Possibly the greatest title for a medical journal article I’ve seen. You might think with a title like that, the article can’t help but be a dud. However, it delivers the promised payload. The charts especially blew me away.
This is a dream. (more…)
I’ve discovered this week just how much His Majesty can be a pain in the
G. mentioned in passing the other day one of those quirky Mormon teachings that I’ve been curious about for a while: “Satan rules over the water.” The origin of this teaching is Doctrine & Covenants Section 61, in which the elders have to halt a river voyage when they see “the destroyer riding in power upon the face of the waters.” The Lord declared to them, “Behold, I, the Lord, in the beginning blessed the waters; but in the last days, by the mouth of my servant John, I cursed the waters.” D&C 61:14. And then later on: “I, the Lord, have decreed, and the destroyer rideth upon the face thereof, and I revoke not the decree.” D&C 61:19
What I wonder is whether “the destroyer” who rode upon the face of the waters was, in fact, Satan, or if it was instead a destroying angel sent by the Lord, as in the days of the Passover. (more…)
What do people collectively want? It’s hard to say. Voting gives you one kind of answer, but voting isn’t nuanced. Voters can only say yes or no to ballot questions as phrased and as they understand them. It’s possible that with more explanation they might feel differently, or with even slightly different phrasing they choose the other option. Or else they can only select between candidates. Different voting systems give different answers. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that no voting system can ever perfectly capture voter intent. Polls are even more fallible.
That’s where the concept of the General Will comes in. What if someone knew the people well enough to have an intuitive, almost literary, sense of what they wanted? That’s why dictatorships claim to be democracies. They say they’re giving the nation what it really, collectively, wants.
The reason it’s hard to know what voters want is because it’s hard to know what a voter wants. Individuals are something like a collection of people over time. No man can step in the same river twice, the Greek said, because it’s never the same man. The mind is always engaged in editing memory to fit the needs of the present, which it wouldn’t need to do if we were really fully the same throughout, if we always had the same end in view. (more…)
Mormon Christianity has a lot of odd little teachings that don’t seem to add up to anything at first glance. Resurrected beings have bodies of flesh and blood. Heaven has three main degrees. Satan rules over the water. And Christ atoned twice, first in the Garden, second on the cross. (more…)
The presence of God is eternity. (more…)
“A lot of them have nice things to say about it, but none of them practice it anymore. I went a different route.”
The sovereign is the one that makes exceptions. That’s the famous aphoristic summary of Carl Schmitt on political theory. It’s intuitively compelling while intuitively incomplete.
Schmitt is usually thought of as a theorist in the fascist ballpark. His aphorism, however, points in a democratic direction. It suggests that every institution includes an implied arrangement for nullifying top down decisions by lower level individuals doing something different through recalcitrance. Every democracy is Irish democracy. (more…)
1. All American children used to grow up hearing the story of how little George Washington cut down a cherry tree, then confessed to the deed by saying, “I cannot tell a lie.”
2. It is generally agreed among historians, even those not disposed to tear down the reputations of the Founding Fathers, that the cherry tree story was an invention of Parson Weems.
3. Therefore, George Washington almost certainly did not exist, and we need to stop hurting people by making such a fetish of honesty based on fairy tales like these.
Q.E.D.
[Following are the final two paragraphs from James Thurber’s “Sex Ex Machina” which first appeared in The New Yorker, March 13, 1937.]
I should like to end with the case history of a friend of mine in Ohio named Harvey Lake. When he was only nineteen, the steering bar of an old electric runabout broke of in his hand, causing the machine to carry him through a fence and into the grounds of the Columbus School for Girls. He developed a fear of automobiles, trains, and every other kind of vehicle that was not pulled by a horse. (more…)
I could hear His Majesty cackling over the paper even before I emerged from the kitchen with his breakfast pancakes and porridge.
The Independent reports on a detailed genetic study of the British population. Many historic and prehistoric demographic events show up, but some don’t:
“Other major events in history, such as the Roman invasion and occupation between 43AD and 410AD, the large-scale invasion by the Viking Danes in 865AD and the subsequent establishment of Danelaw, as well as the Norman invasion of 1066, cannot be seen in the genetic profiles of Britons today.
“This probably reflects the fact that often major cultural shifts are carried out by relatively few people within an elite who do not leave their genetic mark on the conquered masses, said Sir Walter Bodmer, the veteran population geneticist who first had the idea of the study.”
Something worth remembering the next time DNA and the Book of Mormon comes up.
His Majesty was almost creepily cheerful this morning.
Bruce Charlton is thinking deeply about the Atonement. He is working out alternatives to the customary belief that Christ took on the punitive consequences of sin for us and to the customary liberal notion that the atonement was fundamentally an act of symbolic engineering to excise our retrograde belief in sin and guilt. Charlton thinks he’s found one. (more…)