He used his own dying and death to help others

 

Now and then one comes across a story that really touches the heart of what it means to be human, and to live - and sometimes die - as positively as possible.  Dr. Richard Scolyer appears to have been such a man.

Richard Scolyer, who has died aged 59, was a surgical pathologist who, with his colleague Georgina Long, revolutionised the treatment of advanced melanoma (skin cancer); in 2023 he became his own "guinea pig" after developing glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive brain cancers.

As co-directors of the Melanoma Institute Australia, dedicated to researching the lethal skin cancer that afflicts Australia more than any other nation, the two scientists pioneered a treatment which involves administering immunotherapy drugs before surgery so that the immune system is triggered by the whole cancer rather than the few remaining cells after tumour removal. Their work lifted the survival rate for advanced melanoma from less than 5 per cent in 2010 to more than 50 per cent today, saving thousands of lives.

But by 2024, when the pair were named joint Australian of the Year, Scolyer was facing his own cancer battle. It began during a visit to Poland in May 2023 when he found himself convulsing on the floor of his hotel room. An MRI scan carried out in Kraków showed a mass in his temporal lobe, and he knew immediately that it was bad news. A subsequent biopsy performed in Sydney diagnosed an aggressive grade 4 IDH-wildtype glioblastoma and Scolyer was given six to eight months to live.

"I didn't want to die. I loved my life," he wrote in a memoir, Brainstorm. Only three weeks earlier Scolyer, a keen sportsman, had represented Australia at the World Triathlon Multisport Championships. Now he had been given a death sentence: "It didn't sit right with me… to just accept certain death without trying something. It's an incurable cancer. Well bugger that!"

Under a team led by Georgina Long, Scolyer became "Patient Zero" for a radical form of treatment based on the approach developed for melanoma, which involved delaying surgery for two weeks while immunotherapy drugs were administered, allowing the immune system to train on millions of cancer cells. Scolyer decided to go public with his treatment, gaining thousands of followers on social media.

The regimen carried many dangers. Even a short delay in surgery could allow the tumour to grow, and there was a high chance the drugs' side-effects could kill him. "There was understandable resistance from some in the medical community," he recalled.

But early results were promising. When the tumour that had been removed was analysed, Long's team found that there had been an explosion of cancer-fighting immune cells. Then in May 2024, an MRI scan revealed that the tumour had not returned, though it did not mean the cancer was cured: "It's just nice to know that it hasn't come back yet, so I've still got some more time to enjoy my life," Scolyer said.

But in March this year, days before Scolyer was due to part in a charity cycling event in Tasmania, a brain scan showed that the cancer had progressed. "Not the best day ever," he told his followers on Facebook.

His death, three years after diagnosis, far exceeded the life expectancy for his tumour, and a clinical trial based on his treatment is now underway at Duke University in the US.

There's more at the link.

Effectively, Dr. Scolyear allowed his own body, and the process of his own dying and death, to be used for treatment and further research.  As if to acknowledge his self-sacrifice, he survived his cancer for far longer than the norm for gioblastoma sufferers, thereby allowing a great deal of research to be conducted that will benefit others in future.  Sadly, it couldn't benefit him, apart from giving him longer to set an example to the rest of us.

A tribute to him has been posted on the home page of Melanoma Institute Australia.  There are many replies to it from those who remember him with love and kindness.  I'll let this one speak for all of them.

If it were not for his brilliant work, I too would not be here today, having had lifesaving Immunotherapy for my late stage Melanoma diagnosis.

Words alone cannot express my gratitude and thanks, together with the sadness that you too were not able to have been afforded the opportunity of a second chance of life.

May you rest in peace Professor.

Indeed.  May choirs of angels sing him to his rest.

Peter

Tab clearing

 

Over the past few days I've come across several very useful and informative articles.  I haven't got time to make each one into a detailed blog post, so I'll link to them here.  I'm sure some of them will interest you.

1.  What is the British military actually for?

This is about the British military, not the USA's, but nevertheless there are many common factors in the problems confronting each of them.  I daresay we on this side of the Atlantic should pay equal attention to the reasons for the existence of our armed forces, and whether (and how well) they are structured to implement those reasons.

2.  What happens if the State decides you're too expensive to keep alive?

A very thought-provoking academic study of Canada's Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) program, and the pro's and con's of expanding it to provide involuntary euthanasia - in other words, a doctor or medical panel will decide whether your life is worth saving.  If you're a net expense to the government or medical insurance, here comes the lethal injection.  The abstract opens with this chilling statement:

"This study explores the potential economic savings from expanding medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in Canada, where it is currently a leading cause of death, to include vulnerable groups that cost the government more than they contribute in taxes. These groups include individuals with severe mental health issues, the homeless, drug users, retired elderly, and indigenous communities. Both voluntary and non-voluntary scenarios were analyzed, projecting total savings of up to CAD $1.273 trillion by 2047."

So, if the Canadian government thinks you're worth less to them alive than what it would cost them to treat your medical issue(s) . . . enjoy the euthanasia polka!

