NYC and Mamdani Deserve Each Other

 J. R. Dunn has a post today at the American Thinker entitled Let's not save the Dems this time. He makes a number of good points including one that is often attributed to Napoleon: “never interrupt when your enemy is in the process of destroying himself.”

As the clock ticks down the last days before the 2025 elections, we’re hearing more calls for the GOP and conservatives in general to intervene in the NYC election to prevent Zohran Mamdani from being elected mayor.

What we don’t hear is an answer to the question of why? Why, exactly, should the GOP and the MAGA movement waste time, effort, and political capital to prevent the Democrats from throwing themselves off the cliff? Why write another chapter in the never-ending saga of Republicans pulling Dem chestnuts out of the fire and the getting kicked in the face immediately afterward?

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The Dems, so we’re told, having come to their senses, will realize what the Republicans have spared them from and will be grateful. New York voters, with their customary insight and depth of perception, will reward the GOP with showers of votes. In other words, we’ll witness something that has never happened and never will.

What will happen instead is this: voters will see the GOP tossing away the principles and practices of MAGA just as they were beginning to bear fruit. They will see conservatives supporting one virulent social democrat over another for no rational reason. They will see the Uniparty in action. And they will respond as they always have: by walking away.

Dunn is correct here. New York voters have continually voted for Leftists like Bill DeBlasio and as Dunn notes elsewhere have spit on Rudy Giuliani who made New York again a tourist destination. What, pray tell, does the GOP owe to the party that started the Civil War, and apparently want to start another, who riot at the drop of a hat and maintain actual paid rioters. These people actively interfere with Trump's order to carry out the law and kick illegals out.  They flood the streets with criminals who should be in jail.  These people deserve everything Mamdani can deliver to NYC.

The impulse to save New York City doesn’t play, either. New York City doesn’t want to be saved. This is the city that elected Bill DeBlasio to two terms – in landslides, to boot. That sent Sandy O to Congress. That has reelected Chuck Schumer repeatedly. This is the city that had not one good word to say for Rudy Giuliani, the man who effectively destroyed the Mafia’s control of key city industries and who bought NYC an extra twenty years of life as mayor, when he was targeted by the Left. They’ve made their bed, and I wish them the joy of it.

I've highlighted the key issue. New York City doesn't want to be saved, didn't asked to be saved, and will just resent it if the GOP steps in to save them. There is another proverb here that applies: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." It reminds of Christians who think they are being kind by attempting to send missionaries to the unchurched. But all they do is make the people they are trying to save angry. Instead, they should stand ready to give a defense for why they have hope and let the Holy Spirit do the rest.

I encorage gentle readers to read the whole post.

Nutrient Partitioning and the Inability To Lose Fat

 Following onto yesterday's post, I get a weekly missive (I think they call these newsletters) from Dr. Michael Eades, one of two authors of The Protein Power Life Plan which advocates for a low carbohydrate lifestyle. Eades himself has said that the plan is really a high fat diet, but that the publishers felt this wouldn't sell because of the way fats have been demonized.

Featured in this week's Arrow is a piece by Adam Kosloff on nutrient partitioning entitled The Rats Who Starved to Death While Obese. The article is both disturbing and interesting. It is disturbing not because of the starvation of the rats, as disturbing as that is, but what it has to say about human obesity. It is also disturbing because it points to the blindness of doctors and dieticians to the suffering of their patients.  I encourage gentle readers to read Kosloff's article.  In many cases, these nutritionists are as cold as liquid nitrogen to our sufferings.

Using a low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet, I have gotten my weight down to 225 from a high of 307. Yet I have been unable to get any lower for at least 6 months. This despite starting a jogging program and keeping my calorie consumption around 1500-1800 calories per day. There is something else going on. At those low-calorie consumption levels, if the Calories In/Calories Out (CICO) formula worked I would be losing a pound every week and a half conservatively. But the Carb-insulin-hypothesis (CIH) doesn't explain the problem fully either. It gets closer but doesn't quite close the gap in understanding.

I have noted that I can gain weight, meaning fat, by just smelling a piece of pie. That may or may not be true, but it illustrates the problem. I have gained weight while fasting for a couple of days. Holiday eating consists of one meal, yet it takes weeks to get back into ketosis, and even then, the weight doesn't fall right off. As I stated above, I seem to have a lower limit to my weight that my body simply refuses to let go. I know of other people who have the same issues. There clearly is more to it than mere CICO.

