On Miracles.

People say walking on water is a miracle, but to me walking peacefully on earth is the real miracle.

Thich Nhat Hanh

On Steak and Other Red Meats.

Vegans and PITA trigger alert.  Stop here.

Red meat animals have been bred for millennia as walking larders for nomadic people which convert non-arable vegetation to useful proteins for human consumption. By and large the animals are selected to be herd able and relatively trusting and are therefore unfit for survival in the wild.  If this is cruelty to animals so be it.  It is prehistoric cruelty, so enjoy the food or pay for their freedom in human habitations as India does.  They die in the wild.  Probably more brutally than even a factory slaughter house.  Not that I condone factory methods. Religious or humane slaughter is much preferred, as most "Free Range" ranchers have learned to advertise.  If stem cell meat becomes commercial I would probably break our prehistoric contract with those animals and condemn them to extinction except for zoo farms to keep the species alive.  Similar to our treatment of Buffalo in the US.  Culls would go to the fancy restaurants and the stem cell pink slime to fast food as usual.

White meat, pigs, chickens and recently turkeys were bred as human garbage and bug eaters and therefore can carry human diseases.  Nonetheless useful food if well cooked.  It loses most of its flavor if cooked well so most white meat dishes are heavily spiced and good.

Red meats are most flavorful rare and are safe for human consumption if freshly sliced as in prime rib or seared to remove handling pathogens. They stand up well to strong flavored sauces as in barbecue sauce and steak sauce for those that don't like rare meat.

A high quality steak if it is seared on the outside is safe and wonderful.  If it is a low quality steak, burn it.  Chefs know this and select the meat by how it is ordered. Steak tartare was almost certainly mishandled in most restaurants.  Hence the spices and crap they include covering up the spoiled meat. I learned this lesson in high school in the Midwest when I worked in a gourmet meat market and grocery store.

My boss overheard me tell a customer that I liked my steak well done (without the ketchup) :-)  He didn't say anything at the time but soon invited me to his home for dinner.  The Colonel asked me to select a T-bone steak, my favorite at the time, from the "Super Deluxe" case which was meat from steers bred for show. He displayed the blue ribbons on the wall of the meat department. He asked me to select one exactly like it from the "Good" case which was USDA select, the lowest quality in the store.  His butcher was good so even that was well chosen.

I showed up at his home with the steaks still flash frozen as all employees were instructed to recommend to our customers, and asked me how I liked my steaks cooked and naively I said well done. He said nothing but my plate when it came out had two parts of T-bones without the bone well done just like I liked them. The Colonel asked me to taste them and asked me which was the Prime  and which was the Select steak. I guessed wrong. He then said to his wife "take that away, and bring the other half properly cooked." I looked at the poor cow bleeding all over my plate, almost gagged, but he was the boss so I tried them both and answered confidently which one was Prime and which one was Select.  I didn't need the A-1 sauce I was thinking about asking for, and enjoyed the rest of both steaks. I was a growing athlete at the time and almost asked for the burned halves back. Ever since if I trust the chef I will order steaks Extra Rare and am usually rewarded with an excellent steak. At one time I asked for my steak as rare as the meat was good that day, but quit when one day I got a well done steak which made even a bad piece of meat worse. I needed the A-1.

It is hard to find but I still like a rack of Lamb rare, but even medium rare it is good without sauces.  If it is only offered with sauce I assume the chef knows his meat and go with the flow.  

Wisdom From Imaginary Entities

beliefnet. 

You may have knowledge of Donald Duck but can Donald Duck give you knowledge and wisdom? Answer: no, therefore Donald Duck has no objective existence he is just a cartoon character.willieHindu

Even imaginary beings can impart knowledge and wisdom.  For many children in the early days of television, the cartoons provided many of their moral and social skills.  As well as an introduction to classical music.  Please note that the script writers were anonymous at least as far as the kids are concerned.  It was the characters that provided the message.  Don't bother with a rant about the bad messages, although discussion of the messages would be welcome, the beauty of fictional wisdom is that one can choose that which seems wise and reject the garbage.

I prefer to get my history from fiction rather than from the biased "historians."  A successful fiction writer will be in tune with the ethos of herm time or hesh will not not sell.  I suspect mining wisdom from the remainder shelves is about as useful as mining it from the history shelves.  One must account for the bias evident in the story, a good story is inevitably biased, but given the bias the wisdom supporting the bias is useful data.   Incidentally the perceived bias of the author is irrelevant.  Creators are telling stories to the culture which will sell.  If their own dysfunctional bias becomes too prominent the story will not sell.   


