Finding Warmth in January

You wouldn’t think that you could have a winter storm and a raging fire at the same time, but a little after midnight we managed it. Kerosene heaters are pretty safe, but not perfectly so. No one was harmed in the ensuing blaze. 

You usually only get biker photos of me, but here’s one our acting public information officer snuck last night as we were winding up. 

We had mutual aid from a neighboring county, including one of the guys with whom I’d done the long Technical Rescue general and rope rescue courses. I brought a ladder over to their unit to get them up with a chainsaw to cut a ventilation/attack hold in the eaves on that side. 

One of the guys who didn’t know me remarked that I was carrying the double ladder by myself, and the officer who trained with me said, “Yeah, I know him. Strong as a bull, can’t tell him ****, can’t teach him anything.” Then we laughed and he went up the ladder while I stabilized it in the mud. 

I’m proud of my son, who was on the interior attack last night. I think I mentioned that he finished his live Fire training late last year, and last night he put it into action. 

A Funny Story

 Scottish musician KT Tunstall tells a funny story here.

She's not our usual fare here, so maybe a couple of introductory tunes are in order.


Bleak Midwinter

The Worst Month

We are currently experiencing the first of what are said to be three Arctic blasts, accompanied by a great deal of rain locally. Snow might at least be beautiful; cold rain and attending mud are not at all. It turns to ice in the freezing nights, but the days stay just a degree or two above freezing. The air at 34 degrees with high humidity and cold wind is far worse than the air at 28 with the water frozen out of the air. The skies are grey almost every day somehow. The few hours of sunlight is veiled, the lumens lowered by the lowering clouds.

Plus it's Dry January now, an event that I participate in every year because of the rational wisdom associated with it. It is an opportunity to prove my freedom to myself on Kant's terms, by which he meant doing what you least want to do because you ought to do it. Instead of just waiting out the month with a glass of ale, every year I add abstinence to the rest of the miseries of January. Thereby, perhaps, I improve my health; certainly I improve my discipline, and demonstrate my freedom from the control of base desires and appetites. All the same, it is entirely unpleasant.

There's a chance that I will get to ride sometime before February, but so far it's not looking good. I last rode on New Year's Eve, and it is starting to look like it may be St. Brigid's Day before there's another fit chance, if indeed one comes so soon as that. 

February isn't all that much better, but at least it brings back beer and daffodils. For now, all one can do is wait and endure, and try to fit in some maintenance projects. This month I'd like to go and repair my hand-built ford, which is still functional after Helene but worse for wear; other parts of the road to the old country cemetery that our governor decided to allow to rot, leaving it to the labor of individual citizen volunteers; and help a neighbor with a massive tree trunk that fell on his fence in the hurricane. We cleared the most of the tree the same day, as well as the road to his  home, but the bulk of the tree is thousands of pounds and will require a tractor and several of us with chainsaws. This neighborly effort has been being put off until after the holidays, which are now upon us. I went out and looked at it yesterday, shortly joined by one of those neighbors bundled up like a mummy, who averred that we might wait until the current cold snap passes... and the one after... and the one after that.

Sleep and Memory

The link between good sleep and a sound mind may have to do with the way that dreams deal with memories. One might think that the engagement of the imagination with memory that occurs in dreams is a better way of processing hard memories than the wakeful obsessing over them; but the scientists say maybe the real benefit is just that the parts of your brain that suppress memories are better-rested.
Eighty-five healthy adults attempted to suppress unwanted memories while images of their brain were taken using functional MRI. Half of the participants enjoyed a restful night of sleep in the sleep lab before the task, whereas the other half stayed awake all night.

During memory suppression, the well-rested participants showed more activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- a brain region that controls thoughts, actions, and emotions -- compared to those who stayed awake all night. The rested participants also showed reduced activity in the hippocampus -- a brain region involved in memory retrieval -- during attempts to suppress unwanted memories.