3.  The Declaration of Dependence

We are amid a significant shift in the cultural messaging around parenthood, and we can’t throw shame or money at the problem if we hope to solve it. A growing number of people in younger generations have decided that having children simply isn’t worth it. Why? ... The biggest shift ... is the acceptance of the idea that having children is merely one among many viable choices available if one is to live a flourishing adult life; indeed, it might lead to greater personal growth if one doesn’t have children at all. In very short order, the social pressure that used to insist that people who did not have children were selfish has shifted to its opposite—the idea that having children is selfish, given the world’s unsolvable problems and the need to pursue one’s own goals. From here, it is a short leap to viewing children as a burden, a cost to personal autonomy that is not worth paying. 

4.  The Loophole That Put Drunk Truckers Back On The Road

"A federal database built to flag and remove drunk and drugged truckers from U.S. highways used the equivalent of an "honor system" as its last line of defense between a family in a minivan and a substance addict steering an 80,000-pound mass of steel ... But what if a current alcoholic or drug addict could immediately get back behind the wheel by paying a third party to simply check off a box inside the database, rather than complete and pass follow-up drug or alcohol testing?"  Looks like thousands of truckers have been doing precisely that - posing a grave danger to other American drivers.

5.  Stop Nick Shirley!

Instrumental in exposing sufficient fraud so it could no longer be ignored by local or state officials is independent journalist Nick Shirley, who exposed the infamous “Quality Learing Center” day care fraud in Minneapolis, as well as many less well-known fraudulent day cares. So effective was Shirley, and so quickly did his work anger local fraudsters and state officials, Shirley received so many death threats he apparently decided to give California a try ... In Minnesota and California, honest public employees tried for years to expose fraud, but their superiors and the state Attorney General’s Office ignored them. But with Shirley’s discovery of incredible levels of fraud, the California Legislature was prodded into action: they’re criminalizing exposing fraud ... why would legislators, people sworn to protect the public, presumably at least in part by catching criminals defrauding taxpayers of billions, want to protect those criminals? It’s a puzzler, unless, perhaps, those NGOs and nonprofits are primary funding sources of the Democrat Party and Democrat politicians?

6.  Things don’t happen to me.  They happen for me

Rita is a personal friend of long standing, and shares a Substack with Lawdog, whom most of us know.  I was touched by her recent essay, and thought it worth sharing.

I want to share something that has been much on my mind of late, but I want to preface this with the caveat that there’s a sea of pretty ideas out there that appeal instantly but that don’t stand up to intensive scrutiny ... The story I share with you below is about making a choice to perceive things from a more objective standpoint, rather than seeing every curveball as the ultimate disruptor that could have occurred, and making life a misery ... I’ve always tried to embrace the joy of living, but I’ve not always understood how to go about it. I think now I understand that this joy is not having the right things or the stylish possessions that the world dictates are the measure of a life well-lived. I think one can have a joyous life in the most humble of circumstances, if one chooses.

There you go, friends.  I hope you found at least one or two of those articles worth your time.

Peter

Two different perspectives on technology, and both are thought-provoking

 

First, an article in American Intelligence addresses artificial intelligence in the agricultural sector.  (American Intelligence provides very few details about itself or those behind it.  I did a search using Supergrok, which provided these details, if you're interested.)

America cannot lead the AI farming revolution while federal policy keeps imported labor cheaper than machines

Every agricultural economy has a legacy. The question is which part is being preserved. The fertile soil is a legacy. The family farms are a legacy. The harvest is a legacy. So is the labor model that brings it in. And across American agriculture, that model has for forty years depended heavily on foreign labor, illegal hiring, and a political class determined not to disturb either.

When a city brochure pairs “legacy” with AI robotics in the same breath, it is not just describing the future. It is making a quiet promise: the technology will advance, but the labor model will not.

America is preparing for the AI age everywhere except the place that feeds the country.

. . .

Autonomous tractors already plant, till, and spray without a driver. Computer-vision systems can scout crops plant by plant. Machine-learning models can optimize water, fertilizer, pest control, and yield down to the meter. Robotic harvesters can pick faster, cleaner, and longer than hand crews. Precision irrigation can be guided by satellite analytics. AI-assisted breeding can compress decades of plant selection into months.

The question is no longer whether American agriculture can automate. It is whether Washington will stop subsidizing the cheap labor model that makes automation a losing bet.

America should be leading this revolution. It builds the software, funds the research, trains the engineers, and talks constantly about technological dominance. Yet federal policy still props up an agricultural labor model built on cheap imported labor, illegal hiring, and guestworker expansion. That bargain has kept human labor cheaper than machines, delayed mechanization, and now risks leaving the United States on the sidelines of a revolution it should own.

There's more at the link.

To a technologist, that sounds wonderful.  Machine intelligence and labor will take over the agricultural sector, modernizing everything and guaranteeing much greater yields and more efficient utilization of resources.  So far, so good . . . but what happens to the many millions of people who earn their living working on farms and in the food industry?  When they're replaced in the fields and the food processors, where will they find employment?  Almost every other sector of the economy is also paring back on human resources and switching to ever greater automation.  How is our economy, our nation, going to cope with the burden of all those thrown out of work by this sea-change?

Furthermore, what will it do to nations that cannot afford to grow their own food even today, but also cannot afford to automate their agriculture?  Will there be seeds they can grow, or will even that be absorbed into techno-agriculture?  What about the illegal aliens who used to flood across our borders to work on American farms?  Now they'll be stuck in their own countries, without work, and possibly without local food either.

