As the skipper in Bull Durham says, “This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball.” Players all blend together until you know their stories. It’s the stories that make baseball come alive.

With basketball, the pace is so fast there’s no time to tell the stories, So the media takes it up, complete with the drama that creates ratings in a 24-hour news world.

A football game has too many players to relate to because a football game is war. On the battlefield, you don’t have individual soldiers. You have regiments, companies, and battalions working together seamlessly.

But baseball’s battles are more like duels. One batter faces off against one pitcher. Nobody else gets involved until the pitch is hit or missed. Each individual effort leads to the team’s victory or defeat. If you don’t know anything about those individuals, yeah, it drags.

The pace of the game makes room for the stories. No other sport has that in the same way as baseball, as long as you have a good storyteller.

Vin Scully: The Master Storyteller

That’s what Vin Scully did so well. Every evening like Shaharazade, he’d embrace those lulls and use them to captivate the listener. For 67 years, for over two hours a night, he turned faceless players into real human beings for millions of listeners and viewers.

Even though players came and went, he would weave them into the endless tradition of the team and the entire game of baseball. And not just Dodger stories. Whatever team was on the field, Vin would happily tell those men’s tales too. Vin didn’t just make Dodger fans. He created lovers of the game of baseball.

The mindset Keller has expressed — that most political positions aren’t absolute spiritual battlegrounds — was accurate in yesterday’s sanctuaries (and for most of Keller’s career, considering he planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in 1989). It reflects what Renn calls the “neutral world” in what he’s dubbed the “three worlds of evangelism.” Following the pre-1990s “positive world,” in which most of Western culture looked favorably at Christianity and its values, the “neutral world” reigned until roughly a decade ago, when Western society’s attitude toward Christianity soured into a “negative world.”

In a neutral world where the most controversial political topics were tax cuts or foreign policy, the apartisan approach Keller has espoused was likely wise for the average Christian. However, American politics in the past decade has ceased to be chiefly about policies like taxes or welfare spending or even immigration — issues on which Christians can make good-faith arguments for a variety of political stances.

Fighting a Culture War in a Hostile World

Now, in Renn’s “negative world,” the political left has become the party of celebrating abortion on demand until birth; of chopping off the breasts and genitals of confused, manipulated children and ripping them from their objecting parents’ custody; of inflaming hatred based solely on the color of a person’s skin; of obliterating the nuclear family; and of inundating schoolchildren with pornographic books and the performances of cross-dressing male strippers. America’s leftist factions have used the highest office of law enforcement to terrorize a pro-life pastor, shuttered church gatherings, and continue to demand that Christians proclaiming simple truths like God’s design for marriage be excommunicated from their jobs and public discourse.

America is neck-deep in a culture war, and some of the most prolific instigators of it are in our highest political offices. Keller’s right that no political party is perfect and that Christians should not make an idol of a party or of politics in general. But unless we go the way of the early 20th-century fundamentalists, we’re going to have to meet the cultural onslaught — and some of the biggest arenas of the cultural fight have been made political. I’m sure Keller would agree that it shouldn’t be a partisan position to protect kindergarteners from being coached into sexual confusion by their teachers, but alas, that is where the political left has chosen to draw its battle lines.

With the announcement of the Keller Center, there’s hope Keller and The Gospel Coalition are catching up to what time it is. Keller’s narration in the announcement video mirrors the language of Renn’s “three worlds” almost verbatim:

We now live in a post-Christendom culture. For at least a thousand years, Western culture has been what you might call Christendom culture. Even if most people were not devout Christians, there was a positive understanding of Christianity in the culture. … The culture instilled in people a certain amount of background beliefs that the Bible assumes. … [But] now, you’re in, how do you win people to Christ in a post-Christendom era? And the church does not have any idea how to do it. //

Keller criticized evangelicals who are “turning to a political project of regaining power in order to expel secular people from places of cultural influence.” While Christians should not seek out power for power’s sake, we should defend the vulnerable from the harmful lies and agendas of those in positions of cultural authority.

Jesus rejected the zealotry of those who expected him to overthrow the Roman empire, but He also denounced the faux moralism of the Pharisees, the prominent cultural leaders of the society in which he lived. That faux moralism has a parallel in today’s false gospels that actively promote sin in the name of “inclusivity” or “a woman’s right to choose” — and one of the chief avenues perpetuating those false gospels is political.

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Nebraska has created a unique path for women and families to show reverence for the loss of children in the womb. Other state legislatures should follow.

In Nebraska, any woman who has suffered a miscarriage of her child during a pregnancy that a state-licensed health professional has confirmed is eligible to receive a commemorative birth certificate for the child, without regard to when the miscarriage occurred. So even women who suffered a miscarriage many years ago may request the certificates. Nebraska’s law is the first of its kind to require no minimum gestational period and to be retroactive.

