Tag: pandemic

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 357

lots of arti­cles from a busy week — skim the titles and you’ll find at least one that intrigues you

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.

357 is an idoneal num­ber, only 65 of which are known to exist (and there are at most 2 more). A num­ber is idoneal if there is no way to write it as ab+bc+ac where a, b and c are all dif­fer­ent pos­i­tive num­bers. I did­n’t know idoneal num­bers exist­ed until today. Here’s a paper about them.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Relat­ed Arti­cles (Inter­est­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing)
    • GPT‑3 is ‑right now- already more than capa­ble of enabling stu­dent pla­gia­rism (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “I can­not empha­size enough that this is not ‘some­time vague­ly in the next five years’, nor is it ‘acces­si­ble only to stu­dents with a back­ground in comp sci’. It’s a 6 cents per thou­sand words pla­gia­rism ser­vice avail­able to every­one right now.… One idea- play around with your own ques­tions before assign­ing them to stu­dents and make sure GPT‑3 has trou­ble answer­ing them.” This is actu­al­ly quite stun­ning.
    • AI Wrote and Per­formed a Jer­ry Sein­feld Rou­tine (YouTube): one minute. GPT‑3 wrote a Jer­ry Sein­feld joke and this YouTube chan­nel did a deep­fake of his voice deliv­er­ing it. Not per­fect… but sur­pris­ing­ly good.
    • Google Engi­neer on His Sen­tient AI Claim (Bloomberg Tech­nol­o­gy, YouTube): ten min­utes. This is, to be clear, a dif­fer­ent AI sys­tem than GPT‑3.
    • ‘An Invis­i­ble Cage’: How Chi­na Is Polic­ing the Future (Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao & John Liu, New York Times): “The lat­est gen­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy digs through the vast amounts of data col­lect­ed on their dai­ly activ­i­ties to find pat­terns and aber­ra­tions, promis­ing to pre­dict crimes or protests before they hap­pen. They tar­get poten­tial trou­ble­mak­ers in the eyes of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment — not only those with a crim­i­nal past but also vul­ner­a­ble groups, includ­ing eth­nic minori­ties, migrant work­ers and those with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness. They can warn the police if a vic­tim of a fraud tries to trav­el to Bei­jing to peti­tion the gov­ern­ment for pay­ment or a drug user makes too many calls to the same num­ber. They can sig­nal offi­cers each time a per­son with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness gets near a school.” Empha­sis added.
  2. Weed users near­ly 25% more like­ly to need emer­gency care and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion (Sandee LaM­otte, CNN): “When com­pared with peo­ple who did not use mar­i­jua­na, cannabis users were 22% more like­ly to vis­it an emer­gency depart­ment or be hos­pi­tal­ized, the study revealed. The find­ing held true even after adjust­ing the analy­sis for over 30 oth­er con­found­ing fac­tors, includ­ing oth­er illic­it drug use, alco­hol use and tobac­co smok­ing.”
  3. Some Supreme Court arti­cles:
    • Dobbs Is Not the Only Rea­son to Ques­tion the Legit­i­ma­cy of the Supreme Court (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Our polit­i­cal sys­tem is not designed for polit­i­cal par­ties this dif­fer­ent, and this antag­o­nis­tic. It wasn’t designed for polit­i­cal par­ties at all. The three branch­es of our sys­tem were intend­ed to check each oth­er through com­pe­ti­tion. Instead, par­ties com­pete and coop­er­ate across branch­es, and pow­er in one can be used to build pow­er in anoth­er — as McConnell well under­stood.”
    • The End of Roe Is Just the Begin­ning (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…any con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion about this ruling’s con­se­quences is prob­a­bly a fool­ish one. There can be no cer­tain­ty about the future of abor­tion pol­i­tics because for almost 50 years all pol­i­cy debates have been over­shad­owed by judi­cial con­tro­ver­sy, and only now are we about to find out what the con­test real­ly looks like. It’s mere­ly the end of the begin­ning; the true end, in what­ev­er set­tle­ment or vic­to­ry, lies ahead.”
    • After Dobbs, mar­ried women keep­ing their sur­names regains polit­i­cal mean­ing (Kim­ber­ly A. Ham­lin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Today, sur­veys esti­mate that between 10 per­cent and 20 per­cent of Amer­i­can women keep their maid­en names, though the per­cent­age is high­er for women with advanced degrees and those who mar­ry lat­er in life. Debates about sur­names are, in essence, debates about women’s auton­o­my. Do we regard women as indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens or, pri­mar­i­ly, as wives and moth­ers?” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mia­mi Uni­ver­si­ty (in Ohio).
    • Vouch­ers for Reli­gious Schools Don’t Threat­en the Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State (Chris Freiman, Sub­stack): “Crit­ics of vouch­ers fail to dis­tin­guish between a direct sub­sidy for reli­gion and a tax-fund­ed enti­tle­ment dis­trib­uted to cit­i­zens who may use that enti­tle­ment for reli­gious pur­pos­es.… Cit­i­zens should be free to use school vouch­ers for pri­vate reli­gious edu­ca­tion because every­one should be free to use their state-sup­plied resources to pur­sue their own good in their own way, whether their good is reli­gious or not.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at William & Mary. This is pithy and well argued.
    • The Supreme Court hands the reli­gious right a big vic­to­ry by lying about the facts of a case (Ian Mill­his­er, Vox): “Kennedy will no doubt inspire oth­er teach­ers and coach­es to behave sim­i­lar­ly to Coach Kennedy, but those teach­ers and coach­es will do so at their own per­il. Gorsuch’s opin­ion doesn’t weigh whether a coach is allowed to do what Kennedy actu­al­ly did. That remains an open ques­tion, because the Court did not actu­al­ly decide that case.” A while ago I men­tioned that Mill­his­er often has a hard time under­stand­ing those he dis­agrees with or por­tray­ing them sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly. I give you exhib­it A.
    • Court’s Excel­lent Rul­ing in Coach Kennedy Case (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “The school dis­trict dis­ci­plined him only for his deci­sion to per­sist in pray­ing qui­et­ly with­out his play­ers after three games in 2015. It sought to restrict his actions at least in part because of their reli­gious char­ac­ter. Its poli­cies were not neu­tral toward reli­gion. Nor were they gen­er­al­ly applic­a­ble: In response to Kennedy’s reli­gious exer­cise, the dis­trict imposed on him a post-game oblig­a­tion to super­vise stu­dents that it did not impose on oth­er mem­bers of the coach­ing staff.” You would not know any of these facts had you only read Mill­his­er’s arti­cle.
    • Jus­tice Thomas and Lov­ing v. Vir­ginia (Josh Black­man, Rea­son): “…Lov­ing was premised on both the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause and the Due Process Clause. Even if you reject sub­stan­tive due process, you could still find that Lov­ing reached the cor­rect result on the basis of the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause. After all, the law lit­er­al­ly treats peo­ple dif­fer­ent­ly on the basis of their race. Two white peo­ple can get mar­ried, but a white per­son and a black per­son can­not. Even the most con­ser­v­a­tive jurists would deem such a law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.”
    • Politi­co, Axios, and NBC News ped­dle a weird smear of Clarence Thomas (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “Thomas didn’t claim that the cells of abort­ed chil­dren are in the vac­cines, but NBC News, Politi­co, and Axios all wrote as if he did. They were dead wrong on an eas­i­ly check­able fact. How did this hap­pen? How did three out­lets all ‘fact check’ a claim Thomas nev­er made, imply­ing or stat­ing that he did make it?”
  4. The Cathe­dral Vs. Yeshi­va (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “How will­ful­ly blind do you have to be to say that Yeshi­va is not a reli­gious insti­tu­tion? Some­thing tells me that the judge had her mind made up before the first argu­ments were heard. Anoth­er thing that ticks me off is that LGBT rights are wide­ly accept­ed and cel­e­brat­ed in near­ly every col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty in this land. Yeshi­va is one of a rel­a­tive hand­ful of insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion where peo­ple who choose to attend do not have to vio­late their reli­gious con­sciences by burn­ing a pinch of incense to the LGBT Cae­sar. But the Grand Inquisi­tors of the new reli­gion will not tol­er­ate any dis­sent. Their god is a jeal­ous god.” The updates at the end are worth read­ing.
  5. A Can­did Con­ver­sa­tion with Reporter Jeanne Lenz­er on Uncov­er­ing Cor­po­rate Influ­ence in Med­i­cine and the Media for Over Two Decades (Paul Thack­er, Sub­stack): “I called the Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion and found out that they were tak­ing Genen­tech mon­ey, and when I asked them about any finan­cial con­flicts among their pan­elists, they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. When we put peo­ple on a pan­el, we insist on finan­cial dis­clo­sure.’ I said, ‘Fine, would you send me those dis­clo­sures?’ They said, ‘We don’t dis­close dis­clo­sures.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. From Aug 2021. Also, that excerpt is fun­ny.
  6. Ire­land’s COVID Response, Part 4: The Def­i­n­i­tion of Insan­i­ty… (Sam Enwright, Sub­stack): “The vac­cines proved that our civil­i­sa­tion is still capa­ble of great­ness on the scale of the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet, can the aver­age per­son on the street even name a sin­gle indi­vid­ual that designed and built them? This New York Times arti­cle about Katal­in Karikó, pio­neer of mRNA tech­nol­o­gy, is unbe­liev­ably depress­ing. She spent decades on the fringes of acad­e­mia strug­gling to get research fund­ing or recog­ni­tion. After Salk devel­oped the polio vac­cine, peo­ple par­tied in the streets. Today, we get end­less screeds about how ‘tech can’t save us’ and Big Phar­ma is ‘prof­it­ing from pain’. I’m not say­ing there is no mer­it to these com­plaints. But a word of advice: before you crit­i­cise, go to where peo­ple are doing tru­ly extra­or­di­nary things, and observe. Lis­ten, for ye have much to learn.”
    • This is much bet­ter than the title might lead you to assume.
  7. Acad­e­mia
    • Account­ing For Col­lege Costs (John Went­worth, Less Wrong): “In this post, we’ll dig into the account­ing data for col­lege costs, espe­cial­ly for 4‑year pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges. The main the­o­ry we’ll end up at, based on the account­ing data, is that col­lege costs are dri­ven main­ly by a large increase in diver­si­ty of cours­es avail­able, which results in much low­er student/faculty ratios, and cor­re­spond­ing­ly high­er costs per stu­dent.”
    • It’s Time to Review the Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (Willy Chert­man, CSPI): “Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (IRBs) are ethics com­mit­tees, ide­al­ly com­posed of sci­en­tif­ic peers and lay com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, that review research before it can be con­duct­ed. Their osten­si­ble pur­pose is to pro­tect research sub­jects from research harms. But often­times, IRBs are cost­ly, slow, and do more harm than good. They cen­sor con­tro­ver­sial research, invent harms where none exist, and by des­ig­nat­ing cer­tain cat­e­gories of sub­jects as ‘vul­ner­a­ble,’ cause a cor­re­spond­ing dimin­ish­ment in research on those sub­jects.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week hear­kens back to the 90’s, when polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote two arti­cles back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism. I encour­age you to read them both — espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 351

