Is a pandemic like a war?

I may update this list from time to time as I think of (or am instructed about) new aspects.

Yes

1. You have an identifiable enemy that is killing you.
2. You have reasonably clear and achievable objectives. To be accurate, the USA has not fought with clear and achievable objectives for several wars now, but that’s because we’ve been idiots.
3. You need collective action to achieve those objectives.
4. Some of your people are going to die, and a lot are going to suffer, and the means you devise for the “fight” will cause some suffering, lots of opportunity costs, and probably some deaths.
5. Reaching your objectives requires money. The more your economy is crippled, the harder it will be to reach your goal—and you will have additional deaths because people rely on that economy. For the USA that can mean crippled transportation systems that don’t provide cities the food/fuel/medicines they need; for a poorer country that can mean that farmers starve because the army has confiscated their crops.
6. ”The enemy gets a vote.” You have to be ready to adjust your plans.
7. You will do unhappy and unjust things: seizing goods, locking people up ("quarantine" comes from a 40-day detention)--and in war killing people.
8. Your means need to be commensurate with the threat. Scorched-earth may be an appropriate tactic when Germans are invading the USSR, but it wouldn’t be appropriate if Mexico were invading the USA.
9. Some people will get rich off the new requirements, whether drug or ammo manufacturers. You may have to intervene to keep this from getting out of hand, but you need them to benefit to keep supplies coming. “Useful profiteers.”
10. Some people will try to use emergency powers to enrich themselves or entrench themselves in control. “Evil profiteers.” The tools and restrictions intended for defeating the enemy can be turned against your own people.
11. Internecine quarrels about means and promotions and whatnot will be ugly, cause a great deal of damage, perhaps lose you your war—and are unavoidable.
12. You need accountability for the results. If marching men out of the trenches into no-mans-land just gets them machine-gunned, somebody needs to be told to stop that.
13. Wars are full of lies trying to nudge the population, cover up screwups, and prevent panic.
14. You have to make decisions without enough information.
15. You are afraid. Too much fear is bad--you lynch Germans during WW-I or fail to press on against the Confederates at Yorktown. Too little and the Barbarossa plan catches you by surprise.

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No

1. There is nobody who can surrender. You can kill enough human enemies to make them stop whatever they were doing. You can’t kill all the viruses. Smallpox was an exception—it was easy. Ebola is hard.
2. As a consequence of the above, either the infectious agent or the treatment will keep on killing some number of your people forever. If you can reduce the rate to something small, your emergency is over. 0 deaths is not possible with dangerous disease.
3. Everybody dies. You can defeat one foreign enemy, but one of the domestic ones (cancer, heart disease, murder) is going to get you sooner or later. The temptation for mission creep and battling the next disease ("it's almost as dangerous!") will probably be overwhelming.
4. In a war, if you didn’t have a dedicated enemy when you started, you do now—you can’t just say “Oopsies” and stop. If you find a pandemic to be less of a problem than you thought, you can “just stop.” The hard problem will be getting the powers-that-be to admit they were wrong.
5. Against an epidemic, your tactics will always partake of "scorched earth," damaging your economy and future. In wars, that's only sometimes true.

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Yes and No

1. It depends on the intensity. A mild disease is more like the random Muhammadans going on solo jihads in London. You can let the existing systems (police in one case, medical in the other) take care of the problem. A more dangerous disease is comparable to them being organized and funded, as with 9/11. You need to bring new tools to bear on the problem. Ebola would be like an invasion.

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Obviously the tools differ: chemicals, quarantines, research, crash programs to redo HVAC (for airborne pathogens) vs the familiar trucks, bullets, and bombs. But they’re both expensive and have huge opportunity costs.

As a thought experiment, imagine a disease spread by contact, with a week-long incubation period during the last three days of which the victim is contagious, with a 40% death rate.

The disease appears in Sao Paulo, spreads quickly, and is quickly identified.

You’re the director of Epidemic Security. Congress has just voted a (possibly merely the first) 30-day state of emergency. The country is going to be “invaded.” What do you do?

Just a few quick ideas: shut down the borders and all international travel until quarantine centers are built. Plan for 2+ week quarantines—1-week is the average incubation period, not an exact one. Unauthorized border crossing is an existential threat, and met with deadly force. Ration bleach, alcohol, peroxide, etc. Begin construction on inter-“zone” quarantine stations designed for isolation and disinfection. With luck you won’t need them, but you probably won’t have any luck.

Does that sound Chinese to you? It should also sound Italian, and French, and so on—people take deadly epidemics deadly seriously.

Once the disease appears inside the country, you have to become radical—otherwise 40% means a lot of people die. Isolate infected zones. Within the zones, nobody goes outside for a week or so. (This will kill some people—not enough food, not enough meds, uncooperative.)

The economy takes a huge hit. Even after it’s all over, lots of jobs will be gone forever, and you’ll have more poverty. But then, 40% death rate would do even worse.

Now modify the situation. (Parallel extreme cases sometimes help illustrate principles.) Suppose the death rate is 99%.

Borders close. No admittance, whether or not you’re a citizen. Civilian monitors augment the Coast Guard watching the coast. Preemptive inter-“zone” traffic stops at boundaries for 20-day quarantines. Civilian monitors watch back roads. People starve. Measures get even harsher if the disease gets a foothold in the country.

Now modify the situation to its opposite. Suppose the plague will only kill everyone over 100 with heart disease.

Would you do anything at all? Maybe invite the likely victims to live in bubbles, if that. This doesn’t qualify as a public emergency.

The typical year's annual flus don't meet the threshold for an emergency. We're fortunate that the medical system has vaccines that help, but even without them it hadn't been a disaster-level problem. That's not comforting to my friend's wife--he died from the flu a few years ago.

Some thoughts about surviving when things go south

from LawDog, a former lawman who spent some of his youth in Africa. It is not wise to wait for the US Embassy to help you.

On a closely related topic, reports say 112000 people were evacuated from Afghanistan. I don't know how many were US, other NATO, Afghan, or what. Using the news reports, I'm estimating 15 days. I don't know what the average capacity of the planes leaving was: 300 might be a bit high. You can squeeze a lot of people in a cargo plane, but I presume they had smaller ones too. If the rate was steady, and the operation took 15 days, that comes out to a minimum of a plane every hour. Scale for different estimates: 100/plane gives a plane every 20 minutes. 7 days for the push (assuming it took a while to ramp up capacity) and 100/plane gives a plane every 10 minutes--which I'm not sure is plausible.

I wonder how many of the evacuations were land-based, and what it took to get them through.

Persistence of vision

I remember reading decades ago that dogs didn't seem very interested in movies. They were alert to sounds, but the motion on the screen meant nothing to them.

On the other hand, dogs can watch TV and cats can too. From the latter: "Yes, cats can watch TV but process images differently than humans. TV images are tougher for cats to identify to see because they process at a rate of 70 – 80 Hz; faster than what TV’s show. Cats can see many of the same colors although some red colors are desaturated." Dogs do not see as well, and have fewer colors.

There's a difference between modern TVs and old projection movies. The movies projected images one after another and relied on human persistence of vision to have the images blend together rather than flicker. Nobody likes to watch flicker, and dogs and cats seem to need higher frame rates than people do (predator eyes?). So movies wouldn't be so attractive.

But old-style TV's used glowing phosphors--would their fading overlap the next image? Not really. Different colors have different fading times, but they're generally less than 1/1000 second. The monitors I used to use at work had refresh rates of 60-80 Hz: good enough for me, but maybe marginal for a cat. LCD displays can have refresh rates of over 5/1000 second. That's plenty fast enough to keep it from flickering for a cat.

Of course the pixel colors are designed to look realistic for human eyes. I don't know exactly how to map that for cat vision. If cats are nearsighted (per the link), then the "everything-in-focus" world of a nearby TV screen might be especially fascinating.

Parasite on a parasite

I missed this story when it first came out: the zombie-ant fungus has a parasite of its own.

You probably know of the fungus that infects some ants, scrambling the ant's brain so that it wanders out to die and grow a mushroom out of its body. The ants try to defend against it by grooming each other, but it turns out that another fungus in turn infects the first one, cripling its fruiting body and making the resulting mushroom less contagious to ants.

I wonder if this new parasite is in some way cultivated by the ant colonies.

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayetu Moore

She was a little girl in Liberia; one of the daughters of a university teacher and a mother studying in the US on a scholarship.

Civil war came to Caldwell and the father, three daughters, and two grandparents fled on foot for weeks until they reached an isolated village where they had family. Because the last leg was by boat, it was inconvenient for the war to reach the village--but if they needed medicine the war could still touch them.

The back cover tells you that she survived, and came to the US, and went back again--to find an angel. (Not her words.)

The first part is a child's eye view of life in Liberia, and worth reading just for that. Just a hint--her father doesn't want to tell her about gunfire, and so she uses the word "drums" because that's what she thought it was.