I'm not a Luddite.  I think automation and technology can serve us well, if properly managed, and hold out great hope for the future.  However, we can't embrace them blindly unless we also account for those who will be displaced by them.  How are we going to cope with them in our increasingly digital society?  How are they going to adapt, particularly if there's no work available for them to earn a living while they and their families adapt?

That dilemma was discussed last year at the Nexus Conference 2025, 'Apocalypse Now: The Revelation of our Time'.  It was held under the auspices of the Nexus Institute, which describes its mission like this:

As an independent non-profit foundation, the Nexus Institute brings together the world’s foremost intellectuals, artists, scientists and politicians, and encourages them to discuss the questions that really matter. How are we to live? How can we shape our future? Can we learn from our past? Which values and ideas are important, and why?

From reading its Web site, the Institute seems fairly typically left-wing and progressive, but it does appear to try to provide those with different philosophies with an opportunity to participate in wide-ranging discussions.  Here's an excerpt from a panel from last year's conference titled "The Wild West of digital technology in a capitalist system".  I don't agree with many of the points raised (unsurprising, from my right-of-center perspective), but I think they present aspects of the problem that are important, and worth examining.

The future of our technological society is far from settled, and is in many cases unsettling to think about.  I try to keep informed about all sides of the debate, and the article and video clip above have helped me to do that.  I hope you enjoyed them, too.

Peter

Kat really needs our help

 

Late last month, I wrote about Kat Ainsworth Stevens.

She's a friend and occasional member of the North Texas Troublemakers, and an active gun writer - you've probably read articles by her if you read gun mags or several well-known Internet sites.  When last I wrote about her, she was facing imminent surgery for breast cancer, and since she's a free-lancer, she doesn't have medical insurance to help.

She's had her surgery, which was massive - double mastectomy, every lymph gland in sight, all that sort of thing.  She's recovering from it at present, and is facing both radiation and chemotherapy to knock down any remaining traces of the cancer.  To make matters worse, her four-year-old son developed some sort of intestinal disorder that required him to be hospitalized as well:  but Kat can't visit him much, because her wounds are still draining and the risk of infection is simply too great.  That's a very tough row to hoe.

Kat's received her first bill from the hospital.  It's well into the five-figure bracket, and it won't be the last, either, what with chemical and radiological therapy still to come.  Her friends have therefore organized a raffle for a Foxtrot Mike Ranch Rifle (description at link).

The one on offer in the raffle has been upgraded even further, making it a very desirable firearm.  Click the link to see it in more detail, with more and larger images, and enter for the raffle.  Any donation up to $100, no matter how small, gets one ticket, and multiple tickets are given for larger donations - details at the link.

Kat's good people, and deserves our help.  Please donate whatever you can afford, either to the raffle, or (if you prefer) to the original GiveSendGo fundraiser, which is still in operation.

Thanks, friends.

Peter

Almost beyond parody

 

When I first heard about this a few days ago, I dismissed it as a fake news gimmick.  I mean, who would be dumb enough to actually say something like this?

Turns out I was wrong.  Jim Treacher reports:

Okay, let me try this: MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.

That stands for: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and additional identities.

Again, that’s MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. I find it helps to go three letters at a time. Like when you’re giving your account number to the customer service guy, who says his name is Steve but he has an Indian accent.

The speaker there is named Leah Gazan. (Oops. There’s a warning sign right there.) Who is a member of [the] Canadian Parliament. She’s in the NDP, whatever that is.

There's more at the link.

Rick Moran adds:

MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is an all-inclusive, all-encompassing, balls-to-the-wall, slam bang, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am acronym for the totality of the gender bending, sexually "unique" population of Canada. 

. . .

Budgeting for each and every identity, preference, and fantasy spirit in the MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ community would blow up the Canadian budget. 

I fondly recall when sexual preference identities were simple: LGB and maybe T, XYZ, believe you me. It was easy. It was a simpler time then. We didn't have to worry about offending someone by using the wrong pronoun. We didn't have to worry about making some poor, disturbed "T" or "Q" explode in tears from being misgendered.  

It would be so much easier (and we'd be less likely to offend) if the MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ "community" would just walk around with name tags identifying which gender they are, what their sexual identity is, and most importantly, what pronouns they prefer to be referred to.

Yes, that's a joke. No Nazi "Star of David" references, please.

Not that I'd use them. But since misgendering is going to be an Olympic sport in 2030, it would be helpful to know who we should insult.

Again, more at the link.

And yet . . . even when they come up with absolute howlers such as the acronym above . . . the LGBWTF crowd actually expect us to take them seriously.  They (well, some of them, anyway) expect us to take the acronym seriously.

What are they smoking???  Whatever it is, where can I buy some?  If I'm going to have to read, or listen to, or endure that sort of crap any longer, I'm going to need all the help I can get!

Oy, gevalt...

Peter

The state and "Cheddarisation"

 

The word "Cheddarisation" threw me when I saw it in the title of an article at Off-Guardian, but having read it, it makes sense.

Once, Britain was a landscape of cheese. There were hundreds of distinct regional varieties, each rooted in a particular place and shaped by local conditions and practices.