this week’s news was full of stuff I did not like

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 the 351st install­ment. 351 is, I am told, the small­est num­ber such that it and its sur­round­ing num­bers are all prod­ucts of 4 or more primes (in the case of 351=3·3·3·13).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Col­lege Stu­dents Are Not OK  (Jonathan Malesic, New York Times): “High­er edu­ca­tion is now at a turn­ing point. The accom­mo­da­tions for the pan­dem­ic can either end or be made per­ma­nent. The task won’t be easy, but uni­ver­si­ties need to help stu­dents rebuild their abil­i­ty to learn. And to do that, every­one involved — stu­dents, fac­ul­ties, admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic at large — must insist on in-per­son class­es and high expec­ta­tions for fall 2022 and beyond.” The author has a PhD in reli­gious stud­ies and was a tenured the­ol­o­gy prof, but now teach­es writ­ing at anoth­er uni­ver­si­ty. His per­son­al jour­ney seems inter­est­ing.
  2. MIT, Har­vard sci­en­tists find AI can rec­og­nize race from X‑rays — and nobody knows how (Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe): “Ghas­se­mi and her col­leagues remain baf­fled, but she sus­pects it has some­thing to do with melanin, the pig­ment that deter­mines skin col­or. Per­haps X‑rays and CT scan­ners detect the high­er melanin con­tent of dark­er skin, and embed this infor­ma­tion in the dig­i­tal image in some fash­ion that human users have nev­er noticed before. It’ll take a lot more research to be sure.”
  3. Pan­dem­ic news, not great this week:
    • The Covid Capit­u­la­tion (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “To recap, we have a high­ly unfa­vor­able pic­ture of: (1) accel­er­at­ed evo­lu­tion of the virus; (2) increased immune escape of new vari­ants; (2) pro­gres­sive­ly high­er trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty and infec­tious­ness; (4) sub­stan­tial­ly less pro­tec­tion from trans­mis­sion by vac­cines and boost­ers; (5) some reduc­tion on vaccine/booster pro­tec­tion against hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and death; (6) high vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty from infec­tion-acquired immu­ni­ty only; and (7) like­li­hood of more nox­ious new vari­ants in the months ahead” The author is a pro­fes­sor of mol­e­c­u­lar med­i­cine at the Scripps Insti­tute.
    • Per­ma­nent Pan­dem­ic (Justin E. H. Smith, Harper’s Mag­a­zine): “That the polit­i­cal is always biopo­lit­i­cal, in at least this gen­er­al sense, may be a fact that recedes from view in those rare moments when things are func­tion­ing smooth­ly. At such times, the var­i­ous doc­u­ments that gov­ern­ments make us fill out and sign, or fill out on our behalf when we are born, mar­ried, arrest­ed, or dead; the var­i­ous licens­es we get renewed; and the accred­i­ta­tions we col­lect come to appear as ends in them­selves rather than as part of a vast appa­ra­tus that lim­its what we can do with our own bod­ies.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris.
    • The new Covid equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I know many of you like to say ‘No worse than the com­mon cold!’ Well, the thing is…the com­mon cold impos­es con­sid­er­able costs on the world. Imag­ine a new com­mon cold, which you catch a few times a year, with some sliv­er of the pop­u­la­tion get­ting some form of Long Covid. One 2003 esti­mate sug­gest­ed that the com­mon cold costs us $40 bil­lion a year, and in a typ­i­cal year I don’t get a cold even once.… Even under mild con­cep­tions of cur­rent Covid, it is entire­ly plau­si­ble to believe that the costs of Covid will run into the tril­lions over the next ten years.”
    • With Plung­ing Enroll­ment, a ‘Seis­mic Hit’ to Pub­lic Schools (Shawn Hubler, New York Times): “No over­rid­ing expla­na­tion has emerged yet for the wide­spread drop-off. But experts point to two poten­tial caus­es: Some par­ents became so fed up with remote instruc­tion or mask man­dates that they start­ed home-school­ing their chil­dren or send­ing them to pri­vate or parochial schools that large­ly remained open dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. And oth­er fam­i­lies were thrown into such tur­moil by pan­dem­ic-relat­ed job loss­es, home­less­ness and school clo­sures that their chil­dren sim­ply dropped out.”
  4. Abor­tion-relat­ed:
    • Roe draft is a reminder that reli­gion’s role in pol­i­tics is old­er than the repub­lic (Ron Elv­ing, NPR): “The ques­tion aris­es: Since when did so much of our pol­i­tics have to do with reli­gion? And the answer is, since the begin­ning – and even before. Reli­gion was a dri­ving and deter­mi­na­tive force in pol­i­tics on this con­ti­nent even before the ‘Unit­ed States’ had been formed.And it has been brought to bear in wide­ly dis­parate caus­es. Reli­gion has been invoked to con­demn slav­ery and seg­re­ga­tion, to ban alco­hol and the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion­ary sci­ence and to bol­ster anti-war move­ments.”
    • When an Abor­tion Is Pro-Life (Matthew Lof­tus, New York Times): “I view my work as a physi­cian as part of a bat­tle against bro­ken­ness in the phys­i­cal health of my patients, a bat­tle whose tide was turned when Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The Bible teach­es that our phys­i­cal bod­ies will one day be res­ur­rect­ed as Christ’s was, mys­te­ri­ous­ly trans­formed but some­how also con­tin­u­ous with our present flesh and blood — like a seed is trans­formed into a plant. I teach and work along­side local health pro­fes­sion­als so that we can care holis­ti­cal­ly for peo­ple in need, fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Jesus, the heal­er.… Here, I think the excep­tion proves the rule: End­ing a child’s life before birth is so wrong that only sav­ing anoth­er life could be worth it.” This is a remark­able op-ed.
    • A cri­tique of the reli­gious pro-life move­ment: The Reli­gious Right and the Abor­tion Myth (Ran­dall Balmer, Politi­co): “White evan­gel­i­cals in the 1970s did not mobi­lize against Roe v. Wade, which they con­sid­ered a Catholic issue. They orga­nized instead to defend racial seg­re­ga­tion in evan­gel­i­cal insti­tu­tions, includ­ing Bob Jones Uni­ver­si­ty. To sug­gest oth­er­wise is to per­pe­trate what I call the abor­tion myth, the fic­tion that the gen­e­sis of the Reli­gious Right — the pow­er­ful evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal move­ment that has reshaped Amer­i­can pol­i­tics over the past four decades — lay in oppo­si­tion to abor­tion.”
    • But actu­al­ly no: What every­one gets wrong about evan­gel­i­cals and abor­tion (Gillian Frank & Neil J. Young, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Twelve years before the Roe deci­sion, a young woman wrote to the lead­ing U.S. evan­ge­list, the Rev. Bil­ly Gra­ham, with the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘Through a young and fool­ish sin, I had an abor­tion. I now feel guilty of mur­der. How can I ever know for­give­ness?’ Gra­ham, whose syn­di­cat­ed news­pa­per col­umn ‘My Answer’ reached mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, replied: ‘Abor­tion is as vio­lent a sin against God, nature, and one’s self as one can com­mit.’ Gra­ham telegraphed evan­gel­i­cals’ unease with abor­tion, which would become increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal in the com­ing years.”
    • Real­ly actu­al­ly no: There’s been some dis­cus­sion about how evan­gel­i­cals in the U.S. didn’t start oppos­ing abor­tion until the late 1970s – sev­er­al years after Roe v. Wade in 1973. There’s a lot more nuance to that his­to­ry. (Andrew Lewis, Twit­ter): an inter­est­ing thread from a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati.
    • As in strong­ly no: Ballmer also mis­rep­re­sent­ed the legal aspects of this sto­ry (Jon White­head, Twit­ter)
  5. How Mary White­house Waged War on Pornog­ra­phy (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “White­house was mocked for pre­dict­ing that sex­u­al mes­sag­ing would soon tar­get chil­dren; it is now the norm for LGBT con­tent to appear on children’s TV shows and in sto­ry­books. She warned that films such as Bernar­do Bertolucci’s Last Tan­go in Paris crossed a line; it was lat­er revealed that the rape scene in the movie deeply trau­ma­tized the scene’s young actress, who received vile treat­ment at the hands of old­er men. On the big cul­tur­al ques­tions, White­house was right and her crit­ics were wrong.”
  6. Nao­mi Judd: ‘It’s scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so togeth­er side’ (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Nao­mi Judd thought she under­stood the ties that bind coun­try-music stars and their audi­ence – then one aggres­sive fan went and joined the Pen­te­costal church the Judd fam­i­ly called home. ‘It real­ly bur­dened me,’ said Judd, after sign­ing hun­dreds of her ‘Love Can Build a Bridge’ mem­oir back in 1993. ‘I just don’t sign auto­graphs at church. The best way I can explain it to chil­dren … is to say, ‘Hon­ey, Jesus is the star.’ ” What a great open­ing sto­ry.
  7. On the shoot­ings:
    • Faith on the ground in Buf­fa­lo: Voice Buf­fa­lo exec­u­tive direc­tor Denise Walden (Adelle M. Banks, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “They are some of the matri­archs and the pil­lars of our com­mu­ni­ty. They will be missed in ways that I don’t think I can do jus­tice to describ­ing, but who bring joy to this com­mu­ni­ty. They’re the ones who help stand and hold this com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er.”
    • The FAQs: What Chris­tians Should Know About the ‘Great Replace­ment’ The­o­ry (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “The recent shoot­ing in Buf­fa­lo is the fifth ter­ror­ist attack in the past five years in which a white suprema­cist gun­man made ref­er­ence to the Great Replace­ment con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry.… Chris­tians should be the first to decry the racism and xeno­pho­bia of the the­o­ry, along with con­demn­ing the vio­lence it has per­pet­u­at­ed.”
    • Doc­tor Who Fought Church Gun­man Remem­bered as Kind Pro­tec­tor (Julie Wat­son, Min­istry Watch): “The fam­i­ly and sports med­i­cine physi­cian was like fam­i­ly to the staff and he encour­aged them to learn kung fu, telling them about the impor­tance of know­ing self-defense tech­niques. He also learned how to han­dle a gun for that same rea­son. That pre­pared­ness com­bined with Cheng’s serene dis­po­si­tion like­ly gave him a pro­cliv­i­ty for act­ing hero­ical­ly, accord­ing to active shoot­er experts.… Author­i­ties cred­it Cheng’s quick action with sav­ing per­haps dozens of lives at a cel­e­bra­to­ry lun­cheon for con­gre­gants and their for­mer pas­tor at Irvine Tai­wanese Pres­by­ter­ian Church, which wor­ships at Gene­va Pres­by­ter­ian Church in the Orange Coun­ty com­mu­ni­ty of Lagu­na Woods.”
    • After Shoot­ing, Church­es Nav­i­gate Chi­na-Tai­wan Ten­sions Under the Sur­face (Kate Shell­nutt & Sean Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As soon as they heard that a gun­man attacked a Tai­wanese church in Cal­i­for­nia on Sun­day, some Tai­wanese cor­rect­ly assumed polit­i­cal motives.… The shoot­ing sus­pect, David Wen­wei Chou, was born and raised in Tai­wan but con­sid­ers him­self Chi­nese. (Chi­na cur­rent­ly claims Tai­wan as its ter­ri­to­ry.) He left notes in Chi­nese in his car stat­ing he did not believe Tai­wan should be inde­pen­dent from Chi­na. Chi­nese social media cir­cu­lat­ed pho­tos of Chou indi­cat­ing that he was a leader of a Chi­nese pro-uni­fi­ca­tion orga­ni­za­tion in Las Vegas.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books] in par­tic­u­lar I have often have use­ful. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.”  First shared in vol­ume 217.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 347

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 347, a Fried­man num­ber. That means it can be writ­ten as an equa­tion com­prised of its own dig­its (3+4=7).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What John Updike and Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins knew about the pow­er of East­er (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “If Jesus wasn’t actu­al­ly res­ur­rect­ed, then East­er is less real than the bud­ding buzz of spring, less real than a dying breath, less real than my own hands, feet and skin. I have no inter­est in a Chris­tian­i­ty that isn’t deeply, pro­found­ly, irre­ducibly mate­r­i­al.”
  2. Frag­men­ta­tion Is Not What’s Killing Us (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[The break­down at Babel] does indeed sound like now. But the lessons we learn will be wrong if we don’t see the pri­ma­ry point of the Babel sto­ry: The prob­lem wasn’t the frag­men­ta­tion. The prob­lem was the uni­ty.”
  3. Chi­na Covid #2 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “I want to empha­size that it is very dif­fi­cult to know what is going on inside Chi­na and my sources for this are not the best. I find the Ukraine war a rel­a­tive epis­temic cake­walk com­pared to this. So please under­stand that the alarmist claims from var­i­ous threads are to be tak­en with large heap­ings of salt.”
  4. Solve for the wartime pre­sen­ta­tion equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The country’s IT Army, a vol­un­teer force of hack­ers and activists that takes its direc­tion from the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment, says it has used [facial recog­ni­tion search­es] to inform the fam­i­lies of the deaths of 582 Rus­sians, includ­ing by send­ing them pho­tos of the aban­doned corpses. The Ukraini­ans cham­pi­on the use of face-scan­ning soft­ware from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a bru­tal but effec­tive way to stir up dis­sent inside Rus­sia, dis­cour­age oth­er fight­ers and has­ten an end to a dev­as­tat­ing war.” Tech­nolo­gies always have unex­pect­ed appli­ca­tions.
  5. Help­ing the Poor: The Great Dis­trac­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Gov­ern­ments around the world impose numer­ous poli­cies that active­ly hurt the poor. The whole debate about ‘help­ing the poor’ cre­ates the illu­sion that the sole rea­son for their suf­fer­ing is mere neglect, even though out­right abuse is ram­pant.… They don’t need us to help them; they need us to stop hurt­ing them.”
  6. There is No Pink Tax (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Pref­er­ences dif­fer sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly across gen­ders lead­ing to sub­tly dif­fer­ent prod­ucts even in cat­e­gories which appear sim­i­lar on the sur­face.… Women and men could save mon­ey by buy­ing prod­ucts pri­mar­i­ly mar­ket­ed to the oppo­site gender–like 2‑in‑1 shampoo+conditioner–but only by buy­ing prod­ucts that they pre­fer less than the prod­ucts they choose to buy.”
  7. Study explores aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess among Jew­ish girls (Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty, Phys.org): “Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents are 23 per­cent­age points more like­ly to grad­u­ate col­lege than girls with a non-Jew­ish upbring­ing, even after account­ing for their par­ents’ socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus. Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents also grad­u­ate from more selec­tive col­leges, accord­ing to a new­ly pub­lished study by Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Ilana Hor­witz.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. One of our PhD can­di­dates is coau­thor on the paper — con­grat­u­la­tions!