(As a way to determine if I need to take in calories, if I am hungry, I eat protein.  If I don't have energy, I eat fats.  But I always have energy, so I am only concerned about protein intake which usually includes enough fats as well.)

Kosloff sums up his essay with three questions researchers should be asking:

The core questions should be along the lines of:

Why does the body partition fat the way it does?

Is that partitioning normal?

If not, what can be done about it?

These are the questions that actually matter.

And once we start asking these questions, perhaps we can stop blaming people for biology—and start figuring out how to fix it. Maybe then—just maybe—the torture of our mammalian cousins won’t have been entirely in vain.

The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same

I was at church yesterday evening rehearsing with the handbell choir.  Now you need to understand that we are currently experiencing stormy weather from at least two different storm systems with winds gusting to 35 miles per hour and rain that will continue for most of the week.  One of the ladies seemed surprised that I was there because I am an old fart and she thought couldn't get around well.  I pointed out that I jog 2 miles 3 times per week.  That surprised her.

Actually, it surprised me as well.  I thought I had run for the last time perhaps 25 years ago when I took to riding a bicycle.  I had always practiced running hard, and running hard all the time breaks the body down.  Bicycling did not break the body down, while still giving one the benefits of aerobic exercise.  Oh, and bicycling was fun, so much fun!

But feeling the need to build myself up after so much time spent in the hospital, then in getting radiation, I went for a walk.  But that was not enough to get the heart pumping.  I started jogging, it was too loosey-goosey to be called a "program," about 6 months into my recovery from cancer surgery.    Technically, I can call it a jog because both my feet are off the ground during every step.  But my pace is about the same as when I walk, about 20 minutes per mile.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was a memory from the early 1970s of a kind of training not unlike what I was experiencing called Long Slow Distance, or LSD.  LSD, the drug, was at that time a psychotropic drug that some proclaimed would open up the unused portion of the brain to all the wonders of the universe.  But it proved to be, as could be predicted, a massive failure.  LSD, the training method, turned out to be the then latest re-packaging of what has been learned and relearned over the generations.

Training by jogging long slow distances was popularized by then Runner's World editor Joe Henderson.  At the time, Henderson noted that a number of very successful runners, mostly distance runners, people who ran anywhere from 1 mile to the marathon, were training this way.  In his book Long Slow Distance: The Humane Way to Train Henderson points out that the speed that one is capable of running is a function of genetics. You are either born fast, or for most of us, we are not. Constantly training for speed will only shave a few seconds off your basic speed. But by constantly training for speed by doing fast intervals you will inevitable injure yourself time and again and may do more damage than can be repaired.  For the great majority of runners who run for fitness and the occasional race for a personal best, is it really worth it?  Only you can decide, but the fact there is an alternative is eye-opening.

By contrast, LSD is training for endurance. You can train yourself to run for fantastic distances. The marathon has in the years since been outclassed as the world's most grueling race by iron man and ultra-marathon races up to 100 miles. I am not endorsing such extremes that test the body to the limits of what it is capable of doing.  Such extreme events carry their own problems of injury and damage. The current record, by the way, for the 100-mile race is held by Zack Bitter at a blistering 6 minute 48 second per mile pace.

Speaking of Zach Bitter, he eats a low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet for both his training and racing.  The diet is very high in animal products.  While most running and marathon training coaches still endorse a high carbohydrate diet, carb loading before races, and using carb heavy gels during races, Professor Tim Noakes has shown that using fats to fuel a race rather than glycogen and carbs is a more efficient way to run.  Even very thin runners have enough fat on their bodies to sustain a full marathon without eating a single bite and without bonking.

Following a carnivore diet. basically beef, butter, bacon and eggs, I have put Dr. Noakes finding into practice myself and find that along with jogging, it is slowly changing my body, slowing down the aging process.  It will not make me live longer, but it will allow me to live better with the time I have left.

I recently got a copy of Joe Henderson's book again and have been reading it.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems.  You can also watch an interview between Henderson, now 82 years old, and two of his running desciples here. Enjoy.

