Posted for future reference

 

A Youtube short of about a minute.

The speaker says his piece and gets booed.

Paraphrasing (because I know some people dislike Youtube) 

Men: Do you live a life that demonstrates enough virtue that a rational woman will be comfortable submitting to your authority?

When you are probing unknown territory, do you squash down your ego and ask for guidance? Do you ask HER? That is what mature authority looks like; using the best information to make the best decisions.

Women: Do you demonstrate enough virtue that a rational man will be willing to risk dying to protect you? 

This is what "Women, submit to your husbands and men, love your wife the way Christ loved his church"means. 

What we call "Mental Illness" can be a positive adapation for certain environmental stresses

Is it possible that there are situations where "symptoms of mental illness" are positive adaptations?

Anxiety and Depression 

The two largest categories of mental illness in terms of number of diagnoses are Anxiety and Depression.

Anxiety: May I suggest that the ant in the story "The Ant and the Grasshopper" was driven by anxiety to store provisions for the winter?

Mass grave of Medieval famine victims

Getting ready for winter was not a trivial task in medieval Europe. The days of summer were long in terms of number of sunlight hours due to the high latitude. Peasants had to work as if the hounds-of-hell were chasing them every daylight hour. The name of that hound? "Anxiety".

Peasants who were not anxious starved to death before the next harvest.

Incidentally, people who are anxious tend to be great planners. They constantly play "What if..." in their minds and make plans to remediate those issues. Modern society sits on a foundation of What-if plans. 

Depression: Conversely, being able to sleep for 20 hours a day during the winter was an energy conservation strategy. Put the entire family into bed and throw all of the clothing and blankets over them and let the cooking fire drop to a slow-smolder. Relatively little energy was expended. 

If you charted the energy expenditures it would look like the flight of a woodpecker. A burst of beating wings and then a ballistic free-flight that was as long or longer than the burst of wings beating.

Not wanting to socialize was also a benefit. Lice spread typhus and those beds got lousy because boiling all of the bedding and then drying it all-in-one-go was beyond the means of most families. Socializing meant sharing lice with other families...lice which might bring typhus into your family. 

ADHD

It is notable that the surge in diagnosed cases of Attention Deficit, Hyperactive Disorder(ADHD) in boys approximately aligns with the removal of gym classes and recess from elementary schools? It also coincides with the time when kids transitioned from walking to-and-from school with busing being the predominant mode of getting to-and-from school.

A "good student" is one who sits passively and "doesn't make trouble".

There was a time when every person in the family had to contribute to the household economy. Those little boys would scour the area for twigs and sticks to cook the daily porridge. They would trap sparrows and catch minnows for the stew-pot. The child who sat passively and "didn't make trouble" was an economic dead-weight in terms of the family economy in a subsistence environment.

In older people, having a certain percentage of the population with ADHD meant that nearby tribes could not sneak up on your tribe. Nor were flash-floods and sudden wildfires likely to catch the tribe unaware if Billy was relentlessly scanning 360 degrees of the compass.

Finally, I had a conversation with a doctor who claimed to have ADHD.  His intellect was impressive as he quickly leapt from topic-to-topic. It is my impression that he was probably very good at diagnosing issues because he didn't get trapped or "overly-invested" in any one possibility. 

I have seen trouble-shooters in the factory get bogged down when they are "absolutely sure" they know the cause of a problem and then they try to bend the symptoms to match the illness. They would have been far more effective if they considered the four most likely diagnosis consistent with the main complaint and then looked for the best fit. 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

PTSD comes in a lot of flavors, but in some cases it keeps people alive on the battlefield. There are situations where actions must happen faster than conscious thought. Obviously, I am not talking about the PTSD where the person goes catatonic. I mean the PTSD where the patient explodes out of bed 210% awake and sprinting at the sound of whistling or a "pop". Maybe they smash the face of the person who is too close to them.

Summary 

Are these behaviors anomalies or is our current environment a transient anomaly? The subsistence agriculture in Europe lasted for roughly 3000 years. Warfare has been around longer than that. Industrialized education, depending on how you want to define it, has been around for fifty-to-one-hundred years.

Genetic Drift

An earlier post asked "Are there more crazy people now?" and the body of the text focused on how the pressures of environmental "triggers" have increased for most causes.

The genetic portion which is responsible for 60%-to-85% of the cases was not discussed in that post.

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

The short answer is "yes".

Life was a constant struggle for sane, well adjusted people in the slums of Limerick, Liverpool and Hamburg. It was fatal for crazy-people.

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.