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 346

strong arti­cles this week — more rec­om­mend­ed than nor­mal

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, vol­ume 346, is the 5th Franel num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Spir­i­tu­al­ly uplift­ing:
    • Fire Upon The Earth (Charles Cha­put, First Things): “Too many peo­ple who claim to be Chris­t­ian sim­ply don’t know Jesus Christ. They don’t real­ly believe in the gospel. They feel embar­rassed by their reli­gion and out of step with the times. They may keep their reli­gion for its com­fort val­ue, or adjust it to fit their doubts. It doesn’t reshape their lives, because it isn’t real. And because it isn’t real, it has no trans­form­ing effect on their behav­ior, no social force, and few pub­lic con­se­quences. Their faith, what­ev­er it once was, is now dead.” THIS IS STRAIGHT FIRE. The excerpt does not do it jus­tice.
    • The Man On The Mid­dle Cross (Alis­tair Begg, YouTube): one and a half min­utes.
    • It’s Fri­day… But Sun­day’s a Com­ing! (YouTube): three and a half min­utes
  2. Recalled Expe­ri­ences Sur­round­ing Death: More Than Hal­lu­ci­na­tions? (Neu­ro­science News): “The recalled expe­ri­ences sur­round­ing death are not con­sis­tent with hal­lu­ci­na­tions, illu­sions or psy­che­del­ic drug induced expe­ri­ences, accord­ing to sev­er­al pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished stud­ies. Instead, they fol­low a spe­cif­ic nar­ra­tive arc involv­ing a per­cep­tion of: (a) sep­a­ra­tion from the body with a height­ened, vast sense of con­scious­ness and recog­ni­tion of death; (b) trav­el to a des­ti­na­tion; © a mean­ing­ful and pur­pose­ful review of life, involv­ing a crit­i­cal analy­sis of all actions, inten­tions and thoughts towards oth­ers; a per­cep­tion of (d) being in a place that feels like “home”, and (e) a return back to life.” The orig­i­nal research: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.14740
  3. Why the Past 10 Years of Amer­i­can Life Have Been Unique­ly Stu­pid (Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic): “The sto­ry of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what hap­pened to Amer­i­ca in the 2010s, and for the frac­tured coun­try we now inhab­it. Some­thing went ter­ri­bly wrong, very sud­den­ly. We are dis­ori­ent­ed, unable to speak the same lan­guage or rec­og­nize the same truth. We are cut off from one anoth­er and from the past.” This is quite good. Haidt is a social psy­chol­o­gist at NYU and is some­one who seems to be faith-adja­cent: he’s near Chris­tian­i­ty but not there yet.
  4. LGBTQ relat­ed
    • What I wish I’d known when I was 19 and had sex reas­sign­ment surgery (Corin­na Cohn, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Surgery unshack­led me from my body’s urges, but the destruc­tion of my gonads intro­duced a dif­fer­ent type of bondage. From the day of my surgery, I became a med­ical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life.” I am impressed that the Wash­ing­ton Post pub­lished this op-ed.
    • How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Cul­ture War (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “If con­ser­v­a­tives had pre­dict­ed just before Oberge­fell v. Hodges that soon a fifth of young adults would iden­ti­fy as L.G.B.T.Q., promi­nent voic­es would deploy terms like ‘preg­nant per­son’ and ‘men­stru­a­tor’ in place of ‘woman,’ and natal males would be win­ning women’s track and swim­ming com­pe­ti­tions, they would have been treat­ed as hys­ter­ics.” This is a strong essay. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed and worth using up one of your pay­wall access­es.
    • Vic­to­ry: Shawnee State agrees pro­fes­sors can’t be forced to speak con­trary to their beliefs (Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom): “As part of the set­tle­ment, the uni­ver­si­ty has agreed that Meri­wether has the right to choose when to use, or avoid using, titles or pro­nouns when refer­ring to or address­ing stu­dents. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the uni­ver­si­ty agreed Meri­wether will nev­er be man­dat­ed to use pro­nouns, includ­ing if a stu­dent requests pro­nouns that con­flict with his or her bio­log­i­cal sex.” In addi­tion, “the uni­ver­si­ty agreed to pay $400,000 in dam­ages and Meriwether’s attor­neys’ fees.”
  5. Pan­dem­ic relat­ed
    • The Accu­ra­cy of Author­i­ties (Robin Han­son, blog): “The best esti­mates of a max­i­mal­ly accu­rate source would be very fre­quent­ly updat­ed and fol­low a ran­dom walk, which implies a large amount of back­track­ing. And author­i­ta­tive sources like WHO are often said to be our most accu­rate sources. Even so, such sources do not tend to act this way. They instead update their esti­mates rarely, and are espe­cial­ly reluc­tant to issue esti­mates that seem to back­track. Why?” There is sol­id wis­dom in this post.
    • Faith, Sci­ence, and Fran­cis Collins (Dhruv Khullar, New York­er): “In May, 2021, after help­ing to lead the fed­er­al pan­dem­ic response for more than a year, dur­ing which he woke up most morn­ings at four-thir­ty, Collins escaped for a week­end to a rent­ed barn in Loudoun Coun­ty, Vir­ginia. He brought his gui­tar and a Bible that he has had for decades; hors­es and goats kept him com­pa­ny. Collins gazed out at the blue sky and rolling hills. He wrote, prayed, and ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to leave his post as the direc­tor of the N.I.H. Collins told me that he prays not to ask God to change his cir­cum­stances, but to ask God what he him­self should do.”
    • A Warn­ing From Shang­hai (Jay Bat­tacharya, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Yet the soul search­ing [of the attack on me and oth­er researchers] should have caused among pub­lic health offi­cials has large­ly failed to occur. Instead, the les­son seems to be: Dis­sent at your own risk. I do not prac­tice medicine—I am a pro­fes­sor spe­cial­iz­ing in epi­demi­ol­o­gy and health pol­i­cy at Stan­ford Med­ical School. But many friends who do prac­tice have told me how they have cen­sored their thoughts about Covid lock­downs, vac­cines, and rec­om­mend­ed treat­ment to avoid the mob.”
  6. The Law that Banned Every­thing (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If every­thing is poten­tial­ly ille­gal, and gov­ern­ment does not have the resources to go after every­thing, then the gov­ern­ment basi­cal­ly has arbi­trary pow­er to do what­ev­er it wants under civ­il rights law.” This was an absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view. The inter­vie­wee is a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego.
  7. A primer on the Stan­ford bud­get (Tim Macken­zie, Stan­ford Dai­ly) “… this year’s oper­at­ing bud­get says ‘the buffers serve as a finan­cial reserve in the event of an earth­quake or oth­er dis­as­ter.’ In oth­er words, Stan­ford has near­ly $4 bil­lion in a rainy-day fund. In the 2019–2020 bud­get, the last pre-COVID bud­get, Tier I and Tier II Buffers stood at $1.4 bil­lion and $1.0 bil­lion, respec­tive­ly. The buffers actu­al­ly grew by more than a bil­lion dol­lars dur­ing the ongo­ing pan­dem­ic. Mean­while, hun­dreds of work­ers were laid off and sub­con­tract­ed work­ers went months with­out promised pay. Appar­ent­ly, a glob­al pan­dem­ic does not reach the thresh­old of ‘earth­quake or oth­er dis­as­ter’ required to uti­lize finan­cial reserves to resist changes in uni­ver­si­ty oper­a­tions when chal­lenged with mar­ket uncer­tain­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have For the clas­sic selec­tion next week: Against Against Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I wor­ry the move­ment against bil­lion­aire char­i­ty is on track to dam­age char­i­ty a whole lot more than it dam­ages bil­lion­aires.” This is a very inter­est­ing essay, and he has a follow-up, High­lights From The Com­ments on Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy, which thought­ful­ly responds to crit­i­cisms. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 213.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 342

