Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 331

Mer­ry Christ­mas! On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

This is vol­ume 331, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Mark Lowry, Did You Know Your Mary Song Would Be Con­tro­ver­sial? (Bob Smi­etana, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “He added that most of the ques­tions he had did not make their way into the song—only the ones that rhymed made it.”
2. Kid­napped Mis­sion­ar­ies Made Dar­ing Escape from Their Cap­tors, Fled for Their Lives on Foot at Night (Steve War­ren, CBN News): “ ‘After much dis­cus­sion and prayer, they became solid­ly unit­ed that God seemed to be lead­ing them [to escape]. He said they sought spe­cif­ic signs from God, and He con­firmed over and over that the tim­ing was­n’t right yet. Then, the night of Wednes­day, Decem­ber 15 arrived. When they sensed the tim­ing was right, they found a way to open the door that was closed and blocked, filed silent­ly to the path that they had cho­sen to fol­low, and quick­ly left the place that they were held despite the fact that numer­ous guards were close by,’ Showal­ter said.”
3. COVID relat­ed news
   • Media Ignores GOOD NEWS On Pan­dem­ic (Break­ing Points, YouTube): thir­teen encour­ag­ing min­utes. The title is a lit­tle click­baity, but I guess they got­ta pay the bills.
   • The F.D.A. clears Pfizer’s Covid pills for high-risk patients 12 and old­er. (Rebec­ca Rob­bins and Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “With­in a week of autho­riza­tion, Pfiz­er is expect­ed to deliv­er to the Unit­ed States enough of its pills to cov­er 65,000 Amer­i­cans. At cur­rent infec­tion rates, that would be enough sup­ply for less than one day if it were giv­en to half of peo­ple in the Unit­ed States who test pos­i­tive for the virus. Pfiz­er is expect­ed to deliv­er to the Unit­ed States anoth­er 200,000 treat­ment cours­es in Jan­u­ary and then anoth­er 150,000 treat­ment cours­es in Feb­ru­ary. The pace of deliv­er­ies is expect­ed to increase sharply after that.” This is tremen­dous news.
   • Pro­fes­sion­al Sports Are Learn­ing to Live With COVID. We’re Next. (Will Leitch, NY Mag): “The leagues are now admit­ting what most of us are real­iz­ing but wary of say­ing out loud: COVID is just a part of our lives now, and if we don’t learn to live with it, we’re nev­er going to be able to do any­thing.”
   • The Vac­cine Moment, part three (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “It’s fair to say that the ‘con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists’ have had a good pan­dem­ic.”
   • Covid Pan­ic is a Site of Inter-Elite Com­pe­ti­tion (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Rare and fatal events some­times occur; that’s life. When you can you mit­i­gate the risk. Death from a car acci­dent is far more like­ly for me than death from Covid. It’s still rare, but there’s a risk, and putting on a seat­belt is a rea­son­able mit­i­ga­tion tac­tic. Sim­ply nev­er get­ting in a car, though, would not be rea­son­able. The risk reduc­tion would not out­weigh the con­sid­er­able costs. So I don’t make that bar­gain. And thus with Covid. I’m vac­ci­nat­ed, I mask in most indoor set­tings, and if I devel­op symp­toms I’ll imme­di­ate­ly seek a test and quar­an­tine myself. Those are accept­able trade­offs, for me. As a now triple-vaxxed per­son who has had the virus pre­vi­ous­ly I am intent on liv­ing my life as nor­mal­ly as pos­si­ble, which includes not undu­ly wor­ry­ing about it or demand­ing oth­ers do so. And I would argue that expect­ing oth­er­wise from me would make you func­tion­al­ly an anti-vaxxer.”
   • Why the Supreme Court Hasn’t Ruled (For Now) on Vac­cine Man­dates (Mark Movs­esian, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “The Court has not explained its rea­sons in these cas­es. But the jus­tices’ cau­tion is not sur­pris­ing, for a few rea­sons. First, reli­gious exemp­tion claims gen­er­al­ly pose hard ques­tions, which are par­tic­u­lar­ly trou­ble­some in this con­text. The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has inten­si­fied divi­sions about the val­ue of reli­gion and reli­gious free­dom in our coun­try, and the jus­tices might wish to avoid doing some­thing to pro­voke fur­ther con­flict. Sec­ond, the Maine and New York law­suits are cur­rent­ly at the pre­lim­i­nary injunc­tion stage, and the fac­tu­al records in the cas­es are still unclear. The Court might rea­son­ably think that it should allow the low­er courts an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­sid­er the claims fur­ther before it issues any rul­ings. Final­ly, the Court might think that state and local gov­ern­ments will them­selves see the pru­dence of offer­ing reli­gious exemp­tions, as many already have done, con­sid­er­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties vac­cine man­dates have cre­at­ed for health­care and oth­er ser­vices.”