Among the participants who slept in the lab, those who spent more time in REM sleep were better able to engage the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during memory suppression, pointing to a role for REM sleep in restoring prefrontal control mechanisms underpinning the ability to prevent unwanted memories from entering conscious thought.

It strikes me that REM sleep is supposed to be when dreams occur, so maybe the more natural hypothesis is (also?) correct. Dreaming may help process the memories so they aren't so upsetting; rest may help the brain deal with the need to wakefully suppress old thoughts.  

“Jackery” Indeed


My mother kindly sent me this as a gift this Christmas, thinking I might need a solar generator in case of another hurricane. This product is clearly labeled and marketed as a solar generator. 

What it is, however, is a battery. It has no electricity generating capacity of any sort. It is compatible with separately sold solar panels, which do all of the “solar generating” but are not included. The panels cost more than the fraudulently labeled “generator,” as indeed they should since they do all the work of generating electricity. 

I gather this company is doing very well on Amazon, which is thereby a (probably unwitting) participant in the fraud. I’ve tried to alert them, but their customer service for that has been outsourced to a bot that doesn’t understand the problem. 

So anyway, be warned about this company and its unethical practices.  

Beauty

I have finally found an internet link to the 1987 film "Life Story: The Race for the Double Helix," with Jeff Goldblum and Juliet Stevenson. I was struck dumb by this production when I saw it in the late 1980s and have always wanted a copy. This link to Part 1 and Part 2 is a perfectly awful print with slightly mismatched sound, and yet I was as transfixed watching it just now as I remembering being the first time. A thoroughly satisfying story from the first scene to the last.

One for Gringo


Medieval Studies

I have spent a lot of my life with Medieval texts, as have many of you. 
Boston University is offering a graduate-level “Medieval Trans Studies” course for the upcoming spring semester that explores how “medieval texts speak to the historical, theoretical, and political concerns that animate contemporary trans studies.”

The course has drawn criticism from scholars who argue that it reflects modern ideological biases rather than historical accuracy.

It considers “the deep histories of transgender embodiment” through an examination of texts stemming from the Middle Ages, according to the course description.

Students will read about “alchemical hermaphrodites, genderfluid angels, Ethiopian eunuchs, trans saints, sex workers, and genderqueer monks,” according to the university.

Adam Kissel, a fellow with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy [...said] it is permissible for universities to study how Medieval writers understood their fantasies regarding gender. However, BU’s course is “a distraction from better emphases.”

“In the Middle Ages there was no rational doubt that humans were created only male and female. The people knew that freaks of nature were abnormal,” Kissel said.

That's stronger language than I would have used, but it is definitely true that the Medieval understanding of humanity and creation is exactly that human beings were created male and female. The most rational minds of the age were trained by the Church, for whom* it is a point of clear doctrine.

Having spent a lot of time with Medieval texts, I have to say that while there are some interesting cases, you have to go a long way to find them. There is also a lot more about cross-dressing by clear males or females than anything resembling trans-* cases. There's a certain amount of playful literature about cross-dressing, both females dressing in armor in order to pursue a knightly quest, or male knights dressing as women to humiliate each other (either by beating the other male while dressed as a woman, or by forcing the other to wear female clothes as a forfeit for losing). This wasn't aspirational, even in the literature; it was a joke, the way that in Norse mythology Thor is pictured cross-dressing in a comedy story about how he pretended to be a bride in order to recapture his hammer from a giant who had stolen it. In Malory, for example, it's usually a story involving Sir Dinadan, who is most usually a comic relief figure in the Tristan stories.

Outside literature, Joan of Arc dressed as a knight (but didn't fight as one, though she led inspirationally from the front). A Persian scholar describes female Crusaders dressing in armor but not presenting themselves as males, but it doesn't appear this really happened and the story was probably made up to make the Christians look bad. The religious ruling about this holds that such women would be 'anathema' and this scholar thinks it is unlikely women really did this, at least regularly. There were probably females in armor successfully hiding their sex in order to fight as mercenaries, I would guess, but it wasn't an ideal people were striving for -- and it was more likely, I assess, among poorer women who had relatively few options and found mercenary work palatable. 