the long col­lec­tions of links are at the end — punchy stuff up top

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 342, which is 666 in base 7. Do with that infor­ma­tion as you see fit.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Came to Col­lege Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Cen­sor­ship Instead. (Emma Camp, New York Times): “…my col­lege expe­ri­ence has been defined by strict ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty. Stu­dents of all polit­i­cal per­sua­sions hold back — in class dis­cus­sions, in friend­ly con­ver­sa­tions, on social media — from say­ing what we real­ly think. Even as a lib­er­al who has attend­ed abor­tion rights protests and writ­ten about stand­ing up to racism, I some­times feel afraid to ful­ly speak my mind.”
    • This is a strong col­umn. And the anec­dote about her first amend­ment sign is amus­ing.
  2. We’re All Sin­ners, and Accept­ing That Is Actu­al­ly a Good Thing (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “My favorite def­i­n­i­tion of sin comes from the Eng­lish author Fran­cis Spufford. He says that most of us in the West think of sin as a word that ‘basi­cal­ly means “indul­gence” or “enjoy­able naugh­ti­ness.“ ‘ Instead, he calls sin ‘the human propen­si­ty to mess things up’ — only he doesn’t use the word ‘mess,’ and his word is prob­a­bly clos­er to the truth of things.”
    • This sen­tence from lat­er on was quite good: “The Luther­an the­olo­gian Mar­tin Mar­ty wrote that we live in a cul­ture where ‘every­thing is per­mit­ted and noth­ing is for­giv­en.’ ”
  3. Women who self-objec­ti­fy are less aware of the cold dur­ing nights out, study finds (Beth Elwood, Psy­Post): “Self-objec­ti­fi­ca­tion is when a per­son is over­ly con­cerned with how oth­ers per­ceive their appear­ance. When peo­ple self-objec­ti­fy, they view them­selves as objects of attrac­tion. Inter­est­ing­ly, a greater ten­den­cy to self-objec­ti­fy has been asso­ci­at­ed with reduced atten­tion to one’s bod­i­ly process­es, for exam­ple, dif­fi­cul­ty iden­ti­fy­ing feel­ings of hunger.”
    • “Self-objec­ti­fy.” I love when we come up with new words that we don’t need. Vain will do fine, thank you. And I doubt this is as gen­dered as the head­line sug­gests — I see frat bros in their mus­cle shirts even when it is chilly out. Vain peo­ple are appar­ent­ly not lying when they say they don’t feel the cold.
  4. A feud between mail car­ri­ers, wild turkeys comes to a dead­ly cli­max near Sacra­men­to (Chris­t­ian Mar­tinez, LA Times): “For months, mail car­ri­ers in the Sacra­men­to Coun­ty enclave of Arden-Arcade have been ter­ror­ized by wild turkeys, at times dis­rupt­ing deliv­er­ies. This week, ten­sions between the fowl and one U.S. Postal Ser­vice work­er reached a vio­lent cli­max when the car­ri­er killed a turkey while on duty, offi­cials said, prompt­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion by the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Fish and Wildlife.”
    • If a crime was com­mit­ted then Cal­i­for­nia laws need reform. If self-defense is a legit­i­mate excuse in human death how much more when an ani­mal is killed? I stan the let­ter car­ri­er.
  5. On Ukraine:
    • Why Fore­cast­ing War Is Hard (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If North Korea can main­tain a for­mi­da­ble army, I sus­pect that Rus­sia can too no mat­ter how bad sanc­tions get.… I keep try­ing to play the sce­nario out in my head as to what a Russ­ian loss looks like and it’s hard to see it.”
    • Ukraine is around the same size as Texas. (My Life Else­where)
    • The U.S. Is Not at War, But Its Civ­il Soci­ety Is Mobi­liz­ing Against Rus­sia (Ben­jamin Park­er, The Bul­wark): “While no state of war exists between the gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed States and the gov­ern­ment of Rus­sia, a sort of opt-in, cul­tur­al-eco­nom­ic qua­si-war exists between Amer­i­can civ­il soci­ety and the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment. The same goes for many if not all of the oth­er coun­tries arrayed against Rus­sia. This rais­es lots of inter­est­ing and dif­fi­cult ques­tions…”
    • Relat­ed: Putin Dons Pres­i­dent Xi Mask So Com­pa­nies Will Stop Boy­cotting Them (Baby­lon Bee): ouch
    • Go Ahead. Pray for Putin’s Demise. (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Very often in the impre­ca­to­ry psalms, we are ask­ing that people’s evil actions would ric­o­chet back on them­selves. We are not pray­ing that vio­lence begets more vio­lence or that evil starts a cycle of vengeance or retal­i­a­tion. But we are pray­ing that peo­ple would be destroyed by their own schemes and, as my pro­fes­sor prayed, that bombs would explode in bombers’ faces.”
    • They Pre­dict­ed the Ukraine War. But Did They Still Get It Wrong? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s a curi­ous fea­ture of West­ern debate since Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine that a school of thought that pre­dict­ed some ver­sion of this con­flict has been depict­ed as dis­cred­it­ed by the par­tial ful­fill­ment of its prophe­cies.”
    • Ukraine’s Believ­ers and the ‘Chris­t­ian’ Putin (Mindy Belz, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Pro-Russ­ian fight­ers in Don­bas seized church­es and Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties, some vio­lent­ly. Mili­ti­a­men abduct­ed, tor­tured and killed four Pen­te­costal dea­cons. Their bod­ies were found in a mass grave along with two dozen oth­ers. One watch­dog group, the Euro­pean Evan­gel­i­cal Alliance, called Don­bas ‘the area of Europe where the church suf­fers the most.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Face­book allows war posts urg­ing vio­lence against Russ­ian invaders (Mun­sif Ven­gat­til & Eliz­a­beth Cul­li­ford, Reuters): “The calls for the lead­ers’ deaths will be allowed unless they con­tain oth­er tar­gets or have two indi­ca­tors of cred­i­bil­i­ty, such as the loca­tion or method, one email said, in a recent change to the com­pa­ny’s rules on vio­lence and incite­ment.”
      • It’s like a mod­ern-day ver­sion of the reli­gious gym­nas­tics Jesus con­demned in Mark 7:9–13. Face­book is opposed to calls for vio­lence except when they are not.
    • Why white evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are Putin’s biggest Amer­i­can fan base (Anthea But­ler, MSNBC): “…more pro-Putin Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals are com­ing into sharp focus. Tel­e­van­ge­list Pat Robert­son pro­claimed that Putin is ‘being com­pelled by God’ to invade Ukraine — his take on Putin’s moti­va­tions is ques­tion­able at best, but his sup­port for Putin as part of a divine plan is notable.”
      • Ummm… not a Pat Robert­son fan­boy here, but I feel the need to point out to the author that Judas was part of a divine plan. Being part of a divine plan is not auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­mend­able. The arti­cle is inter­est­ing regard­less.
    • The Real Rus­sia ‘Reset’: Reassess­ing US Sanc­tions Pol­i­cy Against Rus­sia (Daniel P. Ahn, Rus­sia Mat­ters):  “…the pecu­niary cost of sanc­tions to Rus­sia has been larg­er than pre­vi­ous­ly esti­mat­ed, but these sanc­tions have had an effect on domes­tic pol­i­tics that is not nec­es­sar­i­ly favor­able to U.S. inter­ests. Name­ly, the Russ­ian government’s attempts to pro­tect eco­nom­ic sec­tors it con­sid­ers strate­gic have made the country’s pow­er­ful elites even more depen­dent on the Krem­lin, while the bot­tom-line costs are borne by ordi­nary peo­ple.”
      • This is recent yet from before the cur­rent sanc­tions in response to the inva­sion of Ukraine (and thus less caught up in the moment). Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. On the pan­dem­ic:
    • Tol­er­at­ing COVID Mis­in­for­ma­tion Is Bet­ter Than the Alter­na­tive (Conor Frieder­s­dor, The Atlantic): “On Decem­ber 30, 2019, Li Wen­liang, an oph­thal­mol­o­gist at Wuhan Cen­tral Hos­pi­tal in Hubei, Chi­na, began to warn friends and col­leagues about the out­break of a nov­el res­pi­ra­to­ry ill­ness. Four days lat­er, he was sum­moned to appear before local author­i­ties, who rep­ri­mand­ed him for ‘mak­ing false com­ments’ that ‘severe­ly dis­turbed the social order.’ In hind­sight, Li was the first per­son accused of dis­sem­i­nat­ing med­ical mis­in­for­ma­tion dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, despite the fact that he was telling the truth.”
    • Sec­ondary Attack Rates for Omi­cron and Delta Vari­ants of SARS-CoV­‑2 in Nor­we­gian House­holds (Jør­gensen, Nygård & Kacel­nik, JAMA): “Sec­ondary attack rate [chance of trans­mit­ting to some­one else in your house­hold] was 25.1% (95% CI, 24.4%-25.9%) when the vari­ant of the index case was Omi­cron, 19.4% (95% CI, 19.0%-19.8%) when it was Delta, and 17.9% (95% CI, 17.5%-18.4%) when it was non­clas­si­fied.”
      • This is straight-up sur­pris­ing to me. If you got COVID there was only a 1/5 to 1/4 chance of spread­ing it to the peo­ple who live with you. This is based on nation­al-lev­el Nor­we­gian data and I don’t know enough about Nor­way’s archi­tec­ture, cul­ture, or COVID restric­tions com­pared to the USA to know how well this maps to us, but it’s real­ly inter­est­ing. For con­text, when I got COVID so did most (but not all) of my fam­i­ly.
    • An Anti-Vax Judge Is Pre­vent­ing the Navy From Deploy­ing a War­ship (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate): “The Navy and the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry are there­fore in a stand­off. The Navy will not deploy Doe’s war­ship until he is stripped of com­mand [because of his response to COVID]. Mer­ry­day will not allow it to do so. As a result, Mer­ry­day has effec­tive­ly tak­en a 10,000 ton, $1.8 bil­lion guid­ed-mis­sile destroy­er out of com­mis­sion.”
      • This is more of an op-ed than an arti­cle and is very hos­tile to the offi­cer and the judge. Nonethe­less inter­est­ing.
    • Destroy­er can’t deploy because CO won’t get COVID vac­cine, Navy says (Geoff Ziezulewicz, Navy Times): “But accord­ing to Mat Staver of the Lib­er­ty Coun­sel, a reli­gious free­dom non-prof­it rep­re­sent­ing the plain­tiffs, the gov­ern­ment is ‘putting in these histri­on­ic kinds of state­ments into the record that are com­plete­ly con­trary to the evi­dence.’ While Navy lead­ers have pro­fessed lost con­fi­dence in the CO, they still sent him and his ship out to sea for two weeks of train­ing, Staver told Navy Times on Mon­day. ‘When this was filed in court say­ing the ship is not deploy­able because they lost con­fi­dence in the Com­man­der, the Com­man­der was on board the ship out to sea for two weeks of test­ing and train­ing for mil­i­tary readi­ness,’ Staver said.”
      • A more com­pre­hen­sive account­ing. The legal con­text about the require­ments of RFRA at the end are clar­i­fy­ing.
  7. Flori­da’s edu­ca­tion bill:
    • For the bill: Why are they real­ly want­i­ng to talk to 1st graders about sex­u­al­i­ty? (Peter Heck, Sub­stack): “What am I miss­ing? Why are there peo­ple so invest­ed in talk­ing to kinder­gart­ners about sex that they are rail­ing against this law and ral­ly­ing Hol­ly­wood, media, and their entire pro­gres­sive pop cul­ture appa­ra­tus into mis­rep­re­sent­ing and revers­ing it?”
    • For the bill: “Don’t Say Gay” is a lie (Allie Beth Stuck­ey, World): “..what is the well-mean­ing, rea­son­able oppo­si­tion to this bill? I am hard-pressed to think of one valid rea­son, even as I have attempt­ed a good faith effort of putting myself in a progressive’s shoes. The most char­i­ta­ble expla­na­tion I can give is that most peo­ple angri­ly protest­ing and report­ing on the bill have not read it.”
    • Against the bill: Bills like ‘Don’t Say Gay’ hurt LGBTQ youth already at high risk of sui­cide (Amit Paley, USA Today): “LGBTQ youth are already placed at sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased risk for sui­cide because of how they are mis­treat­ed and stig­ma­tized. The Trevor Project’s  2021 Nation­al Sur­vey on LGBTQ Youth Men­tal Health, cap­tur­ing the expe­ri­ences of near­ly 35,000 LGBTQ youth across the Unit­ed States, found that 42% of respon­dents seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered attempt­ing sui­cide in the past year, includ­ing more than half of trans and non­bi­na­ry youth.”
    • The above claim in aca­d­e­m­ic con­text: Sui­cide by Clin­ic-Referred Trans­gen­der Ado­les­cents in the Unit­ed King­dom (Michael Big­gs, Archives of Sex­u­al Behav­ior): “From 2010 to 2020, four patients were known or sus­pect­ed to have died by sui­cide, out of about 15,000 patients (includ­ing those on the wait­ing list). To cal­cu­late the annu­al sui­cide rate, the total num­ber of years spent by patients under the clinic’s care is esti­mat­ed at about 30,000. This yields an annu­al sui­cide rate of 13 per 100,000 (95% con­fi­dence inter­val: 4–34). Com­pared to the Unit­ed King­dom pop­u­la­tion of sim­i­lar age and sex­u­al com­po­si­tion, the sui­cide rate for patients at the GIDS was 5.5 times high­er.”
      • Sum­ma­ry: this study sug­gests that UK youth who con­sid­er them­selves trans are more like­ly to attempt sui­cide than their peers but at a much low­er rate than the fifty per­cent which is often thrown around. The sui­cide rate among this pop­u­la­tion is actu­al­ly thou­sands of times small­er than that, slight­ly above one hun­dredth of one per­cent. Each of those deaths is a tragedy, and hav­ing an accu­rate under­stand­ing of the prob­lem is essen­tial to plan­ning effec­tive soci­etal respons­es.
      • Inci­den­tal­ly, this far low­er num­ber is actu­al­ly com­pat­i­ble with the 50% claim in the pre­ced­ing arti­cle when the phrase “seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered attempt­ing sui­cide” is right­ly under­stood. The aca­d­e­m­ic paper delves into some rel­e­vant con­sid­er­a­tions and I com­mend it to you.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Asym­met­ric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy. If some­one were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win eas­i­ly. We would respond by cut­ting that per­son out of our life, and con­tin­u­ing to do the thing.” This entire series of arti­cles (this is the fourth, the oth­ers are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth read­ing. It’s a very inter­est­ing way to think about the lim­its of rea­son and the wis­dom hid­den in tra­di­tion. First shared in vol­ume 206.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 341

a lot about Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine, but don’t sleep on the rest — there’s good stuff!

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 341, which when ren­dered in base 2 (34110=1010101012) is appar­ent­ly the small­est pseudo­prime in that base.

