Who had the more truth? The three kings who followed a rumor, or the scribes who remained sitting with all their knowledge?
Søren Kierkegaard
Merry Christmas!
Who Had the More Truth?
You Can’t Trust the Experts: “Cut Medicine in Half”
[O]ur main problem in health policy is a huge overemphasis on medicine. The U.S. spends one sixth of national income on medicine, more than on all manufacturing. But … we see at best only weak aggregate relations between health and medicine…. Cutting half of medical spending would seem to cost little in health, and yet would free up vast resources for other health and utility gains. To their shame, health experts have not said this loudly and clearly enough. … [M]edicine has played at best a minor role in our increased lifespans over the centuries.… [W]e could cut U.S. medical spending in half without substantial net health costs.… This would give us the equivalent of an 8% pay raise.
Robin Hanson, “Cut Medicine in Half”
Universal health and universal health care have hardly anything to do with each other. Eat, sleep, and exercise accordingly.
Day Bidet #26
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas:
- “Genuine love makes life unpredictable. Love makes life uncontrollable. Love makes life vulnerable. Love makes us not in charge. Love makes us not powerful. Love in fact puts us at risk … and I believe that is precisely why we decide to love things rather than people.”
- “The vaccine was invented in a weekend, available in February. In free market land, we would not have had a pandemic, or a recession. 284 thousand people would be alive today.” (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
- “[W]here modern readers might read ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ as synonymous, the New Testament makes a distinction. Specifically, where modern readers would tend to group ‘soul’ with ‘spirit,’ the New Testament would group ‘soul’ more with ‘body.'”
- Medical error prematurely kills 400,000 people a year. Or in other words: You can’t trust the experts. (Related.)
- “[T]here are plenty of reasons to think that, as a reliable historian, Luke is telling us about a real census that really took place in Judea at the time.”
- Clown World. Clown World.
Cold War IIClown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. - Deep cuts!
More:
Carnivore success story. (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
“The earliest copyists of Christian literature were trained professional scribes.”
“Someone doesn’t choose sex work or not having kids in a vacuum – humans and lemmings are driven by not too dissimilar urges.” (Related. Related. Related. Related.)
“Jesus Christ is our Kinsman-Redeemer.”
“Millions of Northerners regarded the South as a region of nightmare and evil.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Natural Toxins
[A]round 15% of cancer-related deaths are due to natural toxins in our diet…. Take the case of celery. Celery produces potent toxins to prevent animals and insects from eating it. Organically produced celery has more natural toxins than celery treated with pesticides. Why? Celery is in an arms race with predators: It has to produce ever more potent toxins to survive, because natural selection is producing predators that have resistance to its toxins. … So, organically produced celery may actually be more dangerous than celery treated with pesticides.
Allen Buchanan
Oh eeh ooh killer tofu indeed.
Ditch the organic produce. Eat meat.
How Did They Get That Right?
What we find is an exact corollary between the top 9 most common male names in both the New Testament documents and other non-scriptural sources of that same time frame.
When researchers looked at the top 9 Jewish names of first century men living in Egypt they got a much different list of names that did not correspond at all to the list of names in Israel.
This means that it’s very unlikely that someone living in Egypt, for example, would have been able to guess at the right proportion and types of names to include in a story about Jewish men living in Jerusalem, even if they lived during the same time period. Much less likely that someone living outside of Jerusalem would have been able to accurately guess the types and proportions of Jewish names a half century later.
“It’s not just that they have the right proportion of names,” says Dr. Williams. “They also have the right features of names [e.g., especially common names like Simon and Mary are often qualified so that they can be disambiguated].” … We see a Gospel record that retains very specific details about seemingly minor characters and accurately communicates their names, decades after the facts and thousands of miles away. … The Gospel authors are also aware of the names of several cities and villages in the area, and they speak of them with amazing expertise. … “The Gospel authors … know that Capernaum is next to the sea. They know whether the land in those areas goes up or down, they know traveling times, etc. How did they get that right?” … [T]he Gospels of Philip and Peter and Thomas only mention Jerusalem and Nazareth whereas the Gospels mention a total of 23 towns and villages.… “… [T]hey’re getting it right on botany, on the shape of houses, on the description of the Temple, they’re getting the coinage right, they’re getting the social stratification right, they’re getting the religious setting right. After a while you think, there are so many opportunities for them to go wrong if they’re making it up. But they don’t seem to get it wrong.”