4. COVID-adja­cent but real­ly about the FDA
   • The FDA Has Punt­ed Deci­sions About Luvox Pre­scrip­tion To The Deep­est Recess­es Of The Human Soul (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “As a psy­chi­a­trist, I’m not sup­posed to say flip­pant things like ‘we give SSRIs out like can­dy’. We do care­ful risk-ben­e­fit analy­sis and when appro­pri­ate we screen patients for var­i­ous risk fac­tors. But after we do all that stuff, we give them to 10% of Amer­i­cans, com­pared to 12% of Amer­i­cans who got can­dy last Hal­loween. So you can draw your own con­clu­sion about how severe we think the risks are.”
   • This Sci­en­tist Cre­at­ed a Rapid Test Just Weeks Into the Pan­dem­ic. Here’s Why You Still Can’t Get It. (Lydia DePil­lis, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Amer­i­can med­ical device reg­u­la­tors have nev­er been enthu­si­as­tic about let­ting peo­ple test them­selves. In the 1980s, the FDA banned home tests for HIV on the grounds that peo­ple who test­ed pos­i­tive might do harm to them­selves if they did not receive simul­ta­ne­ous coun­sel­ing. In the 2010s, the agency cracked down on home genet­ic test­ing kits, con­cerned that peo­ple might make rash med­ical deci­sions as a result.”
5. Also COVID-adja­cent but real­ly about Face­book: Rapid Response: Open let­ter from The BMJ to Mark Zucker­berg (Fiona Godlee & Kam­ran Abbasi, The BMJ): “We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion provider to have been affect­ed by the incom­pe­tence of Meta’s fact check­ing regime.… Rather than invest­ing a pro­por­tion of Meta’s sub­stan­tial prof­its to help ensure the accu­ra­cy of med­ical infor­ma­tion shared through social media, you have appar­ent­ly del­e­gat­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty to peo­ple incom­pe­tent in car­ry­ing out this cru­cial task.”
   • Accord­ing to Wikipedia. the BMJ is the fourth-high­est-ranked med­ical jour­nal in the world by impact fac­tor.
6. Why the **** Do You Trust Har­vard? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Har­vard exists to make sure our soci­ety is not equal. That is Harvard’s func­tion. You get that they just want to make it eas­i­er to turn down the poor but bril­liant chil­dren of Asian immi­grants, right? You under­stand that what Har­vard and its feck­less peers would like is to admit few­er stu­dents whose Kore­an par­ents clear $40,000 a year from their con­ve­nience stores, right? And you think, what, they’re going to be walk­ing around Brownsville, hand­ing out admis­sions let­ters to kids with holes in their pock­ets and a dream in their hearts? To the extent that any Black stu­dents are added to the mix by these poli­cies, it’s going to be the Jaden and Wil­low Smiths of the world. If you think Har­vard has any actu­al, gen­uine desire to fill its cam­pus with more poor Amer­i­can-born descen­dants of African slaves you are out of your fuck­ing mind.” Lan­guage warn­ing, in case that was not obvi­ous from the title. Also, much more cor­rect than many peo­ple would like to believe
7. For­eign Drones Tip the Bal­ance in Ethiopia’s Civ­il War (Declan Walsh, New York Times): “Mr. Singer, the drone expert, said the exper­i­men­ta­tion with drone war­fare in Ethiopia and Libya has par­al­lels with the Span­ish Civ­il War in the 1930s, when out­side pow­ers used the fight to test new mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies and to gauge inter­na­tion­al reac­tion to deter­mine what they could get away with. ‘It’s a com­bi­na­tion of war and bat­tle lab,’ he said.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Would you car­ry a wal­nut in your pock­et for ten years? (Would I Like To You?, YouTube): four min­utes
• How to Make a Flag (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): sev­en min­utes
• Church Livestream Hits Record 3 View­ers (Baby­lon Bee) — livestream­ing real­ly does serve a need, but the num­bers are fun­ny
• It’s Offi­cial: New White House Dog To Be Named Karl Barx (Baby­lon Bee): par­ti­san­ship aside, that would be a great name for a dog.
• Neigh­bor Bob’s Friend (Pearls Before Swine)
• A Sim­ple Mis­un­der­stand­ing (Pearls Before Swine)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter) First shared in vol­ume 186.

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.