These cheeses were not interchangeable. They reflected differences in soil, pasture, climate and animal breeds. Their characteristics shifted with the seasons. They were products of specific environments and the knowledge of those who worked within them. But that diversity has largely disappeared.

Today, most cheese available through mainstream supply chains is standardised. It is consistent in taste, texture and appearance, regardless of where it is produced. Variation has been minimised with predictability the defining feature.

The turning point came during the Second World War. Faced with the challenge of feeding a population under rationing, the British government intervened in food production through the Ministry of Food. One of its key decisions was to consolidate cheese-making into a single, standardised form: Cheddar.

The rationale was practical. Cheddar was durable, transportable and relatively straightforward to produce at scale. In wartime conditions, these qualities made it suitable for centralised distribution. Efficiency took precedence over diversity.

. . .

What occurred in the British dairy sector can be understood as an early example of a wider process: the replacement of complex, localised systems with simplified, standardised ones. For the purposes of clarity, this process might be described as cheddarisation.

Cheddarisation is not confined to cheese. It refers to a more general pattern in which diversity is reduced in favour of uniformity, and local variation is treated as an obstacle to efficiency. Systems are reorganised so that outputs can be standardised, scaled and controlled ... Once a system is simplified enough to be managed from a central desk, the people within that system lose their ability to act outside of it.

There's more at the link.

Off-Guardian offers a number of articles about what it calls "the anti-human agenda", of which the above article is one example.  Categories include:

War on Food

War on Money

Climate Change

Health Tyranny

There are many interesting discussions under each heading.  Recommended reading.

Peter

Preparing to die

 

Ben Sasse, former US Senator and former President of the University of Florida, announced last December that he'd been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

In a wide-ranging discussion with Ross Douthat, Mr. Sasse discusses his current state of health (parlous), and how he's preparing for his approaching death.  I found it a very moving discussion, particularly his courage and openness in speaking out about the end of his life and how he's trying to fill every remaining minute of it with important things.

The New York Times published an opinion column about this interview titled "How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying".  At present, it's not behind a paywall.  If you prefer to read rather than watch or listen, I highly recommend clicking over there to read it.  It's long, but well worth your time.  If you'd rather not read it, here's his hour-long-plus interview with Mr. Douthat.

I can only admire Mr. Sasse's faith, and his willingness to be so open about a subject often regarded as taboo among many people today.  I hope and pray that his example will inspire many to think about their own futures, and how "in the midst of life we are in death", to quote the ancient funeral ceremony.

May God be merciful to Mr. Sasse, and welcome him home to eternity when the time comes.

Peter

A fascinating legacy from a bygone era

 

This report caught my imagination.

In northern India's Uttar Pradesh state, a team of workers is carefully restoring a centuries-old royal kitchen that once fed the rulers of the former princely state of Awadh.

Tucked within the sprawling complex of Chota Imambara - a mausoleum and congregation hall - this kitchen in Lucknow is a reminder of a different kind of royal legacy. Built in 1837 by former Awadh ruler Muhammad Ali Shah, the site once served not just the elite, but the public too.

At its peak, the meals here were prepared for both the royal household and ordinary people, especially during religious gatherings and special occasions.

. . .

According to historians, in 1839, Muhammad Ali Shah gave 3.6m rupees - considered a vast sum in those days - to the East India Company, then a British trading enterprise, on the condition that it would be responsible for maintaining the monuments built by the Awadh nawabs, while the kitchen would continue to run on the interest earned from the fund.

After India became independent 1947, this money was transferred into a local bank.

Today, the kitchen is managed by the Hussainabad Trust - a state government-monitored body - which continues to use the interest to fund and manage the kitchen's operations.

That legacy lives on in the meals still served here, prepared to the same standards laid down generations ago.

. . .

Historian Roshan Taqui says the king was determined to ensure the kitchen kept running without interruption.

To handle the scale of cooking, he built two identical kitchens on either side of the Chota Imambara - a design that also reflects Awadhi architecture's heavy emphasis on symmetry, he adds.

The concept of twin kitchens is proving useful to this day.

"During this Ramadan, while restoration was underway in one of the kitchens, cooking continued in the other," Taqui says.

There's more at the link, including details of the ongoing restoration of the two-century-old kitchens using original materials and techniques.  There are several photographs of the process.

It's fascinating to think how different faiths such as Christianity and Islam could give rise to similar concepts of alms-giving on the part of the rich and powerful.  In Europe, knights and barons might endow a monastery or hospital or way-station for pilgrims, something that would be useful for generations to come, in the same way as Muhammad Ali Shah decreed that his palace kitchens would feed the poor as well as his household.  Both operated on the principle of "storing up treasure in heaven", where one's good deeds may help to offset the less good or downright sinful ones - a very common approach to faith in earlier times.

I could wish that some of our modern oligarchs and rulers might continue the practice . . .

Peter

I'm sorry, but this kicked over my giggle-box

 

CederQ, who blogs with Phil over at his place, put up a meme this morning.  I can't reproduce it here, because it's definitely Not Safe For Work and not family-friendly:  here's the link, if you don't mind the risk.  Even so, I had to laugh out loud at the caption.  It reads, on the top line:

SAYS SHE STRIPS TO FEED HER KIDS

On the bottom line:

GETS MAD WHEN YOU THROW CANNED GOODS AT HER

The captions, combined with the NSFW image, had me laughing out loud.