She describes her teenage self as painfully aware of being black and different in the USA: trying to "find herself" and trying to "fit in"--not an easy circle to square.

She dreams of Satta, the rescuing rebel soldier, over and over, and finally decides to go back to Liberia to find the rest of her family again. The last part of the memoir belongs to her mother, telling her part of the story.

The Dragon is legion: a prince who tries to chase the monsters out of the forest becomes a dragon in his turn, to be chased by others later. Doe, Prince Johnson, Charles Taylor--and others. She finds racist dragons in the US too. The women are the women she knew, and perhaps herself as well. The Giant--I'll let you learn that yourself.

The memoir speaks of great losses and confusion, and hard choices, and confesses to some stupidity. But courage and love move through it.

Thank you, Ann

With months to plan...

We have a history of trying to use the military for "social goals". (*) I gather that the social goals of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity are in the running for our militaries' the highest priority--perhaps not officially, but effectively.

I have no proof that DIE-based promotion priority had a bearing on the magical thinking Afghan withdrawal plans. (We've seen years of magical thinking in military planning--the LCS, Zumwalt-class destroyer, etc--and plenty of specialized trade-offs that assume that you can know which cave to shoot a small missile into.) But it seems at least possible.

In an environment where politics matters most--well, CYA killed a lot of people at Chernobyl. I suspect that we'll soon suffer worse things than the Afghan debacle, even if we try to flush the brass and suits tomorrow morning. There are undoubtedly plenty of other places where our plans have little to do with reality.

In our less powerful future, how can we train and promote people who'll keep their eyes on the ball and test their theories? Who won't believe every "transformative technology" pitch that comes their way? Of course there's the reverse problem--fighting the last war and believing bigger battleships will always win in the end is a way to lose. Still, things like the Zumwalt suggest that we don't have enough believers in iterative improvements. Maybe a machine shop course in which officer candidates make improvised weapons, repeating with improvements during the course. And maybe another to focus on the dangers of using stupid metrics (McNamara again). Find a way to honor the men who find the flaws in the plans in time to fix them.(**)

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(*)"The poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nation's abundance. They can be given the opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which will reverse the downward spiral of human decay". The book says McNamara was pushing this before the recruiting crunch, so he may actually have believed it.

(**)That may be impossible. There's a bias that regards coders as productive for a company's bottom line and testers as a sometimes necessary evil.

Speaking of luxury beliefs

Who Will Save Us From Racist AI?

Machine learning can find patterns (although not meanings!) in data, and often improve the accuracy of a diagnosis, and sometimes its precision (as the article says). A paper stirred up a lot of controversy when it found that from chest x-rays, computed tomography, and mammograms the AI program could very accurately predict a patient's self-reported race. I'd heard that a forensic pathologist could identify a corpse's race from the long bones with about 80% accuracy (or was it 90%?) (at least in the USA), but chest bones are new.

This instantly provoked angry complaints that "AI Has the Worst Superpower…Medical Racism."

One of the methods used to test a patient’s kidney function measures glomerular filtration rate (GFR). However, several studies have found that blacks have higher baseline GFRs than whites, so the test has to adjust for this factor depending upon the race of the patient. Graduate student activism led to several institutions removing the racial adjustment or replacing it with a different lab test, ostensibly in the name of addressing “systemic racism.”

In other words, for the sake of their luxury beliefs, the grad students pushed to reduce the quality of care for African Americans.

"One thing we noticed when we were working on this research was that there was a clear divide in our team. The more clinical and safety/bias related researchers were shocked, confused, and frankly horrified by the results we were getting. Some of the computer scientists and the more junior researchers on the other hand were surprised by our reaction. They didn’t really understand why we were concerned."

"You've got to be carefully taught..."

When I first heard of "Marxist-Leninist Physics" I thought the notion obscene. I still do. And my opinion of those administrators and grad students is not printable.

It's quite easy to screw up machine learning, and train it on the wrong things, as with the infamous case of the "horse recognition" algorithm that was trained on pictures of horses taken from an organization's portfolio. The alborithm trained not on the horse but on the logo. A medical algorithm trained only on whites may not do as well on blacks. Looking for skin cancer precursors with a system trained on brunettes may not work so well with freckled red-heads. And it is harder to get a comparable training set with a minority than with a more common group. E.g train on 10,000, test on 10,000. It's easy to find those numbers when the population is a million, but if there are only 5000 to begin with? You can't get statistics as good.

Those are real problems. But that's not the complaint here--the ideologues want to squelch real findings in favor of their beliefs.

I know some people who believe the Earth is less than 7000 years old. Let's squelch carbon-14 dating in favor of something that lets dates fall within that window--just to keep them happy.

That isn't quite a fair comparison. The Young Earth Creationists generally have a lot more redeeming features than the Social Justice Warriors--they've been much more eager to help their neighbors, for one thing; even neighbors who don't agree with them. And their belief is harmless.

Ignorant, Dumb, Stupid

Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid

The essay distinguishes between “dumbness” and “stupidity.” The former is lack of intellectual horsepower (and not the same as ignorance, which is the universal human default, though curable). The stupid apply the wrong model to the problem at hand—and don’t learn better.

Sometimes this is because the old model used to work, and the new problem sort-of looks like the old. He uses the example of Gen. Haig in WW-I:

British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.

Stupidity needn’t just come from obsolete models “that used to work”; it can also come from adopting fashionable models from another context. His example is the currently fashionable “social justice” models from the US, which are being adopted in lands whose history isn’t remotely like ours—and whose social problems have different sources.

Education as such won’t fix “stupid,” since one of its attributes is unwillingness to change models even after painful experience. It might make the stupid worse, since the subject will now think himself more clever than usual. Stupid might even spread: “There are some things so stupid only an intellectual can believe them.” And they do.

Another essayist more charitably calls these “luxury belief systems.”

“Once upon a time, it was more advantageous to know the facts of the world than not to, so we developed science. Today, our beliefs are less a reflection of our reality than a means of identifying our respective political tribes and negotiating our status within them.”

Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

I’d not read his last Diskworld novel yet, and figured a little light reading was what the doctor ordered.

Creative but uncontrolled—I’m afraid he was slipping. Characters get preachy, and inconsistent, and Pratchett tried to explain too much. It violates the Chekhov’s Gun principle “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.” Don’t bother.

Gamma gardening

When I was little I read about using radiation to try to induce useful mutations. I heard nothing more for decades. They're still doing it.

Modern genetic engineering has replaced the need for atomic gardening, but the legacy is still carried forward by the Institute of Radiation Breeding in Japan, which currently owns the largest, and possibly the only surviving gamma garden in the world, at Hitachiōmiya in Ibaraki Prefecture. The circular garden measures 100 meters in radius, and enclosed by an 8-meter high shielding dike wall. Species within are irradiated with gamma rays from a cobalt-60 source placed inside a central pole.

The blurb for the Rio Red grapefruit somehow doesn't mention exactly how "scientists tried to breed" it, but wikipedia says they used thermal neutrons instead of gammas (as the first link says--though maybe the gamma source is just the last one running).

I wonder why the USCitrus site is cagey about that... It couldn't be because some people freak out when they hear the word "radiation", could it? "Frankenfood" ... "Godzilla in your juice glass" I wonder how Godzilla would taste sauteed in olive oil with a little pepper and garlic.

Pagan ritual

What was it with beans in the ancient world? From Ovid's Fasti:

 This day they call the Feralia because they bear (ferunt)
Offerings to the dead: the last day to propitiate the shades.

See, an old woman sitting amongst the girls performs the rites
Of Tacita, the Silent (though she herself is not silent),
With three fingers, she sets three lumps of incense
Under the sill, where the little mouse makes its secret path:

Then she fastens enchanted threads together with dark lead,
And turns seven black beans over and over in her mouth,
And bakes the head of a sprat in the fire, mouth sewn up
With pitch, pierced right through with a bronze needle.

She drops wine on it too, and she or her friends
Drink the wine that’s left, though she gets most.

On leaving she says: ‘We have sealed up hostile mouths
And unfriendly tongues’: and the old woman exits drunk. 

(I wonder if by Ovid's time anybody remembered the "why" for any part of that ritual.)

Pythagoras had odd beliefs about fava beans. Romans had an odd anti-ghost ritual that involved black beans:

When midnight comes, lending silence to sleep,
And all the dogs and hedgerow birds are quiet,
He who remembers ancient rites, and fears the gods,
Rises (no fetters binding his two feet)
And makes the sign with thumb and closed fingers,
Lest an insubstantial shade meets him in the silence.