Also, there’s a lot hap­pen­ing this week and I feel under­in­formed. These are the things that stood out to me from the less-than-I-would-have-liked that I did read.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rus­si­a’s Inva­sion of Ukraine:
    • Just war the­o­ry and the Rus­so-Ukrain­ian war (Ed Fes­er, blog): “One of the strik­ing fea­tures of the cat­a­stro­phe in Ukraine is how unam­bigu­ous­ly the prin­ci­ples of just war doc­trine seem to apply. On the one hand, Russia’s inva­sion can­not be jus­ti­fied giv­en the cri­te­ria of just war the­o­ry. On the oth­er hand, NATO mil­i­tary action against Rus­sia can­not be jus­ti­fied either.” The author, a Chris­t­ian, is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Pasade­na City Col­lege.
    • We Are All Real­ists Now (Ryan Feda­siuk, George­town Secu­ri­ty Stud­ies Review): “After a sleep­less night spent read­ing takes about every mod­ern geopo­lit­i­cal issue under the sun I found, hon­est­ly, that I could not care less about any of them. Can peo­ple get to safe­ty? Where are the med­ical facil­i­ties? How many refugees can the Unit­ed States admit? — These are the ques­tions that mat­ter. War may be an object of aca­d­e­m­ic study, but it is first and fore­most a human cat­a­stro­phe.” The author is pur­su­ing his mas­ter’s at George­town. This is brief and quite good. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Paus­ing at the Precipice (Tan­ner Greer, Schol­ar’s Stage): “This is a pow­er­ful frame­work for under­stand­ing for­eign pol­i­cy crises. Cat­a­stroph­ic mis­judg­ment rests on the con­ver­gence of two ele­ments: an emer­gent sense that there is a moral imper­a­tive to act paired with a break­down in the for­mal deci­sion-mak­ing process­es designed to force pol­i­cy mak­ers to care­ful­ly weigh the poten­tial con­se­quences of their deci­sions.”
    • The Absence Of A Trag­ic Sense (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…we have just entered into an extreme­ly dan­ger­ous peri­od of life on this plan­et. Peo­ple who are thrilled over the moral clar­i­ty of the moment must have for­got­ten that the Cold War, with the ter­ror of nuclear war hang­ing over our heads con­stant­ly, was a time of moral clar­i­ty too.”
    • We Have Nev­er Been Here Before (Thomas L. Fried­man, New York Times): “…today’s world is rest­ing on two simul­ta­ne­ous extremes: Nev­er have the lead­ers of two of the three most pow­er­ful nuclear nations — Putin and Xi — had more unchecked pow­er and nev­er have more peo­ple from one end of the world to the oth­er been wired togeth­er with few­er and few­er buffers. So, what those two lead­ers decide to do with their unchecked pow­er will touch vir­tu­al­ly all of us direct­ly or indi­rect­ly. Putin’s inva­sion of Ukraine is our first real taste of how crazy and unsta­ble this kind of wired world can get. It will not be our last.”
    • Ukraine war: ‘My city’s being shelled, but mum won’t believe me’ (Maria Korenyuk and Jack Good­man, BBC): “My par­ents under­stand that some mil­i­tary action is hap­pen­ing here. But they say: ‘Rus­sians came to lib­er­ate you. They won’t ruin any­thing, they won’t touch you. They’re only tar­get­ing mil­i­tary bases’.”
    • Russ­ian Degra­da­tion and Ukrain­ian Hope: The Exam­ple of Chris­t­ian High­er Edu­ca­tion (Per­ry Glanz­er, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Russ­ian polit­i­cal lead­ers con­tin­u­al­ly exalt cor­rup­tion, dys­func­tion, and the pur­suit of pow­er. This leads them to under­mine bur­geon­ing efforts to rebuild civ­il soci­ety, improve reli­gious lib­er­ty, or expand reli­gious edu­ca­tion. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the dom­i­nant Russ­ian Ortho­dox Church makes things worse. For­mer com­mu­nists large­ly con­trol the Russ­ian Ortho­dox Church, and they use this pow­er to sup­port a Russ­ian ver­sion of Chris­t­ian nationalism—making the church an instru­ment of the state. In Ukraine I have found hope and courage among edu­ca­tors and Chris­tians try­ing to build civ­il soci­ety in the con­text of reli­gious free­dom in ways that some polit­i­cal lead­ers sup­port­ed.” This was unex­pect­ed­ly inter­est­ing. The author is an edu­ca­tion prof at Bay­lor.
    • How Putin Wants Rus­sians to See the War in Ukraine (Masha Gessen, The New York­er): “While news chan­nels around the world broad­cast spe­cial reports from Ukrain­ian cities that are being bom­bard­ed by the Russ­ian mil­i­tary, Russ­ian news­casts on state-con­trolled chan­nels, which have a monop­oly on broad­cast tele­vi­sion, are short and unevent­ful.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • The West’s Green Delu­sions Empow­ered Putin (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Green cam­paigns have suc­ceed­ed in destroy­ing Ger­man ener­gy independence—they call it Energiewende, or ‘ener­gy turnaround’—by suc­cess­ful­ly sell­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers on a pecu­liar ver­sion of envi­ron­men­tal­ism. It calls cli­mate change a near-term apoc­a­lyp­tic threat to human sur­vival while turn­ing up its nose at the tech­nolo­gies that can help address cli­mate change most and soon­est: nuclear and nat­ur­al gas.… Ger­many has trapped itself. It could burn more coal and under­mine its com­mit­ment to reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions. Or it could use more nat­ur­al gas, which gen­er­ates half the car­bon emis­sions of coal, but at the cost of depen­dence on import­ed Russ­ian gas. Berlin was faced with a choice between unleash­ing the wrath of Putin on neigh­bor­ing coun­tries or invit­ing the wrath of Gre­ta Thun­berg. They chose Putin.” Those last two sen­tences…
    • When the Man Meets the Moment (David French, The Dis­patch): “The future is opaque. The fog of war has descend­ed over the bat­tle­field. Much is unknown, but this much is clear: An ordi­nary man has answered the call of an extra­or­di­nary time, and he has sparked hope in his own peo­ple and in a cyn­i­cal and weary west.”
    • A Tale of Two Mas­culin­i­ties (Andrew T. Walk­er, World): “…com­pare the rival mas­culin­i­ties of Zelen­skyy and Vladimir Putin. Zelenskyy’s com­mon grace demon­stra­tion of healthy mas­culin­i­ty exudes lead­er­ship, courage, resolve, and sac­ri­fice. He does not tell you of his courage; he sim­ply shows it. And then there is the so-called ‘man­li­ness’ of Putin, who boasts of a mas­culin­i­ty with ridicu­lous pho­tos of him­self rid­ing hors­es while shirt­less.”
    • ‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes (Mau­ra Reynolds, Politi­co): “Putin is increas­ing­ly oper­at­ing emo­tion­al­ly and like­ly to use all the weapons at his dis­pos­al, includ­ing nuclear ones. It’s impor­tant not to have any illu­sions — but equal­ly impor­tant not to lose hope.” Not the main point of the piece, but my favorite part is when she says sanc­tions won’t be enough and then sug­gests stronger sanc­tions. Over­all a mixed arti­cle but worth read­ing if you’re inter­est­ed in the sub­ject.
    • Ukrain­ian sailor in Major­ca tried to sink yacht of Russ­ian boss (BBC): “He told a judge that he regret­ted noth­ing and would do it again.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • For­mer Miss Grand Ukraine joins fight against Russ­ian inva­sion (Patrick Reil­ly, New York Post): “[Anas­ta­sia Lenna] had pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a mod­el and a pub­lic rela­tions man­ag­er in Turkey, accord­ing to her Miss Grand Inter­na­tion­al pro­file, a whole world away from the vio­lence of the bat­tle­field. She also speaks five lan­guages and has worked as a trans­la­tor.”
  2. Supreme Court:
    • Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son Thanks God for Supreme Court Nom­i­na­tion (Jack Jenk­ins, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Jack­son did not men­tion a spe­cif­ic faith tra­di­tion in her remarks, so it was not imme­di­ate­ly clear whether she would alter the reli­gious make­up of the Supreme Court, which cur­rent­ly con­sists pri­mar­i­ly of Catholic and Jew­ish jus­tices (Jus­tice Neil Gor­such was raised Catholic but attend­ed an Epis­co­pal Church in Col­orado).… Mis­souri Repub­li­can Sen. Josh Haw­ley not­ed Jack­son had served on the board of Mon­trose Chris­t­ian School. The Mary­land school, which has since been closed, oper­at­ed under a state­ment of faith that declared ‘we should speak on behalf of the unborn and con­tend for the sanc­ti­ty of all human life from con­cep­tion to nat­ur­al death’ and out­lined a belief that mar­riage exists only between a man and a woman. In respond­ing to Haw­ley, who said he agreed with the state­ments, Jack­son dis­tanced her­self from the school’s beliefs. She said she did not ‘nec­es­sar­i­ly agree with all of the state­ments,’ and was not pre­vi­ous­ly aware of their exis­tence.”
    • The Long Cru­sade of Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas (Dan­ny Hakim and Jo Beck­er, New York Times): “Gin­ni Lamp, as she was known then, was on a cheer squad for taller girls known as the Squires, bran­dish­ing a sword and a shield before foot­ball games. ‘She would march in front with that; she loved doing that,’ said Sue Nor­by, a class­mate. ‘My oth­er friends were on the pom­pom squad because they were so short, but Gin­ni was on a dif­fer­ent squad because she was tall, with oth­er tall girls. She was the war­rior woman.’”
      • I have men­tioned this before, but I am a suck­er for sto­ries about the Jus­tices. They are all such fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple. Even ide­o­log­i­cal pieces like this reveal their idio­syn­crat­ic won­der­ful­ness. Warn­ing: this is very long.
  3. Covid Arith­metic for Anx­ious Par­ents (Bryan Caplan, blog): “The most ‘adult’ thing for par­ents and teach­ers to do on this March 1 [when Vir­ginia lifts its school mask man­date] is walk kids through the Covid math. Even third-graders should be able to fol­low it. And if you real­ly want to show your matu­ri­ty, you should con­fess that for the last two years, most adults have been act­ing like chil­dren. Life gave us a math project, yet we act­ed like it was a poet­ry assign­ment.”
  4. Walk­ing in the Pur­pose of God (Chris­tos Makridis, XA Alum­ni): “Put sim­ply, I nev­er would have guessed what I’m doing now three years ago. While my engage­ment in the cryp­tocur­ren­cy and NFT sphere ‘might’ have been pos­si­ble on paper, it wouldn’t have been near­ly this rich and diver­si­fied absent my say­ing ‘yes’ to the Lord one step at a time and sim­ply walk­ing in obe­di­ence.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of XA at Stan­ford.
  5. Study Exam­ines Link Between Account­abil­i­ty to God and Psy­cho­log­i­cal Well-Being (Neu­ro­science News): “Reli­gious believ­ers who embrace account­abil­i­ty to God (or anoth­er tran­scen­dent guide for life) expe­ri­ence high­er lev­els of three of the four vari­ables of psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being – mat­ter­ing to oth­ers, dig­ni­ty and mean­ing in their lives, though not hap­pi­ness – accord­ing to a study from researchers with Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty, West­mont Col­lege and Hope Col­lege.”
  6. Against alco­hol, #6437 (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…a sud­den and unex­pect­ed nation-wide alco­hol sales ban in South Africa… causal­ly reduced injury-induced mor­tal­i­ty in the coun­try by at least 14% dur­ing the five weeks of the ban.” Links to a brief sum­ma­ry of some research with links to the orig­i­nal arti­cle.
  7. There’s No Cri­sis of Faith on Cam­pus (Ryan Burge, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Looked at in its entire­ty, the col­lege expe­ri­ence may actu­al­ly make stu­dents more sure of their reli­gious beliefs after they grad­u­ate. This is the idea known to psy­chol­o­gists as the ‘inoc­u­la­tion effect’: When some­one is con­front­ed with weak attacks on their beliefs, they become more pre­pared to defend those beliefs when they come under seri­ous attacks. This is essen­tial­ly how a vac­cine works: It gives an indi­vid­ual a weak­ened ver­sion of the virus, so that when the immune sys­tem encoun­ters the real thing, it can eas­i­ly fight off the vil­lain. Sim­i­lar­ly, chal­leng­ing a young per­son to defend their beliefs in a sup­port­ive, open envi­ron­ment like col­lege may leave them bet­ter pre­pared to hold firm to their con­vic­tions lat­er in life.“The author, whom I have cit­ed before, is a pas­tor and pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The APA Meet­ing: A Photo-Essay (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Were there real­ly more than twice as many ses­sions on glob­al warm­ing as on obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der? Three times as many on immi­gra­tion as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exag­ger­ate this. There was still a lot of real­ly meaty sci­en­tif­ic dis­cus­sion if you sought it out. But over­all the bal­ance was pret­ty strik­ing…. If you want to mod­el the APA, you could do worse than a giant fire­hose that takes in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny mon­ey at one end, and shoots lec­tures about social jus­tice out the oth­er.” This is fun­ny, ram­bling, insight­ful com­men­tary on the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s annu­al meet­ing. First shared in vol­ume 204

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 340

Lots of Ukraine/Russia links, plus more enter­tain­ing links than nor­mal as a com­pen­sa­tion.

