Sheep and Goats

Category: My Books

  • Science Takes a Hit in Pandemic’s Aftermath

    Nobody’s trying to diss vaccines here—honest, I’m not. I’m just trying to write a commentary on evolution—to what extent (if any) can it be reconciled with Genesis? Why should vaccines thrust themselves into the middle of the discussion? No reason at all, that I can see.

    Except that Sean Carroll, author of ‘The Making of the Fittest,’ does just that. Many times I’ve mentioned this book in my blog. At last, he reaches the ‘dessert’ portion of his book that he likens to a full-course meal. He’s dealt with all the basics for evolution. He rests his case. Now, it’s time for dessert and after-dinner conversation—of which there is a lot. Now he launches into related topics. Two of them are related. A third is not.

    Carroll brings up Stalin’s science crony (Lysenko), who disregarded evolutionary teachings (as a bourgeois notion of the West) and consequently imposed mass starvation on the Soviet Union through mandated and misguided agricultural policies. Okay, that fits. He brings up how deniers are ever scheming to attack his cherished evolution and how they might be defeated. That fits, too.

    In between he sandwiches in a critique of those who practice chiropractic. “Spinal crackers” he calls them. (Let the reader use discernment that he doesn’t like them.) That doesn’t fit at all. What in the world do chiropractors have to do with anything? It’s as though his brother in-law went to a chiropractor rather than the doc Carroll recommended and he is still grumbling about it.

    I mean, his book is about evolution and the war against creationists. Chiropractors have no problem with evolution. At most, some will put a theistic spin on it, but there are plenty of scientists who do that too. Their schools incorporate evolution. What’s with this ax to grind over chiropractic? Ah, here it is: The “founding principle [of chiropractic] conflicted with the medically accepted view of infectious diseases as being caused by germs.” Well, that is certainly unforgivable but even so, is that enough for “spinal crackers” to earn his special contempt in a book plainly about something else?

    Oh, here it is: “The opposition of chiropractors to the germ theory of disease led to a resolute opposition to vaccination, opposition that continues among a substantial fraction of chiropractors today.” Well, maybe, but it’s news to me. If it ever did, suffice it to say that most have long since grown out of that notion. This doesn’t seem to placate Carroll at all. He is determined to eradicate the offending health regimen.

    Now, as it turns out, for many years, I worked in a field of repetitive motion that periodically took it out on my back. Many times I would pull a muscle leaving me in pain and almost unable to walk. Each time, my favorite chiropractor restored both posture and pain instantly. How he did it, I don’t really care. It’s not as though when my back heard that science doesn’t endorse him it went bad again. This is especially poignant as I have known many to suffer back problems, go the route of conventional treatment, culminating in surgery, and end up essentially crippled for life. Few of them are comforted by knowing their selected route was “evidence based.” So now, does Carroll put chiropractors on the kill list? Not on my watch.

    Not once did any chiropractor I engaged make any comment about vaccines. Nonetheless, what underhanded methods have they used to undermine them, according to Carroll? He mentions a few. First, they “doubt the science,” a sin that includes (1) “point[ing] to other measures, such as sanitation and hygiene, as the entire explanation for a decrease in certain diseases [rather than vaccination].” They also (2) question the motives and integrity of scientists, suggesting conspiracies between them and pharmaceutical companies—in short, that “their support for vaccination is motivated by greed, not public health.” They (3) cite dissenting views among “ardent critics who hold medical credentials,” as though those views are right, even though they are minority. They (4) make appeals to personal freedom. They (5) exaggerate harms vaccines might cause. However, Carroll says, “once the fog of disinformation clears and the efficacy of vaccines is demonstrated on a massive scale, most of the arguments provide weak refuge.”

    Funny he should say this just fifteen years before response to a worldwide pandemic took these arguments off the back burner and put them up front. These days those five points are reasserting themselves and it has nothing to do with chiropractors. The safety of the Covid-19 vaccine proved so flawed, its efficacy so overstated, and the curtailment of freedoms (point 4) so egregious during the pandemic, that not only do the Covid vaccines come in for intense criticism, but the furor has spilled over into all vaccines. One might even say that all of science takes a hit by thrusting it forward as though a poster child. Here Carroll’s book is named Top Science Book of the Year by USA Today, and he cannot stay on topic. He must veer from evolution to tackle a topic made prominent by its sheer irrelevance to his book.

    The obvious gaslighting that occurred during the pandemic has come back to bite them all. Were you to tie a millstone to the feet of every chiropractor and pitch them all into the sea, it would make no difference to current circumstances. Nobody, self included, would have ever predicted it. When you rile the masses, however, they research matters and end up doing far more damage to your cause than you ever dreamed they would. Speaking to Carroll’s point (1), for example, the CDC’s own mortality data reveals that in 1900, measles caused 13.3 deaths per 100,000 population. By 1960, the figure was .2 deaths per 100,000. The measles vaccine was rolled out in 1963. Thus, the chiropractors’ point (1) is exactly correct, at least in the case of measles. After a mortality drop of 98% had already taken place, a vaccine to eradicate measles was introduced. Its backers thereafter claimed credit for the entire drop.

    Not to mention that letting vaccines take over a job that nature or sanitation or hygiene or something was already winning is not necessarily a good thing. Turns out that when you force the human immune system to be on high alert for a particular pathogen, it comes at the expense of everything else. The immune system’s capacity is not infinite. Does this explain why mainstream vaccine experts highlighted in a 2017 study that children worldwide vaccinated with DTP were 10 times MORE likely to die in the first six months of life compared to unvaccinated children? They didn’t die from what they were immunized against, but they did die, at a ten-fold increased rate.

    Not to mention that most vaccines (not true of the measles vaccine, but it was of Covid-19) alleviate symptoms but do nothing to prevent transmission. This becomes counterproductive. A sick person who doesn’t know he’s sick stays in circulation and infects others. A sick person who knows he’s sick stays home and infects nobody. Though it be hard to imagine today, I used to look forward to measles, chicken pox, and mumps. It meant a week off school. The same thing happened with the Brady Bunch family, a sit-com from the 1960s. The eight children all came down with measles in an episode titled “Is There a Doctor in the House?” It’s “a slight temperature, a lot of dots, and a great big smile” due to staying home, playing Monopoly, and missing school. It’s very hard to gaslight someone out of recalling their own experience. Lest this threaten to happen anyway, here is a sit-com to confirm that my experience was nearly everyone’s experience.