Another Loss in the Formerly Great Britain

 Fay Voshell at the American Thinker today has an article entitled An Enemy Has Done This that speaks to the downfall of the Anglican Communion in the formerly Great Britain. She is writing about the recent defacement of Canterbury Cathedral by graffiti "artists" at the invitation of the Dean of the Cathedral. Like everything else in the formerly Great Britain, the elites have attempted to smear s**t on everything from literature, to art, to the religion of the people.

So much is true. But Voshell, of all people should understand that a Cathedral is not where the LORD lives, but it is in the hearts and minds of the people themselves. Voshell should go ahead and name the enemy of whom she speaks, for it is none other than the Devil himself. As in Eden, these clerics are in a childish rebellion against our LORD and Savior Jesus Christ.  That these childish, rebellious little people were allowed to put on the robes of pastors and to pollute the gospel message is an utter disgrace.

It is no wonder that the Anglican Communion has been shedding people right and left.  This happens whenever the gospel is watered down to conform to the world and its sinful nature.  In congregations where the pastors preach the true, real gospel they are growing, having children and are attracting escapees from other denominations.

And what is that true gospel?  In the words of Pastor Kevin Martin at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Raleigh, North Carolina:

The good news is not that Jesus loves you just the way you are—so you should feel good about your lousy sinful self. NO! The good news is you can feel good about Jesus, the LORD who took on all your sins, damned and died of them on the cross, so that sharing his dying and rising, by faith alone in his Gospel and sacraments, you have the promise of rising free of your lousy old sinful self, one fine day…

The good news is that just like Jesus beat the crap out of Jacob at the Jabbok last week, so he beats us—up and down—sharing his dying with us daily, so this lousy old sinner we are so sick and tired of will get drowned, engulfed, and die everyday, flooded by Baptism’s cleansing waters, fed with Jesus’ body and blood, torn down and rebuilt daily into Christ’s Image.

So, to Fay Voshell, whom I like as a writer, and if she is reading this, and to others who are thoroughly disgusted by events in the Anglican church, run, don't walk, run from there and join a congregation that preaches the true gospel message.

Congress Should Finish the Job on Recognizing Concealed Carry Permits

 How about a little gun news.  This is first and foremost a gun blog, though events have unfolded that require me to emphasize the Christian nature of self-defense and of course guns that facilitate it.  I have spoken in the past about the fact that a license to carry a firearm in public is much like a driver's license.  For example, your state of residence examines you, and determines that you have no criminal history or other disability that would prevent you from owning a handgun, and that you have taken and passed the required legal training and submitted the paperwork requirements and the fees.  I think all states have implemented some sort of mental inquiry into their examination of your qualifications.  They thereupon license you to carry a weapon in public, usually concealed.  Here's the difference; with a driver's license you can drive in any state, but with a concealed weapon permit, your rights end at the state line.

Sean Maloney at Ammoland makes the argument that America is Overdue for National Concealed Weapons Carry Reciprocity.

If you can legally carry a concealed firearm in your home state, you should be able to do the same when you travel across state lines. That’s common sense. It’s consistent with the Constitution. And thanks to the Supreme Court, it’s increasingly clear that it should be the law.

America doesn’t tell travelers to give up their First Amendment rights at a state border. It doesn’t say that Ohioans lose free speech in New Jersey, or that Texans lose Fourth Amendment protections when landing at LAX. Yet with the Second Amendment, some states act as if constitutional rights stop at their borders.

They don’t.

Gentle readers can read the entire article and are encouraged to do so. It covers such things as that concealed carriers would still have to obey local laws and that in truth concealed carriers are more law abiding than the average person. Congress regulates such things across the states all the time. Driver's licenses are just one of them. Marriages in one state are recognized in all the other states as well. What Congress has so far been unable to overcome is the minority of states, like New York and Illinois, that refuse to recognize other states licenses to carry a concealed weapon. But now, while the Republicans have a majority and a president willing to sign off on it is the time. I know, of course, that a number of RINOs would balk at it as well, but in truth it is no longer such a stretch. Most states already recognize each others permits, and Congress doing its duty is just finishing the job.

God Help Us

The American Thinker yesterday had a post by Joseph Ford Cotto entitled They want to destroy normal people: The Left's war on the Right. The "Right" here are people who just want to be left alone; to raise their families, live in peace with their neighbors, live good lives and be good citizens. They don't care about or subscribe to the multiplying causes of the Left. But the Left is determined to make them care, or to punish them for not caring.