Infant mortality in Ireland starting in 1930 at 85/1000 live births in urban areas.

 

Infant mortality in Ireland 1960-2020 ending up at about 3/1000 live births.

If you were a crazy-woman, your best chance of getting married was to get pregnant and "trap" an impulsive man. There was  a pretty good chance he was also crazy or was an alcoholic.

As her child, your best hope for survival was to be placed in an orphanage, which in turn greatly reduced your chances of marrying and producing children.

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

Anecdotally, one of our local characters who was called "Homeless Girl" had five children before age 25 and they were all removed by Child Protective Services because: 

• She was homeless
• She was addicted to drugs and could not care for them

Eventually, she O.D.ed in the bathroom of a fast-food restaurant.

The average woman in the United States has her first child at age 27-1/2 years.

That means that this crazy-woman had FIVE children before the average, not-crazy woman had her first. And all of the crazy-woman's children survived.

This is happening (with minor variations in the details) all over the United States and Europe. 

Numerically, that means that 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. 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

 "The Ramp Grove is a secluded old growth forest remnant along the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River in Washington State. We identified it on satellite images. We named it the Ramp Grove because it is an unusual ramp-like geologic formation with cliffs above and below. It starts at 1500 feet and tops out at 2000 feet."
Too isolated to log economically.

Hat-tip to Lucas Machias

Lessons from Jake Paul

 

A Social Media personality decided it would be a lark to go into the boxing ring with a top-tier, professional boxer.

The personality had a few photo-op bouts with ancient Mike Tyson and assorted wannabes and he didn't totally embarrass himself, so he decided that he was ready for prime-time.

I think it was Joe Rogan who called it. "Anthony Joshua is going to f___ing kill him." 

And Anthony Joshua did. It was like watching a hungry wolf execute a Golden Retriever. The wolf is a pro. His life depends on efficiently killing the prey. The Golden Retriever is play-acting. Jake Paul was not capable of defending himself. He was always a half-step behind and Anthony Joshua was reading him like a book.

Death of "...the narrative"

One of my kids asked me "Why are you so negative about Meghan Markle?"

If I am honest, it is because I resent her certainty that top-dollar script-writers and video camera-men are more important than decades of experience. 

I have a nephew who is a cook in Napa, California. He has been busting his ass for twenty years and has satisfying some of the most affluent and critical clientele in the world. And he will never get one-tenth of 1% of the accolades that Markle demands as her marriage dowry.

"The Rev" (my nephew) works 18 hour days and, with support, bangs-out  flawless 7 course meal for a wedding reception for 200 guests. From scratch. And he can do it four days in a row. Week-after-week-after-week.

He is not unique. There are legions of people like him in every city in the US. 

Markle does not even know how to hold a pastry bag. 

And the "...strong, independent woman..." insists on using her maiden name, except when she thinks using the surname "Windsor" is more to her benefit. Even though the only reason people pay any attention to her is because some dude named Andrew married her.

My super-powers

My super-power is that Mrs ERJ seems happier when I am around.

My dog likes me. 

Most of the time, my kids will respond to my texts if I ask a direct question.

I am pretty good at keeping gas in the tanks of our vehicles.

Beyond that, I am pretty humble. I have no desire to make a spectacle of myself by claiming to be more than I am. The higher the monkey climbs, the clearer the view everybody else has of his backside. 

Asymmetric Information

 

"Just Divorced" stick family

 

This is a follow-up on the previous post "Human Trafficking".

From the comments 

Milton, one of my regular readers commented about mothers needing to rethink the threat situation and then he added 

"...With a Mama Bear mentality and defensive handgun training (***last minute gift idea fellas***), let the gift purchasing be left to Dad."

Let me point out that he did not write "Purchase the mother of your children a firearm" because that would be a violation of the Federal Firearm code sometimes called "a straw purchase".

He suggested finding a certified trainer who is experienced in training WOMEN.

Women are not men. On average, women have smaller hands than men. From a physical standpoint they can have difficulty racking the slide due to hand-strength and upper-body strength issues. 

My sister had a boyfriend who bought her a Derringer in .45 Colt. Maybe not the best choice. Not my sister's hands.

Some women are extremely petite and will have a hard time "hiding" a concealed carry. Most women's clothing, especially for younger women, is form-fitting. Perversely, the firearms most suitable for deep-carry (like Derringers) have brutal recoil and limited-to-very limited ammo capacity. 

Women are more likely to be "talked down-to" when purchasing a firearm and end up with a firearm that they are not comfortable with. They are less likely to ask questions especially when men are around. 

