Meanderings, 27 August 2022
Welp, the summer’s all but over when the kids (and our grandkids) return to school. We live near a high school. We now hear teams on fields, bands getting their horns and drums ready for the games, and the traffic is picking up. Here we go! Thanks again to Kris for her help with finding these links.
Good morning!
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
SAN MARCOS, Texas (KXAN) — A Texas State University student is in the process of adopting a baby he found in a trash can while visiting his family in Haiti.
In 2017, 22-year-old Jimmy Amisial heard a large crowd gathering in the streets and said he couldn’t believe what he found in the middle of the group.
“I saw there were about 15 to 20 people staring at the baby on the pile of trash,” Amisial said.
The crying baby boy was covered in fire ants.
“He had no clothes on. He was crying. I could hear the pain in his voice,” Amisial said. “I couldn’t think of anything but to save him.”
He picked up the baby and took him home to his mom where they bathed, clothed and fed him. Amisial said police investigated but couldn’t find the parents. Then, a judge asked Amisial a question he wasn’t expecting.
“He said, ‘Would you be willing to be his legal guardian?'” Amisial said.
After taking a few nights to think it over, he took a leap of faith and decided to go for it.
Desiring God‘s recent blog post by Greg Morse about beards and their theological significance – nay, their desirability to demonstrate God-given manliness – seems like a pretty close shave towards patriarchy if you ask me. It’s time for some bald facts.
I am not sure why Desiring God had to become Desiring Beard. It feels like a beard – er, a bridge, too far. I read the article and I agree with some of the theological underpinnings. But beards? Really?
Look, I love my beard. My wife loves my beard. My kids love my beard. And God probably loves my beard too. But not because it’s a beard, but because He loves all of me and gave His Son as an atoning sacrifice for my sins. And one of those sins was not a lack of hirsuteness in the beard department.
At this point all you clean shaven male bloggers would be putting up a picture you found on the internet after typing in the term “hipster beards”. Not I!
On loan forgiveness, by idle musings:
Lots of press, largely negative, about the loan forgiveness plan announced yesterday by the Biben administration. I freely admit to not being an expert, but I agree with John Hawthorne's take, as well as the first look by Bob on Books.
Now, for those of you who whine about your loans being paid by yourself over the course of x years and not getting any forgiveness, let me share my story. I finished classroom work on a PhD in ancient Mediterranean studies in 1988 from the University of Chicago. Even with a full-ride and stipend, I still was the equivalent in today's money of over $100,000 in debt.
I couldn't find a job in my field, so I went back to warehouse work, which is what I had done during college on the breaks (among many other things!). After about three months, I got a job as a warehouse manager making the equivalent of less than $50,000. This is with two kids. We chose for Debbie to be a full-time homemaker. (Several reasons for that, some financial—she would have had to make more than the going wages to cover the overhead—and others because we both felt it was important for our kids to have someone at home for them. We don't regret that decision.)
I consolidated all my loans into a Sallie Mae one that was for thirty years. It took us twenty years to pay off the loan—and the only reason we paid it off that early was because when I got hit by a truck on my bicycle, the insurance settlement gave us an extra $10,000, which we put toward the student loan.
The irony is that up until the time the loan was paid off, I had only worked five years in an area that was related to my college education (Eisenbrauns). BUT—and this is extremely important—the skills I learned in the course of my college education enabled me to excel in the jobs I had. It enabled me to apply critical thinking to problem solving that others were stumped by. It enabled me to look at the entire picture and formulate a plan before just diving in. It enabled me to save the companies I was working for many thousands of dollars. My goal was to save the company double my salary every year in cost-savings—but not by cutting employees wages. In fact, I was always fighting for better wages for my employees, showing management that it was cheaper to pay a higher wage to avoid high turnover than it was to keep rehiring and retraining all the time. (It was an uphill battle…)
Do I wish that the loan forgiveness program had existed back then? Sure. Do I resent the fact that others are "getting off easy"? No.
Is the loan forgiveness plan perfect? No. It has many problems, but as John Hawthorne points out, it's a good start. Now we need to start improving it and taking a serious look at the whole model of higher education, as Bob on Books says.