There are moments when politics ceases to be about policy and becomes something deeper. The public reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination was one of those moments. Some Americans mourned; others reveled in cruelty. What emerged was not simply outrage, but a portrait of a society whose fractures now define its moral compass.

Cotto describes a recent conversation he had with his friend Paul Gottfried, editor of Chronicles magazine. Because Cotto is quoting Gottfried in many cases, the man sounds not quite sure of himself, but I think this is just him hunting for the right words to convey his thoughts.

“The dominant class comes out of the left in our dominant class in our society,” Gottfried noted. “So, so the, the right, I think is in a desperate position. I do not buy any of this nonsense to the Democratic Party.” His skepticism toward the idea of a collapsing Democratic Party underscores his larger belief: institutional control matters more than temporary polling shifts.

“I think what, it’s more important than that is hate, hatred” of “normal people who the, the left would like to destroy, take away their power,” Gottfried said. “If you have to kill them, that’s fine. We want to, we want to rid the world of them. And there’s a, there’s a hatred particularly for Western civilization and more particularly for white male Christians and, you know, are seen sort of seen as the ultimate enemies.”

That hatred, he argued, is the emotional engine of what he calls the new political religion of “wokeness.”

“I think this is the way I see wokeness. I think it’s extremely dangerous because, because of its pervasiveness and because it is able to appeal to, to a number of people throughout the western world in a way that no other movement could,” Gottfried told.

His view is stark: “The other side is winning, winning decisively. And we have to come up with a, with a strategy. The strategy is not going to be dialogue that’s long over…the question is, can you meet leftist violence with force on your side?”

Gentle readers, I urge you to read the entire article. The emphasis above is mine, as it gets to the crux of the matter.  I could go on quoting, but fair use prevents it, and in any case, Cotto does a better job than I could of explaining exactly what we are up against.  You, me, all of us who lay claim to normalcy, to being just another Bozo on the bus, have a target on our backs.  It might be easier to go along to get along, but God does not allow a middle ground.  We are either with Him unconditionally, or we are against Him.

 Gottfried is correct that the Democrat party is not done, not by a long shot. As the Democrat party has moved further and further to the Left, and the mask is coming off, we can see that what the members of the party want is totalitarian control of the population. Better to rule in hell than be a servant of God. Now, the guy down the street who votes Democrat may seem like a perfectly nice guy. He goes to the Baptist church and holds great tailgate parties when his team is in town. But he votes Dem, and the politicians he votes for want totalitarian control, and he sadly is just a useful idiot.

I keep telling people to buy guns and ammunition, and to train with those weapons. If your church does not have a security plan, perhaps it is time to put one in place. I can't see the future, and I am no prophet, but the writing on the wall says that the day is coming soon when we will have to defend ourselves, while at the same time maintaining duty to be proper images of God on earth. God help us.

AI Doesn't Know What It Is Doing

 I don't get to hear the Glenn Beck radio show ever day like I did when I was working.  But I did here one recently in which Beck was ranting about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) taking over the world.  According to Beck, AI would take all the jobs, and we would find ourselves with nothing to do.  I listened with interest but just couldn't get worked up.  Despite what the tech gurus want to believe, computers can never replicate, nor can they replace the human mind.

At First Things Thomas Fowler has an article entitled AI Doesn't Know What It's Doing.

Modern AI is based on ideas of human knowing that stem from the British empiricist tradition, in particular the philosophy of David Hume. Hume envisioned the body as a composite of discrete physical systems, with the senses sending their reports to the mind, which then worked on these reports. These “reports” he termed “impressions,” which gave rise to “ideas”:

I venture to affirm that the rule here holds without any exception, and that every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it; and every simple impression a correspondent idea.

Hume presents a theory of knowing in which ­senses deliver impressions, which we process as ideas. Once we have ideas, we can reason with them, either by means of logical inference, or directly as “matters of fact” (empirically ­grounded facts, including scientific laws). As for general ideas, they are nothing more than particular representations, connected to a certain general term. This theory quickly leads to nominalism, the belief that abstract entities do not exist and that any talk of entities such as “mankind” refers only to collections of individuals. Hume recognizes that we have such universal ideas in our minds, but they are mere labels, bearing no relation to reality. He rejects the longstanding opinion that there exist universals in themselves.