Humans are story learning creatures, and whether the story has an identifiable author or is simply part of the culture it is always a good story, with unequivocal morals. Also note that stories can take many forms, verbal are the most common including those using music as a mnemonic, but some art and recently visual stories are threatening to become the dominant story telling form.  Visual stories are not new it is just that technology has made them easier to produce and distribute.    

There are two additional fictional sources of wisdom: Fable and Scripture. Both are specifically collections of folk or tribal wisdom, frequently by identifiable authors who happen to be great story tellers.  Most of the Pentateuch stories that everybody can recite from memory and frequently used as lessons are from the Yahwist.  The main difference between fable and scripture is that one is expected to find and learn the wisdom from fable while scripture is generally expected to be taken whole as wisdom.  In some religions scripture is TRUTH™ and for a particular translation every word is accepted as reflecting the will of God.  "God" capitalized is universally used as the god created by Abram or possibly his tribe and adopted under many names or symbols by the many religions and sects and cults that accept Abram as the founding patriarch. 

If one treats scripture as fable that is some wisdom and some garbage it becomes a valuable source of wisdom about our friends and adversaries that are believers. 
 

On Feminism, Activism and Isms

http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/09/social-justice-less-elitist/

But sometimes those same activist cultures can be unnecessarily exclusive – and worse, inaccessible and elitist. I even feel myself doing it sometimes:

 Or why I abandoned the "Feminist movement" in the'70s in spite of being a milk feminist. My first mistake was suggesting that an attack on "man/men" as generic was a mistake. That they should have promoted a gender specific noun for males corresponding to women, something like heman or heeman. Nope. We got to get rid of man in chairman, workman, "All Men are created equal." etc. Look how well that worked several decades later.  Well, it is a fact that all the chairs are no longer chairman of this or that and that all of the significant chairs still have men's butts glued to them.  It is also a fact that "All people are created equal" unless they are female, or non-Caucasian.  (At least they changed the box from Caucasian to white and then fucked that up by including "Hispanic" for all non-Caucasian whites.)

Over the years I have discovered that anything that appears to be a meeting of anything resembling believers is almost certainly not user friendly for anyone but the organizers and true believers.  I find it much more useful to let others attend and read the blogs and reports of the attendees, which are either ignorable dogma or tales of exclusion, prejudice and harassment. Even "freethinkers" like skeptics and atheists are surprisingly dogmatic.  In discussing paranormal phenomenon I have lost count of the times I have heard that "Randi's million dollar prize proves that the paranormal cannot exit." Atheists are not content to ignore God and gods in their daily lives, they must prove that gods necessarily cannot exist for anybody and that all religions are horrible abusers of believers.   .  

The excuse for all the sins of the activists is that they are raising awareness, and that in order to do so the message must be focused and consistent, that is reflect the narrow and exclusionary views of the promoters.   

But it taught me a valuable lesson: the best way to support any -ism or activist is to walk their talk. It is not surprising as we see in the article, how many of the -ists don't.  I wonder how many people or corporations who wear pink ribbons on their persons or products have ever done anything at all to help with treatment or research into breast cancer except to throw some chump change into some charity without even running a Navigator on the charity?  Have the GLBTQ activists done anything but create reaction and hate for their GLBTQ neighbors walking their talk by living working, raising children, and proving to their neighbors and churches that they are simply human?  Does posting your Black Lives Matter vid of police brutality on the web do anything but insure the Police, their captive prosecutors, and the media will insure justice denied? See: what to do with your arrest video.

Activism works, but it does not involve going to meetings and talking tactics.  Get a bunch of your friends together go to the city council meeting, the planning commission meeting, or if you have a lot of friends to Washington DC (Social media helps coordinate things but use email and secret groups on Facebook.  It won't stay secret but it is hard to disrupt.) While you are there making sure all of your friends are registered to vote, and will do so if only to vote the incumbents out. 

The other form of activism is using any position of privilege you might have to affirmatively support any challenge to injustice you know about.  If your significant others are challenging the system make sure that you use your LinkedIn network to help even at the cost of burning some of your own bridges. If you have that video of brutality or bullying on your thumb drive, don't just tell the victim it is there, tell them you will appear on their behalf.     