    Believe me, look into these things and it is a hornet’s next you look into. So much for Carroll’s point (3). The dissenting views he complains of are having their day in the sun. As to his point (2), greed eclipsing public heath, I commendably don’t go there—but it is only by ignoring human nature. Somehow the most ardent cheerleaders of science envision practitioners of their discipline immune to the base forces that afflict the unenlightened ones. Tell Carroll to put on his pith helmet once more and get back to digging up fossils. Science takes a hit which it brought on itself. It made a massive authoritarian grab for the world, locking down everyone for years, forcing its will on them all, only to be caught with its pants down.

    As for chiropractic, ought we expand this to all alternative health therapies that Carroll would likely also have a problem with? Vincent McCabe’s 1997 book, “Let Like Cure Like,” discusses common principles to most of them: “These philosophies, both thousands of years old, have yet to be proved scientifically because of the limitations of science, not because they are not true.”

    It is left to the reader to assess this statement. Are there limitations of science? This is not the same as asking whether science knows everything. Its most fervent supporters readily acknowledge that it does not. The point of contention is whether science itself has limitations. Given time, could it figure out everything? The great divide hangs upon that question. It is given increased pertinency as science is the driving mechanism for those who would choose human rulership over the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ rulership of God. Will it truly enable them to “know good and bad,” as was promised in the garden?

    ******  The bookstore

  • An Equal and Opposite Expert

    Arthur C. Clarke is the wit who coined the expression, “For every expert there exists an equal and opposite expert.” He may have thought he was arranging a meeting of the two when he introduced Carl Sagan to Stanley Kubrick. They were both experts, and if their respective areas of expertise, science and filmmaking, are not exactly opposites, they will do for the purposes of this narrative. He hoped the two would hit it off. Instead, they couldn’t stand one another. Well—Sagan liked Kubrick well enough to all but assume takeover rights on his upcoming film, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. “Get rid of him. Make any excuse. I don’t want to see him again,” the director afterwards told Clarke.

    Clarke may well have thought of himself and Kubrick as equal and opposite experts. He, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov were the Big 3 of science fiction just then. Kubrick’s star was quick rising in the film world. His ‘Paths of Glory’ (1957) was acclaimed an anti-war masterpiece. Big budget Spartacus (1960) won four Oscars. Lolita (1962–you don’t want to know what that one’s about) proved his literary chops. And Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worryng and Love the Bomb (1964)—who can forget General Buck Turgidson shielding war plans with his hands as the Russian ambassador enters the room, as though hiding Scrabble tiles from a cheating opponent? Or when he later scuffles with that ambassador and is rebuked by President Merkin Muffley; “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” Or when cowboy pilot Major T J “King” Kong mounts the jammed nuke in his B52’s bomb bay to free it, then rides it down to earth, whooping and waving his hat as he triggers the end of the world?

    So when Kubrick sought out Clarke for an upcoming science fiction movie, the latter might have thought the collaboration only natural. Didn’t the writer have some short story (The Sentinel) in which aliens monitor another civilization to alert them once they’ve grown smart? The two hit it off immediately. Nor did it dampen their relationship (as Clarke feared it might) when he fessed up to the director that he was a “well-adjusted homosexual.” “Yeah, I know,” Kubrick said and moved on. He probably had already looked into just why the British writer lived in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and not his native England. He probably had not yet looked into it when Clarke first came to his attention, judging by his initial remark that the writer was “a nut who lives in a tree in India or someplace.” England was not then as gay friendly as it would later become.

    There has never been a good science fiction movie, Kubrick observed to Clarke as he proposed brainstorming for one; they’d all been garbage up to then. Clarke wasn’t so sure of that. There had been two or three good ones, he thought, but there is a time to keep your mouth shut. It certainly was true that science fiction at the time was considered just one small step up from pornography, and film adaptations were mostly monsters on the beach eating teenagers. It would take Steven Spielberg 30 years to improve on that scenario with his Jurassic Park dinosaur eating a lawyer.

    Sagan left his mark on the film, even if Kubrick did show him the door. He had advised that any aliens be not shown but only implied. Preserve the awe. If you show them and they are in any way contrived, it will be a letdown. If you show them and they are done perfectly, it will still be a letdown, since where do you go from there? Thus, the movie showed the deeds of the aliens, their devices, their abilities, but as to their appearance itself, they stayed as invisible as Yahweh: “No man has seen God at any time,” says the scripture. Nor would any see the aliens.

    There really wouldn’t be much difference between aliens and God, Clarke had earlier mused. J. D. Vance said much the same much later in a Joe Rogan interview, in which he promised to use his Vice Presidential office to someday look into accumulating UFO reports. His VP status means nothing is off-limits to him, he told Joe. It is only time constraints that make it so (welcome to the human condition) plus the fact that in government there are foot draggers a’plenty who impede directives of any sort. But he would get around to it. A dull stretch of time would surely arise to permit undistracted investigation, he said—though his interest was beginning to wane, since he knew many far more interested in the question than he, and if they had come up with nothing, he was veering toward the view that maybe there was nothing to be had. If so, he would be joining the ranks of Elon Musk who said that if anyone would know, it would be him and he’d seen nothing.

    The idea behind Clarke’s likening God to aliens is that any alien with the wherewithal to roam the galaxies and pay earth a visit would likely be indistinguishable from God. It wouldn’t just be the Gibeonites pretending that they were from far away. These beings would in reality be from unimaginably for away—and just try to fathom the technology that must be second nature to them in order to do that.

    Space Odyssey pretty much ran with this idea, first presented in The Sentinel. Its aliens are an atheist’s God-dream come true—they only bestows gifts and expects nothing in return. That God they can get behind—one whose modus operandi is the Dylan line, “Oh, whatever makes you happy, I won’t stand in your way.” If they entertain the Bible God at all, they are miffed He isn’t that way. They are miffed that he wants stuff and doesn’t just give stuff. It wouldn’t be so bad for them if he was like Santa Claus.