After cleansing his hands in spring water,
He turns and first taking some black beans,
Throws them with averted face: saying, while throwing:
‘With these beans I throw I redeem me and mine.’
He says this nine times without looking back: the shade
Is thought to gather the beans, and follow behind, unseen.
Again he touches water, and sounds the Temesan bronze,

And asks the spirit to leave his house.
When nine times he’s cried: ‘Ancestral spirit, depart,’
He looks back, and believes the sacred rite’s fulfilled.
Why the day’s so called, and the origin of the name,
Escapes me: that’s for some god to discover.

Compare and contrast neo-pagan ritual.

I think Wright spotted a couple of contradictions in neopagan thought:

Two major paradoxes loomed in their worship. The first was that real pagans honored and obeyed their fathers, and revered the household gods, and worshipped the gods of the city and the marketplace, and respected their ancestors and founders. The poor neopagans were the children of evangelicals, so the gods of city and agora were Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the ancestors and founders of THIS nation were monotheists, all stout Christians with an odd Deist, Jew, or Freemason thrown in for flavor.

This places the diligent neopagan in the odd position of being obligated by ritual and tradition to offer due reverence and worship to the altars of his fathers and the temples of his gods, but those altars are Christian, and those temples are cathedrals.

Related to this was the problem of the Asatru — the True Men — who were allegedly worshippers of Odin and Thor, but only one of them volunteered for service in the military, which, alas, he survived intact. Those not falling in battle were doomed to the “straw death” and an afterlife in Folkvangr rather than Valhalla, hence not to stand with the gods at the Last Battle.

The second paradox was that the Old Gods were actually quite strict about sexual morality. A Vestal Virgin caught coupling with a man was buried alive. To the North, the adulterers were sent to Nastrond at death, not Valhalla.

Lewis did a fine takedown of ignorant admirers of the pagan. "You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune)."

Algebra and Geometry

From a post in honor of Fr Koterski:

“Do you prefer geometry or algebra? You can tell a lot about someone based on whether they prefer geometry or algebra.” ... He had noticed that there was a difference between people who work backward from the answer and people who seek the unknown.

I don't think he was right. High-school algebra was a set of tools for manipulating unknowns to try to learn their values. Geometry was a different set of tools, coupled with some disciplines for proving that statements you think are true actually are true--in this case about geometry, but the same disciplines appear repeatedly through the rest of math.

In math quite a bit of progress happens when someone is noodling around on a set of problems, finds something that looks like a useful pattern, and then sets out to try to prove the relationship.

Problem is, it might not be as universal a relationship as he thought. He winds up "proving it" in the old sense--testing it. Unknowns abound.

FWIW, both courses were straightforward and fun.

Fans in the stands

"Playing professional football games in empty stadiums had a hugely negative effect on the success of home teams, with home advantage almost halved, new research shows."

Is anybody surprised? Stage fright's a real thing, and so is getting "energized" by a friendly crowd. It makes a difference in how you play if Dad is watching the softball game. Or your girlfriend. How could a crowd not have some effect? Well, maybe...

Afghanistan

I haven't written much about Afghanistan and the war there. I've thought that Afghans would be foolish to help us: we don't keep secrets and we leave without keeping promises. I've thought that "take revenge and leave" would have been a good strategy, especially since we couldn't/wouldn't deal with the Taliban financiers in Pakistan. Yes, I know that doesn't satisfy the criteria for a "Just War." It would still have been better than what we did.

Our policy makers were so willfully blind on so many fronts and for so long that it hurts to think about it. Other people have already gone into aspects of it in detail. We were fighting a religious war without admitting it or planning accordingly. We were trying to build an Afghanistan where there never has been a "nation"-loyalty. We weren't willing to tear Pakistan a new rectum for ISI's support of Taliban/AlQaida. We never looked closely at how reliable our local allies really were. And on and on, down to details about tactics that I can't comment on.

We are rich enough to trade money for blood. We use expensive technology to magnify the power of our soldiers. That's good, but it seems to have shaped our thinking into technology-based paradigms (by, as Commander Salamander likes to point out, influencing which people get promoted). Train and drill the Afghans with the best stuff and best ways of thinking about countries and their armies, and they'll be a cohesive force for stability. That just costs money and time. But it didn't address their tribalism. Very little could; that's a core human value.

A generation of planners seem to have just doubled-down on "more of the same." Whenever we had talk of leaving, we got stories about the people who worked with us and would be abandoned, and what would happen to all the schools and girls under Taliban, and "never tell the day you're going to pull out" (excellent advice, of course; pity we didn't take it).

Iraq was different--they had at least some history of nationhood, and it was at least theoretically possible to hope for a not-unfriendly government there at the end of the day. We didn't keep our eye on the ball, and in retrospect I'm not sure the hope was possible after all. But Afghanistan?

I can see why some people think in terms of conspiracies and war profiteers. 19 years of stupidity is hard to believe in. (I'm leaving out the first few months of the war--those didn't seem outrageous.) But there it is.

It wasn't just that the war took so long--long wars seem to be pretty common.

Conservation of Complexity

Software always involves abstraction. I'd be happy to hear clarification from genuine information theorists, but I think there's a "convervation of complexity" in using a toolset. (Or in trying to solve a problem with laws and regulations.)

For instance, if you have a server farm of identical systems, it's nice to have some simple procedures for standing up a new system automatically, or wiping one whose system disks failed and reinstalling. There are lots of tools for that.

Such a tool will let you collect all the common stuff together, and let you customize the details for different servers with different purposes. Compute servers, disk servers, DNS, wiki, database servers--we have patterns for them, and customizations for the patterns. The same database server software, loaded in the same place, with the same admin--and each instance adds different users and tunings and backup times.

You can get some huge gains in productivity at first. Then those pesky corner cases bedevil you. E.g. a new software version isn't backwards compatible with the old. You need both old and new. Do you break commonality and add a new class to your management tool, or add lots of "if"s into your scripts? The former means you have to manage changes in two places at once; the latter makes the code complex and bug-prone. You get complexity either way.

Containers and clouds are all the rage in computing, and something like Kubernetes is wonderful for making certain classes of service resilient and easy to scale. Not everything fits in that model. I've listened to the people trying to make that work. I think I'll be retired by the time disillusion with that magic bullet sets in. I also noticed that the big clouds aren't 100% reliable in availability or in integrity (parler). It's nice to have hardware of your own in the back room, and a manager you can collar without waiting for the ticketing system.

I've heard stories of corporate deciding to use a new wonder-software that requires redoing workflow, and losing all the putative productivity savings in the expense of the changeover.

Abstractions always leave out bits of the real world. When you try to stretch it too far the real world always wins. sometimes people die

"Prestige" and "Colloquial"

The author of this short peice explains why rhetorical language exists (hint--it isn't for prestige).

"Spending eternity"

"For $2 Million, a Chance to Spend Eternity Next to Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner" I'll skip that, if I may. The only thing "next to" both Circle 7.2 and Circle 8.1 is Geryon. (or perhaps Circle 7 Ring 3)

I wonder who writes these headlines...

Culture-wide cognitive distortions

This is way outside my zone of expertise: an attempt to use cognitive distortion phrases in books to see if there can be society-wide patterns. Apparently "I am a" is a phrase that doesn't occur much in normal conversation, but appears much more frequently in the speach or writings of someone with depression. (That makes sense--how often do you think about yourself? Even Walter Mitty thought about himself in action, and let his imagined audience be the judge.)

The authors use a set of phrases which I gather are well-known in the field, and prepared similar sets for German and for Spanish (which they meant to use as a control). They were looking for (A) catastrophizing, (B) dichotomous reasoning, (C) disqualifying the positive, (D) emotional reasoning, (E) fortune telling, (F) labeling and mislabeling, (G) magnification and minimization, (H) mental filtering, (I) mindreading, (J) overgeneralizing, (K) personalizing, and (L) should statements.

They used "the third version 2019 release of the Google Books n-gram data" and the google tools, and prepared plots of 125 years of frequency of these classes of phrases appearing in books, by year.

They see a spike in German starting in about 1943, which sort of makes sense--it was starting to become clear that the thousand-years was likely to be quite a bit shorter, so you might see more people expressing "cognitive distortions." -- Although I'd have guessed that the full-court press of Nazi propoganda starting in the 30's might have appeared in some of their categories. That's probably a naive view, though.

Anyhow, Spanish was meant to be a control because it is so wide-spread that one single culture shouldn't dominate. That may not have been a good guess.

Never mind WWII, though. Almost every category except the "Should statements" shows a dramatic spike in the rate starting in the late 90's. That's a curious change in style--and it's found in all 3 languages.

The obvious question is "Can a culture experience cognitive distortions?" My intuitive answer is "Sure, cultures can go mad," and I could proffer the daily news as proof. Are they seeing a culture of twisted thinking in our printed media?

I'd like to hear what real experts think.

The last trump

Watchman Nee has an interesting take on reconciling Luke 21:27-34 (and Mark 14: "Stay alert!") and 1 Thes 4:16-18 about being caught up in the clouds. Will we welcome the moment, or be too caught up in the world to answer the call?