Maybe the hardest thing for a woman to wrap their mind around is that they have to know when they pick up a weapon that the MUST be willing to pull the trigger without hesitation when the need arises. At some point there is no more time to "talk about it" or "call a friend" or "exercise conflict de-escalation techniques". If you wait for +100% certainty* then you (and your kids) will be the victims.

Asymmetric information

Going back to the scout cruising the parking lot looking for kids to nab at the local big-box grocery store. Most parents are going to think "My kids are responsible and would never open the door for a stranger." right?

Visualize kid(s) playing on their phones in a Honda Odyssey or Ford Bronco with the "cute" stick-figure family shown at the top on its back window.

Now visualize an older person in a Walmart vest banging on the window and yelling "Oh my God! Oh my God! Your mom fell and hit her head. She needs you right now!!!" What "responsible kid" will fail to rush to his/her mom's aid?

If the kid hesitates, the faux employee can add "She needs you to unlock her phone so she can call for help."

That stick-figure family that "mom" modified to stick her thumb in the eye of her "ex" just made her family a prime target because it gives potential abductors a credible back-story. They KNOW that the shopper is not "dad". They know that the kids will be hyper-protective of "mom".

We live in an era of Too Much Information. Most people share personal information as if they were writing in their best girl-friend's high school year book. Facebook is probably the worst offender but even a bumper sticker can share too much information. That information can be used against you. 

Incidentally, I applaud all of my commentors. You are very discrete in what information you share. Keep up the good work. 

Regarding the issue of "sensationalism"

There were 254 "Human Trafficking" cases (some involving multiple people) identified in Michigan in 2023. Is that a lot for in a state with 10 million people? Link

I sent an email to the person who shared the information with me. I asked for permission to attribute the quotes to her and/or for "original sources" to quote. I sent it at 5:38 p.m. on Saturday but she hasn't gotten back to me. 

I decided to exercise executive privilege and run the post anyway due to time urgency. I trust that my readers are mature and can decide if any "entertainment" I post on this blog applies to your situation or not. 

*99.1% certainty + redundant confirmation 

Human trafficking

 

A person who follows these issues closely recently informed me that we are at "annual peak human trafficking".

She said that the Super Bowl represents the largest "event" for the human trafficking industry. And industry it is. Orders are made. Delivery time-tables are specified. "Products" are delivered. 

For a kidnapped child to show up in Southern California (where the 2026 Super Bowl will be held), they must be scooped up this week. Fortunately for the kidnappers, the frenzy of Christmas shopping makes it easy to have a scout cruise parking lots and calling in "teams" to nab kids left in cars to play with their "device" while mom or dad is making last-minute purchases.

One reason this isn't covered in the news outlets and captured in the FBI UCR system is that there is a break-down in reporting as files-are-cleared at the end of the year. Law enforcement agencies have a limited number of days to report-out end-of-year data before the results are compiled... Overburdened agencies face a lot of "moral hazard" to disappear reporting incidents that happen in the last half of December.

Another factor at play is many "missing children" are assumed to be muddled custody issues as they are passed back-and-forth between separated parents. The Christmas-New Years period is probably peak-chaos for custody conflicts and it is easy to assume that "Brad" is being an asshole. Little does the custodial parent know that their child is in a basement in Detroit getting addicted to drugs to make them compliant in time for The Big Party in Southern California.

My source informed me that the largest demographic for "orders" are for children between the ages of 5-and-11 (gender not specified!). Then next biggest demographic this time of year is for white women between the ages of 35-and-70 for the purpose of "Harem Masters". And yes, they are also addicted to drugs.

The third biggest demographic is for minority men between the ages of 20-and-30 as "Pimps" to keep the "Harem Masters" in line. 

These people are all expendable. In fact, they become a liability as the party "fizzles out" and they become potential witnesses/evidence. All of those little kiddies seen in the Epstein photos? Yeah, they are dead.

I know it sounds like a horrible Liam Neeson movie but as I get older it becomes harder and harder to find any act that is so depraved that there are not people actively engaged in and profiting from it. 

Bottom Line

Take your children with you into the store when you shop or leave them at home with a responsible adult. Don't leave them in the vehicle. Don't let them bring their "device".

Keep track of them while you are in the store. Pro-tip, buy them helium balloons and tie them to your child's wrist. Leave the ribbon long enough that the balloon can be seen above the racks.

Order stuff on-line and have it delivered. It probably won't arrive in time for Christmas Day but you can point out that there are 12 DAYS of Christmas. Jesus himself didn't get his Christmas gifts until the Magi arrived and that was NOT on the day of his birth. 

Stay away from crowds!