On long COVID — this is not the flu, folks:
Rachel Robles contracted Covid in March 2020. The 27-year-old data analyst has not gone a single day without symptoms since. Most doctors did not believe her when she described how she had gone from running the Brooklyn Half Marathon the previous year to enduring such crippling fatigue that her couch felt like quicksand. How she suddenly struggled to put numbers together, despite her technical training. How no matter how many breaths she took, she always felt starved for air.
Three months in, one doctor told her, “Covid doesn’t last for 90 days. You either get over it or you die.”
That dichotomy — in which the only possible outcomes of Covid are either complete recovery or death — has turned out to be anything but true. Between 8 million and 23 million Americans are still sick months or years after being infected. The perplexing array of symptoms known as long Covid has left an estimated 1 million of those people so disabled they are unable to work, and those numbers are likely to grow as the virus continues to evolve and spread. Some who escaped long Covid the first time are getting it after their second or third infection. “It is a huge public health crisis in the wake of acute Covid infection,” says Linda Geng, a physician and codirector of Stanford Health Care’s long Covid clinic.
Though there is no longer debate that long Covid is a real phenomenon — both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have recognized its existence — the science is so new that many questions remain about how to define the condition, what causes it and how to effectively treat it. It has become clear, for example, that long Covid can assume a variety of different forms. “Not everyone has the same disease,” which means there are different causes, says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine.
There was a time, not very long ago, when far-right figures wanted to avoid being called “Christian nationalists”—denying or deflecting or pleading ignorance. Even now, some reject the label. “Reporters frequently ask me,” Robert Jeffress, the megachurch pastor, said last month, “‘Are you a Christian nationalist?’ . . . And I respond emphatically, ‘No, not in any way.’” In May, Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee in the race for Pennsylvania governor, wrote a reporter, “Is this a term you fabricated? What does it mean and where have I indicated that I am a Christian Nationalist?” Franklin Graham told the same reporter that “Christian nationalism doesn’t exist.”
Despite the protestations, the term Christian nationalism is well suited for much of the far right. Think of (defeated) Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor’s slogan “Jesus, Guns, Babies.” Or the extensive Christian symbolism in the crowd that attacked the Capitol on January 6th. Or the Republicans, such as Rep. Lauren Boebert and Doug Mastriano, who have pointedly said they believe in collapsing the separation of church and state.
We may be entering a new phase, however—one in which at least some people are claiming, proudly, to be Christian nationalists, and writing apologetics explicitly in defense of the label and its attendant ideology. Witness Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who openly proclaims herself a Christian nationalist on Twitter and in interviews and on t-shirts. Or the Federalist, which on August 11 published an article entitled “Christian Nationalism Is Biblical And America-First, But It’s Not White.” The author, Carina Benton, is a regular contributor to the Trump-loving right-wing outlet and not someone with apparent expertise in theology or political philosophy—but the article is a useful indicator of how the debate is shifting, and because similar arguments have popped up elsewhere, it is worth at least a quick dissection.
About 113 million years ago these were fresh:
By Claudia Dominguez and Raja Razek, CNN
Dinosaur tracks from around 113 million years ago have been revealed at Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas due to severe drought conditions that dried up a river, the park said Monday in a statement.
"Most tracks that have recently been uncovered and discovered at different parts of the river in the park belong to Acrocanthosaurus. This was a dinosaur that would stand, as an adult, about 15 feet tall and (weigh) close to seven tons," park spokesperson Stephanie Salinas Garcia told CNN in an email.
The other species that left tracks behind at the park in Glen Rose, Texas, was Sauroposeidon, which would be about 60 feet tall and weigh about 44 tons as an adult, Garcia added.
This summer's excessive drought has caused a river in the park to dry out completely in most spots, revealing the tracks -- the latest long-hidden secret recently exposed as bodies of water have dried up due to drought conditions across the globe.
More than 60% of Texas was experiencing drought last week in two of the most intense categories, according to the US Drought Monitor. The state also recently has experienced heat waves that pushed temperatures into the triple digits, leaving millions under excessive heat alerts.
The human-caused climate crisis, too, has increased the potential for more frequent dramatic swings in periods of drought and high precipitation, such as flash flooding this week in the Dallas area.
Under normal weather conditions, the dinosaur tracks found in the riverbed are under the water and filled with sediment, which makes them less visible, Garcia explained.
"Being able to find these discoveries and experience new dinosaur tracks is always an exciting time at the park!" Garcia added.