Weekly Meanderings, 6 October 2018

Last updated on: October 6, 2018 at 12:02 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 6 October 2018 2018-10-05T13:40:26-05:00 Scot McKnight

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With the Chicago Cubs postseason derailed after one game our baseball season comes to an end. We will be cheering for the Brewers and the Red Sox, with a slight advantage to the Brewers. We enter, then, into that liminal sports season between baseball and basketball, with occasional glances at football. The last four Octobers have been crazy busy in the McKnight family, so I think we’ll kick back and enjoy October another way. Spring Season kicks off in February where once again we’ll enter the chase for the World Series. Until then, enjoy these weekly meanderings in and around the internet, with special thanks to JS this week.

Moose poop art at Tirdy Works.

Mary is a creative and resourceful woman. She collects moose droppings with her bare hands and turns the poop into art right there on her kitchen table that you can put in your very own home!

I have never seen someone so comfortable man handling poop. You know what they say if you love your job you won’t work a day in your life!

HT: AM

Tipsy Birds

GILBERT, Minn. — Young. Tipsy. Traveling “under the influence.”

Police in Gilbert, Minnesota issued a statement to address a growing problem in the small city.

Drunk birds.

“The Gilbert Police Department has received several reports of birds that appear to be ‘under the influence’ flying into windows, cars and acting confused,” Police Chief Ty Techar wrote in the statement.

No, no one is intentionally slipping booze to the city’s birds. According to Techar, this unusual case of flying while intoxicated can be traced back to berries.

Certain berries in the Gilbert area have begun to ferment sooner than expected due to an early frost.

Many birds have not yet migrated south, and those still in town have been eating the berries up and, according to police, getting “a little more ‘tipsy’ than normal.’”

Techar notes that younger birds’ livers can’t handle the toxins as well as more mature birds.

“There is no need to call law enforcement about these birds as they should sober up within a short period of time,” Techar wrote.

From AP:

DENVER (AP) — Another rare Colorado River fish has been pulled back from the brink of extinction, the second comeback this year for a species unique to the Southwestern U.S.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to announce Thursday that it will recommend reclassifying the ancient and odd-looking razorback sucker from endangered to threatened, meaning it is still at risk of extinction, but the danger is no longer immediate.

The Associated Press was briefed on the plans before the official announcement.

Hundreds of thousands of razorbacks once thrived in the Colorado River and its tributaries, which flow across seven states and Mexico.

By the 1980s they had dwindled to about 100. Researchers blame non-native predator fish that attacked and ate the razorbacks and dams that disrupted their habitat.

Their numbers have bounced back to between 54,000 and 59,000 today, thanks to a multimillion-dollar effort that enlisted the help of hatcheries, dam operators, landowners, native American tribes and state and federal agencies.

“It’s a work in progress,” said Tom Chart, director of the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. “We get more fish out in the system, they’re showing up in more places, they’re spawning in more locations.”

O my, o my, but I totally believe it.

Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected. …

It would, then, be all too easy to draw the wrong inferences from Sokal Squared. The lesson is neither that all fields of academia should be mistrusted nor that the study of race, gender, or sexuality is unimportant. As Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian point out, their experiment would be far less worrisome if these fields of study didn’t have such great relevance.

But if we are to be serious about remedying discrimination, racism, and sexism, we can’t ignore the uncomfortable truth these hoaxers have revealed: Some academic emperors—the ones who supposedly have the most to say about these crucial topics—have no clothes.

Evangelicals and Race [HT: JS]:

In a recent New York Times editorial, Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute uses the same binary framing to argue that the forces of anti-racism have allies in unexpected quarters. “Religious conservatives,” she argues, “are far more supportive of diversity and immigration than secular conservatives.” They “have more favorable feelings toward African-Americans” and other groups who have faced discrimination. Religion might make conservatives stubborn opponents to same-sex marriage, she admits, but it’s been a moderating force on issues of race.

A thirty-page report, on which the editorial is based, lays out the evidence. Limiting the scope to Trump-voters, Ekins homes in on “religious conservatives”—those who attend church once or more weekly. The largest proportion of this group self-identify as evangelical: a full 60% (and 76% of the more than once-weekly crowd). The remainder are Catholic, other Protestants, a handful of other religious groups, or “nothing in particular.” ….

Sixty-seven percent of religious conservatives say racial equality is important; I take them at their word. But thanks to these sorts of misleading studies, well-meaning people don’t realize how much a part of the problem they are. This report is the product of a disingenuous fishing expedition: a hypothesis confirmed only by ignoring the totality of the data.

Evangelicals who want to become anti-racists should ignore right-wing think-tanks and the hagiographical narratives that make evangelicals into the champions of racial equality. Instead, start listening to those among you who experience the racism you insist does not exist. These activists, believers all, have said it again and again since Ferguson. White evangelicals, and religious conservatives more broadly, have a race problem—one hidden by good guy/bad guy binaries.

