Christmas: A Season of Bravery

If you are a believer, then you probably believe that Mary and Joseph were devout Jews who practiced their religion with correctness.

I want to look at what they risked by agreeing to be the parents of Jesus.

Mary

Mary risked being rejected by Joseph, the man she was engaged to. Joseph knew that they had not had intercourse so Mary knew that there was a very high probability that Joseph would terminate the engagement and expose her as a fornicator. There was even the potential that Mary could have been stoned for committing the act of adultery.

At another level, Mary's family was very highly regarded. Her brother-in-law was one of the priests allowed into the sanctuary of the temple. Being pregnant before she was supposed to be would bring dishonor upon her whole family. Likely, she would have been disowned. 

Joseph

Joseph was a tradesman. Traditionally, his profession has been translated as "carpenter" but some scholars think it he could have been a brick maker or a potter or some other building trade. Their reasoning is that wood is scarce in the Holy Land and having one person working solely with wood seemed unlikely in a village.

It is almost a certainty that the crones would count the months from when Joseph took Mary into his house and when Jesus was born. They would look at his size when he was born and they would quickly figure out that Mary had conceived before they were married.

This will seem like a very, very small thing to many modern people...but it was a very big deal not so long ago.

The people in the village (many of them family members) would conclude that Joseph did not follow the rules, that he cut corners and "cheated". Not a very good look for a tradesman whose reputation pays his wages.

That would have been a cruel, hard blow to an upright man who took pride in his strict compliance to Mosaic Law. 

Flight to Egypt

Shortly after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Joseph, Mary and Jesus fled to Egypt to evade King Herrod's massacre of the infants. In some ways this is a repeat of the Jews fleeing to Egypt to evade the famine during the time of Joseph, son of Jacob.

In this case, Mary's time with Elizabeth, Jesus's birth in Bethlehem (not Nazareth) and the subsequent flight to Egypt stymied the old hags who would have counted the months and then wagged their tongues.

The message for us in 2025/26

Mary and Joseph followed the mission that God gave them. They knew the risks and did the right thing anyway. They had no way of knowing that other things would happen that would short-circuit the likely outcomes.

To me it is a message of "Do the right thing. Be merciful. Pray. Let the chips fall where they may." Don't be enslaved by the bad decisions we may have made in the past. This is what we signed-on for.

"The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."  Luke 12:53 KJV

Another Christmas Party After-Action-Report

The immediate ERJ Family Christmas celebration is in-the-bag for 2025.

Mrs ERJ and I will attend Mass tomorrow morning, but all of the heavy-lifting (socially) is done. 

Highlights

We have been enjoying beautiful sunrises.

Most of the high-calorie treats were sent home with the kids (Yeah!!!)

Our new son-in-law made the salad and we kept that here (Double Yeah!!!)

The presents were modest and everybody seemed grateful. Even the gag-gifts were well received.

I learned that my regular attire is now considered fashionable. The family fashionista informed me that New Balance shoes are retro-cool. And in the summer, so is wearing calf-height crew socks AND sandals. Ironically, the last combination was once known as "Senior Citizen birth-control" since it would NOT get you any dates. 

Nobody unearthed sensitive, unpleasant events from the past. We did talk about some times that were unpleasant but those were times when the family pulled-together and got through it; no victims but plenty of heroes.

Belladonna was dragged out to the swing set by Quicksilver. I learned that they both share a dislike of snakes.

This guy was pretty lively for an air temperature of 40F.  He keyed out as Heterodon platirhinos 

White Oak leaf included in the frame to provide a size reference.

"No fangs, none for me today" You can kind-of see the "hog-nose" that gives this snake its common name "Hognose Snake". One of his defenses is to spoof being a venomous snake.

I was assigned the job of relocating Heterodon.

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.