Seriously, though, I can't tell you how many times, as a pastor and a private individual, I've been asked for help by someone.  Almost always, their need is stated to be something physical, like food, a bus ticket, or whatever.  However, when I offer to buy them the thing(s) they need, rather than give them money, they get upset with me.  It's quite clear they want the money for other things, and I'm the bad guy for "giving them a hard time" by havering about it.

I will admit, I've never tried to throw canned goods at strippers (or anything else, for that matter).  I've never even been to a strip show or club.  Nevertheless, I'm curious about the ballistics.  What size can?  What contents?  How hard should it be thrown?  Answers in Comments, please - but keep it clean!

Peter

Rescuing a kidnapped girl from her predator captors

 

The BBC has the fascinating story of how a girl who'd been missing for six years was finally traced and rescued.  It's too long to cite everything here, but this excerpt gives you some idea of the care and attention to detail involved.

Squire and his team could see, from the type of light sockets and electrical outlets visible in the images, that Lucy was in North America. But that was about it.

They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.

So Squire and his colleagues analysed everything they could see in Lucy's room: the bedspread, her outfits, her stuffed toys. Looking for any element which might help.

And then they had a minor breakthrough. The team discovered that a sofa seen in some of the images was only sold regionally, not nationally, and therefore had a more limited customer base.

But that still amounted to about 40,000 people.

"At that point in the investigation, we're [still] looking at 29 states here in the US. I mean, you're talking about tens of thousands of addresses, and that's a very, very daunting task," says Squire.

The team looked for more clues. And that is when they realised something as mundane as the exposed brick wall in Lucy's bedroom could give them a lead.

"So, I started just Googling bricks and it wasn't too many searches [before] I found the Brick Industry Association," says Squire.

"And the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like, 'how can the brick industry help?'"

She offered to share the photo with brick experts all over the country. The response was almost immediate, he says.

One of the people who got in touch was John Harp, who had been working in brick sales since 1981.

"I noticed that the brick was a very pink-cast brick, and it had a little bit of a charcoal overlay on it. It was a modular eight-inch brick and it was square-edged," he says. "When I saw that, I knew exactly what the brick was," he adds.

It was, he told Squire, a "Flaming Alamo".

"[Our company] made that brick from the late 60s through about the middle part of the 80s, and I had sold millions of bricks from that plant."

Initially Squire was ecstatic, expecting they could access a digitised customer list. But Harp broke the news that the sales records were just a "pile of notes" that went back decades.

He did however reveal a key detail about bricks, Squire says.

"He goes: 'Bricks are heavy.' And he said: 'So heavy bricks don't go very far.'"

This changed everything. The team returned to the sofa customer list and narrowed that down to just those clients who lived within a 100-mile radius of Harp's brick factory in the US south-west.

There's much more at the link.  It's well worth reading in full, to give you some idea of the difficulties involved in tracing missing children.

The horrifying part of the story, to me at any rate, is that when police finally raided the house and rescued the girl, they learned she'd been raped by a sexual predator for six years.  Six years - and she was 12 years old when rescued.  That means she'd been missing and abused for half her life.  She was a child, with no resources to call on, no parent to lean on, nobody to help at all.  How she survived such abuse is something I can't comprehend.  Now in her 20's, she has a few things to say in the article about her experiences.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of missing children in our country.  Many of them were sent here by human traffickers, sold on to predators and abusers across the country.  It's heartbreaking to think that Lucy is only one such person.  If only we were all more alert to the warning signs, we might be able to help so many more . . .

Peter

The lighter side of relationships

 

This cartoon is a fun reminder of the early stages of relationships, when one is still finding out about the other's haps and mishaps, mistakes and corrections.  Click the image to be taken to a larger view on the "Foxes In Love" Web page.

Ah, memories . . . !

Peter

Cognitive dissonance - ammunition edition?

 

Fellow blogger Eaton Rapids Joe mentioned Republic Ammunition in a recent post, particularly their low-cost primers.  I took a look at their product line, and was intrigued to find this.

Er... um...

I can understand wanting to give your better half (?) a Valentine's Day gift that expresses your love.

However...

Is it wise to give your (current) better half a Valentine's Day gift that he/she can use against you if they (or you) decide that he/she/you is no longer their/your better half?

Not the sort of "target market" in which I'd like to participate!

Peter

That's mind-boggling...

 

Courtesy of a link provided by DiveMedic, we learn that human breast milk is one of the most complex systems nature has ever devised.

Milk is not just nutrition.
It is information.

. . .

When a baby nurses, microscopic amounts of saliva flow back into the breast. That saliva carries biological signals about the infant’s immune system. If the baby is getting sick, the mother’s body detects it.

Within hours, the milk changes.

White blood cells surge.
Macrophages multiply.
Targeted antibodies appear.

When the baby recovers, the milk returns to baseline.

This was not coincidence.
It was call and response.

A biological dialogue refined over millions of years. Invisible—until someone thought to listen.

. . .

Milk changes by time of day.
Foremilk differs from hindmilk.
Human milk contains over 200 oligosaccharides babies can’t digest—because they exist to feed beneficial gut bacteria.
Every mother’s milk is biologically unique.