The appeal of binary thinking is not limited to conservatives; it’s found among all white Christians, including my corner of the religious world. Presumably, white religious Clinton voters see themselves as progressive on race, yet an embarrassing 29% of frequent church-attenders agreed that “if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.” That’s a full 10 points higher than Clinton-voters who never attend church. Sit with that for a moment.

A recent review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility noted that a binary “world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct.” The reality, she writes, is that “white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.” If white Protestant progressives want to take their place in the anti-racist charge, they must first entertain the prospect that we are the worst transgressors of them all.

Faith is not a product to be marketed with claims of perfection, it’s a flawed human experience in constant need of reform. Racist ideas are a cancer that has grown within American Protestantism, conservative or not, for hundreds of years. Addressing it begins with admitting there’s a problem.

Brett Molina:

Cutting back on screen time, along with the right amount of sleep and physical activity, is linked to improvements in coginition among children, a study suggests.

The observational study analyzed data from a broader study funded by the National Institutes of Health, focusing on 4,500 children between the ages of 8 and 11.

Researchers then compared time spent on screens, sleeping, and engaged in physical activity from that study against the Canadian 24-hour Movement Guidelines, created by the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology to advise how kids should spend their time in a given day.

The study associates kids who met the guidelines — which include 9 to 11 hours of sleep, at least one hour of physical activity, and less than two hours on screens — with improvements in cognition.

Researchers found even just limiting screen time or getting enough sleep had the strongest links to better cognition.

“Evidence suggests that good sleep and physical activity are associated with improved academic performance, while physical activity is also linked to better reaction time, attention, memory, and inhibition,” said Dr. Jeremy Walsh, the study’s lead author who works with the CHEO Research Institute in Ottawa, Canada, in a statement.

The study was published last week in the journal “The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health.”

The study found only 1 in 20 children in the U.S. met all three guidelines, while nearly one in three met none of them.

Must-read sermon by Beth Allison Barr.

Mandy Smith: A Romans 14-15 kind of unity. [Our unity is in Christ.]

But our unity is not based on agreement in all things. Our unity is based on our submission to Christ—a unity that is given, not attained. The problem is not that we don’t agree; the problem is that when we disagree, we behave in ways which don’t look like submission to one another, or to Christ, in our desperate efforts to make the Church “one” politically. Which only makes us more divided and anxious. And only makes us look less like Jesus. It only serves to reinforce the categories of the world.

Here’s an alternative: We can remember that regardless of whatever category the world puts us in, whatever candidates we vote for, whatever opinions we hold, if we are coming to those perspectives out of submission to God, we are able to remain in the same Christian category. We are in the “we shape our opinions and morals based on our submission to Scripture and the authority of God” category, and so we are one, even if our opinions differ. It stretches our imagination of what this Spirit is to consider that the same Spirit can fill us, different as we are. There is something we learn about Jesus, some way our own hearts are transformed when we choose to believe we are one with folks who are very different from us. In living with one another, in submission to Him and to one another, something happens in our hearts and we learn our identity is deeper than what box we check on a ballot.

Claire Hansen on Michael Sharp’s crossword blog:

To some, Michael Sharp is internet royalty. But many of his followers don’t know his real name.

Colleagues and students at Binghamton University know him as Professor Sharp, an English lecturer with an interest in crime fiction and comics. To crossword lovers around the world, he is Rex Parker, the witty persona behind one of the most influential blogs in the crossword community, a nebulous but passionate network of solvers and constructors.

Every night at 10 p.m. Sharp waits for the online release of the next day’s New York Timescrossword puzzle, downloads it, and typically solves it in three to 10 minutes, depending on the difficulty — speeds dizzying even to seasoned solvers. (On Saturday and Sunday nights, the puzzle is released at 6 p.m.) Then he publishes the filled-in grid online and writes a blog post. He details words he liked, clues he hated, and judges the snappiness of the theme. He’s unflinchingly honest. “No. No to all this … this is grating,” he wrote about this Tuesday’s puzzle.

And, with occasional help, he’s kept this up every day for 12 years.

When The Chronicle first interviewed Sharp, in 2008, the blog was just two years old, hitting around 6,000 visitors a day. Now, page views can climb up to 50,000, he said, especially on a Sunday, when befuddled solvers flock to it in search of an elusive answer.

As the internet morphs into a space increasingly controlled by content algorithms designed to funnel eyeballs to the hottest takes and hippest products, his blog, Rex Parker Does The NY Times Crossword Puzzle, has remained purposefully and stubbornly the same. There is no snazzy interface, no slick upgrade, just text, a few links, and a crossword.

Though the site remains a holdover from an internet era long gone, Sharp has had to navigate digital landmines only too modern: mindless bigotry in the comment section, politics on Twitter, and a readership that has become simultaneously more socially conscious and politically divided. In the past decade, his voice has shaped the way many in the crossword community think and talk about the tricky little puzzles they so love.

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