The Incels are Restless

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/04/1427765/-The-Shootings-are-not-Senseless?detail=email#

Today a growing segment of young adult males will not achieve the material and social success necessary to be attractive mates and form households. By way of comparison, a generation ago in his mid-20s my father had a house, a wife, two kids and a stable job things I was unable to achieve until my ’30s. ...  Today Increased economic opportunity and higher educational attainment for women has removed the economic need to be tied down to undesirable dudes. This is a good thing for almost everyone. But for those on the outside, however, it turns social awkwardness and the tail end of the achievement bell curve into a prison planet of isolation. And that generates rage.

 note: "Incel" a name they call themselves, meaning "involuntary celibate."

Perhaps the rage comes from the tail end of the curve.  The more concerning issue is that the middle of the curve for males is incel. (This may not be a new phenomenon.)  Women now have control not only of not only who they will have a baby with but who they will fuck.  Women it seems have little incentive to have sex per se, hence scriptural admonitions to "pleasure" their husband once a week. 

The cost of sex historically has been disproportionally high for women.  Instinctively, killing a baby is not an option, and abortion was never socially acceptable and the cost both physically and monetarily was high.  So perhaps the sin of Eve was discovering the "apple" method of contraception:  Place an apple between your thighs and hold it there.  That is a woman can choose not to have sex.  This apparently worked fine in Eden, that is a stable agricultural or hunter gatherer society.  Women could choose successful men to father their children, and space them naturally using the apple method until the child was weaned and productive.  Much of this is speculative as stable agricultural and hunter gatherer societies by definition balance consumption and production, with not much left over for kings, priests, and exploitation.  Thus they are easily victimized by kings, priests, and despots with plenty of warriors. Therefore few remain to study and all we have is oral history.  

The invention of exploitive societies demanded a ready supply of warriors.  That is incels who substitute male bonding, possibly with voluntary or involuntary homosexual sex, and killing for sex.  Men get used up rapidly in traditional warfare. In order to produce the required warrior/incels it was necessary exploit women as baby factories.  Women became the property of successful men that is those who were not used up in war or those powerful enough to not have to go to war. Women's choice in such a society was to breed or starve. Encouraged both by social and religious pressure.    
In the west exploitive societies seem to have been invented by Abram's tribe, or perhaps his invention of God as the underlying justification for exploitation was the most successful.  It has certainly been successful and threatens to take over the entire globe.  However it has run out of people and things to exploit, and revolts by those exploited have begun to be successful.  

The most successful revolt has been enabled by contraception, which allows a woman to choose between being a breeder of incels/warriors for a successful man or pursue some other path to social success which may or may not include reproduction. Note that prior to reliable female contraception career paths for women involved avoiding sex as they did not pay enough to support a family: Teaching, nannying, and other service occupations.  

WWII used up enough men that women were introduced to "real" work to produce the war machinery, famously by Rosie the Riveter.  Their success enabled different aspirations for some girls, who could prepare for careers other than the traditional service occupations and many chose to do so.  Boys were still being conditioned for warrior/unskilled labor and generally discouraged from pursuing the "college track" except as athletes.  Which leads us back to the incels perhaps as a majority in most of the west.  The demand for warriors has dropped significantly recently, and unskilled labor no longer supports a family even the current norm of one or two children so the support for sex trade-off no longer works for a large segment of the male population.   

Confessions of an Eugenicist

As a staunch evolutionist I am becoming a bit concerned that the human race is breeding itself into mediocrity and that it may not survive the coming human caused changes to the planet that we live on.  The challenges we face will take all of the brain power of the most creative, intelligent and savvy of our children and grandchildren, and it may be that as humans we have given up on breeding them.

I admit to being dismayed that a large portion of the best and brightest in the US have bought into the false dichotomy promoted by the religious right and some feminists that women must either choose the stay at home mom track or a life style without children.  

This observation does not preclude that the stay at home mom may not have valuable genetics, many "successful" men chose accomplished women as their "homemaker" but their accomplishments outside the home are expected to end with the first child. Nonetheless early marriages for women seem to indicate selection criteria other than creativity, intelligence and savvy.  Or perhaps I should say that creativity, intelligence and savvy are incidental to the main selection criteria and society encourages keeping these traits in the closet for the main breeding population.  