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 340, which is cool because it’s a mul­ti­ple of 17 and I real­ly like the num­ber 17.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. On Ukraine and Rus­sia: a lot of links here, just open the inter­est­ing titles in new tabs.
    • To Stay and Serve: Why We Didn’t Flee Ukraine (Vasyl Ostryi, Gospel Coali­tion): “How should the church respond when there is a grow­ing threat of war? When there is con­stant fear in soci­ety? I’m con­vinced that if the church is not rel­e­vant at a time of cri­sis, then it is not rel­e­vant in a time of peace.… while the church may not fight like the nation, we still believe we have a role to play in this strug­gle. We will shel­ter the weak, serve the suf­fer­ing, and mend the bro­ken. And as we do, we offer the unshak­able hope of Christ and his gospel.” Respect.
    • We lack the abil­i­ty to ideate and inno­vate on for­eign pol­i­cy (Melis­sa Wear, Sub­stack): “Why is it that the media and experts mar­veled so much at the unprece­dent­ed shar­ing of intel­li­gence on Pres­i­dent Putin’s next moves? Because it was some­thing new. And it’s no sur­prise it comes from the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. They and those in the mil­i­tary and defense are not as often cul­ti­vat­ed under the ban­ner of progress and peace and the End of His­to­ry in typ­i­cal IR and polit­i­cal sci­ences cours­es, nar­ra­tives, and hall­ways of pow­er.”
    • We’re All Ukraini­ans Now (David French, The Dis­patch): “No one claims that Ukraine is a per­fect coun­try. Like many for­mer Sovi­et republics, it has strug­gled to find its foot­ing. It’s endured author­i­tar­i­an­ism, and it bat­tles cor­rup­tion. But, in Lewis’s words, it is ‘not in the least aggres­sive.’ It ‘asks only to be let alone.’ As a nation that has endured its own aggres­sive attacks, how can we not empathize? How can we not do what we rea­son­ably can to deter Russ­ian aggres­sion and help Ukraini­ans defend them­selves?” 
    • Thoughts On Shit­post Diplo­ma­cy (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can diplo­mat who post­ed this meme should have known this. He or she was almost cer­tain­ly a For­eign Ser­vice Offi­cer in the Pub­lic Diplo­ma­cy cone; a pub­lic diplomat’s first charge is learn­ing how to com­mu­ni­cate per­sua­sive­ly to the peo­ple of the region sta­tioned in. It is not that this offi­cer lacked the raw intel­li­gence to ful­fill this role: four out of every five appli­cants fail the For­eign Service’s selec­tive entrance tests. It is what this diplo­mat did after receiv­ing his or her post that mat­tered. This diplo­mat did not study. Memes like these are the prod­uct of a cul­ture that retweets more than it reads.”
    • On Ukraine (George Weigel, First Things): “For months now, the world press has described Russ­ian troop deploy­ments along Ukraine’s bor­ders as spear­heads of a pos­si­ble inva­sion. The truth, how­ev­er, is that Rus­sia invad­ed Ukraine sev­en years ago, when it annexed Crimea and Russ­ian ‘lit­tle green men’ ignit­ed a war in east­ern Ukraine that has tak­en over 14,000 lives and dis­placed over a mil­lion peo­ple. What­ev­er the cur­rent mil­i­tary devel­op­ments, a Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine has not been ‘immi­nent’; the inva­sion is ongo­ing.”
    • Amid War and Rumors of War, Ukraine Pas­tors Preach and Pre­pare (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Preach­ing on the Ser­mon on the Mount’s injunc­tion toward peace­mak­ing, Kulakevych con­tin­ued his laser-sharp focus on the pos­si­ble Russ­ian inva­sion. Five weeks ago, as the sep­a­ratist con­flict in the east­ern Don­bas region began to esca­late, he sur­veyed the Bible for its teach­ing on ‘wars and rumors of war.’ He fol­lowed that with an appli­ca­tion of ‘Do not let your hearts be trou­bled’ and, on the next Sun­day, a trea­tise on wor­ry.”
    • Rus­sia Keeps Pun­ish­ing Evan­gel­i­cals in Crimea (Kate Shell­nutt and Forum 18, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Since Rus­sia annexed the Crimean Penin­su­la from Ukraine in 2014—one of the cen­tral points of con­flict in the cur­rent clash between the two countries—Protestant Chris­tians in the ter­ri­to­ry have faced greater gov­ern­ment penal­ties for prac­tic­ing their faith.”
    • Rus­si­a’s space agency warns US sanc­tions could ‘destroy’ coop­er­a­tion on the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (Kristin Fish­er, CNN): “If you block coop­er­a­tion with us, who will save the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (ISS) from an uncon­trolled deor­bit and fall into the Unit­ed States or…Europe?” Rogozin said. “There is also the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a 500-ton struc­ture falling on India and Chi­na. Do you want to threat­en them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Rus­sia, there­fore all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Putin as a man of ideas (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “If you write books, whether good or bad ones, and won­der whether your work mat­ters, I sug­gest the answer lies before you on your TV screen each evening. Rus­sia is a nation of ideas, led by peo­ple who are obsessed with ideas. The rest of the world, most of all Europe, will need bet­ter ideas in turn.”
    • Putin’s spir­i­tu­al des­tiny (Giles Fras­er,  UnHerd): “Last year, on the anniver­sary of the bap­tism of the Rus, [Patri­arch] Kir­ill preached to his peo­ple, urg­ing them to stay true to Vladimir’s con­ver­sion and the blood of the ortho­dox mar­tyrs. He told them to love ‘our home­land, our peo­ple, our rulers and our army’. The West­ern sec­u­lar imag­i­na­tion doesn’t get this. It looks at Putin’s speech the oth­er evening, and it describes him as mad — which is anoth­er way of say­ing we do not under­stand what is going on. And we show how lit­tle we under­stand by think­ing that a bunch of sanc­tions is going to make a blind bit of dif­fer­ence. They won’t.”
    • Putin’s Attack on Ukraine Is a Reli­gious War (John Schindler, Sub­stack): “Every sec­u­lar geostrate­gic chal­lenge cit­ed as a rea­son for Putin’s aggres­sion – NATO expan­sion, West­ern mil­i­tary moves, oil and gas pol­i­tics – exist­ed in 2014, yet Putin then chose to lim­it his attacks on Ukraine to Crimea and the South­east. What’s changed since then that makes his effort to sub­due all Ukraine seem like a good idea in the Krem­lin? The cre­ation of an auto­cephalous Ortho­dox Church of Ukraine in 2019, with offi­cial Amer­i­can back­ing, is the dif­fer­ence, and Moscow believes this was all a nefar­i­ous U.S. plot to divide world Ortho­doxy at Russia’s expense. Clear­ly Putin has decid­ed that reclaim­ing Ukraine and its cap­i­tal, ‘the moth­er of Russ­ian cities,’ for Russ­ian Ortho­doxy is worth a major war. Make no mis­take, this is a reli­gious war, even if almost nobody in the West real­izes it.“This is in the mix. I don’t know what per­cent­age of the mix it is, but it’s def­i­nite­ly in the mix.
    • War and dat­ing apps (swipe left) (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Ukrain­ian women in sec­ond city Kharkiv — just 20 miles from tyran­ni­cal Vladimir Putin’s vast inva­sion force — have been stunned by a sal­vo of admir­ers in uni­form. Hunky Russ­ian troops called Andrei, Alexan­der, Gre­go­ry, Michail and a beard­ed Chechen fight­er nick­named ‘Black’ were among dozens whose pro­files popped up.” This is a link to a sum­ma­ry of an arti­cle from the Sun. The sum­ma­ry is enough, but if you click through you’ll see actu­al Tin­der pho­tos.
  2. I spent six months in a cult. They’re still here on cam­pus. (Camille Williams, The Dai­ly North­west­ern): “So, you are prob­a­bly won­der­ing: how did I get out? …Some may call it a gut instinct; I call it the Holy Spir­it with­in me squirm­ing in revolt. After that con­ver­sa­tion, I ran out of my bed­room and yelled to my moth­er, ‘I acci­den­tal­ly joined a cult.’ After she went from con­fused laugh­ter to vow­ing to throw hands with these peo­ple, I final­ly start­ed to feel this bur­den release.”
    • This is an arti­cle by a stu­dent in Chi Alpha at North­west­ern. She was in Chi Alpha, got sucked into a cult, and then got out and returned to Chi Alpha.
  3. Gang­sters want to be good peo­ple too (Chris Blattman, blog): “I remem­ber meet­ing one gang leader on the streets of Chica­go. We were stand­ing in line at a nacho and ice cream truck (yes that exists) chat­ting. I was try­ing to under­stand how one of the vio­lence reduc­tion pro­grams I was work­ing on affect­ed his oper­a­tions. After all, we were try­ing to recruit away his best young men—his star deal­ers and shoot­ers. We want­ed to get them into oth­er kinds of jobs. Sure­ly he was frus­trat­ed. On the con­trary. He was delight­ed. ‘I only do this for the boys,’ he said. ‘They need some­thing to do. Your pro­gram is even bet­ter. I’m hap­py they’re going.’ In his mind, the vio­lent drug-deal­ing was a pub­lic employ­ment pro­gram, and he the admin­is­tra­tor.”
  4. Some Cana­di­an Con­voy After­math:
    • Con­voy Crack­down (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “Fam­i­ly mem­bers hav­ing trou­ble liv­ing their lives is being treat­ed not as a bug but as a fea­ture. The sins of the father are to be laid upon the chil­dren, it seems. This extends as not­ed above to those who pro­vide finan­cial assis­tance to those engag­ing in dis­ap­proved activ­i­ties, and that such retal­i­a­tion will con­tin­ue to hap­pen after the activ­i­ties in ques­tion cease, so not only is one with­out one’s mon­ey and oth­er assets, and with­out the abil­i­ty to spend what one does have, oth­ers may rea­son­ably fear that help­ing you not end up on the street might land them in the same sit­u­a­tion.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • Trudeau ends use of Emer­gen­cies Act, says ‘sit­u­a­tion is no longer an emer­gency’ (Nick Boisvert, CBC): “The Sen­ate was in the midst of debat­ing the act on Wednes­day but with­drew the motion short­ly after Trudeau made his announce­ment.” I am glad the emer­gency mea­sures have been lift­ed, but what should con­cern us all is that this is now on the table as an option for oth­er­wise rights-based gov­ern­ments.
    • What Led to Canada’s Cri­sis (Nathan Pinkoski,First Things): “The cri­sis had its ori­gins in mate­r­i­al con­di­tions unique to Cana­da. A com­bi­na­tion of elite over­pro­duc­tion and Canada’s posi­tion in the shad­ow of the Unit­ed States has pro­duced an ide­o­log­i­cal­ly super­charged man­age­r­i­al class that has accel­er­at­ed the adop­tion of a new kind of emer­gency politics.“The author is at the near­by Zephyr Insti­tute.
  5. By Any Oth­er Name (Hele­na, Sub­stack): “UK NHS refer­ral data shows a 4000% increase in pedi­atric gen­der ser­vice refer­rals (not a typo). So-called ‘gen­der dys­pho­ria’, which was once a very rare diag­no­sis that described most­ly pre­pu­bes­cent boys and adult men, is now most com­mon­ly diag­nosed in teenage girls. Activists will argue that these explo­sive num­bers are a result of increased soci­etal accep­tance, and that at long last trans peo­ple are com­ing out of hid­ing and liv­ing as their authen­tic selves. If this were true, one might expect to see com­pa­ra­ble rates of trans­gen­der iden­ti­ty across all age groups and between both sex­es, but its dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly ado­les­cent females feel­ing that warm and fuzzy inclu­sive accep­tance.” A very per­son­al nar­ra­tive. Long, rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. The C.D.C. Isn’t Pub­lish­ing Large Por­tions of the Covid Data It Col­lects (Apoor­va Man­davil­li, New York Times): “…the C.D.C. has been rou­tine­ly col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion since the Covid vac­cines were first rolled out last year, accord­ing to a fed­er­al offi­cial famil­iar with the effort. The agency has been reluc­tant to make those fig­ures pub­lic, the offi­cial said, because they might be mis­in­ter­pret­ed as the vac­cines being inef­fec­tive.” My lev­el of con­fi­dence in our pub­lic health agen­cies can­not go much low­er. And sad­ly, in an attempt to pre­vent peo­ple believ­ing dis­ap­proved thoughts the CDC has inflamed con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists. Out­ra­geous.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have From Mid­west Drug Deal­er to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspir­ing Sto­ry (Yas­min Sam­rai, Stan­ford Review): “To jus­ti­fy his crim­i­nal behav­iour, he told him­self that though sell­ing pot was ille­gal, it wasn’t immoral. This the­o­ry came crash­ing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres dis­cov­ered that the bur­glars had near­ly mis­tak­en his house for his neighbor’s, he real­ized that sell­ing drugs put oth­er people’s safe­ty in jeop­ardy. ‘I was shocked and sick­ened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black mar­ket and my actions had unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.’” What a wild sto­ry. First shared in vol­ume 204 

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 337

Some wild sto­ries about Stan­ford in this one.