None of this really even approaches the side cases that this course will apparently take as its foci. I think the effect is likely to suggest that the Middle Ages were quite different from what they were, which could easily be a disservice to students. Only after a basic appreciation has been conveyed should such fringe elements be taught to avoid that deception. This is said to be a graduate-level course, though, so perhaps that will be the case.


Ecclesia is a person in the Medieval Catholic understanding, indeed a female person.   

The Quality of Mercy

I'm not in principle opposed to commutations of sentences or even pardons. It's a royal prerogative that for some reason the Founders chose not only to retain, but to vest in the executive. It might also have been vested with the truer sovereign, the American people, as perhaps by having annual referenda on it. [UPDATE: Or administratively, which seems to have problems too.] It might also have been rejected as incompatible with the judiciary's independence; but the Founders usually preferred to limit independence with checks and balances between the three branches. 

Courts often get things wrong. They are human institutions, and any system of rules can end up being unjust by applying those rules to a situation that they weren't really fit to handle. The rules are written in advance of the reality of the cases to which they end up being applied, and as such the cases may involve aspects the legislators never considered. This also has the happy quality of preventing magistrates from drafting rules that will favor their own side, of course; that was what Aristotle liked about the approach, and why he recommends it strongly in Rhetoric I.1. Still, the other side of that coin remains: sometimes the only rules we have don't fit a particular case well. Justice seems to involve setting the rules aside. Pardons and commutations are an approach to that problem that has evolved over human history, and retaining it doesn't seem in principle problematic to me.

One problem with locating it in an individual, though, is that the individual may prove to have poor judgment. This works in both ways: they may lack the virtue to stand up for the interests of justice by issuing a pardon when it is deserved, or they might lack the virtue to use the power in a just manner and end up pardoning people they should not.

The use of the clemency power in grand gestures is likely to prove problematic, as it is very likely that grand gestures will end up including some candidates who shouldn't have been included. On the other hand, there is Biblical warrant for a complete jubilee -- perhaps there is a basic wisdom to the idea that everything should be wiped clean every so often. Perhaps we should even use the power in this wide-ranging way more often that we do.

These big questions are in the news because of a series of Biden administration pardons and commutations that seem to range between somewhat unjust to completely unjust (e.g. his pardoning of his own son in the face of manifest criminal wrongdoing in which the elder Biden is also involved). However, there's also a set now from the outgoing governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper. Readers know that I think he has been a terrible governor, and I sorrow that his chosen replacement will become our next governor. That said, I don't get the sense that on this occasion he has engaged in anything unjust. 
Before Tuesday, North Carolina had 136 offenders on death row. Cooper’s office said it had received clemency petitions from 89 of them.

Cooper’s office said it considered a variety of factors, such as a defendant’s conduct in prison, the adequacy of legal representation and sentences received by co-defendants.

“These reviews are among the most difficult decisions a Governor can make and the death penalty is the most severe sentence that the state can impose,” Cooper said in a news release. “After thorough review, reflection, and prayer, I concluded that the death sentence imposed on these 15 people should be commuted, while ensuring they will spend the rest of their lives in prison.”

I'm inclined to accept this as a reasonable use of the power; it is not an extravagance, and the penalty that remains imposed is quite severe. (I'm not in fact sure that 'life in a state prison without the possibility of parole' is preferable to death.) The pardon power is possible to use well, and whether or not I agree with Gov. Cooper in each particular case, I am satisfied that he took his duties seriously here. That may be the best we can do as human beings.

What COVID taught us about censorship

The CISA was a potent source of the censorship madness that engulfed the USA in 2020.

A remarkable politician

Argentina's Milei is a rare example of a libertarian who knows how to use power.

3,500 Years of Hangover Cures

Gone

The Old Year now away is fled…