First Friend

Overheard:

"When the Man walked up he said, 'What is Wild Dog doing here?" And the Woman said, "His name is not wild Dog anymore, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always."

-Rudyard Kipling

There is more than one way

To care for baby chicks.

The bride and I bring very different attitudes to how much time and effort to put into caring for baby chickens.  I have to confess, however, that if you're gonna put forth the effort , this is a pretty damn efficient way to keep them contained.  Old welded wire fence holding up fabric snow fence enclosing heat lamp, chicks, food and water.

Basset Hound Clown Car

I always thought of them as clowns.

12 miles

Twelve miles after the overnight shift.  It seemed like a good idea when I set out.

No Make-up Selfie

My kind of Playground

Kick out the kids; I want to play.




The Atlantic gets it about right.  Confidence is caught not taught.  If you choose to be a nervous wreck, your child is more likely to become one.  If you ask me, it is a bigger detriment to our children than second hand smoke from Dad's unfiltered Camels.

Get your kids outdoors and know when to not pay attention.

Scars are sexy.  Skinned knees heal.  Joy is in the doing it yourself.  Confidence is for a lifetime.

The Overprotected Kid

 A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and across a grassy square, 5-year-old Dylan can hear them through the window of his nana’s front room. He tries to figure out what half an hour is and whether he can wait that long. When the heavy gate finally swings open, Dylan, the boys, and about a dozen other children race directly to their favorite spots, although it’s hard to see how they navigate so expertly amid the chaos. “Is this a junkyard?” asks my 5-year-old son, Gideon, who has come with me to visit. “Not exactly,” I tell him, although it’s inspired by one. The Land is a playground that takes up nearly an acre at the far end of a quiet housing development in North Wales. It’s only two years old but has no marks of newness and could just as well have been here for decades. The ground is muddy in spots and, at one end, slopes down steeply to a creek where a big, faded plastic boat that most people would have thrown away is wedged into the bank. The center of the playground is dominated by a high pile of tires that is growing ever smaller as a redheaded girl and her friend roll them down the hill and into the creek. “Why are you rolling tires into the water?” my son asks. “Because we are,” the girl replies. 

Life begins when you can appreciate a walk

Whether it be indoors, outdoors, fast or slow:

Saturated Fat and "Settled Science"

They always claim to be on the side of "settled" truth.

Beware anyone who feels the need, in the name of science, to use shame in an attempt to shut down those who disagree.  As more and more studies call into question the link, thirty years after it was considered settled science, between saturated fat and heart disease, what other bits of received scientific wisdom might be up for question.

Of course I am alluding to the catastrophic warmists who fill the void left vacant by the death of that old time Puritan fundamentalism.  They, like Jonathon Edwards, believe that humanity hangs like a spider suspended by a thread in the hand of an angry god.  Once upon a time you might be sentenced to wear a scarlet letter or drowned as a witch for disrespecting the received wisdom of God's prophet.  Today too many direct questions and you are labeled a "denier."

This is not to say that eating bacon double cheese burgers everyday is good for your health or that burning dinosaur bones is without ecological consequence.  It only goes to demonstrate that complex systems, like the human body and global climate, are truly complex and attempts to simplify them lead to false conclusions.

It also demonstrates that those advocates who are the most strident, the most ready to overstate their case, should not be trusted with the power to govern our lives, or even to set the terms of public debate.  It matters little if the fundamentalism they espouse is Calvinist, Nurtitionist, Warmist; or any other human ideological classification, it all comes from the same place in the human heart.  Where there is the absence of humility there lies the seed that we must be dictated to, for our own good of course.

Culture, Policy, and Events

Unpersuadable

The two things I find most distasteful in a human being are actually closely related: self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Consequently, whatever the subject of debate is, I find plenty to be uneasy about. Conviction can be a beautiful thing, so long as it does not serve as an excuse to treated one's fellow homo sapiens as so many polluted lepers.