Day Bidet #25
O Come, O Come Emmanuel:
- “Why Doesn’t Jesus Fast?”
- “[B]eing ‘pro-government’ or ‘pro-market’ is beside the point, in a society in which college-credentialed overclass mandarins circulate freely among government, corporations, law firms, universities, foundations, think tanks, NGO’s, and media companies, accumulating wealth along the way.”
- “[I]n the first century the most common picture of the afterlife, shared by practically everyone, was of a region of the dead in which there are places both of torment and of beatitude.”
- “What if we reached The Future, and then passed it? What if it has come and gone, and now we are in a post-Future future?” (Related. Related.)
- You can’t trust the experts. You can’t trust the experts.
- Good advice. (Related.)
- “Without charity the outward work profiteth nothing; but whatsoever is done of charity, be it never so little and contemptible in the sight of the world, it becomes wholly fruitful.”
More:
“We have our old friends who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence. … Who helped [Hunter Biden] build the foundations?” (Transcript. Related. Related.)
Worth checking out if you have not read the Pseudepigrapha.
“Why Is Archaeology Useful to Christians?” (Related. Related.)
Islam is right about women. (As are most traditional religions and cultures, of course—nothing special about Islam. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related: “Reminder that the same people who think keeping a tidy and cozy home, cooking, baking, raising their children, and loving their husband makes them a slave/doormat, but being alone, drinking, taking pills, eating takeout/Cheetos, and putting on a fake smile for social media is the good life.”)
Chambers on the 20th Century
[The 20th century] is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form, so that the characteristic experience of the mind in this age is a political experience. At every point, religion and politics interlace, and must do so more acutely as the conflict between the two great camps of men—those who reject and those who worship God—becomes irrepressible.
Whittaker Chambers, Witness
You may not be interested in politics. But politics is interested in you.
True Friendship Is the Least Jealous of Loves
Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but “A’s part in C”, while C loses not only A but “A’s part in B”. In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away”.
CS Lewis, The Four Loves
Day Bidet #24
Seven days, seven links:
- “The story leaves us no moral rules.” (More.)
- Apparently race isn’t a social construct after all. (Nor sex.)
- An interesting take on Acts 15.10. (Related: An interesting take on Exodus 4.24-26.)
- “This suggests the hypothesis that home-schooled children should be smarter than public-schooled children because they’re not getting exposed to the latest contagious infection every month.”
- “[I]t’s very possible that Joseph (and eventually Jesus) would have worked to build Sepphoris, since Nazareth was only about 4 miles from Sepphoris.”
- “We have seen an extra 378k deaths this year…. It seems reasonable to attribute 50k of that from covid. However, the rest is probably the result of increased isolation, lack of standard care, and medical malpractice.” (Related.)
- An “outstanding collection of chronologies, genealogies, and maps by Ian Mladjov.” (Related.)
More:
A related reminder: They hate you. They hate you. They hate you. They hate you.
“Growing up I saw my family lose their entire savings three times.”
“What are younger women’s perpetual sins that they must watch out for?”
Carnivore success story. (Related. Related. Related. Related.)
Politics Is Interested in You
[S]ocialism is precisely the religion that must kill Christianity. … [I]t has replaced the transcendental God of the Catholics in consciences with trust in man and in his best efforts as the only spiritual reality. Our gospel is modern philosophy … that which does without the hypothesis of God in the vision of the universe.
Antonio Gramsci
How is socialism supposed to kill Christianity? Gramsci again:
In the new order, socialism will triumph first and foremost by capturing the culture through the infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media, transforming the consciousness of society.
Gramsci, by the way, died in 1937. A man ahead of his time.
You, dear Christian reader, may not be interested in politics. But politics is interested in you.
Brave Ole World 