    So obliging is this Space Odyssey alien/god that the ending space-child, to the accompaniment of Also Sprach Zarethrusta, snuffs out in mid-flight (in the book, not the movie) the nukes that human governments have launched toward each other, taking for granted that they have learned their lesson and will not immediately build more. Many have been the science fiction scenarios that hold earthings a bunch of warlike losers who have not learned to get along and until they do any sane alien race is best advised to shun them. This particular alien race controls them by ruining their nukes, trusting (they don’t know much about humans, do they?) that they won’t afterwards complain about it.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Endless Grad Students to Propel Evolution

    Endless graduate students propelled by endless grant dollars explore every vestage of evolution theory. No nook is too obscure for someone to make a doctorate out of. All are programmed in the purely material Few thing to break from the mold. All are proclaiming their quest for truth. All equate their decisions to chemical reactions and somehow imagine such chemical reactions can discern “truth.” Not all, I know—that is hyperbolic. But it is the overwhelming trend. Better to hold up a stop sign to a tsunami than to attempt its reversal.

    Whereas, my people, as soon as you hop onboard, they will send you out knocking on doors on the basis that we are in the last days. So I won’t find much evolution commentary in-house. The pickings will be exceedingly lean. I’ll have to track it elsewhere.

    Thing is, if we really are in the last days—and one can easily make a case for it since every day reveals a greater trainwreck of human self-rule than the day before—then knocking on doors is just the ticket. The end is indeed “just around the corner,” even if it has proved to be one heckuva corner. No matter. When the court case is at last closed, the verdict pronounced that human rule aport from God is a disaster, when the books are finally closed on the experiment and it recedes in memory—a thousand plus years from now, will humans once again get it in their heads that self-rule is the way to go? Hopefully, Mark Twain’s words will apply, that a cat which sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. In fact, it won’t sit on a cold one either. Why? Because they all look hot.

    Meanwhile, it’s not entirely unlike when, during the Vietnam War era, I sent my buddy in college a faux form letter as though from the government: “This country has enough” followed by a long list of professions requiring a college degree, of which I put a check mark by the one he had chosen. “What we need now is soldiers! Enlist now, Kevin!” So it is that the Bible think tank, though there be many things to do in life, facilites the door-to-door ministry.

    Though representing a Western field that maintains nothing is more important than “spreading one’s seed,” after which evolution doesn’t give a hoot whether you keep living or not, they have collectively neglected that task to such a degree that their world threatens to collapse. You would think they would focus on why THAT is true. Why has the Western world effectively chosen collective suicide? Isn’t it Nero fiddling while Rome burns to be pretending that their chemically-determined choices have any meaning, much less that they uncover “truth,” when the very society they live in dissipates through lack of child-bearing?

    One might prefer the model of Genesis: Jehovah made the attraction between the sexes very very strong. He did not want to come along one or two thousand years later to a barren planet only to hear Adam say, ‘Oh….yeah….You did say that didn’t you? Sorry. I guess we just plumb forgot. So it is that for thousands of years parents would warn their offspring about premature sex, not always successfully. The young person would creep ever so closer to this tantalizing new force of sexual attraction, as though a spacepod approaching a black hole. Closer and closer they creep. It is so enticing. What is all this fuss from the old people, anyway? Suddenly he is caught in its grip and pulled into a two-mile long strand of spaghetti.

    It’s not the model that prevails these days in the West, at least insofar as bearing children is concerned. Western society ignores the most basic instinct in the world, as though pulling the plug on itself is the noblest aspiration one could attain. It’s not because they don’t understand quantum mechanics that would make them do this, nor why the universe accelerates as it expands, as though having the good sense to stay away from us.

    Only the monied and comfortable atheists can occupy oneself with the ‘how’ questions of evolution, undistracted by Rome burning. Only they, in their own world, can fail to see that it is burning, as they fascinate themselves with a worldview of chance their “evidence” points them to. Only they can be oblivious to how it cuts them off from the hopes and dreams that have historically driven humanity. Long ago (1920), H.G. Wells, who turned atheist over time, observed: “The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly. . . . The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued.” Then, connecting that attitude with an increased appetite for war manifested in WWI and soon-to-come WWII: “Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.” [Outline of History]

    They concluded that God was dead. They didn’t disagree with their own conclusion, but they were saddened by it. They knew they had lost a lot. Not so atheist’s next generation! They gleefully saw off the branch upon which they sit, in return for the ecstasy of no one telling them what to do! Our 70-80 years, with nothingness looming beyond, seems to them a great bargain. No matter if it ends in the nursing home with someone (ideally) changing their Depends three times a day! In his time, Ronald Reagan was, arguably, the world’s most influential person. Ten years later, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, he didn’t know who he was. Does this faze the next generation? It doesn’t seem to. For the first time in human history, relative comfort and ease is possible for most of us, provided we play our cards right and aren’t terribly unlucky and live in privileged nations. We can have fine homes, fine cars, cool technology. And that’s good enough for them! What could God possibly add to that?

    Sean Carroll waxes ecstatic over the notion of chance being the driver of our lives, with no sense at all at being cut off adrift. It’s another of his books, a more recent (2020) offering than The Making of the Fittest. This one is entitled A Series of Fortunate Events, the subtitle reading Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You. “Fascinating and exhilarating!” someone chimes in on the cover. Readable though the book is, that won’t be my chime. Mine will be more along the lines of the guillotine joke. For greater sadistic effect, the executioner one day had decided that candidates ought be placed on their backs looking up at the fearsome blade. Twice the machine had inexplicably failed. Twice the prisoners had consequently been released. But as the third candidate was fastened in place, looking up, he exclaimed, “Hey! I think I see what is wrong with the thing!”

    ******  The bookstore

  • Science without Religion is Lame. Religion without Science is Blind

    Science without Religion is Lame. Religion without Science is Blind

    Albert Einstein wrote: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Science provides the how of the universe, but religion provides the why, along with the morals and purpose.