. . .

Milk has been evolving for more than 200 million years—longer than dinosaurs walked the Earth. What we once dismissed as simple nourishment is one of the most sophisticated communication systems biology has ever produced.

Katie Hinde didn’t just study milk.
She revealed that nourishment is intelligence.
A living, responsive system shaping who we become before we ever speak.

There's more at the link.

That may be one of the most mind-blowing scientific analyses I've ever read.  I had no idea . . . and I guess most of the scientific and health community didn't, either.  It took one researcher who caught a glimpse of something tantalizing, enough to make her look further and go deeper - and she revealed a whole new wonder of nature.  Here's a TED talk she gave in 2018, before much of the most recent research was revealed.

The more I learn of this sort of complexity in nature, the more I shake my head at those who claim that evolution is responsible for everything, that we're merely cosmic "accidents", that there's no such thing as "intelligent design".  If there isn't, how does one account for the immense intelligence revealed just in the biological system of human milk - never mind everything else about us, and about life?

I know we'll never agree on that, but that's OK.  I'm just going to say, "Thank you, Lord", and leave it at that.

Peter

Boxing Day

 

The day after Christmas is known as Boxing Day in Britain and most Commonwealth nations.  I've had a few questions from American friends about why it's named that.  Wikipedia supplies a simple answer:

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest attestation from Britain in 1743, defining it as "the day after Christmas day", and saying "traditionally on this day tradespeople, employees, etc., would receive presents or gratuities (a 'Christmas box') from their customers or employers."

The term "Christmas box" dates back to the 17th century, and among other things meant:

A present or gratuity given at Christmas: In Great Britain, usually confined to gratuities given to those who are supposed to have a vague claim upon the donor for services rendered to him as one of the general public by whom they are employed and paid, or as a customer of their legal employer; the undefined theory being that as they have done offices for this person, for which he has not directly paid them, some direct acknowledgement is becoming at Christmas.

In Britain, it was a custom for tradesmen to collect "Christmas boxes" of money or presents on the first weekday after Christmas as thanks for good service throughout the year. This is mentioned in Samuel Pepys' diary entry for 19 December 1663. This custom is linked to an older British tradition in which the servants of the wealthy were allowed the next day to visit their families since they would have had to serve their masters on Christmas Day. The employers would give each servant a box to take home containing gifts, bonuses, and sometimes leftover food. Until the late 20th century, there continued to be a tradition among many in the UK to give a Christmas gift, usually cash, to vendors, although not on Boxing Day, as many would not work on that day.

There's more at the link.

As a child in South Africa, I remember my parents putting together "Christmas boxes" (usually envelopes) for the workers who delivered mail, bottles of milk, and other services to our home.  They'd give them to the workers a couple of days before Christmas, rather than the day after, because so many of them would be hung over after Christmas and might not make it to work that day!

With the passing of the "servant era" in Western society, the concept of Boxing Day has died away, too.  I think that's a pity.  It's worth remembering those on whose service we rely every day of the year, and acknowledging that in some practical way.

Peter

An interesting conundrum

 

From Eaton Rapids Joe:

Are more people carrying "crazy-genes" then they did in the past?

The short answer is "yes".

As recently as 1900 in developed countries like Ireland, England and Germany, if your mother was crazy you were probably not going to live to see your first birthday ... In total, crazy-genes had a high probability of "dead-ending". In those days the pool of crazy people resulted from random meetings of recessive genes or in new mutations.

Flash-forward to the permissive, Welfare-State.

... back when "crazy-genes" self-extinguished we experienced a rate of approximately 5% seriously crazy people. Now the crazy-people genes are subsidized rather than exposed to Darwinian selection and the numbers are growing much faster (due to high risk behaviors) than the numbers of not-crazy people.

There's more at the link, including examples.  Recommended reading.

I hadn't made the connection in genetic terms.  Like almost everybody, I've noted the increase in the number of crazy-behaving "street people":  talking to themselves, gesticulating wildly even though they're not talking to anybody, behaving very oddly and sometimes self-destructively, and so on.  However, without thinking about it much, I'd assumed that much of this was due to the lack of mental health care (after the closure of most sanatoriums and institutional mental health care facilities).  I hadn't thought about the fact that the sheer survival rate of everyone, on average, also meant that more "crazy-genes" were also surviving, and therefore slowly increasing in proportion to the rest of the population.

So . . . if that's the case, how are we going to deal with the problem?  We can't very well simply execute those with "crazy-genes" - not and still regard ourselves as human beings.  On the other hand, we do them (and ourselves, and our society) no favors by allowing them to increasingly take over our streets.  What next?

Peter

Heh - seasonal edition

 

I do enjoy the "Foxes In Love" comic strip.  The author/artist gets so much right about human relationships.  Here's his entry for December 17th:  click the image to be taken to a larger view at the comic's Web page.

I would say "heartwarming", but I think "footwarming" is more the pursuer's intention!

Peter

Spicing up your (Regency) love life

 

I had to laugh at a review of a new book, "The Regency Guide to Seduction: Love Advice for Modern Heroines", by Lady Bennet-Down (an obvious nom de plume, but also witty).