Will Storr investigates the tension between conviction and critical thinking farther than I ever will in his new book The Unpersuadables and runs into the problem that he A) knows he must be wrong about something but B) believes his opinions are right about everything. My answer would be humility, or, at least, the discipline of being polite to everyone. There is a detailed review over at Salon.com.

Such rumination undermines Storr’s faith in his convictions, rooted as they once were in the rather quaint confidence that human beings make up their minds rationally. Instead, exploring recent developments in neuroscience, he learns that we believe first — engaging mental models formed early in life and rarely amenable to change — and come up with the reasons for it afterward. By the now-familiar process of confirmation bias, we ignore what doesn’t support our most favored notions, and shine a brilliant spotlight on the ones that do. Our minds operate unconsciously to a flabbergasting degree, while our consciousness is forced to tag along after, cooking up convincing rationales. “We do not get to choose our most passionately held views, as if we are selecting melons in a supermarket,” is Storr’s provocative conclusion.

The Abusive Self-Appointed Nannies

Among my uncritically held beliefs is that when your absence of humility blinds people, you should be held accountable. Not with jail time, public flogging or judicial maiming but public outing and shaming; and those who have faith-based opposition, including illegal activity, has slowed the development of Golden Rice should be ashamed.

By 2002, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A-producing gene from carrots into rice, had handed all financial interests over to a non-profit organization, so there would be no resistance to the life-saving technology from GMO opponents who resist genetic modification because big biotech companies profit from it. Except for the regulatory approval process, Golden Rice was ready to start saving millions of lives and preventing tens of millions of cases of blindness in people around the world who suffer from Vitamin A deficiency.
It’s still not in use anywhere, however, because of the opposition to GM technology. Now two agricultural economists, one from the Technical University of Munich, the other from the University of California, Berkeley, have quantified the price of that opposition, in human health, and the numbers are truly frightening.

Everything has Trade-Offs

From War is Boring:

In 1969, the Soviet navy shocked the U.S. and NATO militaries with a new and incredibly capable submarine—one that could swim faster and dive deeper than anything else under the sea.But the seven high-tech-class submarines—able to reach 45 knots and 2,400 feet—were actually inferior where it really mattered. Their speed and depth-resistance came at the cost of noisy internal machinery that made them easy to detect … and destroy.

Libya Continues to Fall Apart

And we continue to try to manage it without risking anything to resolve it.

American Navy Seals have seized a North Korea-flagged tanker which had been loaded with crude oil at a rebel-held port in eastern Libya, the Pentagon said on Monday.

The operation to take control of the Morning Glory came a week after Libya failed to prevent the tanker from leaving the rebel-controlled eastern port of Es Sider loaded with an estimated $20m cargo, in a crisis that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

"The Morning Glory is carrying a cargo of oil owned by the Libyan government's National Oil Company," said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. "The ship and its cargo were illicitly obtained from the Libyan port of Es Sider."

There were no casualties in the operation, which took place in international waters off the coast of Cyprus. The operation to take control of the Morning Glory came a week after Libya failed to prevent the tanker from leaving the rebel-controlled eastern port of Es Sider loaded with an estimated $20m cargo, in a crisis that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Live better and live longer: correlation or causation?

Why should I care? Enjoy more muscle in the everyday and enjoy more everydays before that day when you do not.

New UCLA research suggests that the more muscle mass older Americans have, the less likely they are to die prematurely. The findings add to the growing evidence that overall body composition — and not the widely used body mass index, or BMI — is a better predictor of all-cause mortality.
The study, published in the American Journal of Medicine, is the culmination of previous UCLA research led by Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, an assistant clinical professor in the endocrinology division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, that found that building muscle mass is important in decreasing metabolic risk.

"As there is no gold-standard measure of body composition, several studies have addressed this question using different measurement techniques and have obtained different results," Srikanthan said. "So many studies on the mortality impact of obesity focus on BMI. Our study indicates that clinicians need to be focusing on ways to improve body composition, rather than on BMI alone, when counseling older adults on preventative health behaviors."