    Given a choice of unknowns, most people will choose the why questions over the how questions—unless you include such questions as ‘How do I keep my head above water in an inherently unjust world?’ But that is really just a subset of a greater why: “Why is the world inherently unjust?” Moreover, one has to be comfortable and monied to be preoccupied with the how. Those with any significant struggling in their lives will more readily fixate on the whys. Each day will have its own anxiety, said Jesus. For the average person, there is precious little reward in fixating on the how. If your specialty of how persuades you that it is permanent curtains in but a few decades, where’s the reward in that? Bragging rights, maybe, strutting around to tell others how smart you are. One thinks of Jesus’ words regarding those doing acts of piety to be seen by men; they were “having their reward in full.” One also thinks of the Sherlock episode in which (per John’s blog) the public learned that Sherlock didn’t know the earth revolved around the sun. Far from being embarrassed, he shot back with ‘What difference does it make?’ How could such knowledge conceivably help in the day-to-day of life? Yes, I know, Sherlock is fiction, but his observation was not. That’s not to say the search for the how is bad. It is greatly welcomed so long as it stays in its lane. When it supposes it owns the entire road, that is another matter.

    It is a fine thing to be interested in reality, but it’s overrated. Define the benefits of being interested in reality when you’re only around a few dozen years to enjoy it. The entire field of poetry and art is stocked with people who are “interested in reality” only to a limited degree. Ought we them to knock it off and get real? At any rate, upon contemplating the very tiny and the very large, being obsessed with finding reality through science leads to results impossible to visualize.

    The goal here is to see how much of a bridge can be built between Genesis and evolution theory and to what degree (if any) they need be mutually exclusive. To that extent, one must be willing to sacrifice undue literalism on one end and undue extrapolation into ideas more speculative than proven on the other. One might contemplate that when we hear science accounts for only 5% of what is out there—that the 95% that is dark matter or dark energy we don’t know what it is and that they primarily are stipulated just to keep our present 5% knowledge intact, well, maybe even that 5% is not as sure as we think it is.

    It may just boil down to a difference in filling in the gaps. One side fills them in with God. The other side fills them in with mathematics impossible to visualize. At the tiny end, it is Feynman saying he thinks it safe to state that nobody understands quantum physics. At the massive end, it is dark matter and dark energy comprising 95% of what is said to be out there, and which James Peebles called “placeholders for our ignorance.”

    As to sacrificing undue literalism, that shouldn’t be too hard when we reflect that God doesn’t really have eyes, ears, a hand, an arm. The anthropomorphizing of God, used throughout the Bible, is clearly a poetic devise. We all know enough not to demand evidence of the bush when someone says we must not beat around it. Most Bible verses used to support the trinity teaching would, if they were seen in any other context, be instantly dismissed as figures of speech. Really, if you were going to employ a human analogy to suggest equality, would you not suggest one of brothers rather than that of father and son?

    Poetic devices all. The Bible is full of them. The beauty of poetry is that it doesn’t unduly hem you in. When something is written in “poetic symbolism,” who can say how far that symbolism goes? How much of it can be allowed in our road to reconcile Genesis with evolution? One might be reminded of a scene from Up the Down Staircase, a novel set in an urban high school. A student is given a grade of F for wrongly interpreting a poem. He protests, supporting his interpretation with the reasons for it. The grade stands. It even stands when he locates the poet himself, brings the fellow to school, and the poet says, “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.” But for the school it is ‘Once an F, always an F.’ The only satisfaction the student finds is in knowing he has changed school policy. From that time on, only dead poets are assigned for interpretation.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Darwin’s Bulldog

    This book I have in mind, attempting to reconcile Genesis with evolution, will not be anti-science. But it will be taken that way by mainstream science because of its ever increasing “my way or the highway” attitude. “Can’t we all just get along?” I will plead like Rodney King. No, will be the answer. We can’t. ‘All or nothing’ thinking, it is called.

    It is not really the evolutionists, per se. Darwin himself wasn’t that way. He saw no inherent conflict between his theory and belief in a First Cause. It is the atheists who have hijacked that field. Perhaps, it starts with his contemporary, Thomas Huxley, who was nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog.” You might well be apprehensive running across a gentleman with a bulldog. It recalls my own father-in-law, a gentle soul if ever there was one, calling out to his newly arrived campsite neighbors who were alarmed at his galloping pit bull come to greet them, “Don’t worry, he’s friendly!” Turns out he was, but not so Darwin’s bulldog.

    With these new modern atheists, if you express reservations, any at all, against evolution accomplishing all by itself the job of life, you are anti-science. I have called such people, not scientists, not even evolutionists, both of whom can be broad minded, but scientism-philosopher-atheist-cheerleaders (SPACs), who ram their anti-God dogma down everyone’s throat as the be-all and end-all. They are the epitome of narrow-minded. Bititish satirist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that science “could be as dogmatic as any Church, and with less justification, and its devotees as bigoted as any country clergyman.” He was speaking of the scientism-philosopher-atheist-cheerleaders.

    Most recently, that “my way or the highway” attitude has been showcased in connection with vaccines, thrust to the fore during the Covid 19 pandemic. Were you to express any reservations about them, any at all, you were summararily labeled “anti-vax.” I hesitate to go there too much, hoping not to be drawn there against my will, because it is yet all in the blender of history-making. Instead, I’ll try to confine myself to examples of intractibilty that have long emerged from the blender and are considered settled.

    One such example is that of Ignatz Semmelweis. In the mid 1800’s, the Hungarian medical doctor got it into his head that fever and death following doctor-assisted childbirth could be curtailed by washing hands and equipment frequently. Doctors back then would deliver a baby, having just emerged from an autopsy, only wiping their hands on their smocks! There were some sort of tiny “particles” contaminating the women, Semmelweis proposed. Doctors howled with laughter at such nonsense. Isaac Asimov’s ‘Guide to Biology’ vividly portrays Semmelweis’ presenting his ideas at seminars, with his esteemed audience mocking him, hurling catcalls! Doctors argued that, even if Semmeweis’ findings were correct, washing one’s hands each time before treating a pregnant woman would be too much work.

    Semmelweis enforced strict antiseptic practices at the hospital under his supervision, cutting deaths to under 1%, and it made no difference in their attitude! Colleagues ridiculed him his entire life, he suffered a nervous breakdown, says Asimov, and died in an insane asylum tormented by memories of women screaming in their death-agonies following hospital-acquired infections. With Semmelweis out of the way, his own hospital went back to familiar practices and the mortality rate climbed to 35%. You can read the bare facts in many places, but Asimov’s account is the most vivid I have come across, remarkable in a book that purports only to be an outline, a “guide.”