The review says that the book "reveals how to introduce a soupçon of Regency romance into your search for a happily ever after".  Some highlights:

Here, in extracts from the book, the fictional author Lady Bennet-Down gives her tips on how to tackle the most modern of problems with all the grace of Austen heroines Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood.

First impressions

We’ve been chatting on the apps, and things were going well, but they’ve just sent me a d--k pic. What’s my next move?

The proper response depends on your sensibilities. Has this impromptu artwork left you thoroughly appalled? Perhaps a light quip or a sharp rebuke is in order. For example, “Thank you for that kind reminder to pick up some baby carrots.” Or how about a tactful silence?

Don’t be drawn into judgement too quickly

The time it takes to sip one sherry is not nearly enough to fully know a person or their suitability as a partner.

Dance like no one’s watching

If dancing isn’t your strength, remember: enthusiasm (and a shot of tequila) goes a long way.

There's much more at the link.  Entertaining stuff, particularly if you know your Regency period.

Peter

A good letter

 

Kudos to CDR Salamander for sharing a letter from Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll in preparation for the holiday season.  Mr. Driscoll addresses a long-standing problem, and offers hope.  Click the image below for a larger, more readable view.

I had some experience of that sort of stress during my own military service, decades ago.  Back in 2011, I wrote in these pages about a friend.

I remember Gavin, who was a member of a patrol that found a baby, too young to walk, sitting in the middle of a dirt road in a township, crying. As the point man and a couple of others walked up to see why the baby was just sitting there, the terrorists waiting in ambush blew up the landmine they'd buried beneath her, killing the point man and savagely mutilating the other two soldiers. Bits of flesh and blood from the soldiers, and the baby, splattered all over Gavin . . . across his face . . . in his eyes, nose and mouth.

For years, Gavin would start awake in the small hours at night, a scream of horror on his lips. "They blew up a baby! A baby!" Gavin's wife eventually left him, because she couldn't handle the strain of living with his nightmares. Psychiatric treatment couldn't break the cycle; nor could alcohol, or drugs (legal and illegal). Gavin took his own life at last, too tormented by what he'd seen to endure any longer, in the small hours every night, the parade of images across his closed eyelids. He was a hero in my book . . . and I'll always remember him as such.

There's more at the link.

There are too many like Gavin who never receive the help they need - not just combat stress and trauma, but the quiet accumulation of too many incidents, too much angst, too few friends.  I hope Secretary Driscoll's letter will help to reach them before it's too late.

Peter

Faith (sort of) and life

Stephan Pastis does it again.  Click the image to be taken to a larger view at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.

Any experienced pastor will tell you never to ask questions like that.  The answers might surprise you - particularly from children!

Peter

An alternative point of view concerning extremism

 

Yesterday I cited Rod Dreher at some length concerning right-wing extremism.  As usual, the responses were mixed:  some for his views, some against.  I find it concerning that some were absolutely dogmatic in their views - it was their way, or the highway, and their agreement or disagreement was absolute.  That's very dangerous.  You'll recall Oliver Cromwell's words to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Too many of us (including me, sadly) can assume that we are not mistaken, whereas our opponents are.  In many (but by no means all) cases, it would be a lot better for us to listen to the other side and see whether there's any common ground to be found, or a better approach to achieving something of importance to the society in which both of us live.

An anonymous reader, commenting on yesterday's article, provided a link to this post on X.com by a user calling himself "Wokal Distance".  I thought it made sense.  The reader who posted the link thought it rebutted Rod Dreher's perspective, but I think it does more to sustain it overall.  I decided to re-post the whole thing here, so you could compare and contrast them for yourselves.

I despise the Groyper movement, but if you want to understand where Fuentes gets purchase with young men I will tell you how it happened by telling you about my experience at the orientation night when my son joined elementary school band:

My 11 year old son son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents orientation night which was held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious to me why young men rage against the larger social system.

The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and various decorations that all invoked the various totems if diversity. Black lives matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging, and basically ever sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present. The advertisements for post secondary opportunities featured social justice education prominently, including advertising a course on indigenous ways of knowing" as something grade 12 students should pursue upon graduation.  Many of the teachers has "this is a safe space" sticker son their doors, and others had variations of "in this house" messaging on their doors or on the walls of the classroom.

The entire aesthetic which dominated the decoration of classrooms was the progressive leftist coded "in this house" and "be kind" aesthetic. As soon as you walked into a classroom there was no doubt as the the political leanings of whichever teacher occupied that classroom. The only way I can describe it is to say that progressive social justice activists have colonized the school and marked their territory. 

A woman in a mask (who was in charge) got up and read a number of land acknowledgements before acknowledging the contribution of indigenous people to ways of knowing. Standard leftist land acknowledgement boilerplate. Additionally, every interaction was done in the style of HR style professionalism mixed with progressive leftist coded gentle parenting.

When it comes to how the teachers behaved I am going to draw on both that night and the other times I have been at my sons school in order to explain it. To begin, the boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate modes of interaction and serve as the taken for granted way to properly interact and navigate the world. Almost all the authority figures at my sons school are women with almost no exceptions. One day my son found out that the school had hired a single male education Assistant, and my son came home and told me, in wondrous amazement, that he saw a "boy teacher" at school. The level of wonderment and surprise he expressed was on par with what I would expect if he had walked into school and seen a triceratops walking the hallways. 