The trumpet shall sound, and "I purchased a field and I need to go out to look at it" or "I just got married" or "Let me finish my comment on this post."

The 3D Gospel by Jayson Georges

The premise of this short book (hat tip to AVI is that there are three main approaches to "transgressions": fear (vs power), shame (vs honor) and guilt (vs innocence). The guilt/innocence paradigm dominates the West, shame/honor the MidEast and East, and fear/power is typical of animist cultures.

The thesis is that although the gospel addresses the needs and fears of each of these, the typical Western apologetic around individual sin and satisfaction of justice doesn't fully reach people whose paradigm is different.

He cites Ephesians to illustrate the gospel confronting the different culture types: sin and punishment: Eph 7:1, 2:5; honor within a new family: 1:5, 2:19 (vs 2:12-13); and power against evil spirits: 1:19-21 etc. I leave as an exercise finding references to sins forgiven, welcome at the banquet of God, and power over evil spirits in the gospels.

On the whole I thought the little book useful, though two things bothered me a little.

I'm a Westerner, and not a member of an "honor culture," so I almost certainly don't have a good feel for how the gospel can be taught most effectively in one. I suspect that would come through people from within those cultures, and I, and Georges, are second-guessing. It feels that way, anyhow.

The bad news that comes before the good news is that we're sinners, and the implication for a family-honor based culture is much more dramatic than for a guilt/innocence based one. It isn't merely you who are shamed by sin, but your family, no matter how they may have hidden their shame before. It isn't just what the rest of the society sees that matters, but what God sees.

It would seem (to this outsider) to be a very great wrench to accept the claim that your clan has been living in shame. On the other hand, once you accept that, it is a very great incentive to redeem your clan's honor by turning to God.

But as I said, I'm an outsider.

The other itch was that when addressing fear/power animist societies he seems to be saying that the charismatics and pentacostals speak their language better than other denominations. The Orthodox and Catholics do exorcisms and blessed icons too.

And yes, he does explain that all instances of cultures are blends of these principles.

Have a read. What do you think?

"Agroecology"

Hank Campbell writes about the "new european colonialism. "NGOs in rich western countries are creating financial dependency while evoking claims of 'food sovereignty', but that is leaving out the desires of farmers and people, who very much want to not have the boom and bust of fickle nature." ... "Europe has made it plain that they want European laws to be earth's laws. If a developing nation uses a safe pesticide that Europe has still chosen to ban, Europe will put them in their economic ghetto, along with imports from Israel." This has the possibly unintended side effect of making them dependent on European products. No doubt the rank and file are well-intentioned.

Hank's claim that "NGOs exist to do one thing only - stay in existence" is a bit overstated--he doesn't discuss the religious ones--but someone who went to study abroad for a year who wanted to work with NGO's upon graduation returned with what seemed a much less idealistic attitude towards them and a different career plan. (Still donates to carefully selected NGOs)

Disposing of a frightening reminder

"an object ... also served as a daily reminder of a more recent troubling past". It is indeed troubling to be reminded of the mile-thick ice which aggressively invaded from Canada, forcing out the native inhabitants and thrusting pre-Cambrian intruders into the peaceful land.

Earlier posts: Post 1 and Post 2 and Post 3

"The rock will be placed on publicly accessible university-owned land southeast of Madison near Lake Kegonsa, where it will continue to be used for educational purposes by the geoscience department." Thanks to the Wisconsin State Journal for the photo and story.

Mishearing it better

Sometimes I misremembered a song or slogan, and my version made better sense. To me, anyway.

"Imagine" is back in my news feed again. I dislike the song, but I admit that the lyrics are pretty clear. Nevertheless, I always mis-remember the line as "Nothing to live or die for And no religion too."

I think my version describes the outcome of his imagination better: anomie.

Diagnosis by pop checklists

Just now "Diagnosing autism by tiktok" from Quilette is on AVI's sidebar.

I'm not sure which is more risky--making illness trendy instead of treating it seriously, or encouraging the hypochondriacs to self-treat. Or excusing behavior that's actually something they can control--unlike the truly impaired.

Details, details

The Cana Island Lighthouse is, as you would expect, a popular wedding site--but not so much recently. It seems that lightning preferred to strike the power and light poles rather than the lightning rod atop the lighthouse, and the park hasn't replaced the system. What's a DJ to do without power?

The causeway was only 8 inches underwater when we went, but they told us that last year's lake levels had it almost 3 feet deep. The tractor engine was high enough not to flood, but I could imagine that some long dresses in the hay wagon got wet.

Lists

Top ten video game sequences, ten worst video game presentations, ten worst generals, ...

I'm sometimes curious about history-related evaluations--I figure I might learn something--but almost none of these sorts of things involve any action. Top ten home laptops--yes, we had to buy one recently. Best washing machines of 2021--maybe, if something else breaks. Top five vacation destinations--no, we don't have that kind of money. Ten most livable cities in the US--if you don't have to live there. (It turns out that livability is measured differently when you're on a fixed income.)

Even an interesting list leaves a bad aftertaste. The "worst ten" sorts feel a bit ghoulish, and even the "best five" judge their subjects on limited grounds and don't seem quite fair. Even Satan's chewing gum in Inferno doesn't seem perfectly just: Judas fits the bill, but I'll bet you could find better candidates for the honor than Brutus and Cassius.

Snippets from travel

"Lakeshore Baptist Church" shares a building with "Next Level Salon and Spa." Heavenly beauty care?

Wisconsin Motorcycle Memorial Park

It's real--a one-acre park in Door County in Wisconsin. "The arched entrance to the Memorial Park welcomes you to the "Walkway of Remembrance", a path paved with tribute stones. This walk wraps around the court yard making a loop to represent the never ending circle of life." For some reason the walkway is square instead of round like a motorcycle wheel.

Pass it on

Overheard today: "As soon as I yell 'I'm mad about this!' and express myself, I move on and I'm not angry anymore."

"Conductor, when you receive a fare..." Or, "It only takes a spark to get a fire going, and soon all those around can ..."

Incarnating

Psalm 144:13-14 prays that our flocks multiply and our cattle bear without mishap or loss.

Since the psalmist is talking to God, why doesn’t he ask instead that new cattle appear like manna from heaven? For God, the one is no harder than the other. He made the world to work the way it does, and doesn’t seem to care to change it without good reason.

One thing does change in the psalm—the meaning of the fertility. It isn’t to be mere good luck—it would be a working-out of God’s love for the psalmist.

The fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, etc—appear as physical actions with supernatural meaning. Laziness isn’t patience, though when you’re standing in line they may look similar.

St Therese said it well—our goal shouldn’t be to do great things, but to do small things with great love (The one who is faithful in a very little thing is also faithful in much.). Jesus said that anyone who gave a cup of cold water in His name would not lose his reward.

Meaning matters.

---

We are told that “God is love.” The converse isn’t always true—what we call love is usually, as Lewis emphasized in Till We Have Faces, so polluted by self-interest that it’s presumptuous to call it love at all. But perhaps I can say that insofar as it is right, and is love, then God is there—in a different way from His “ordinary” omnipresence.

This is not to say that we in ourselves have the power to make God incarnate in the world, but we have the opportunity to let His love become physical and bring Himself more deeply into creation.

To be clear, I take it that God, though "simple" in Himself, is present in the world in different ways—in Jesus, in the Lord’s Supper, through the Holy Spirit living in us, in our neighbor (the least of these), and of course in His omnipresence that even the philosophers recognize. I think that He is also present in our obedient acts of love.

I emphasize obedient, because we’re good at fooling ourselves. It’s the same kind of problem as “How do you worship God?” Worship somehow has to be commensurate with our nature—or we couldn’t do it. I can’t worship God the same way a star would if it could. Unfortunately all kinds of idolatries also seem to fit. The rules need to come from God.

They can be rules of action or renunciation. Fasting is a classic. It is a sacrifice and self-discipline, oriented to our need for God and understanding that the physical/mental world isn’t all there is. Some people fast for a while from the news, or from entertainments. In contrast, things like the ancient Syrian eremites who stood with outstretched arms day and night, or those Buddhist monks who starved themselves into mummies—these don’t pass the test. They point away from love in action, and imagine that the body itself is evil.

In the opposite direction I hear: “love is Love.” No, it isn’t; it's not good enough without righteousness to orient it. Dante depicted this nicely.

The orthodox doctrine says that in the resurrection we will be not merely disembodied ghosts, but returned to a (repaired) physicality. We will be images of God in physical form and physical action.

Jesus called many to follow Him in special ways. But He told the Gaderene demoniac (who wanted to follow!) to go home and tell what great things God had done for him—go evangelize! “Take up your bed and go home.” “Go and sin no more.” “I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel! … Go”

Is the renunciate life better? Paul seemed to think so, but he was careful to admit that this was simply him speaking: wisely, since Jesus sent people home sometimes. How often we don't know, but there were only about 120 at Pentacost and He'd had thousands of followers.