Sunday Check In

It has been 113 days since my 40th birthday and the day that I began to make my occasional walks into a purposeful endeavor.  The totals for my fortieth year are:

Road            127
Woods           17
Snowshoe      15
-------------------
Total            159

We've had a bit of a warm up so the roads are clear of ice but the snow remains too deep to head out into the woods without snowshoes.  To be honest, I am ready to be done with those military surplus snowshoes for the year.  Consequently, I pounded out a few miles on the road, including our single longest walk to date: 13 miles.  Saw some turkeys, stag deer whose shed antlers I hope to find in two weeks when, hopefully, snow melt will reveal them, and neighbors.  I also figured out how to make it so I could see the screen on my new cell phone when outdoors.

The changing temperature and desire for a little bit of gear on my walk had me trying out a fanny pack I had planned to use only on walks in the woods.  If you wear a large enough shirt, no one can see that you are wearing it.

Love this part

Today's homeschool lesson:

Geography, demographics, and recent developments of the Ukraine crisis and open question time.

O: Dad, what is same sex marriage?

A: Dad, what is the tea party?

Not Science

From the UK's Independent:

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore tells US Senate there is "no proof" humans cause climate change:

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has angered environmentalist groups after saying climate change is "not caused by humans" and there is "no scientific proof" to back global warming alarmism. 

The Canadian ecologist told US lawmakers there is "little correlation" to support a "direct causal relationship" between CO2 emissions and rising global temperatures. 

"There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years," he told a US Senate Committee "If there were such a proof, it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists."

He also criticised the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for claiming "it is extremely likely" that human activity is the "dominant cause" for global warning, noting that "extremely likely" is not a scientific term.

 

Testiclotomy

I don't know what a testiclotomy is but it doesn't sound like a flavor of ice cream.

A Stoic Foreign Policy

Syria: What is in our control and what lies outside our control?

Discussing the tug of war between idealist foreign policy choices and realism the folks over at War on the Rocks hint on a policy truth that is just as true in our private lives, "the true path to immorality and catastrophe was found in mistaking the ought for the is." 

Anytime the world as we conceive it inside our head deviates from how it is in the flesh-space dimensions outside of our imagination, we are set up for disappointment at the least and tragedy at worse.  Some deviation is impossible to avoid, we do not have perfect knowledge.  Even the hardest nosed realist makes mistakes.  Yet when our view of the world is tinged by ideals, any set of ideas, we will develop a false view of the universe and, consequently, respond poorly.  The more ideals color our perception of the universe, the greater the error we are prone to inflict upon either ourselves or others.

The humility of stoicism is that the practitioner trains their mind to accept that which is outside of their control and to distinguish between our preferences and what is.  Perhaps we would prefer the world to be different but in in the very naming it as a preference we remove from the idea the power to delude us.  "Ought" is reserved for things within my control: my thoughts, my actions, my attitudes and even then what is ought is brought in line with the nature of the universe.  I ought to be an exemplar of what it means to be human and human.  I ought to execute my role well, whatever that role is.  I ought to be a model homo sapiens.     

It always escapes the confines of the lab.

The life excellently lived is a microscopic example of realist political action.  The thinking errors which lead an individual into a workplace tryst, thinking it good and will make them happy, are of the same kind that lead a nation's leaders to undertake an ill-advised war: consequences are obscured by misinformed emotion.  The stoic understands the good life to be one lived with courage, justice, prudence and temperance regardless of the circumstances or limits imposed by the world-as-it-is.  A realist foreign policy should be driven by the exact same motivations.  People are people.  Decisions are decisions.  Good thinking leads to good decisions regardless of the subject.  Bad thinking leads to bad decisions whether the damage is personal or commit the populace of an empire to ruin. 


Realists are the true ethicists and the most effective practitioners of compassion.  Ideology is always a simplified view of the world that forces an interpretation on every event in order to fit the worldview espoused. Regardless of the title, ideologues have decided, before the details of a problem are known, the proper course of action on the basis of the theory they hold to be true. 

Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall."  Ideology makes predictions as if life were a dance: predictable and rhythmic.  Children often think their lives will unfold in a predictable and benign manner.  Success require putting away childish things and "getting real" both in how we approach our personal lives and the public policy we advocate.

Book Review: The Epictetus Club

My wife has made amazing progress as a cook over our 18 years of marriage. Despite some wonderful meals in her repertoire, she still frequently falls into what I call the fast trap. When turning on the stove top on she reflexively spins the knob to high, and then attempt to ride the wave as she browns burger or sautés vegetables. Scorching is frequently the result and meals burned around the edges a regular occurrence. Dishes also become more onerous for what is essentially nothing more than a habit ingrained overtime.

The fast trap also springs when she does not think of the day’s meals as a daylong endeavor but approaches each meal reflexively in response to hunger. There are days when breakfast begins when a child clamors for it. Lunch preparation begins when she starts to get hungry at mid-day. Dinner is planned when I have begun to hunt through the cabinets, looking for sustenance. When meals are prepared for their speed and not necessarily their optimal taste or texture the family is fed but stress is acute and satisfaction is decreased.

There is a temptation to the fast trap whenever we discover a concept or idea that stuns us with its sense of promise. We want answers quickly. We want serenity now. We want five steps and two weeks to a better tomorrow. Some changes can be made quickly but long lasting change happen more slowly. We can grasp some ideas in a moment but others must sit and roast slowly in the crock pot of an unhurried mind if their full flavor is to emerge. Hope for serenity is smelled before it is tasted and the change in diet takes time to show itself in our overall health.

A few years ago I observed that my monotheism was dying. My moments of unbelief were growing longer and more certain and periods of faith shorter and presented as emotional responses rather than conviction. Disoriented I began to search for something solid about which to orient myself. In some passage of some book somewhere I came across a reference to Epictetus, a stoic philosopher of the second century of the Common Era. As I read his work I began to find hope for an anchored and disciplined life after the death of my god.

By the happenstance of history we have a remarkable corpus of Epictetus’ teachings available to us and I consumed them quickly. Some of it I understood immediately it was easily incorporated into my life. Other bits rattled around in my brain and with sometime I was able to sort them out. The meaning, let alone relevance, of other passages still eluded me. I read college textbooks about the teachings of Epictetus. I began to follow some blogs about contemporary stoic practice. I worked through other ancient and modern authors. I re-read the teachings of Epictetus in another translation thinking perhaps this would help make things clearer. I adopted some stoic practices myself but on the whole I was caught in my own kind of “fast trap.” I thought by turning the heat up higher, reading more words about stoicism, reading more sophisticated analysis of the ancient philosophical schools, that I could make my brain “cook faster” and see the results of a stoic education, if not immediately than quickly, but I was starting to feel a little crisp along the edges.

Reading The Epictetus Club by Jeff Traylor offers a taste of stoicism slowly cooked by an inmate with few books and an excess of time. Concepts that seem largely theoretical are made concrete through clear examples of life leading to and then within a state prison. The genesis of these stories and the desire to escape them are universal to being human: spousal conflict, desire to be a good parent, money problems, seeking a purposeful life, the temptation of shady business practices, worry of what the future holds, the instinct to avoid consequences for our own rule breaking, anger, yearning for respect, and the fear of death. They apply to us all as the author details as he applies the same questions the prisoners face to his own life as a newly minted college graduate beginning a career. The story is told in such a way that applying them to any setting or stage of life is a straightforward task.

Interspersed within compelling narrative the book is organized around ten central lessons taught by inmate “Zeno” that confront basic thinking errors human beings make and offers alternatives to replace them. Complete with exercises and illustrations, the book breaks down Epictetus’ teaching into easily understood bite-sized pieces. It leaves the reader with a slow cook recipie for "what I can work on next" which serves as an outlet other than my fast cooking habit of quickly moving on to another book.  If the book itself is not practical enough, it contains resources for an Epictetus Club program that can be used as a template for stoic practice.  It is not a source of go-to information about the philosopher or the first century but it is an accessible and practical outline of stoic practice.