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 337, a prime num­ber. In fact, the dig­its are prime even when rearranged (the oth­er per­mu­ta­tions of these dig­its being 373 and 733).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I do not expect a civ­il war in Amer­i­ca (and what does wor­ry me) (Chris Blattman, blog): “Most ene­mies pre­fer to loathe one anoth­er in peace. War is real­ly cost­ly. It kills, destroys economies, and weak­ens your coun­try to ene­mies. As a result, all sides have huge incen­tives to avoid vio­lence. That’s why most rivals don’t fight. For every thou­sand eth­nic groups, gangs, reli­gious sects, polit­i­cal fac­tions or nations who hate one anoth­er, maybe one in a thou­sand end up in pro­longed vio­lence. Because it just doesn’t make sense.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist and polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at U Chica­go. I like this arti­cle in part because he spends time talk­ing about the absurd “democ­ra­cy rat­ings” polit­i­cal sci­en­tists have been down­grad­ing Amer­i­ca in over the last few years.
  2. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed news:
    • PDF: A Lit­er­a­ture Review and Meta-Analy­sis of the Effects of Lock­downs on COVID-19 Mor­tal­i­ty (Jonas Her­by, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Han­ke, Stud­ies in Applied Eco­nom­ics): “[The stud­ies] were sep­a­rat­ed into three groups: lock­down strin­gency index stud­ies, shel­ter-in-place­order (SIPO) stud­ies, and spe­cif­ic NPI stud­ies. An analy­sis of each of these three groups sup­port the con­clu­sion that lock­downs have had lit­tle to no effect on COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty. More specif­i­cal­ly, strin­gency index stud­ies find that lock­downs in Europe and the Unit­ed States only reduced COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty by 0.2% on aver­age. SIPOs were also inef­fec­tive, only reduc­ing COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty by 2.9% on aver­age. Spe­cif­ic NPI stud­ies also find no broad-based evi­dence of notice­able effects on COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty. While this meta-analy­sis con­cludes that lock­downs have had lit­tle to no pub­lic health effects, they have imposed enor­mous eco­nom­ic and social costs where they have been adopt­ed. In con­se­quence, lock­down poli­cies are ill-found­ed and should be reject­ed as a pan­dem­ic pol­i­cy instru­ment.”
      • Lock­downs only achieved a .2% reduc­tion in deaths? That’s one in five hun­dred. Wow. Some of the oth­er stuff our soci­ety did was jus­ti­fied, but clear­ly lock­downs aren’t a tool we should use in the future.
    • Race-Based Rationing Is Real—And Dan­ger­ous (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “The rationing rules in New York and else­where are not the prod­uct of any­thing resem­bling con­ven­tion­al polit­i­cal per­sua­sion. No par­ty would support—certainly not openly—the essen­tial­iza­tion and instru­men­tal­iza­tion of race in med­i­cine. Few are will­ing to defend poli­cies such as these on the mer­its, because what exact­ly would they say? Telling­ly, these con­tro­ver­sies have received lim­it­ed cov­er­age from main­stream out­lets.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • COVID Affects Your Mem­o­ry (Alex Gutentag, Tablet): “After spend­ing four years check­ing every per­ceived author­i­tar­i­an impulse from Don­ald Trump, the media sud­den­ly called for strict enforce­ment of gov­ern­ment decrees, denounced the non­com­pli­ant, pun­ished dis­senters, and advo­cat­ed for Big Tech clam­p­downs on speech.… With the 2022 midterms in sight, the nar­ra­tive is sim­ply shift­ing with­out apol­o­gy, and many of the argu­ments once made by ‘covid­iots’ are now being backed by Antho­ny Fau­ci, CDC Direc­tor Rochelle Walen­sky, and the famil­iar cast of jour­nal­ists and experts.”
  3. Two reveal­ing arti­cles about Stan­ford:
    • “Racist, Trig­ger­ing, Dis­re­spect­ful” — Stan­ford RA slams unmasked white stu­dents (Stan­ford Review): “Late Sun­day night, a Stan­ford stu­dent RA in the EVGR dor­mi­to­ry emailed the building’s 2,400 res­i­dents to warn against a ‘gross inequity’ that risked stu­dents ‘being killed or maimed for a life­time.’ The dan­ger in ques­tion? Mask­less stu­dents— espe­cial­ly white ones.”
    • The teach­ers of White Plaza (Valerie Trapp, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “He tried to respond and was cut off. ‘You’re a white guy,’ Wait­es said. ‘I can inter­rupt you.’ ‘And you’re a white woman.’ ‘Well, you’re cop­ping out of the fact I’m say­ing that you’re racist, and you’re not say­ing you’re not a racist.’ ”
    • This isn’t all of cam­pus life, but it’s not none of cam­pus life.
  4. Some insights into acad­e­mia:
    • How the job mar­ket works at top schools (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “At least pre-Covid, most of the fac­ul­ty would get togeth­er and rate the grad­u­ate stu­dents (I am not sure how it has oper­at­ed for the last two years, though I sus­pect the same, only over Zoom). Some but not all of the stu­dents would be des­ig­nat­ed as ‘should work at a top school.’ If you were not so rat­ed, your chance of being hired at a top school was slim. Oth­er schools, of course, would know not to pur­sue the top can­di­dates, and would shoot low­er, though some fool­hardy places might try to lure them any­way. But basi­cal­ly if you were hir­ing at a high lev­el, you would call the place­ment offi­cer at a top school, and they would tier the can­di­dates, based on where you were call­ing from, and rec­om­mend accord­ing­ly.”
    • Intel­lec­tu­al Free­dom in Medieval Uni­ver­si­ties (James Han­k­ins, First Things): “One rea­son [medieval uni­ver­si­ties flour­ished] is the lack of pro­fes­sion­al admin­is­tra­tors, a fea­ture of uni­ver­si­ties that last­ed into mod­ern times. (Har­vard University—O the bliss of it!—as late as 1850 had only a sin­gle full-time admin­is­tra­tor, the pres­i­dent, helped by a jan­i­tor, a cook, and two ush­ers.) It is a gen­er­al prin­ci­ple of suc­cess­ful insti­tu­tions that the peo­ple who run them are the ones most com­mit­ted to their mis­sions and most respon­si­ble for their suc­cess. A pro­fes­sion­al admin­is­tra­tive class, by con­trast, spends much of its time evad­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for fail­ure and tak­ing cred­it for oth­er people’s achieve­ments.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Har­vard.
    • Going South: Life at the World’s Most Pro­gres­sive Uni­ver­si­ty (David Benatar, Quil­lette): “Many uni­ver­si­ties have a problem—on this point there seems to be wide­spread agree­ment. The nature of that prob­lem, how­ev­er, remains bit­ter­ly con­test­ed. Lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives wor­ry that high­er edu­ca­tion has suc­cumbed to regres­sive rad­i­cal­ism on mat­ters relat­ed to race and gen­der. Those who self-iden­ti­fy as pro­gres­sives and social jus­tice activists, on the oth­er hand, com­plain that uni­ver­si­ties are still gov­erned by embed­ded struc­tures of oppres­sion, and that lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives have suc­cumbed to a moral pan­ic in response to rea­son­able calls for reform.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cape Town.
  5. Men in the church:
    • Part one: Is Chris­tian­i­ty doing more harm than good to Amer­i­can men? (Antho­ny Bradley, Acton): “It’s often thought that con­trol of women, and espe­cial­ly women’s bod­ies, has been the obses­sion of Chris­t­ian cler­gy down through the ages, but actu­al­ly it has been the con­trol of men and their bod­ies that has just as often char­ac­ter­ized Christianity’s ori­en­ta­tion. How­ev­er, because that con­trol has his­tor­i­cal­ly been mis­man­aged, rang­ing from fem­i­niza­tion, to priests using the con­fes­sion­al to con­trol hus­bands, to cler­gy falling prey to mar­ry­ing church and pol­i­tics, to cler­gy sex-abuse scan­dals, to recent sto­ries of evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors abus­ing their pow­er, men have become increas­ing­ly alien­at­ed from the very insti­tu­tion cre­at­ed to form them to be of ben­e­fit to oth­ers.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Reli­gious Stud­ies at The King’s Col­lege in NYC. 
    • Part two: Sav­ing men requires the lead­er­ship of lay­men (Antho­ny Bradley, The Acton Insti­tute): “Amer­i­can boys are often taught that mar­riage or work will be a cure for their lone­li­ness and alien­ation, but many men find out the hard way that one can be mar­ried, gain­ful­ly employed, and still incred­i­bly lone­ly. Men need local, lay-led con­fra­ter­ni­ties that res­onate with their deep­est long­ings and their desire for com­mu­nion with their fel­lows, formed by local com­mon inter­ests.”
  6. How Hous­es of Wor­ship Became Hotbeds of Graft (Avi­tal Chizhik-Gold­schmidt, The New Repub­lic): “In extreme cas­es, finan­cial opac­i­ty in hous­es of wor­ship can even become a secu­ri­ty risk: It was that exact lack of trans­paren­cy that may have cost human life at Goldstein’s syn­a­gogue in Poway. Though the syn­a­gogue had received $150,000 from the gov­ern­ment because it “believed that it was at risk of an anti-Semit­ic attack on its con­gre­gants,” accord­ing to one of the con­gre­gants’ sub­se­quent suits—court doc­u­ments show that on the day of the attack, the building’s doors were unlocked and no guards, gates, or oth­er secu­ri­ty mea­sures were in place. Instead of pro­vid­ing a nec­es­sary guard at the front of the syn­a­gogue, funds had alleged­ly been divert­ed else­where; the plain­tiffs argue that this mis­take may have cost the life of Lori Gilbert-Kaye, who was killed in the shoot­ing.”
  7. Con­cern­ing Fran­cis Collins:
    • How The Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment Used Evan­gel­i­cal Lead­ers To Spread COVID Pro­pa­gan­da To Church­es (Megan Basham, The Dai­ly Wire): “Oth­er than his procla­ma­tions that he is, him­self, a believ­er, the NIH direc­tor espous­es near­ly no pub­lic posi­tions that would mark him out as any dif­fer­ent from any extreme Left-wing bureau­crat. He has not only defend­ed exper­i­men­ta­tion on fetus­es obtained by abor­tion, he has also direct­ed record-lev­el spend­ing toward it. Among the pri­or­i­ties the NIH has fund­ed under Collins — a Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh exper­i­ment that involved graft­ing infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the har­vest­ed organs of abort­ed, full-term babies. Some doc­tors have even charged Collins with giv­ing mon­ey to research that required extract­ing kid­neys, ureters, and blad­ders from liv­ing infants.”
    • Evan­gel­i­cals: Who Are The Good & The Bad? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “What sticks in my craw is the seem­ing­ly unex­am­ined assump­tion that if you don’t land where edu­cat­ed mid­dle class elites do on any or all of these ques­tions, that you must in some sense be a threat to the integri­ty of the Church. Per­haps edu­cat­ed mid­dle class elite opin­ion is the real threat, you know?” A long arti­cle sum­ma­riz­ing and inter­act­ing with two oth­er arti­cles.
    • I’m going to regret writ­ing this (Erick Erik­son, Sub­stack): “..the NIH exec­u­tive tells me it is impor­tant to under­stand that Collins does not approve and sanc­tion all research and fund­ing and of the fund­ing Collins has direct­ly over­seen and approved, only a lit­tle would be con­tro­ver­sial. The NIH is com­plex and while Collins guides the whole, he does not over­see or approve the entire­ty of the budget.“A sane take (and one I pri­vate­ly expressed ear­li­er today with­out hav­ing seen this arti­cle).
    • Dis­claimer: I loose­ly know Fran­cis Collins and respect him. I do wish he had done a few things dif­fer­ent­ly, but I am sure that if I had his job he would wish I had done a LOT of things dif­fer­ent­ly and he would be right.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have An MIT Pro­fes­sor Meets the Author of All Knowl­edge (Ros­alind Picard, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arro­gant fool who snubbed the great­est Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, art, and every­thing else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, hav­ing received the most unde­served grace. I walk with joy, along­side the most amaz­ing Com­pan­ion any­one could ask for, filled with desire to keep learn­ing and explor­ing.” First shared in vol­ume 194.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 336

I was quar­an­tined this week, so I had an extra-large pile of stuff to sift through. Enjoy these gems!

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.

I’m a sim­ple man, and I appre­ci­ate that vol­ume 336 is com­prised of dig­its eas­i­ly put into an equa­tion: 3 + 3 = 6.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This Inno­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Home­less Shel­ter Is Ris­ing To Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Hous­ing Chal­lenge (Liza Van­den­boom Ash­ley, Reli­gion Unplugged): “…Orange Coun­ty Res­cue Mis­sion [is] an inno­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian home­less shel­ter based in Tustin with sev­er­al oth­er loca­tions. The Tustin cam­pus, known as the Vil­lage of Hope, runs with­out gov­ern­ment fund­ing or pri­vate debt and employs an orga­ni­za­tion­al and aes­thet­ic ethos that more close­ly resem­bles a col­lege cam­pus than a home­less shel­ter.” This is an uplift­ing read. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Christ and cocaine: Rio’s gangs of God blend faith and vio­lence (Tom Phillips, The Guardian): “Drug lords, some reg­u­lar church­go­ers, have incor­po­rat­ed Chris­t­ian sym­bols into their ultra-vio­lent trade. Pack­ets of cocaine, hand­guns and uni­forms are embla­zoned with the Star of David – a ref­er­ence to the Pen­te­costal belief that the return of Jews to Israel rep­re­sents progress towards the sec­ond com­ing. Gang-com­mis­sioned graf­fi­ti offers spir­i­tu­al guid­ance and heav­en­ly praise.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. What a wild sto­ry! See­ing their blind spots, my main take­away is to won­der what my blind spots are.
  3. Noth­ing Sacred: These Apps Reserve The Right To Sell Your Prayers (Emi­ly Bak­er-White, Buz­zFeed): “It is com­mon for free apps to prof­it from shar­ing their users’ data and to be vague about exact­ly how and with whom they share it, but users feel like Pray.com’s data prac­tices are at odds with the deeply per­son­al nature of prayer itself. Jen­ny, a recent col­lege grad­u­ate who prayed about the infi­deli­ty of a roman­tic part­ner in the app, said ‘there is an expec­ta­tion of pri­va­cy’ among Chris­tians shar­ing prayers.”
    • From lat­er in the arti­cle: “At least one gov­ern­ment has tak­en an inter­est in prayer app data, too — the US mil­i­tary bought exten­sive loca­tion data mined from Mus­lim prayer apps back in 2020 for use in spe­cial forces oper­a­tions.”
  4. PDF: So Long, And No Thanks for the Exter­nal­i­ties: The Ratio­nal Rejec­tion of Secu­ri­ty Advice by Users (Cor­mac Her­ley, Microsoft): “For exam­ple, much of the advice con­cern­ing pass­words is out­dat­ed and does lit­tle to address actu­al treats, and ful­ly 100% of cer­tifi­cate error warn­ings appear to be false pos­i­tives. Fur­ther, if users spent even a minute a day read­ing URLs to avoid phish­ing, the cost (in terms of user time) would be two orders of mag­ni­tude greater than all phish­ing loss­es. Thus we find that most secu­ri­ty advice sim­ply offers a poor cost-ben­e­fit trade­off to users and is reject­ed.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Super­hero Secret Iden­ti­ties Aren’t Pos­si­ble with Today’s Com­put­ing Tech­nolo­gies (Jason Hong, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the ACM): “Super­heroes have to wor­ry about hav­ing their iden­ti­ty being revealed, but the rest of us in the real world have to wor­ry about just how much infor­ma­tion about us is out there, how wide­ly avail­able many of these tech­nolo­gies are, and how both of these can be eas­i­ly abused—sometimes acci­den­tal­ly, some­times intentionally—by adver­tis­ers, gov­ern­ments, employ­ers, stalk­ers, crim­i­nals, and more.” I enjoyed this.
  6. On Russia/Ukraine:
    • US Blun­ders, Ukraine’s War (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Putin or no Putin, no Russ­ian leader could allow Ukraine to join NATO, any more than any Amer­i­can leader could allow Mex­i­co to join a defen­sive alliance formed out of oppo­si­tion to Amer­i­can pow­er. Every Amer­i­can pres­i­dent since James Mon­roe has upheld the so-called Mon­roe Doc­trine, which claims the entire West­ern hemi­sphere as a zone of Amer­i­can influ­ence. By what crack­pot log­ic can we advance and defend that claim, but expect Rus­sia, anoth­er great pow­er, to acqui­esce to Ukraine, a bor­der state to Rus­sia, join­ing NATO?”
    • Rus­sia as the “Great Satan” in the Lib­er­al Imag­i­na­tion (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “…the US for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment believes that every coun­try in Europe should even­tu­al­ly be part of the EU and NATO, and none should be allowed to get close to Rus­sia or adopt a ‘non­de­mo­c­ra­t­ic’ form of gov­ern­ment, with “democ­ra­cy” again being defined as mak­ing inter­nal deci­sions that reflect the pol­i­cy out­comes that State Depart­ment offi­cials wish a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent would imple­ment at home.”
    • Defend Cher­nobyl Dur­ing an Inva­sion? Why Both­er, Some Ukraini­ans Ask. (Andrew Kramer & Tyler Hicks, New York Times): “Mr. Prishepa said he would pre­fer that Ukraine set up the defen­sive lines fur­ther south, giv­ing the irra­di­at­ed zone over to whomev­er might want it. ‘It’s a waste­land,’ he said. ‘No crop will ever grow here.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. Pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives:
    • I Had COVID. Am I Done Now? (Emi­ly Oster, Sub­stack): “I think part of what has made this tran­si­tion dif­fi­cult, even if we say we have accept­ed it, is the resid­ual fear of the unknown that has been hard to shake. It’s not unknown to as many of us as before. I spent the past two years tak­ing a mil­lion PCR and rapid tests, which were all neg­a­tive. When I final­ly got a pos­i­tive result last week, I felt a bit of loss and defeat but also a bit of release. Maybe it’s the same for others.“The author is an econ­o­mist at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Why Are We Boost­ing Kids? (David Zweig, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Mon­i­ca Gand­hi, a doc­tor and an infec­tious-dis­ease spe­cial­ist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Fran­cis­co, was blunt in her assess­ment. ‘I am not giv­ing my 12 and 14-year-old boys boost­ers,’ she told me. Dr. Gand­hi is not the only expert to pub­licly state an inten­tion to not com­ply with the CDC’s rec­om­men­da­tion. Dr. Paul Offit is the direc­tor of the Vac­cine Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter at Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Philadel­phia, a mem­ber of the FDA’s vac­cine advi­so­ry com­mit­tee, and is con­sid­ered one the country’s top author­i­ties on pedi­atric vac­cine pol­i­cy. He recent­ly said that get­ting boost­ed would not be worth the risk for the aver­age healthy 17-year-old boy, and he advised his son, who is in his 20s, not to get a third dose.”
    • Soci­ety has a trust prob­lem. More cen­sor­ship will only make it worse. (Hamish McKen­zie, Chris Best & Jairaj, Sub­stack): “…as we face grow­ing pres­sure to cen­sor con­tent pub­lished on Sub­stack that to some seems dubi­ous or objec­tion­able, our answer remains the same: we make deci­sions based on prin­ci­ples not PR, we will defend free expres­sion, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to con­tent mod­er­a­tion. While we have con­tent guide­lines that allow us to pro­tect the plat­form at the extremes, we will always view cen­sor­ship as a last resort, because we believe open dis­course is bet­ter for writ­ers and bet­ter for soci­ety.” Bra­vo to Sub­stack.
    • The Fol­ly of Pan­dem­ic Cen­sor­ship (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “Cen­sors have a fan­ta­sy that if they get rid of all the Beren­sons and Mer­co­las and Mal­ones, and rein in peo­ple like Joe Rogan, that all the hold­outs will sud­den­ly rush to get vac­ci­nat­ed. The oppo­site is true. If you wipe out crit­ics, peo­ple will imme­di­ate­ly default to high­er lev­els of sus­pi­cion. They will now be sure there’s some­thing wrong with the vac­cine. If you want to con­vince audi­ences, you have to allow every­one to talk, even the ones you dis­agree with. You have to make a bet­ter case.” Parts of this are straight fire.
    • How an Anony­mous Report­ing Sys­tem Made Yale a COVID ‘Sur­veil­lance State’ (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “At Yale, those lost social con­nec­tions have killed more peo­ple than COVID-19. In Sep­tem­ber 2020, a Yale fresh­man told the Yale Dai­ly News that the iso­la­tion of the pan­dem­ic had made her wor­ried about her men­tal health. In March 2021, she com­mit­ted sui­cide in her dorm. Since the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, there have been no report­ed COVID deaths among Yale’s stu­dents, fac­ul­ty, or staff.” The arti­cle describes a few absolute­ly bonkers encoun­ters.
    • The NYT’s polar­iz­ing pan­dem­ic pun­dit (Joanne Kenen, Politi­co): “Oth­er pub­lic health experts Night­ly­in­ter­viewed — some of whom are sources for New York Times health jour­nal­ists or have media gigs of their own — didn’t want to be quot­ed, or said they were too busy tak­ing care of patients, ciao. One well-known research sci­en­tist, who is part of this crit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion but who admires Leon­hardt over­all, wouldn’t even praise him on the record.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have If Lib­er­als Won’t Enforce Bor­ders, Fas­cists Will (David Frum, The Atlantic): “Dem­a­gogues don’t rise by talk­ing about irrel­e­vant issues. Dem­a­gogues rise by talk­ing about issues that mat­ter to peo­ple, and that more con­ven­tion­al lead­ers appear unwill­ing or unable to address: unem­ploy­ment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immi­gra­tion now. Vot­ers get to decide what the country’s prob­lems are. Polit­i­cal elites have to devise solu­tions to those prob­lems. If dif­fi­cult issues go unad­dressed by respon­si­ble lead­ers, they will be exploit­ed by irre­spon­si­ble ones.” I high­light­ed a piece by Frum with a sim­i­lar theme back in issue 175. This is a very thought­ful arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 194.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 335