    Yet, it is not vivid enough. It gets worse. From Asimov, I took it that he suffered a nervous breakdown over the “cognitive dissonance” of knowing he could save countless women who died in agony if only the establishment would listen to him. Reality was much more sinister than that. Not only did his colleagues not listen to him, but they are the ones who consigned him to an insane asylum when he started to get too in-their-face about saving lives. It wasn’t any nervous breakdown at all! It was punishment such totalitarian regimes are known to practice, sending dissidents to psychiatric institutions! Whenever those atheists start prattling on about how scientists graciously change their views at the first hint they may be off-base, whereas it’s only the pig-headed religionists who “stay the course” come hell or high water, I play the ‘Semmelweis’ card.

    ******  The bookstore

  • We Must Not Make a God of the Gaps

    We Must Not Make a God of the Gaps

    “It was a dicey proposition introducing a monotheistic God in a polytheistic world. Could it be that the early Hebrew writers softened the blow by telling their tale in terms of already existing accounts? If so, this would be exactly what the apostle Paul did at the Areopagus in Athens, as related in Acts chapter 17. There, he too embarked on introducing a monotheistic God to a polytheistic people, which was also dicey and possibly illegal. He did it in terms of referring to a certain statue in their midst dedicated “to an unknown god”—they had gods for everything and didn’t want to miss one. ‘This is the god I am here to tell you about,’ he said. It was such an adroit approach that by the time his audience figured out that they didn’t like it, some of them did, even if it did imply changes to their way of life.

    “We need not second the explanation above, but perhaps we can roll with it if need be. It would explain some Genesis similarities to the legends and histories of other peoples. Borrow from their language, dress it up a little, update this or that, and you are good to go. Is that what happened? Maybe. On the other hand, academic opinion can turn rapidly. Maybe everything is just as written. One must always be ready for the next headline proclaiming, ‘Everything you thought you knew about such-and-such is wrong!’ But, for now, the time has long passed for scholars to take ancient Bible history literally. Instead, they regard it as though a product of an ancient Mark Twain turned deist: religious men telling tall tales. Can they be accommodated?” (From: A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen)

    In the same speculative vein, let us suppose, just for the sake of argument—you don’t have to believe it, we’re just playing here—that with God it is not the Michelangelo painting of Him stretching out to touch Adam’s finger, thus imparting life. Say instead it is like Tom Cruise lighting the fuse that sparks Mission Impossible, the mission in this case to establish life in all the earth. Say it unfolds the way the evolutionists insists it does, like one of those books featuring a 3D pop-up diorama. A lot of work goes into those books so that when you slowly open the page you behold the layered scenes sequentially unfolding, rising, and coming raging at you. Say life came about like that.

    Then, at a certain point, God says of the seeds he planted long ago, ‘Okay, how did that garden turn out? Hmm. Here’s one I can work with”—at which point he elevates, enhances, upgrades—call it what you will—a certain Adam, and loads him up with all the additional accoutrements to decisively separate him from the animals and enable him to respond to more intense cultivation.

    Any evidence for this? None. But then, people are enthralled with the Space Odyssey movie these days in which beneficent aliens did the same, so we cannot treat this speculation with less open-mindedness. One of the theories taken seriously today to account for the infinitesimally small likelihood that the universe would have developed to be amenable to life is that we are living in but one of a virtually infinitesimal number: a “multiverse” I mean, if this crock of insight is taken seriously, there is no reason that mine should be laughed off the table. “Can’t we all just get along?” Rodney King pleaded to the LA rioters before their continued actions indicated they couldn’t. That’s all I’m trying to do here. Besides, maybe my suggestion will soften out with context the brother at the Kingdom Hall razzing his Esau-like counterpart behind the now-phased out literature counter: “George, George, we try so hard to teach our kids that we didn’t descend from the apes, we read scriptures, we explain the pictures. We works so hard and we just about have them convinced—and then they look at you and they’re not too sure.”

    Still, as farfetched as the multiverse theory may seem, it is an attempt to come to grips with the crazy odds that would favor nothingness over the present universe. Even if it represents a solution more crazy, it is still attempt to solve a problem. You don’t want to be like the guy before the firing squad of 100 crack riflemen, all of whom miss, and you never stop to think that circumstance a little odd. With many scientists, that’s exactly what they have done. “Ah, well,” they say, “if they didn’t all miss, I wouldn’t be here. Let’s just leave it at that.” It is a remarkably incurious attitude from those who are supposed to have boundless curiosity. It is as though they take an original miracle for granted, then endeavor to explain everything from that point on.

    So then, at a certain point, per my musings, Jehovah injects some leaven into the top results of his evolution experiment, the hominids, and infuses all the additives to make the Adam and Eve scenario hold up. Work it through. Do what the mathematicians do in proving the square root of 2 is an irrational number. They start by assuming just the opposite!—that it is rational. Then they work it through to see if contradictions arise. One does. So they conclude the opposite of their initial assumption must be the answer. So work this revised Adam and Ever scenario out, too. Do contradictions arise? No. Does it leave plenty of gaps? Oh, yeah!—you can drive a truck through some of them. But gaps are perfectly permissible in science. You are not allowed to make a god out of them. Very well. Neither can they make a god out of ours.*

    *”the god of the gaps”—what a stupid expression! It doesn’t occur to these characters who employ it that one can turn it on its head and apply it the opposite way. Or insert it in a totally different context. Let’s say you are trying to prove your case in court but it is overruled because it has significant gaps in it. Trust me on this: it will not advance your cause if you ridicule the judge for making a god of those gaps.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Who Needs a Trillion Dollars?

    Days ago. (June 2026) Elon Musk touched trillionaire status, the first one ever to do so. This inspired on social media the observation (even if with shakey math) that if he gave a billion to every person alive, he would still be a billionaire. I couldn’t believe that he was so selfish so as not to do that—I could use a billion.

    Others wished him well. Here he is creating the technological companies that will save the planet, if anything can save it. Humanists one and all once hailed him as a hero, even a savior. Then he began to weigh in on politics contrary to what many expected, so it became necessary to recast him as the Devil. 