It seems to me that making God’s love incarnate in the world through ordinary living is also a high calling.

Both require the power of God to fulfill.

Close, but...

Youngest Daughter observed that the verb "fash" seemed mirrored in the noun "fashion", but it turns out their etymologies differ. Evocative, none-the-less...

Rabbit tracking

I took to wondering about hinges. I've heard of leather hinges, which despite a certain lack of durability seem actually to have been used--within living memory--to hang doors. (Read the comments on that article.) What did the Romans use?

"Roman doors opened and closed on pivots connected to the top and bottom of the leaf. These pivots were inserted into bronze turning posts that were cut into the threshold". Doors, curtains, partitions and the like didn't survive, and even in Pompeii not much was left. But there's still quite a bit to learn about. One detail: "lower quality materials were preferred in the front of the house, in the areas most accessible to visitors and guests, while the finest materials were reserved (for) the areas surrounding the secluded back garden." Perhaps they didn't want the tax man to get too grand an idea of their wealth.

So that you don't waste as much time as we did...

If you are missing a lightweight strap made partly with velcro, and it's not in any logical place, check the laundry. It might have stuck to your clothes.

11 rescued so far

Tracing a news story: Starting from the beginning: "A vessel build in Liberia named “NIKO IVENKA” has been dedicated and is prepared for full operation. The vessel was produced by a company called HYLAEA INCORPORATED." A second story explains why it was considered "Made in Liberia:" "The NIKO IVANKA was locally built by HYLAEA INC. in Marshall, Margibi County in four months...could address the deplorable road challenge being experienced in the Southeastern region."

Three years later, the cargo ship (not authorized to carry passengers) was in trouble: The vessel was advised on so many occasions not to sail, FrontPageAfrica gathered.

It started to sink: 11 rescued. The picture in that story suggests a calm evacuation (there'a a photographer there!), so I don't know why 15-17 should still be missing, unless they had reason to want to be not found, or they were never there to begin with.

Who to blame? "We are commissioning an investigation into how a vessel that was detained for failure to meet rudimentary safety requirements managed to get on the sea with passengers and cargo," Nagbe said.... "The vessel's owner, a Chinese national, was arrested on Sunday afternoon"

---

I don't expect reports about passenger count to be accurate--certainly not right away.

It isn't obvious where the name Hylaea came from, but the hint in an earlier paragraph suggests Hylaea Inc is a Chinese firm.

I didn't know Liberia had a shipyard. Neither, apparently, does Google.

According to UNCTaDStat Liberia had no significant ship-building in 2019. The 2019 report only mentions 2017--I can't find info for 2018. And when I look up a satellite map of Marshall, I don't see any obvious shipyard infrastructure.

The ship was "built in Liberia"--in specific in Marshall. That just doesn't look plausible (look at the map yourself). The claim could be a complete lie, of course. Or it might have been partly true--the ship might have been finished in Liberia (but who'd send an unfinished ship around the world?), or it might have been superficially refurbished there--redoing the pilot house, wiring, and the paint job on a worn-out tub. I'd guess the third option is the likeliest--a quick refurb of a junker and a big press release. OK, maybe not new wiring Building a freighter in four months seems a bit of a stretch for Liberia--even in a wartime economy in the US after optimizing for speed it took a month and a half--it had taken nearly a year when we started.

And the old tub didn't hold up very well. (I can't figure out which "cargo ship" it might be here--maybe it's too late)

Who told them this was a good idea?

A Lego gun? It's a Glock encased with panels that look like Lego blocks. Lego has demanded that they cease, and as of today they have (having sold fewer than 20). Naturally the news stories play up the notion that kids will think it a toy and shoot themselves, etc, etc. The sheriff's office is only quoted as calling it "concerning," though I imagine they could elaborate at length if the WaPo allowed it.

It isn't a useful tool. Imagine trying to get that snaggy thing out of a holster. It's a grownup's toy. And it looks like a kid's toy. Some will be stolen, of course. So now: You're a cop, and a suspect teenager turns and points this thing at you. Choose quick--is it real?

I gather there's a federal law to keep toy guns from looking real--so kids don't accidentally spook people and get shot. This is the opposite--but the same sort of idea applies.

Spiritual "concierge"

A quick duck-duck-going will find you plenty of kings and queens who had a personal confessor. They undoubtedly had great need for one.(*) Some of them took their jobs quite seriously, and prescribed penances that our era finds startling--and those kings and queens did as bidden.

I suspect there are no significant penances in the world of "spritual concierges", who handle crystals, sage burning, "full moon intention ceremony," and other services to residents of these condos. My church doesn't go in for exorcisms much, but since I can't afford to live in one of these places anyway it doesn't matter.

I remember arriving in the Paris airport way early, and seeing signs for a room for religious use and meditation. I was pleasantly surprised, and eventually found the tiny pair of rooms. At that hour they were empty of people and full of Muslim literature, and showed little wear. It didn't look comfortable, and suggested unhappy possibilities about travelers.

---

(*)

But many a king on a first-class throne,
If he wants to call his crown his own,
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than ever I do,

Illusions

"So all his manhood's strength and pride One sickly dream had swept aside."

AVI has been thinking about the effect of the abstraction of social media on children. First thoughts, "Is development missing something?", and Grim's thoughts on disembodied sex. Perhaps the physical environment isn't that attractive.

Puberty is confusing enough when there are clear sex roles ("What do I say?"), but without them, and with the understanding that there's no reason not to have sex--isn't the pressure and confusion going to be even higher? We have little lectures now and then about "your right to say no" but I don't think those make much headway against fashion.

If I try to imagine myself as a teen girl (it takes some doing, obviously), I think I can see the interest in declaring for a new gender variety that can turn off the pressure, and for hanging out electronically.

For a boy, maybe porn is a big deal. Real people don't seem to act much like the porn actors. If the boy is young enough, will he recognize himself in the male actors in the ubiquitous porn, or will the action seem alien and arbitrary? "If that's what a man wants and I don't, maybe I'm something different." Even boys can be put off by the expectation for sex. And some find the physical environment hostile--because they don't quite fit or because ideological parents or other kin disdain boys, or some such. I'd guess the pressure is worse for girls, but I can imagine boys getting confused too.

Clearly this confusion is new--suicide rates are up, not down with greater acceptance of "gender diversity." If this was something that had haunted humanity since forever, and only our wonderful enlightenment had discovered the truth, you'd expect the reverse.

Sumptuary Laws

Althouse posted on a NYT article, highlighting a comment: "I believe all National Parks should be closed to visitors unless they have been invited. There should be a selection process..."

Some people aren't worthy of being in the parks, or the royal forest. They are, though not in so many words, considered low class.

A very similar air accompanies the calls to live more densely and abandon the use of cars, and to avoid using energy. The exhorters typically don't set the rest of us an example--they're a different class.

The old sumptuary laws were nominally for our own good, to cut down on 'keeping up with the Jones'" spending spirals, keep the balance of trade under control, and to inspire proper humility, but something always showed through: "declare our utter detestation and dislike that men or women of mean condition, educations, and callings should take upon them the garb of gentlemen, by the wearing of gold or silver lace, or buttons,"

The attitude still shows.

Dog parallels

During conversation after dinner, our birthday guest mentioned that border collies were highly intelligent, but if not given adequate training and stimulation, would become destructive. Naturally this reminded me of college students. "Due to their demanding personalities and need for mental stimulation and exercise, many border collies develop problematic behaviors in households that are not able to provide for their needs. They are infamous for chewing holes in walls and furniture, and destructive scraping and hole digging, due to boredom." The parallels seemed obvious.

A more detailed explanation of what makes border collies tick suggests that this isn't perfectly comparable, though.

With friends like this

Some years ago I was asked to lead a study based on The Prayer of Jabez. I firmly declined.

It reminded me strongly of the apocryphal (I hope) sermon based on Genesis 27:11.

While looking for options for a new study (so far no consensus from the group), I scanned a catalog of Christian books and teaching aids, and found... Do I need to comment on this?

The Heart That Grew Three Sizes -- DVD Curriculum Rediscover the gift of Advent this year by looking at a familiar holiday classic through the lens of faith! In this 4-session study based on Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rawle explores Christian themes including the growth of the Grinch's heart, why Christmas saved him, and how the things we despise can sometimes change our lives.

The catalog also offers some other pop-studies "The 40-Day Sugar Fast", some mediocre-sounding studies, a number of renowned commentaries and other tools, and a number of studies that are actually good. Curiously enough, the catalog omits quite a few of the Christian classics. Possibly they feel they can't compete with CCEL.

I'm not saying that secular works can't point to Christ. One key step in my journey to Christ was reading a secular poem by Lewis Carroll. But seriously--is it honest to make 4 lessons of this?

