided to have a look at the most famous: Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims by François duc de La Rochefoucauld

Most of the corpus is clever, though not always edifying or wise. A little acquaintance with The Four Loves clears out some confusion he suffers from. It took me quite a while to read through the work, not because I was slow, but because I found the cynicism (especially about love) a bit hard to take. ("63.—The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation." Um. No.)

A few caught my eye.

• 8.—The passions are the only advocates which always persuade. They are a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.
• 36.—It would seem that nature, which has so wisely ordered the organs of our body for our happiness, has also given us pride to spare us the mortification of knowing our imperfections.
• 127.—The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.
• 150.—The desire which urges us to deserve praise strengthens our good qualities, and praise given to wit, valour, and beauty, tends to increase them.
• 152.—If we never flattered ourselves the flattery of others would not hurt us.
• 159.—It is not enough to have great qualities, we should also have the management of them.
• 300.—There are follies as catching as infections.
• 313.—How is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
• 318.—We may find means to cure a fool of his folly, but there are none to set straight a cross-grained spirit.
• 327.—We own to small faults to persuade others that we have not great ones.
• 372.—Most young people think they are natural when they are only boorish and rude.
• 423.—Few know how to be old.
• 432.—To praise good actions heartily is in some measure to take part in them.
• 437.—We should not judge of a man's merit by his great abilities, but by the use he makes of them.
• 439.—We should earnestly desire but few things if we clearly knew what we desired.
• 442.—We try to make a virtue of vices we are loth to correct.
• 462.—The same pride which makes us blame faults from which we believe ourselves free causes us to despise the good qualities we have not.
• 477.—The same firmness that enables us to resist love enables us to make our resistance durable and lasting. So weak persons who are always excited by passions are seldom really possessed of any.
• 481.—Nothing is rarer than true good nature, those who think they have it are generally only pliant or weak.
• 483.—Usually we are more satirical from vanity than malice.
• XXIV.—The most subtle folly grows out of the most subtle wisdom.
• LXXVI.—Many persons wish to be devout; but no one wishes to be humble.
• LXXXII.—It is more easy to extinguish the first desire than to satisfy those which follow.

Some of these are really good: "To praise good actions heartily is in some measure to take part in them." That may sound a hair familiar: "he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward."

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Computer organization

I wonder if I should run longer power/HDMI cables up the bookcase, and try suspending the monitor from the ceiling--adjustable with a chain loop. Less desk clutter, better monitor height, and I could get it out of the way when I wanted to just look out the window or read.

Work

AVI has a useful post up on work. What's it good for?

There's a little paradox in life. Most of our greatest joys come from using our gifts to serve people we care about. And nobody likes being treated as a servant.

As a Christian, I suspect that the first part of that--the joys--come from being made in the image of God who is love. The second part I think we understand: we want to see love too.

I look a mess

and the incisions will need TLC, but the big tumor is gone, and I'm home. So I will rest "according to the Sabbath."