Under RCV, which critics call “rigged-choice voting,” voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. Such a process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes. //

While the 2020 RCV initiative, known as Ballot Measure 2, was sold to Alaskans as an effort to keep outside dark money from influencing the state’s elections, it was out-of-state funding that helped push the initiative over the finish line. According to an October 2020 report by Breitbart News, for instance, Yes on 2 for Better Elections, a pro-RCV group, raised more funds from outside Alaska ($6,194,081) than from within the state ($20,000).

RCV “becomes an invitation for exceeding amounts of dark money to come in and put forth a candidate that nobody knows,” Mathias said. “Alaskans are tired of being manipulated by rich people from outside [the state who] think they can tell us what to do.”

During the 2022 midterms, Democrat Mary Peltola defeated former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in the race for Alaska’s at-large congressional district as a result of ranked-choice voting. The RCV system also made a difference in the state’s Senate race, where incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski fended off a challenge from Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, Murkowski’s allies were heavily involved in the push for Alaska to adopt RCV as a way to bolster the incumbent senator’s reelection prospects. //

RCV often disenfranchises segments of voters that left-wing election groups often classify as marginalized, such as racial minorities and non-English speakers. Studies analyzing voting patterns in U.S. cities that utilize ranked-choice voting have shown this to be true.

According to a report from the Alaska Policy Forum, for example, after San Francisco, California, implemented an RCV system, voter turnout decreased among black and white voters, as well as those who were younger or didn’t have a high school education. Similar trends were also present in Minneapolis and Oakland, where “voters in predominately minority precincts were less likely to fully utilize their ballots, making ballot exhaustion more likely.”

It’s yet another state-level example of Republican politicians selling out their own voters to bloated and harmful special interests.

Indiana’s term-limited governor, highly unpopular with his GOP base, is pushing an overfunded public health plan that could steal local control from county officials. It’s yet another state-level example of Republican politicians selling out their own voters to bloated and harmful special interests.

The lame-duck governor and several top Republicans in the Republican-controlled legislature are clearly angling to get hired by Big Pharma after leaving public office, thereby using this sweetheart deal to eventually line their own pockets from one of the state’s largest lobbying interests.

A dead whale was found on a New Jersey beach Monday — the ninth one to wash ashore in the New York-New Jersey area since early December in what activists are calling an alarming uptick. //

Clean Ocean Action, an environmental conservation organization, said that the high number of whale deaths in a roughly two-month period has not been seen in the region in about 50 years.

The group said it believes off-shore wind energy projects could be the culprit of the rising fatalities.

“This alarming number of deaths is unprecedented in the last half century, the only unique factor from previous years, is the excessive scope, scale, and magnitude of offshore wind powerplant activity in the region,” COA said in a statement.

Whale carcass washed up on a beach in Manasquan, NJ

On Friday, in a blog post not even promoted by the company's Twitter account or a news release, Blue Origin quietly said its "Blue Alchemist" program has been working on this very topic for the last two years. The company, founded by Jeff Bezos, has made both solar cells and electricity transmission wires from simulated lunar soil—a material that is chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith.

The engineering work is based on a process known as "molten regolith electrolysis," and Blue Origin has advanced the state of the art for solar cell manufacturing. In this process, a direct electric current is applied to the simulated regolith at a high temperature, above 1,600° Celsius. Through this electrolysis process, iron, silicon, and aluminum can be extracted from the lunar regolith. Blue Origin says it has produced silicon to more than 99.999 percent purity through molten regolith electrolysis.

The key advance made by Blue Alchemist is that its engineers and scientists have taken the byproducts of this reaction—and these materials alone—to fabricate solar cells as well as the protective glass cover that would allow them to survive a decade or longer on the lunar surface. //

For decades scientists and engineers have talked about using the dusty lunar surface to manufacture solar panels. All of the key ingredients for solar cells are present in this rocky and dusty regolith on the surface of the Moon—silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, and more.

The abundance of these ingredients has led to hundreds of research papers exploring this idea since lunar soil was returned to Earth during the Apollo program but relatively little engineering development. In other words, we don't know whether covering the Moon with solar panels is simply a great science fiction idea, or if it would actually work. //

Although our vision is technically ambitious, our technology is real now," the company said in its blog post. "Blue Origin’s goal of producing solar power using only lunar resources is aligned with NASA’s highest priority Moon-to-Mars infrastructure development objective."

This is a notable research breakthrough, as the same electrolysis process could also be used to produce metals for building habitats and other structures, as well as oxygen. These are all important for "living off the land" if humans are to avoid the expense of needing to bring everything from Earth to live and work in space. While it is a long way from lab experiments to manufacturing on the Moon, these experiments are a critical first step.

[Tom Cotton] believes anything short of a complete Ukrainian victory — however improbable that might be — would be a disaster and wants an American commitment to “war to the hilt” against Russia.

That may resonate with Republicans who came of age after the Vietnam War when Americans critiqued leaders who didn’t fight to win the wars they blundered into. He believes America should have a “strategy of victory” that will put an end to Russia’s ability to threaten Europe and deter China from invading Taiwan.