The excluded middle is a life style with one or more partners sharing the parenting either as a shared parenting partner or as a stay at home dad. I have seen many scenarios where women have figured out the problem of support for the children that will pass on her superior genes to the race.  From Heinlein: You don't own your genes, they belong to the race.  At one extreme was a talented dedicated woman who said to her husband "If you want kids that is fine, I will have them if you will stay home and take care of them."  Another I know of was a lesbian couple who chose gay men for fathers, and shared parenting among the four of them. The "traditionalists" are women dedicated to their careers and their children, who upfront select men who agree that shared parenting is the way to select superior genes from both and get the kids off to a good start.    

In the shared parenting scenario some of the mom tasks can be contracted, the housework, day care, etc. although in many cases traditional homemaker standards fall by the wayside.  A glance into the bedroom of a shared parenting household will appall traditionalists.  The clean laundry may or may not be folded, but is on a table not in a closet or armoire, the bed is unmade, and if the floor is relatively clean it is because the contracted housekeeper has been there recently.  

Shared parenting is not a lifestyle conducive to material excess, advancement to management in either career, as parenting is a full time second job for both parents.  A recent article suggests that the dearth of women in management positions is that they refuse advancement to keep balance in their lives. Accepting management positions for either men or women frequently means sacrificing both achievement in their chosen field of excellence, and balance outside of the office.  A hidden cost of shared parenting for men is that management is not an option both for social reasons in the paternalistic culture of many businesses and the time constraints of parenting even for older children.  

I know a lot about shared parenting from personal experience and the fact that support comes from other shared parenting couples who seek each other out.  Three times I had to use white male MBA privilege to change careers. Once because I lacked a "Corporate wife" at an important promotional social function, once because management meant a change of locale to corporate HQ and moving was not an option for the family, and once for trying to achieve balance between personal and business life.  I find I am not unique even on the male side.  Most men who co-parent jump off the corporate hamster wheel early to find more rewarding use of their skills and abilities.  

There is some evidence that in some parts of the world, Northern Europe in particular that later parenting and spouse choice based on good genetics is encouraged, but in the US and much of the rest of the world intentional breeding for mediocracy is the social standard.  I know little about the big population centers in South Asia, but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that women are in charge of breeding, which is a good sign.  So maybe there is hope after all for the eugenicists.  Women are naturally eugenicists when given some choice, and contraception gives them that choice.  

Is the Social Contract of Niceness Winning

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/

So let’s talk about how beneficial game-theoretic equilibria can come to exist even in the absence of centralized enforcers. I know of two main ways: reciprocal communitarianism, and divine grace.

Reciprocal communitarianism is probably how altruism evolved. Some mammal started running TIT-FOR-TAT, the program where you cooperate with anyone whom you expect to cooperate with you. Gradually you form a successful community of cooperators. The defectors either join your community and agree to play by your rules or get outcompeted.

Tit-for-tat fails when the community hires enforcers for the tats.  Either vuvuzelas in fancy dresses in over decorated balconies who administer divine grace or community enforcers who inevitably fall victim to the Stanford Prison Experiment guard syndrome.  One would hope that the vuvuzelas would be immune to the guard syndrome, but the evidence is not hopeful. 

The most useful strategy for a community seems to be a variety of tit-for-two-tats.  Some forgiveness for transgressions but recognition of the fact that consecutive transgressions are socially dysfunctional.  This is particularly useful in social situations where communication is possible between the “players” and the first transgression can be identified as such and some sort of counselling available as to community standards.

Tit-for-two-tats is inherent in the UU First Principle of Radical respect.  The first transgression is attributed to ignorance of social standards and not malice.  The second transgression especially after the reciprocal “tit” even without counseling can be attributed to malice and appropriate action taken.    

A Wall of Separation Between Creators and their Creation.

I have always argued that there should be a rigid wall of separation between a creative work and the creator.  Not that the creator of a popular work should be exempt from responsibility for herm own behavior, but that the work itself stands on its own.  

The Huxtable family as portrayed on TV is a creative work that stands alone and apart from any of the foibles or felonies of its creators and actors involved.  Performers, creators, and artists are human.  If they can transcend their personal beliefs and weaknesses to create something of worth more power to them.  It might be argued that the work may be a personal expiation of shame.