spici­er con­tent than nor­mal — you have been warned

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 335. The num­ber 335 is pret­ty cool because it is divis­i­ble by the num­ber of primes below it (335 = 67 · 5, and there are 67 primes less than 335).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No, Reli­gious Free­dom Doesn’t Send Peo­ple to Hell (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious free­dom is a restric­tion on the pow­er of the state to set itself up as a medi­a­tor between God and human­i­ty. It is not an affir­ma­tion of idol­a­try, just as say­ing, ‘The gov­ern­ment shouldn’t take your baby away and raise your chil­dren’ is not an affir­ma­tion of bad par­ent­ing. Say­ing par­ents should raise their chil­dren, instead of the gov­ern­ment, does not mean everyone’s par­ent­ing is good.”
  2. About iden­ti­ty issues
    • No, the Rev­o­lu­tion Isn’t Over (N.S. Lyons, Sub­stack): “In what is rapid­ly becom­ing one of my pre­ferred expla­na­tions for the Rev­o­lu­tion, the evo­lu­tion­ary anthropologist/mathematician/prophet of doom Peter Turchin has iden­ti­fied ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion’ as hav­ing been one of the top dri­vers of rev­o­lu­tion and civ­il con­flict through­out his­to­ry. He points to the ten­den­cy for deca­dent soci­eties to pro­duce far more overe­d­u­cat­ed elites than there are elite-lev­el jobs, lead­ing to large num­bers of under­em­ployed, resent­ful elite-class intel­lec­tu­als of the type who tend pine after the posi­tion and sta­tus they ‘deserve’ and even­tu­al­ly start spend­ing their free time start­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary cells.”
      • This is long and full of insight. And very, very spicy. I have no idea who the author is — N.S. Lyons is a pen name for a DC area ana­lyst with exper­tise in the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty. I assume he finds the pen name nec­es­sary to pro­tect his pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tion when he writes about Amer­i­can cul­ture. Did I men­tion it was spicy?
    • The Trans Move­ment Is Not About Rights Any­more (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “This week, the writer Col­in Wright posed on Twit­ter the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘What rights do trans peo­ple cur­rent­ly not have but want that don’t involve replac­ing bio­log­i­cal sex with one’s sub­jec­tive ‘gen­der iden­ti­ty’?’ And the response was, of course, crick­ets. The truth is: the 6–3 Bostock deci­sion places trans peo­ple in every state under the pro­tec­tion of the Civ­il Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the stur­dy pro­hi­bi­tion on sex dis­crim­i­na­tion. A Trump nom­i­nee wrote the rul­ing. What the trans move­ment is now doing, after this com­pre­hen­sive vic­to­ry, is not about rights at all. It is about cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion.”
    • Why I am no longer a tenured pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to (Jor­dan Peter­son, Nation­al Post): “My stu­dents are also part­ly unac­cept­able pre­cise­ly because they are my stu­dents. I am aca­d­e­m­ic per­sona non gra­ta, because of my unac­cept­able philo­soph­i­cal posi­tions. And this isn’t just some incon­ve­nience. These facts ren­dered my job moral­ly unten­able. How can I accept prospec­tive researchers and train them in good con­science know­ing their employ­ment prospects to be min­i­mal?”
    • Being Jew­ish in an Unrav­el­ing Amer­i­ca (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “The bad guy was killed. The good guys were saved. It doesn’t often turn out that way. All the Jews I know—even the atheists—are thank­ing God.  But why, despite my grat­i­tude, do I feel so much rage? Why does it feel like there is so lit­tle com­fort to be found? What has changed? I did not feel this way in the hor­rif­ic after­math of the Tree of Life massacre—the most lethal in all of Amer­i­can Jew­ish his­to­ry.… What I now see is this: In Amer­i­ca cap­tured by trib­al­ism and dehu­man­iza­tion, in an Amer­i­ca swept up by ide­olo­gies that pit us against one anoth­er in a zero-sum game, in an Amer­i­ca enthralled with the poi­so­nous idea that some groups mat­ter more than oth­ers, not all Jews—and not all Jew­ish victims—are treat­ed equal­ly. What seems to mat­ter most to media pun­dits and politi­cians is not the Jews them­selves, but the iden­ti­ties of their attack­ers. And it scares me.”
  3. The Pro-Life Move­men­t’s Moral Dou­ble­s­peak (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “But the mod­ern Chris­t­ian church has put forth a fake real­i­ty in which women are almost always the vic­tim except in rare, extreme cas­es. They seem inca­pable of admit­ting that women who abort their babies know what they are doing. They can’t bring them­selves to even acknowl­edge that women ini­ti­ate about 70% of all divorces. When pas­tors write entire books about mar­riage and nev­er once men­tion the basic and well known fact that women file for the vast major­i­ty of divorces – and that’s every Chris­t­ian mar­riage book I’ve ever read – they aren’t seri­ous peo­ple. They jus­ti­fy and excuse almost any female behav­ior, and even twist real­i­ty to some­how blame men for it.” There are sev­er­al uncom­fort­able insights in this essay.
  4. China’s Births Hit His­toric Low, a Polit­i­cal Prob­lem for Bei­jing (Steven Lee Myers and Alexan­dra Steven­son, New York Times): “The num­ber of births fell to 10.6 mil­lion in 2021, com­pared with 12 mil­lion the year before, accord­ing to fig­ures report­ed on Mon­day by the Nation­al Bureau of Sta­tis­tics. That was few­er even than the num­ber in 1961, when the Great Leap For­ward, Mao Zedong’s eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, result­ed in wide­spread famine and death.”
  5. Buy Things, Not Expe­ri­ences (Harold Lee, per­son­al blog):  “…the focus on min­i­mal­ism sounds like a new form of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion. Now that even the poor can afford mate­r­i­al goods, let’s den­i­grate goods while high­light­ing the remain­ing lux­u­ries that only the afflu­ent can enjoy and show off to their friends.”
    • This is a short, well-argued con­trar­i­an take. Stuff like this is cat­nip to me.
  6. About the pan­dem­ic:
    • Hong Kongers Rebel Against Order to Hand Over Ham­sters (Rob Quinn, News­er): “After a woman and 11 ham­sters in the pet shop she worked in test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID, author­i­ties said Tues­day that any­body who bought a ham­ster on or after Dec. 22 should hand it in to be euth­a­nized. But while the ter­ri­to­ry gen­er­al­ly has a high lev­el of com­pli­ance with COVID orders, the ham­ster order was wide­ly seen as a step too far…”
    • To Fight Covid, We Need to Think Less Like Doc­tors (Aaron E. Car­roll, New York Times): “Car­ing for an indi­vid­ual and pro­tect­ing a pop­u­la­tion require dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties, prac­tices and ways of think­ing. While it may sound coun­ter­in­tu­itive, to heal the coun­try and put our Covid-19 response on the right track, we need to think less like doc­tors.” The author is both a physi­cian and also the chief health offi­cer at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Omi­cron opti­mist, pes­simist or fatal­ist – which are you? (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “Is this the point at which we should shrug our shoul­ders and give up? Omi­cron has prompt­ed three kinds of reac­tion: opti­mism, pes­simism and fatal­ism.… What’s con­fus­ing is that all three views may be right. Omi­cron is quite plau­si­bly mild, cat­a­stroph­ic and inevitable all at once.” The author is a British econ­o­mist. 
    • Lying About Covid For ‘Inter­na­tion­al Har­mo­ny’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pan­dem­ic start­ed. It is just about under­stand­able, if not for­giv­able, that Chi­nese sci­en­tists have obfus­cat­ed vital infor­ma­tion about ear­ly cas­es and their work with sim­i­lar virus­es in Wuhan’s lab­o­ra­to­ries: they were sub­ject to fierce edicts from a ruth­less, total­i­tar­i­an regime. It is more shock­ing to dis­cov­er in emails released this week that some west­ern sci­en­tists were also say­ing dif­fer­ent things in pub­lic from what they thought in pri­vate.” Con­tains excerpts from a pay­walled arti­cle.
    • School Clo­sures Were a Cat­a­stroph­ic Error. Pro­gres­sives Still Haven’t Reck­oned With It. (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “It is always eas­i­er to diag­nose these patholo­gies when they are tak­ing place on the oth­er side. You’ve prob­a­bly seen the raft of papers show­ing how vac­cine uptake cor­re­lates with Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ing and COVID deaths cor­re­late with Repub­li­can vot­ing. Per­haps you have mar­veled at the spec­ta­cle of Repub­li­can elites active­ly harm­ing their own audi­ence. But the same thing Fox News hosts were doing to their elder­ly sup­port­ers, pro­gres­sive activists were doing to their side’s young ones.” It may not be obvi­ous, but this arti­cle dove­tails very nice­ly with the Dreher arti­cle about elites not being truth­ful and not reck­on­ing with mis­takes.
  7. The long-term effects of protes­tant activ­i­ties in Chi­na (Yuyu Chen, Hui Wang, Se Yan, Jour­nal of Com­par­a­tive Eco­nom­ics): “Our find­ings imply that late-nine­teenth- and ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Protes­tant mis­sion­ar­ies pio­neered that mod­ern­iza­tion move­ment by dis­sem­i­nat­ing, along with Chris­tian­i­ty, West­ern sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy to even the most remote regions of Chi­na. Such efforts accel­er­at­ed the pace of mod­ern­iza­tion, con­tributed to the accu­mu­la­tion of human cap­i­tal, and reshaped the social val­ues of local peo­ple. Although these his­tor­i­cal lega­cies of mis­sion­ar­ies’ under­tak­ings were sup­pressed dur­ing the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, they rapid­ly resurged and began to con­tribute to socioe­co­nom­ic devel­op­ments when Chi­na began to open up and reform.” The authors appear to be schol­ars at Peking Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Medi­um): “How, in famous­ly lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood and among sta­tis­ti­cal­ly pro­gres­sive mil­len­ni­als, had good old-fashioned evan­ge­lism [sic] gained pop­u­lar­i­ty? In this con­text, a church like Real­i­ty L.A. seemed like some­thing that could nev­er work. But that evening, as I reflect­ed on the trou­bled actress and the psy­chic bru­tal­i­ties inflict­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, it occurred to me that I had under­es­ti­mat­ed Hollywood’s biggest prod­uct: lost souls.” First shared in vol­ume 192 

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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.