Hume was never able to explain how we arrive at forms of knowledge such as science, mathematics, and history. What “impression” gave rise to Einstein’s field equations for general relativity? Because every idea must be associated with a precedent impression resembling it, Hume could not explain how we can do something as simple as recognize a thing that is in a different position than when we first saw it—a problem that bedevils AI systems used in autonomous cars. Nor was he able to explain how it is possible to have knowledge of almost anything without recognizing abstract entities as real. For example, the statement “­Beethoven’s Fifth is a great symphony” uses abstract entities as both subject and predicate. Had there never been any performance of the notes Beethoven wrote, the statement would still be meaningful and true. And the term “great symphony” refers not to a collection of performances of music, but to a real characteristic of a certain type of music ­composition.

You see the problem, don't you? We don't really know how the human mind works, but we know it doesn't operate on a Humean model of knowledge. There is something...deeper...that drives the human mind.  We are unique in the animal kingdom in a number of ways.  The most obvious is that we know good and evil

Only in some cases, such as scientific and most historical writing, is the literal meaning of a text its principal meaning. For many works, especially works of literature and philosophy, the message or theme requires a holistic understanding of the text; it is not conveyed by any piece or excerpt that AI can scan. Often, indeed, the meaning of a work may depend on the reader’s imaginative reception of it, as is the case with poetry. And many texts have multiple levels of meaning, so that a literal reading may be true as far as it goes, while being less important than the symbolic reading. Or the real meaning of a text may be the exact opposite of its surface meaning, as in satirical writing. The purpose of much theological and ­poetic writing is to open a window onto a numinous world, and texts in disciplines such as philosophy may depend entirely on abstract ideas and entities. The reader of any of these kinds of texts must be able to perceive the reality behind the words—reading and understanding the entire text (including very abstract ideas and what they entail or imply), taking into consideration the writer’s goal, presuppositions, and biases, and then relating the work to others in order to ascertain its thoroughness, accuracy, and contribution value. Only thus can a thorough view of the subject emerge.

On this ground alone, it is plain that large language models will never replicate human knowing. AI can parrot what real minds have thought and said on these topics, and thus sound intelligent. What it cannot do is understand material.

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The goal of human knowing is always to know something about reality, regardless of whether that knowledge has operational value. By contrast, neither an animal nor an AI seeks the reality of the real. AI must employ symbols, which have no meaning except that assigned to them by someone outside the computer system. The implication for the uniqueness of humans is straightforward. Those who would assimilate humans to computers use an argument with this compound premise: Humans are material only and Human functions can be reduced to algorithms. The conclusion is, Computers can duplicate human minds. But if computers cannot duplicate human minds, then it follows that either (or both) Humans are not material only or ­Human functions cannot be reduced to algorithms. These are fairly momentous points, and they suggest one reason why understanding what computers can and cannot do is important.

Human knowing operates on a principle that is radically different from AI’s Humean paradigm. Humans know by means of an integrated system of sensing, motor skills, and the brain. We have direct contact with reality, and we are able to know realities that exist beyond the realities we ­immediately perceive. This form of knowing is supremely ­creative. It encompasses the way in which we understand situations we have never encountered and generate new theories about reality. Humans can “think outside the box”; AI cannot. AI can, of course, generate “ideas,” understood in the rather limited sense of data structures or random chatbot statements. That is not how humans develop new theories or deal with unexpected situations. Our perception of reality is unlike anything that can be achieved by any paradigm based on separation of functions. AI algorithms cannot creatively and analytically think through a question, using information learned from reading and research, bringing to bear a critical eye for discerning what is valuable and a perception of reality for synthesizing new ideas. They can only ape human intelligence. The AI paradigm reacts to stimuli in the form of sense-type data or website texts; it cannot react, except very indirectly, to any underlying reality. It does not know what it is doing.

Children learn, say arithmetic, by first memorizing tables of examples. 1+1=2. 1+2=3 and so forth. It gets more complicated, for instance 3+3=6, but 3x2 also equals 6. Slowly they begin to know what they are doing, why they are doing it, and to understand. Computers may be able to replicate these feats, but they will never understand. Which is why I do not fear AI, though I do believe that it will present many problems. In the end, it is just another tool, to be used for good and (sadly) for ill.