Illustrations

I was once tapped to do a Bible study on Ecclesiastes. I'm rather fond of the book. Peggy Lee singing "Is That All There Is?" would be a perfect intro -- if 4 minutes weren't forever opening a Sunday School class. The "break out the booze" might have raised a few eyebrows, but if the peice had been shorter I'd have used it.

It's fun--you can read the book three different ways: purely secular, God's around somewhere, and from a New Testament perspective. But even in the New Testament era, sometimes Ecclesiastes-days come.

What's of value in the end

Tarnished beauty under silver hair
Bloodless wrinkles framing dimming eyes
Golden conversations lost in haze
Whispered random words and unsaid "Why?"s

The book is closed.
The gifts are spent.
And grateful friends recall:
Her gifts bought us blessing

Inventing liberty

Donald Sensing reran his post on "How Jesus invented individual liberty." If you haven't read that, do. He highlights how radically different Jesus' demands stood against the honor/shame culture of the land. Even those who want to overturn their Western culture take it for granted. We shouldn't.

Ancestral memory?

When you recline in a recliner chair, the foot rest unfolds up to form a rest for you, and the sides which protected the seat parts jut out below it. From your point of view this is a comfortable foot rest, but from below this makes a little cave just right for a small enough dog to curl up in.

More travel notes

You are never 100% involved in someone else's life, and the tributes at the funeral will hold some surprises, from people who were part of her life but not yours. Not bad surprises; more of "I wish I could have been there too."

Sometimes family you haven't seen in years have a great deal to talk about.

OTOH, one sometimes finds great opportunity to hold one's tongue. (They mean well.)

Dogs can be remarkably patient wrt toddlers pulling on their noses.

Billboards sometimes seem to assume that you've watched TV. When I see "Live mas" I think "Dead weight," but that's probably not the meaning. (A famous taco chain)

At first I thought the hotel had invested in heated toilet seats, and wondered how that worked in such inexpensive-looking plastic fixtures. It turned out they had some plumbing problems with their hot and cold water tanks--and the latter wasn't working at all. Hot water everywhere.

Cell phones are easily portable, and also easily lose-able.

Chesterton again

He can be amazingly timely: "A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers Presidents and Chancellors of the Exchequer Representatives, if we genially encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper."

And when writing about detective stories: "We may dream, ..., and that it would be harder and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes"

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

"If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed."

What Twain actually published was: “Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.”

(If you prefer a more recent source: “It’s better to be uninformed than misinformed. I even doubt some of the pictures I see in the papers.” (Orville Hubbard) )

A commenter at Chicago Boyz wrote that he tries to interpret news stories using a simple procedure: determine the bias, and then assume the opposite of what the story claims. As a rule of thumb it has the obvious problem that every now and then a liar tells the truth. Benny Hinn does not appear to be honest, no matter how much the WaPo hates him. AVI has some thoughts about liars here.

How do we figure out what’s real?

We can go to our trusted sources, and trust them: Just like everybody else does. How do I verify my own sources? “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” (Feynman)

We’ve lots of news sources. Sometimes they tell the truth. How do I know when?

Truth is generally binary, but unfortunately the probability that I trust a story is on a spectrum. If I have seen the scene myself, I consider it very true. OTOH, I don’t always know the context, and … “There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” she said. “You have sayings for everything!” he protested. “You’ll like this one,” she said. “It goes: ‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.”

If the story is from a known liar on a topic which he has lied about in the past and has an interest in lying about again, I judge the probability small. But not zero—as Twain noted, you can lie telling the truth—just leave out important context.

I can ask: suppose the bare facts of the story (strip out the emotive stuff) is correct. What context is missing? Sometimes I can infer the missing context from "What would X be likely to do, and how would CNN interpret that?"

I can assume that if CNN reports on politics or social mores the report is false; either false in its facts or false in its framing. But what if they report on a storm, or a revolution in Chad, or a new business? They have no obvious reason to lie, except of course the reporter’s need to have an interesting story on a deadline. NYT and Daily News reporters have been known to make stuff up—not that long ago, either.

And sometimes politics and corruption invade what ought to be non-political realms. Remember Lysenko? Stories about his work might have seemed like science, but behind the scenes it was ideology down the line. Stories about this business or that (especially green ones) are sometimes puff pieces designed to spur investment in the bubble.

These will probably trip me up, unless I have some prior knowledge about the situation. Often if you remember prior stories about the same topic, you’ll notice that the “breakthrough” is incremental at best and rate the story accordingly. I don’t know about you, but my memory isn’t that prodigious.

I can estimate that if a report is consistent with what I have heard and believed already, it’s probably true—but those who believe the NYT and CNN do the same. I need to be sure I’m not in an echo chamber.

I can cross-check. Do I hear the same elsewhere?

The masters of smear and of advertising have learned how to spread their stories around so that they appear to be verified independently. Sometimes many outlets grab the same press release independently. Can I tell what the source was from reading the story? Sometimes yes. If I can’t figure out what the source is, that counts against the story’s veracity.

Can I check the source? I’ve had a hobby of researching science reports in the media and comparing them to the originals—and a depressing hobby it is, too. By the time the telephone game plays out to the clickbait headline, the research often isn’t recognizable.

Does the story make sense? Someone (haven’t found the quote) wrote that an Englishman would commit any crime, do any treason, before he would walk Trafalgar Square without his pants. I was solemnly told back in 2016 that there was pedophilia dirt on Trump that was being kept secret. Tell me that Hitler regularly vacationed in London in 1943; it’s just as plausible—the secret couldn’t be kept.

Similarly, we were all solemnly assured that Vladimir “my country stays afloat with hydrocarbon sales” Putin wanted Donald “fracking” Trump to win the election in 2016. Nope; that’s an obvious lie. The advantage of it is that I could note who trumpeted it and put them on my liars list.

At end of the day, unless I’m willing to put in work to find out the truth, I’m not going to get it.

---

Maybe a case history showing how I tried to understand a story would be helpful. Or interesting. Or boring.

Let me use a relatively simple story: Wuhan 2019A aka Covid-19 aka Wuflu aka horrible plague aka “nothing-burger.” (I have family and friends who were knocked down for 3 months with it. That’s not trivial.)

The first stories were about Wuhan, the Diamond Princess, and the Italy disaster.

Wuhan reports were of a contagious and dangerous virus, and that the government was using extreme measures to halt it. They had a motive to lie—The same one all dictatorships do—underplay the problems, trumpet the good things. Announcing problems is against interest; we could assume the problem was at least as bad as they claimed. The Chinese released a RNA sequencing of the virus, which sounded like they’d been working on it for a while, but were offering info in good faith. And they claimed some success using hydroxychloroquine. Since they were confessing problems, and seemingly acting in good faith, I could give some credence to the early stories.

The Diamond Princess showed that it was deadly, but only a few percent would die, even in a population that skewed older. It was a nice controlled environment for testing, with few confounding issues. Some people stayed sick for a long time (see personal experience above). The Diamond Princess owners would have had a great incentive to lie about illness aboard their ship—bad PR—but the Japanese didn’t. It seemed trustworthy information.

Reports from Italy sounded like a true disaster. Unfortunately, they didn’t come with the demographic details that would let one compare it to the Diamond Princess numbers. How much excess capacity did Italy have? If none, any plague will have people dying in the halls. Things sounded bad, but when you started asking questions about rates, the numbers weren’t there. The Italians didn’t seem to have a reason to lie about it, so the information was true—but not complete or useful.

I did not listen to the news. I gather from its effects on other people that the media played up the danger-danger-danger aspects.

Hydroxychloroquine seemed a very odd medicine to treat a virus. (I had taken it weekly for years as a malaria prophylactic.) So I went to Google and looked up the papers that dealt with that. (I trusted Google not to hide the information. Why would they lie about medicine? Politics, sure, but why bother to lie about this?) I skimmed the papers I found, and learned to my surprise that the drug has been used against viruses too, and that the Chinese tests against Covid were preliminary and low-statistics, but positive.

A doctor claimed positive results in Europe, in another low-statistics sample. A later study using it on gravely ill patients found no benefit—I hope to no-one’s surprise here. So far, these reports seemed reliable within their limits, and didn’t contradict each other.

At this point I started taking a little more note of the news and found that chloroquine was now claimed to be both useless and dangerous (heart issues—actually retinopathy is the more common risk). From what I knew now, neither claim could be justified. Chloroquine had been proved not to be a miracle cure for the dying, and the heart risk was far lower than the risk of the disease. From a reporter I could expect such exaggeration, but these came from health officials—or at least the officials never seemed to correct a misinterpretation. Somebody was lying.

Why would they lie? Just because Trump had said the drug might be useful? That’s an unworthy motive, but I sounded a sample of acquaintances and concluded that they were prejudiced to believe that anything Trump said was a lie and must be opposed. I could no longer trust that NYT/CNN and even the FDA/CDC could tell the truth on what ought to be a non-political question.