    I’ve heard him likened to Nimrod, which I don’t think is fair. Nimrod was mean. Elon is nice—unless you work for him and don’t put out 200%. In that case, he will fire you in a heartbeat. But he won’t push you off the mountain like Nimrod did. I was explicit with my cover designer that the depicted Tower of Babel for ‘In the Last of the Last Days: Faith in the Age of Dysfunction’ feature a small figure pushing another off the tower to his death in the exact place that the ‘My Book of Bible Stories’ picture about Nimrod (Genesis chapter 11) does the same.

    Moreover, Nimrod is described as “a mighty hunter in opposition to Jehovah.” Musk is not that. He said nice things about our Lord and the Bible when he was interviewed by the Babylon Bee host who asked him to do [From: ‘In the Last of the Last Days’]: a “‘quick solid and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior . . . Personal Lord and Savior. It’s a quick prayer.’ You have to admire them for it—even as you reflect that absolutely no groundwork has been laid. Just how does the richest man in the world  deal with that one? It’s a complete non sequitur from anything they have been talking about in a one-hour interview. . . . Musk is a great guy and all—don’t get me wrong—but he plainly has no background to commit. And he knows it. You can’t just dive into something knowing nothing about it. . . . He pauses. Upon processing the request, he allows how he ‘agree[s] with the principles that Jesus advocated, there’s some great wisdom in the teachings of Jesus, and I agree with those teachings.’ He mentions a few. ‘But hey,’ he adds, ‘if Jesus is saving people, I mean, I won’t stand in his way. Sure, I’ll be saved. Why not?’ Close enough, the host seems to feel. It’s not an out-and-out bullseye, but it satisfied him.”

    See? So he’s “not in opposition to Jehovah at all.” Frankly, I’d like to get him on our side. After all, there will be a need to get things up and running quickly in the new system and he might be just the ticket. Yeah. Get him onboard—though I admit, I can’t quite see him sitting quietly as Oscar Oxgoad is stumbling his way through the meeting for field service, let alone taking part in it. It would be like Dwight D. Eisenhower (who was raised a Witness) holding aloft the Watchtower and Awake magazines in front of the White House, their covers emblazoned with ‘Can Politicians Bring Peace?’

    Say, you don’t think he got that idea of sleeping on the center factory floor under a tent from Moses doing the same in front of the tabernacle, do you? (If he demands 200%, it is not as though he doesn’t give the same.) Could he be sued for copyright infringement? I mean, Moses did it first.

    Nonetheless, he IS running six cutting edge companies, all for the direct benefit of humanity, all of which could be likened to building a tower in the heavens—with some exaggeration, doing what no man has done before, encroaching on the territory of the gods. It IS a lot in that respect like Nimrod building his tower to the heavens.

    Watchtower publications seldom name names. Again, with some exaggeration (but not much), Elon Musk will be reduced to “one American businessman,” Donald Trump to “one American politician,” Vladimir Putin to “one Russian politician.” It used to frustrate me until I discerned the reason. It is the play they are watching. You don’t have to know the actors to follow the play. It can even be a distraction if you do. Moreover, naming the actors creates the illusion that taking out a hero or a villain would change the narrative. Instead, another actor who knows all the lines steps into the role and the play goes on. 

    Of course, another reason they don’t name names is that they don’t know them very well, that they follow names to an astonishingly small degree. Indeed, the one who likened Musk to Nimrod, though very perceptive, is outside the U.S in a developing country, fully engaged in the Christian disciple-making activity there. She will not be one to follow personalities closely.

    So the actors are not the ones followed. But man-oh-man! are they ever larger than life today. Both the heroes and the villains (it will ever be in the eye of the beholder who is who) jump off the page today, perhaps in itself a commentary of where we are in the stream of time. 

    As for trillionaire Musk? A trillion’s small potatoes to him. He just posted:  “In the future, a trillion times a trillion dollars will be spent on making antimatter to travel to other star systems.” Yep. big spending ahead, if the future goes his way. You’re not going to the stars on impulse engines, anymore than the forces that enable micro evolution to reach target are going to do the same for macro.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Alan Greenspan Dies at 100–Mentioned in Tom Irregardless and Me

    No ax to grind here. It is no small feat to live to 100 years of age. He was a wit in his day, looked up to by all, until it all crashed. The debacle he presided over made an apt addition to chapter of ‘Tom Irregardless and Me,’ which I wrote in 2016:

    “An observer might well suppose that the entire purpose of the [2007] meltdown was to chastise Alan Greenspan. As head of the Federal Reserve for 19 years prior to the 2007 economic collapse, did he not, per Ricky Ricardo, have a lot of ‘splainin to do? He attempted it before Congress:

    “‘We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures. You, importantly, represent those on whose behalf economic policy is made, those who are feeling the brunt of the crisis in their workplaces and homes. I hope to address their concerns today.’

    “This is the same Alan Greenspan whose voice to the financial community was once as that of God. As chairman of the Reserve, he’d issue statements regularly about interest rate policy. He’d make the statements incomprehensible; it was almost a game. He’d rehearse them in his head. If they could be understood, he’d rework them. Finance people would strain to discern his real intent, but of course, the task was impossible by design. Far from becoming fed up with such obscuration, they took it all for brilliance! Whereas any street person would instantly recognize a con, the bankers hailed it all as wisdom from on high.

    “Mr. Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, left to clean up the mess, was more straightforward in his speech. Mr. Greenspan himself became that way addressing Congress. He dropped the smart-alecky double talk. His words were clear. And not pretty:

    “‘Given the financial damage to date, I cannot see how we can avoid a significant rise in layoffs and unemployment. Fearful American households are attempting to adjust, as best they can, to a rapid contraction in credit availability, threats to retirement funds, and increased job insecurity. All of this implies a marked retrenchment of consumer spending as households try to divert an increasing part of their incomes to replenish depleted assets, not only in 401Ks but in the value of their homes as well.’

    “No more smug cuteness, building indecipherable word castles. For, alas,

    “‘those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself particularly) are in a state of shocked disbelief.’

    “Mr. Greenspan went on to discuss what had triggered the collapse:

    “‘In recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing system has evolved, combining the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts supported by major advances in computer and communications technology. A Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the pricing model that underpins much of the advance in derivatives markets. This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria.’