My son often comes home from school and expresses utter frustration at the fact that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament are treated as though they were somehow inferior. As he is 11 (and being assessed for autism) he lacks the correct technical language to describe this, so it generally shows up as him getting in trouble for being insufficiently "gentle" and "kind" in response to various passive aggressive power plays and instances of bullying carries out by his more socially developed (often) female peers. 

To say that band night was feminine coded would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that feminized modes of behavior and communication were embedded in every single interaction. It was a totally alien environment for anyone who isn't well versed in navigating the social codes of progressive leftist institutional spaces. It was like the slogan "the future is female" was taken to be a command delivered from God Himself turned into an education program.

Now, I want you to imagine what it is like for an 11 year old boy to be saturated in that environment day after day. he is an alien in his own school who is treated essentially like a ticking time bomb who needs to be effectively managed rather than engaged with an taught, and he knows this is happening. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is  floating around in the ambient culture of the school system. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry (although examples of that exist) it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes, and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules, and standards of behavior cater to the sensibilities of girls and women.

This is the entire social system that a young boy goes through from when he is 6 years old all the way until he is graduated from university.

It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were  reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of Social Justice. What I want to  point out to you is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of  the average 11 year-old boy. He is basically told he has a host of social advantages (white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, etc) that he has never experienced and will never benefit from, and this justifies the system which he is immersed in. And the worst part is, if young men point any of this out, the very people who are doing it will look them in the eye with a straight face and deny that any of this ever happened. Making matters worse these men begin to figure out that the institutions have been used to advance a leftist political agenda that scapegoated their group (young white men), and when they point this out everyone in authority calls them evil bigots.

And all this happens during their formative years.

Now, Imagine you are a young white male.

You graduate from the school system and are released into the world only to find that the feminine modes of socialization pushed on you are entirely unfit for purpose. That the social skills you were taught fail utterly in both the job markets young men tend towards (construction, engineering, building, landscaping, etc) and have no purchase in the dating market where highly agentic, masculine, wealthy men have a huge advantage over the passive, docile "nice boy." On top of that, imagine that a great deal of the job listings that you peruse make it clear that preference will be given to women and "diverse" candidates, and that the job interview itself is full of shibboleths, coded statements, and trap questions meant to elicit responses that allow the hiring party to exclude anyone who isn't sufficiently versed in and aligned with the priorities of the DEI/Woke/Social Justice paradigm.

On top of that, that if a you do get a job you will exposed to various sensitivity trainings, DEI trainings, and intersectionality workshops in which your group (straight white men) are repeatedly scapegoated as the source of all the worlds pathologies. Laid at your feet are patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism and a great number of other social evils for which you are taken to be complicit in and have a responsibility for fixing in virtue of being a white male.

While all this is going on a series of scandals (COVID, Men in womens' sports, trans kids, etc) reveal to you the degree to which the institutions that make up the society you live in have adopted an ideology that is actively hostile to you because you are a straight white male, and have been denying you opportunity while scapegoating you for all societies problems and treating you like you are a defective girl.

Once you understand this, the real question is not "why are some young men radicalizing?" the real question is "why are there any young men at all who have not been radicalized?"

None of this is to excuse any of the extremist radicals who are attempting to harness the resentment and anger of young men for their evil purposes. The point is to get you to understand why young men will attach themselves to any voice who is willing to stridently call for the obliteration of the social system and ideology which lied to them during their formative years and is currently doing things which rob them of opportunities for advancement and success.

The institutions have totally blown their credibility with young men, and have completely destroyed young men's trust in institutions. Young men view the current set of social institutions as ideologically corrupt and totally illegitimate, and they view the narratives that emerge from those institutions as being expressions of as nothing more then a story told to legitimize an ideology which seeks to hold them back. As such, the institutions and their narratives have absolutely no normative pull on young Gen Z men. 

I am not saying the situation is hopeless, but unless you acknowledge what I have laid out here, and engage in a good faith attempt to understand what the school system, Universities, non-profits, HR departments, and other civic institutions have done to young men, you will never be able to gain their trust enough to lead them away from guys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Andrew Torba, and other pathological influences.

That certainly highlights why so many of our young men are attracted to extremism in one form or another.  It's a chilling condemnation of what we've allowed our schools to become:  institutions where our children are brainwashed and propagandized, rather than educated.  I can't think of a better argument for home schooling than the description above.

Compare and contrast that to Rod Dreher's perspective, as covered in these pages yesterday and ten days ago.  What do you think, readers?

I've come out of a background where differences of opinion led - literally - to civil war, mass murder, and the utter destruction of the fabric of a nation.  I've seen it at first hand in the Third World far too often to be under any illusions about how bad it can get.  I would far rather talk than start shooting, unless and until the latter option becomes the only way to defend what one believes in - and yes, I've done that, too.

Only those who've seen and experienced how bad it can get have any real idea of the ultimate development of the mess we're in.  Ask those who served in Mogadishu, or "hot spots in Afghanistan or Iraq.  They know . . . and they don't want that to come here . . . but if we don't get a handle on extremism on both the left and the right wings of our body politic, it's going to come here.

Peter