At the same time, I started frequently reading the chloroquine was a miracle drug and anti-Trump people and big-pharma in search of expensive new drugs were suppressing it. (Chloroquine hadn’t been proven useful yet—that would take a large study. I looked at one of the meta-studies that asserted that it wasn't useful, and wasn't impressed.) Oops. I couldn’t trust the “right-wing” media either. (The claim about big-pharma isn’t easy to prove or disprove.)

Skipping to the present—YouTube and Facebook have been caught deleting stories about the disease. They claim this is merely deleting dangerous misinformation. No doubt some of it is—but how do I know that? I can’t rely on the search engines to find unskewed information. I can’t even rely on DuckDuckGo: it turns out to rely on Bing, and Microsoft has already been caught censoring stories on China’s behalf.

---

I am not advocating utter skepticism. A lot of the news stories are more or less accurate--or would be if they were ever followed-up on. My stint on a grand jury gave me an appreciation for how inaccurate crime reports can be.

But I try to cultivate a "not proven" attitude to the news--especially early reports.

Continual parricide

Chesterton

The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.

He would have understood the statue-toppling, and come up with a good description of it.

The Infamous Mark 14

If you are curious about the infamous Mark 14 torpedo which submariners were saddled with in WW-II, have a look at the Bureau of Ordnance's chapter (p 90 =#108 in the reader)).

The submarine version's problems are fairly well known (ran low, magnetic exploder (which they were ordered to use) didn't work, impact exploder didn't work). The torpedos used by torpedo bombers faced other problems--propellers that failed, exploders that armed in the air--and it was hard to get the angle of attack into the water to go just right. "In the spring of 1942 the best available solution seemed to be biplane extension stabilizers bolted to the torpedo vanes."

The Bureau also experimented with electric torpedos. They made progress after finding a working German model, but it had issues: "hydrogen tended to form within the compartment. After extensive experimentation with various catalysts, the Bureau endorsed the use of coils in the top of the battery compartment to burn off the excess hydrogen. Each day the coils were lighted, air was blown in to support combustion, and the dangerous gas burned off. The expedient worked, but submariners were suspicious of the procedure. On at least one occasion, enough heat was generated to make the Torpex warhead melt and run."

Politics tried to get in the way of procurement (p 125 =#143 in the reader), and the report concludes with a protestation that overall they did a good job on the Mark 14--"Quantity and quality were both admittedly inadequate, and those were deficiencies which could not be corrected quickly enough to avoid the creation of an atmosphere compounded of controvery and recriminations." "During the course of the first year and a half of war, however, almost every one of the plaguing defects was elminated."

Other people had a rather different view of the history of that "first year and a half"--that it was mostly filled with "not listening." The Mark 14 was developed during the Great Depression, and testing focussed on retrieval/reused of the expensive machines. The resulting tests did not address the real problems of the weapon.

Well, of course...

AP headline: "Intel report is inconclusive about UFOs" U=Unidentified, right?

Pollen abetted virus transport

"On pollen and airborne virus transmission" models how pollen w/ viruses adhered can distribute the virus farther than models of simple virus transport. (Hat tip to SciTechDaily).

The correlations illustrated below encouraged them to think about this kind of transport.

Also, RNA viruses have been found in "pollen pellets" before. The maps above are interesting, but you can famously find correlations between deaths by swimming poll drowning and Nicholas Cage movies. Careful checking and modeling are in order.

They put together what looks like a nice careful model, but on first reading through their paper I only found this for the critical part: "some of these contaminated droplets have a high probability of attaching to a surrounding pollen grain and thus being transported." What's that probability? Everything else hangs off that. To be fair, this is a "what if" paper that assumes that contamination. Modeling the adhesion rate would be a different paper.

Adhering to a pollen grain might help keep a virus from drying out as fast, since it would be shielded on one side, so transport isn't the only benefit the virus would get from piggy-backing. And Wuhan 2019A isn't the only disease with a seasonal rate. This seems like it might be a promising research direction. "Mold spores are also released in autumn, and become more common in the air as decaying leaves and other vegetation fall to the ground". Maybe not just pollen...

Juneteenth

Sometimes I wonder if we've been invaded by planet Goofy. If the news media may be believed (I know that's a stretch), Ikea got itself in trouble for proposing to celebrate Juneteenth with a menu involving some "stereotypically black" foods, which are also stereotypically Southern, and which, if my eyes do not decieve me, are quite popular in the South and North (except maybe for the candied yams). I haven't quite figured out whose ox is supposed to have been gored here. If you prefer to celebrate with BBQ, or can't handle the carbs of mac&cheese--whatever; if Ikea wants to sell food they'll figure it out quickly enough.(*)

What are the Federal holidays?

• New Year's Day
• Inauguration Day
• Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Washington's Birthday
• Memorial Day
• Juneteenth
• Independence Day
• Labor Day
• Columbus Day
• Veterans Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Christmas Day

I wasn't aware Inauguration Day was a Federal holiday. That seems like a straightforward patriotic holiday, like Independence Day, Washington's birthday, Memorial Day, and Veteran's Day. Although at least in theory, and probably in the past, days like Independence Day or Memorial Day might include "a bas the Brits and other enemies", but I don't recall ever seeing any of that--and I've been around a few years. Parades might have an honor guard with flags from bygone wars, but we just took off our hats. We didn't yell "Remember the Maine!" The holiday wasn't against anybody.

Christmas is Christian, of course, and fewer of us are--but it isn't "against" anybody. Thanksgiving is generically religious, but even a non-religious man can (and should) spend some time being grateful.

New Year's Day is generic generic--neither for nor against anyone.

Columbus Day was pushed for by Italians who quite reasonably felt not-quite-part of the culture--they figured everybody could rally around the famous Italian. Unity was the point.

Labor Day was not unlike it--labor unions pushed for a celebration of the working man. In theory this could be "against the big capitalists," but I've not heard that. Maybe back in the 1800's it was there.

Martin Luther King Jr's birthday was established recently enough that a lot of us remember--peaceful change was his signature. And it offered to blacks, who quite reasonably felt not-part of the society, an honored proxy. I remember hearing quite a few people who were unhappy with the choice--who thought MLK a communist, or disengenuous about his goals. On the whole, people seemed to be fine with the choice, and it wasn't commemorated as being against anybody--somehow or another everybody seemed to retcon their personal history into one of support.

I'm not sure yet what exactly Juneteenth will be. Will it be a celebration by Republicans and blacks against the history of the Southern Democrats? (There's that "against".) Will it be a blacks and politicians only event? (There's that "against" again.) Unless somebody other than the usual suspects takes the lead, I fear this won't be a uniting holiday. Or will (as with Labor Day), most people just not care about the details, only whether there are enough buns for the hot dogs? And enough watermelon. On a hot June day, watermelon is wonderful.

(*) Where did those foods come from? Chicken--Southeast Asia, Watermelon--Africa, mac&cheese--MidEast for pasta & Europe/CentralAsia/MidEast for cheese; potato--South America; collard--Mediteranian; yams--Africa/Asia/Caribbean

Birds

We have a birdbath in back. Adult robins splash enough to almost water the nearby flowerpots for us. Generally they perch, hop in, splash like mad, hop out, and then fly somewhere to preen.

Not the teenagers. They monopolize the birdbath for maybe three times as long, as they stand there preening in the bath.

At least they don't use all the hot water.

Mom

Under the circumstances, I should write about my mother instead of my father.

When my mother was a young girl she felt God was calling her to be a missionary—she thought in Japan, which would have been a challenging field during the runup to the war. After the war they needed nurses, and she decided she could do the most good as a nurse. She could have become a doctor, but I gather she felt that would limit her.

During nurse’s training she met a young man in seminary. After she graduated (nursing students weren’t allowed to marry), she married him. She kept working as a nurse and he as an accountant until they found themselves called to be missionaries together. The best match for their talents turned out to be on the other side of the world from her original goal—in Liberia, where the indigenous church asked for people to help them.

In Liberia they raised their three children. She served as the nurse at Ricks Institute, where she also taught. Their ministries changed over time, and eventually she taught writers, taught preachers, and mentored students in media. She produced indigenous movies (and she taught the local writers and actors) for the local TV station and she wrote a well-known anti-AIDS pamphlet. Coordinator of BaPSWA, etc

When the civil war in Liberia drove them out, they moved to the Ivory Coast where she worked with translation and training of writers. Liberia was always home for her, even after they retired to Louisville.

She had a puckish sense of humor, read extensively, and was endlessly creative. More important than these, she connected with people easily and was kind and encouraging. She was like a mother to many.

All the Way

On the trip down, as part of the soundtrack for Guardians of the Galaxy (I should probably see that sometime) the system played the song "Go All The Way."(*) Almost 50 years after hearing it the first time I now hear something the band didn't intend. The song was about the "mating dance": "What we're doing now has a logical progression; let's follow it to the end."