Unlike the declining regime in Moscow, Beijing does pose a global threat to U.S. interests. But Cotton gives no explanation for how disarming the American military in order to feed Zelensky’s war machine with no coherent plans for an arms buildup that would put us in a position to help anyone will achieve such deterrence.

More importantly, Republicans don’t seem to have given any serious consideration to the consequences of their plans.

No serious person thinks Ukraine can achieve a total victory over Russia in a war that, following Moscow’s setbacks last year, has settled into a World War One-style trench warfare stalemate.

But what would happen if a massive infusion of American high-tech weaponry as well as cash along the lines of Cotton’s dreams of escalation did lead to a Ukraine victory and, ultimately, Putin’s fall? Do the GOP hawks really think Putin’s regime would be replaced by a Western European-style liberal democracy that poses no threat to its neighbors? Perhaps those who have swallowed the myth that Zelensky is a paladin of American values rather than a typical leader of a corrupt, oppressive former Soviet republic actually believe that’s a possibility.

But the most likely outcome would be a bitter revanchist regime that would probably be even more dangerous than that of Putin. This might also entail the breakup of the Russian Federation and the emergence of unstable, dangerous states in places like Chechnya that could go to war with each other for control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

The Bush-era Republicans who still dominate the Senate GOP caucus have learned nothing from what happened in Iraq, where similarly well-intentioned schemes not only failed to defend American interests but made the world a more dangerous place. //

If instead of heeding the war hawks, Biden begins pushing for a compromise peace deal, Ukraine could be spared more years of a devastating war with countless casualties and damage to an already broken country. The same terms that the Ukrainians will eventually have to accept to end the war years from now are currently available if the West is willing to prioritize diplomacy over escalation. That will mean fewer dead and a lower price for the rebuilding of Ukraine that the United States will be expected to pay.

But for three of Biden’s most illustrious predecessors — Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe — obsequious deference to the chief executive was positively un-American. To make one man the center of the nation’s political life was antithetical to the Constitution and republicanism in the eyes of the three Jeffersonians.

In his newest book, “The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe,” historian Kevin R.C. Gutzman gives us an expansive yet highly detailed account of exactly how this trio of Virginians governed the nation and the legacy of republicanism they left behind. We might better understand how to tackle our own political ills by examining the example they set. //

Jefferson also decided to scrap his predecessors’ tradition of delivering the State of the Union address orally. Never comfortable with giving speeches anyway, Jefferson chose to submit his report in writing because he thought the annual address seemed like a “speech from the throne.” In his unpretentious style, Jefferson informed the people’s representatives that out of “principal regard to … the economy of their time,” he would not ask them to gather to listen to him.

Madison and Monroe followed suit, as did every president until Woodrow Wilson. For the Jeffersonians, the president’s job was to efficiently administer the government, not waste time with pompous speeches. ...

But the Jeffersonians weren’t only concerned with outward appearances. They also believed government policies needed to closely adhere to the country’s founding principles. Protecting freedom of speech, reducing the size of the military, and slashing federal spending were all on the Jeffersonians’ agenda. //

Contrast Monroe’s attitude to modern presidents who have never met a foreign crisis that couldn’t be solved by military intervention, or at least by the threat of it.

Needless to say, the political philosophy of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe was wildly different from that of today’s Republicans and Democrats. As the Jeffersonian dynasty came to an end in 1825, America was at peace, the federal government was small and its power modest, and the national debt was quickly being extinguished (it would be completely paid off in 1835, right on Monroe’s schedule).

America’s leaders have pushed the country further into dangerous confrontations with foreign powers, racked up trillions in debt, and ignored the constitutional limits on their own authority. We desperately need to learn from the Jeffersonians — both from their triumphs and their failures.

One of the great virtues of Gutzman’s “The Jeffersonians” is that he generously quotes his subjects, allowing them to speak for themselves. We would do well to listen to them.

The end for manuals is nigh, and one of these might be the last stick standing.

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Asvarduil Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9y
16,112
Subscriptor

shawnce said:
4 laws is all you need I thought

To paraphrase something someone said in the Wacky Pony Lounge:

We understand neither natural intelligence nor natural stupidity. Our efforts to artificially recreate either of those things can only go so well. //

Bongle Ars Praefectus
12y
3,516
Subscriptor++
gmerrick said:
Can we come up with another word for this. Clearly these constructs are not Artificial Intelligence in any sense of the word. Smart Frames or some other phrase would be better. It's like Tesla continuing to call their self driving software autopilot.
The New Yorker had a good essay yesterday arguing that you can consider them extremely lossy, extremely advanced all-text compressions of their training set. They do their best to reproduce things that look like their training set, sometimes successfully!

I hadn't really thought much about lossy text compression before because it kinda feels useless to not be sure you got the words back that you put in. But these are very fancy lossy text compressors and feel a decent bit more useful.