    “Note the absolute failure of the best and the brightest, the cream of the crop of human experts. A Nobel Prize was even awarded for the economic model that would ruin everybody!

    “Not everybody, Tom,” Mr. Strawman observed. “My portfolio recovered. I held on.” True enough: When Bob Pittance saw his net worth chopped in half, he panicked and sold all his holdings, saying that half is better than nothing. When Billy Banks saw his net worth chopped in half, he said: “Well, I guess if I have to, I can live on a half billion,” and snapped up Bob’s fire sale stocks. (and boasted about it afterward!) With wealth transfer complete, it was ‘pedal to the metal!’

    “Mr. Greenspan’s final statement is breathtaking for its admission of stupidity: Nobody thought to test the model outside of party time,“a period of euphoria.” Nobody thought the real world might differ from the party world. Isn’t there some scripture somewhere about how you can’t trust nobles as far as you can spit?

    “As with the opioids that killed Prince, there is a fatal flaw. It is a flaw that would instantly be spotted by any commoner were the scoundrels not so deliberately intent upon muddying the waters for reasons of greed. The opioid company wanted a grand slam with their new drug. The finance people wanted to party on with other people’s money. They should have had Bible education, but they had only the world’s university education.

    “Does this again not validate how Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t bow and scrape over today’s higher education? They use the world’s education system to acquire the skills necessary to make a living. But as for acquiring wisdom from that source, they’re not keen on it. Within their congregations, they defer to training that addresses the more important moral concerns. For them, that goal is achieved in the context of Bible education.”

    ******  The bookstore

  • Critical Thinking Will Not Save Us

    What is today known as “critical thinking” is a product of the mindset that adheres to the Darwinian model. Adherents to that model all but have a patent on the phrase. Misunderstanding this, modifying the term to fit their own ends, even those taking their cues from the Bible will speak of how they, too, employ “critical thinking,” as though they are not to be outdone by skeptics using the phrase. But it is in vain. Critical thinking, by definition, totally denies miracles. The Bible records many of them. They are to be appreciated through what Paul calls “the eyes of faith.”

    “Critical thinking” is not a mere modern manifestation of the “reasonableness” or “soundness of mind” that the Bible recommends for all Christians. It is the skeptic’s means of discarding faith. It is the skeptic’s way of saying those eyes of faith have cataracts in need of removal. I never use the term, though I understand how some Christians might. It becomes like the conniving doctor from The Fugitive advising detectives that they will never catch Richard Kimble because “he’s too smart.” Whereupon, one of those detectives says, “Well—we’re smart, too,” and a cacophony breaks out with his fellows declaring how smart they are. So it is with the skeptics. You don’t want to accede to them a monopoly on smarts. We’re smart, too, even if we don’t accept all of their premises.”

    (From: A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen)

    Elsewhere in the book, there is a section discussing the difficulties in recording history, which is not objective but very subjective. The book adds that, “Historian Allan Guelzo is dubious about the saving value of critical thinking, due to its effect of “cloaking human foible beneath a veneer of science.”

    But I may bang away at this too much, to the point where some all but blow a gasket. It’s just that vast swaths of the world has replaced “All You Need is Love” with “all you need is critical thinking,” and notion that CT is the secret potion that will solve all is so absurd that I just can’t restrain myself. To clarify, I’m not against it if kept in its place. It’s fine insofar as it goes. But it is not capable of going the distance. It is the repairman who shows up for the job with a toolbox stuffed with wrenches when a screwdriver is needed. Worse yet, he is unsure that screwdrivers really exist. Yes, he has heard anecdotally of such things, but how can he be sure they really are valid?

    I should have inserted “in effect” to make it, critical thinking effectively denies miracles, not that it outright does. As Luke Timothy Johnson put it in a lecture regarding the historical-critical method of examining scripture:

    “the historian cannot take up anything having to do with the transcendent or the supernatural. Therefore, the historian cannot talk about the miraculous birth of Jesus, his miracles, his walking on the water, his transfiguration, his resurrection from the dead and so forth. Well, fair enough, the historian can’t talk about those things, but that methodological restraint . . . very quickly becomes implicitly an epistemological denial, that is the historian can’t talk about these things, therefore they are not real.” 

    So the method embracing critical thinking is okay so long as someone does not suppose their critical thinking is the be-all and the end-all, that it’s fine as far as it goes but it doesn’t go everywhere. But if they DO think critical thinking is the be-all and end-all, then the statement of the book is true as-is: ‘critical thinking denies miracles.’

    …It only becomes a problem when people begin to suppose anything other than critical thinking is not thinking at all. Alas, during these days of exalting science, many people DO suppose that. Elsewhere in that lecture, Johnson likens that historical critical method to a Trojan horse. It is eagerly accepted by schools of theology, for who wants to disdain history? and who wants to be thought uncritical? But once wheeled inside, it releases the troops of faith’s destruction.

    …..I think there are many ways of evaluating information. Who can say the process through which one triumphs over the other in a given situation. There is a character in a certain John LeCarre novel who “believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them.” I never want to be that character and I think to restrict oneself to any one way of analyzing information assures that one will be. To that character, “human nature was one vast unsavory quagmire.” At the very least, that statement verifies what I have found in life, that critical thinking is not the optimal tool for comprehending human nature.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Moab the Blowhard: Isaiah 16

    With the congregation schedule calling for Isaiah 14-16 to be considered, I was a little bummed to be assigned the 16th chapter for the oral Bible reading. 14 looks more interesting. That’s the one where the Grave is greeting newcomers, as though Mick Jagger, ‘Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name. Didn’t you used to be a hotshot back in the day?’ I avoided that song for a long time upon becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. How can a Christian show “sympathy for the devil?” But, in time I discovered it’s not sympathy for him at all—it’s just an expose of his methods.

    Sympathy for ‘Sympathy for the Devil’

    In the case of Isaiah 14, it is ‘sympathy for Sheol,’ usually translated the Grave—big G because it is not an individual grave but the fate of all humankind. Good or bad, it makes no difference. It is also anthropomorphized. It’s not a place of conscious existence. Isaiah 14 is very much in the spirit of Odysseus popping in on Hades during his long voyage home. ‘Man, it sucks here,’ everyone tells him. But it is only a metaphorical place—the state of the dead.