Except there's more that Eric Carmen left out. Gratitude... humility... fertility

We haven't "gone all the way" yet. We're getting there.

UPDATE: Another song says it too

Changing the specs

It causes bloatware, cost-overruns, and products with odd quirks. "We forgot to tell you--the web page needs to have a calculator function, and support both kinds of virtual keypad."

I was introduced to this early.

When we lived in LA, my mother would dry clothes on the clothesline. When other matters occupied her, and I seemed to the uninitiated eye to have time on my hands, I was instructed to take the clothes down and bring them in.

I was only 7, and therefore something short of my full adult height. Reaching over my head to unpin laundry was fatiguing, so I developed a more efficient way of removing the clothes. The clothes came off briskly, the clothesline would dance in pleasing vibrations--sometimes even harmonics of the natural period--and the clothes pins sometimes followed fascinating trajectories.

Only after the job was done was I confronted with a change in the job specifications: I must not only bring in the laundry from the line, without accidently dragging items in the dirt, but I must also bring in all clothes pins and parts thereof, and refrain from tugging on delicate items.

Was that fair?

Mountains and fig trees

Jesus cursed a fruitless fig tree that was advertising first harvest fruit but had nothing. Then He cleansed the temple and the next time the disciples saw it, it was withered. I suppose the object lesson wasn't lost on them.

Jesus used the moment to talk about the power of faith. Again.

Passage	Nearest mountain	Possible action
Matt 17:20	The mount of transfiguration	moved
Matt 21:21 and Mark 11:23	Zion: Jerusalem and the temple mount	thrown into the sea

When Jesus said "whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea'", the "this mountain" was right beside them. It had a city and the holy temple on it. I doubt that throwing Jerusalem into the sea would have ever crossed their minds, and here Jesus is implying that even the temple is secondary, even disposable. Jesus used some truly shocking illustrations.

Multiple views

AVI has a post up on "Negotiated Truth" and ALL CAPS. I generally took all caps to be trying to say "You've not been paying attention, dummy," though a touch now and then helps the skimmer pick out the vital bit. Which, now that I think of it, may reflect the conservative tendency to think their opponents are stupid, in contrast to the leftist bias towards thinking their opponents are evil. FWIW, I joined Braver Angels (aka Better Angels before lawyers got involved), and that's certainly a tendancy in the groups. So I'd predict that liberal sites would use all-caps less. Just my impression.

I remember when I first tried to read Aquinas. The style drove me up the wall--I much preferred the direct style of mathematical proof. This business of "thesis, objections, argument for thesis, reply to objections" left me a bit dizzy. It didn't help that the words didn't always mean what I expected them to mean: simplicity, for example. The approach makes more sense now. The subject matter isn't suited to mathematical precision.

The notion that there might be different ways of looking at things seemed part of the air at home--not that I always looked for different ways. I remember trying to help a journeyman missionary with some of the logistics of a service he was supposed to lead, and discovering that what I thought was innocuous some others in the congregation would have considered horribly presumptuous. I didn't get around to any kind of detailed comparison of flavors of Christianity until I researched for a book for church youth (and concluded that the Southern Baptist assertion that the Eucharist is simply symbolic didn't hold water).

History textbooks were (and still are) deeply now-centric, but the Will and Ariel Durant history spent the time to describe each era and culture as itself, and not in relation to now. You could love or hate it, but a different culture had its own ideas, and they weren't always crazy. Wicked, sometimes. I wonder if learning Latin had the same sort of effect. The only texts were ancient, so you had to look at a universe of different attitudes. The student would be given other prisms to look at life with--whether he used them or not.

Not that everything is fluid--even Tevye ran out of other hands. I can look at ancient Greek religion and affirm that Christianity is better (and an awful lot of ancient Greeks thought so too), and conclude that other things that derived from the pagan worship are also worse. But even that framework doesn't constrain everything.

Of course if Christianity weren't here, history tells me a lot of the principles our fellow-citizens take for granted wouldn't be here either. They have seized on little bits of the legacy and look at the world through them. Chesterton: "The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone."

AVI distrusts the single-viewport descriptions of society, especially racial or tribal ones--our side good; your side not so good; now and forever amen. So too are economic viewports that define a person by the integrated contribution they make to the economic machine, or how good a warrior he is.

How does one cultivate multiplex views of the world--and still make decisions? Or perhaps I should ask--how do we teach our children that? The nominal grownups who find their value, or perhaps their bread-and-butter, in single-viewports won't be enticed. The current educational approach is supposedly about diversity, but it seems to only result in a single allowed viewport--everything is "this-now-ideology" centered, and the kids don't learn what really makes groups diverse.

---

AVI mentions the book of Hezekiah. Dad referenced that one a lot, along with 2 Jezebel. Maybe he picked that up at seminary. Dad went to seminary expressly to become a better layman. He had no call to be a pastor or preacher and he knew it.

Distractions

From time to time I wonder if the focus on the hate-whitey psychiatrists and health care journals and so forth by the media and defense of them by highups represents a masochistic madness that is trying to nudge us to civil strife, or if somebody is cynically manipulating the stories to distract us from other things going on--like the corruption stories that keep vanishing from the news.

Warm ice

Every now and then I run into a story that puzzles me and won't let go.

A recent report says that warm (near melting) ice deforms and breaks differently than cold ice.

The article mentions two effects.

If you stress a chunk of cold ice, it will bend, but then return to its original form when you release the pressure (with a quick and a slow relaxation time). Warm ice can stay bent.

They also show a picture of magnified ice structure with a trans-granular fracture across the grains of tiny ice crystals (at least some of them). I wasn't sure what to make of this, but apparently ice typically breaks differently, in inter-granular fractures where the crack goes along the boundaries of the tiny ice crystals.

I gather that the "transgranular fracture" across the grains is the most common--the cracking occurs not at grain boundaries but along the crystal lattice planes within grains. It's just that that's not the way ice usually breaks.

I think I understand the "Bending and staying bent" bit. When the ice is this close to melting, when you start twisting the grain boundaries one end will feel separation and the other compression--and compression can lower the melting point. So I'd guess that the grains might melt a little bit at the compressed end, with the liquid migrating a little distance away--probably into the "pulled" part of the grain boundary. If you release the pressure, the "damage" is already done--not much at any one location, but spread out over the whole ice sheet that could be a measurable effect.

The cracking change seems a bit more puzzling. You'd think that at grain boundaries where there's a bit of melting, there'd be more opportunity for breaking--but those are exactly the places where the grains are forced most tightly together. Perhaps if the boundaries become a bit more plastic the relative rupture risk switches to the still-brittle cleavage planes? Maybe the pictures are misleading. Or maybe I'm not experienced enough with materials science to have a good intuition for the problem. Hint: probably the latter.

At any rate, if warm ice doesn't bend and break the same way cold does, it might result in different kinds of load when it accumulates. I'm not sure that it makes a huge difference in practice. Ice build-up around a spillway seems likely to stay stressed as long as the water is flowing, so returning to the original shape or not wouldn't seem to matter.

Electrification

This isn't the lesson I would have drawn from that passage, but....

The Liberian Baptist Theological Seminary celebrated a $30K electrification of the campus (solar powered--they can't rely on the grid). Dr. Momolu Massaquoi said

“in March of 2020, I was walking from my house during the night and the entire campus was very dark then I said to myself what can we do to have this place electrified so believing in our teamwork here, I knew that we can put light on this campus remembering Genesis 11 when the people decided to built the tower of Babel and the Lord himself saw the power oneness.”

Somebody needs to have a talk with the photographer about reflective safety vests.

There are still a few names I know...

UPDATE: Unknown found the video

Different impacts

In case we forget: things like 25% higher shipping rates and contention for carriers are an annoyance for us, and cause quite a bit of pain for JIT businesses, but can be an existential issue when a 10% jump in rice prices means you eat less.

The details changed, but it still seems the same

When I lived there, I didn't drive. I didn't have to think about traffic, or arriving on time. I could just watch, or try to read, or talk with other passengers.

The shops are all different, the goods for sale are different, and there are traffic cops instead of traffic lights--but the ambience is the same, the appropriation of the sidewalks as sales floor is the same, the get-ahead-any-way-you-can drivers are the same. I don't remember traffic being quite this slow when I was young, but last time I visited (2006) some streets were horribly congested--and at one point our driver decided to take a one-way street the wrong way. (We hadn't found parking and were trying to kill a little time waiting for my mother to get some money from a bank. I guess that was as good a way of going nowhere as any.) I remember there being more young boys with trays of candy and cigarettes and whatnot--nowadays phone cards are a big item, and when I was there so were bags of water.

It's only a few blocks on this map. There's a new road on the map--a bridge that would have been useful long ago.