    Ah, well—no use pining away for what isn’t. For me, it is Isaiah 16. Maybe it’s sort of a penance for me for squabbling with my brother when we were both kids. 16, too, is sort of a sibling rivalry on steroids, except it is cousins, not siblings. There is a long, long history of bad blood between Moab and Israel and in 16 it comes to a head. It was Moab who long ago hired a prophet called Balaam and sent him into Israel just to mess with them. As for me, I long ago got over my contentions with my brothers. Though, there are times when I review family photos, like this one, and feel bitter regret that I did not ram his fat head into this cake. I mean, it was a perfect opportunity and I let it slip right through my fingers. It has tormented me my entire life:

    Isaiah 16 begins—it’s a missive to Moab: “Send a ram to the ruler of the land, From Sela through the wilderness To the mountain of the daughter of Zion.” Yeah, that’s what I wanted my brother to do for me: send me a tribute! I was the “ruler of land.” I was the firstborn! That means he should kowtow to me. Instead, he did everything in his power to annoy me!” 

    “Sorry, Tom” he says now, “it was just that you were so easy to annoy.” I was not! And even if I was, wasn’t I the firstborn? Where did I read that the second-born causes major upheaval in a family, since the parents now have to split their attention?

    There are some real overtures to Moab in the next few verses, that they will do the right thing in the face of Assyrian onslaught and show mercy to the refugees. “Conceal the dispersed and do not betray those fleeing.” (vs 3) But then, Isaiah has to go talking Jesus to them (vs 5) and it all comes to naught because they already gots their own church—that of Chemoth. (Grumble, grumble—what’s a wannabe Bible scholar to do? When I enter Moab’s god, Chemoth, AI changes it to “chemotherapy.”)

    Alas, we come to the real problem with verses 6-7:

    “We have heard about the pride of Moab—he is very proud— His haughtiness and his pride and his fury; But his empty talk will come to nothing. So Moab will wail for Moab.” THAT’S who they will be concerned for: themselves.

    Why do I take such perverse satisfaction in the fact that Stanley Kubrick, the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, couldn’t stand Carl Sagan? ‘Keep that supercilious fellow away from me,’ he told his collaborator Arthur C. Clarke, who had thought their initial luncheon date had gone well. I think it is a lifetime of Bible training to the effect that modesty is more befitting in a human than pride. There are enough brilliant people around who are humble (Kubrick was one of them, consistently described as friendly, unassuming, and even a “peasant” in Michael Benton’s book on the making of 2001) that to suffer through an arrogant jerk is simply unnecessary—unless you are unfortunate enough to find yourself working for him.

    Cornell, where he hails from as a professor who never showed up to teach class, treats him as a god. The “Sagan Planet Walk,” a scale model of the solar system, characterizes that town, spanning three quarters of a mile, with the sun in the Ithaca Commons. Notwithstanding that Kubrick didn’t like him, he invited him and a few other leading scientists to introduce 2001, because he feared the movie might be too far ahead of its time. Sagan was the only one who wanted payment. He was the only one to demand editorial control. The offer was withdrawn. 

    If he had ever ordered his wine from Moab, he would have found that offer was withdrawn to. A one-time agricultural powerhouse, though Moab’s vineyards “reached as far as Jazer,” extended “into the wilderness,” and “spread out and gone as far as the sea,” (implying exports) it would all come to nothing when Assyria was through. (vs 8-9)

    If he strutted around in life, nonetheless, Sagan was humble in death—I’ll give him that. His gravesite is in Ithaca’s Lakeview Cemetery, a serene and park-like place on the hillside. It features a simply headstone, not the 2001-like monolith that one might expect. As though it was, however, pilgrims will leave blue marbles as tributes referencing his “Pale Blue Dot” characterization of the earth from space. It recalls for me a plea on social media from a scientist to his fellows that they be “intellectually humble.” Is humility such a quality that you can sub-divide it, that as long as you are intellectually humble, you don’t have to worry about being actually humble? 

    It sort of recalls what I wrote in ‘A Workman’s Theodicy’ about the social benefits of being as scientist: “It’s a good gig to be a scientist. You don’t see poverty. You don’t see dirt. You get to hang out with smart people at the university. Everyone you meet likes to read. To be sure, you do see plenty of proud and stubborn people, but as a fellow scientist, they admit you into the club. What’s not to like? You get to hang up in your lab Far Side cartoons, such as the one of the scientists fleeing the lab like kids in frock coats upon hearing the ting-a-ling of the ice cream man—nobody enjoys those cartoons more than scientists, I am told.”

    But enough of bashing scientists. I’m just envious because I missed the boat on that one. It’s Moab’s pride that we’re talking about.* Here it is revealed in the Mesha Stele (Moabite Stone). It’s a black basalt monument erected around 840 BCE by King Mesha of Moab. It stands about 3–4 feet tall, inscribed with 34 lines in the Moabite language, a Canaanite dialect very close to Hebrew, written in a Phoenician-related script. The original was destroyed but not before a paper-mâché impression was made of it, which not sits in Louvre Museum in Paris. On it, Mesha boasts how Chemosh totally crushed Israel. “Israel has perished forever!” it reads. A light dusting, the Bible itself reveals at 2 Kings 3.

    These ancient kings were invariably blowhards. Their scribes had no choice but to record victories, if they valued their heads. Typically, the would up the numbers along the way, to keep their bosses happy. Bob Brier, the Egyptologist tells of one pharoah who records stunning victory after victory, each one closer to home, as he was retreating. It is in striking contrast to Bible writers, who recorded not only Israelite victories, but also defeats.

    The Mesha Stele is also the earliest known reference to the Tetragrammaton, outside of the Bible itself. There is, arguably an earlier Egyptian reference, but it is in that language and thus is truncated to three consonants, making in a ‘Trigrammaton’—who gives a hoot about one of those?

    *(the expression ‘That’s what I’m talkin’ about’ is so dumb that it became an instant hit in our family. Even my 90-year-old dad, upon laying down a Scrabble word, would say, ‘That’s what I’m talkin’ about.’ This is the same dad whom I never knew had a Jersey accent until one day when my daughter took to imitating him.)

    ******  The bookstore