Meet in the Middle

    The latest Jeep ad for the SuperbOwl is all about meeting in the middle.

    About that.

    I find it fascinating and heartwarming that they chose a 1980 CJ5.  Theseia is a 1976 CJ7, but I would have gotten a CJ5 myself for the shorter wheelbase if my legs weren't too long to fit behind the wheel.  As my kids are all on the smallish end of the height scale, though, I may still be able to buy some for them.

    So let's talk about the classic Jeep and why it's an excellent pick for a vehicle to represent America.

    The Jeep transcends parties and political ideologies.  While obviously not an AMC CJ, FDR was often photographed in Jeeps throughout WWII:

    But of course, his near polar opposite, Reagan, was also a Jeep fan.

    And beyond politics to the larger culture, the classic jeep was just as at home getting muddy on a trail with a coal-mining redneck behind the wheel as it was carrying some hippie and his surfboard to the beach.  This guy

and this guy

probably don't have a whole heck of a lot in common, but I'd bet a considerable sum that if they passed each other on the road, they'd both wave.  Unless in the past near-decade that Theseia has been down, Jeep culture has become another tragedy of the politicization of everything good and holy.

    The Jeep has always been a canvas its owners project their own interests onto.  Some more advisable than others.

    Theseia has always been intended to be a middle-of-the-road all-purpose Jeep.  I'm not going to make her a crawler, but she does have a good set of 33"s on her, and until the anti-reverse went out on her old Warn, she sported a decent off-road recovery kit.  She's a jack-of-all-trades jeep, reflecting my generalist attitude toward life.

    I think generalism is the soul of the Jeep, though.  My dad always told me that his Baja Bug could go places his CJ5 couldn't.  And then, of course, there's the Toyota FJ which famously "Out-Jeeped the Jeep."  There's always the Blazer, Bronco, and Scout snobs lurking around the trail to tell you all about how those are better, too.  And, well, they're right to some extent.

    But the classic CJ taps into the mythology of America like no other vehicle can.  It's the modern descendant of the horses of Wayne, Stewart, Eastwood et al, after all.  You've got one extra seat to rescue the schoolmarm, but there's no meaningful provision for other passengers.  Yeah, sure the CJ5 put a "bench" in the back, but anyone tho's ever gotten in it knows that's a complete afterthought.  It's one step removed from a motorcycle in its projection of the individualism of the owner.  We can certainly argue the pros and cons of that individualist attitude, but it's undeniably part of the American zeitgeist.  

    What I find most interesting, though, is that the CJ5 Jeep chose to represent America transcending politics is a vehicle that can no longer be made or sold in America, because of politics.  The nanny-state impulses on both sides have resulted in vehicle standards that make it impossible to get such a vehicle to market.  The simplistic engines that endears it to shade-tree mechanics such as myself would never pass emission standards.  And even sacrificing that still leaves you with a vehicle that would never pass safety standards.  As a former EMT, I get it, of course.  Going 75 mph in a tin can with a hard-mount engine and a high center of gravity is just not a good idea.  Theseia is for in-town and off-road use only.  But that should be a personal choice.

    Recently, of course, Mahindra found a way to bring the classic Jeep back by marketing its Roxor as an OHV you could just happen to buy a street light kit for.  It was a brilliant play, tapping into an underserved market.  For half the cost of a modern Wrangler, one could buy the CJ one really wanted, anyway.  There were even aftermarket grill kits that--while careful to avoid the trademark seven-slot grill--closely mimicked the classic CJ look. 

    So of course, Fiat Chrysler promptly sued.  And both parties were silent.  Democrats, because they're in hock to Detroit's organized labor, and Republicans, because "OMG, furrners!"  Eventually, the case was settled, shockingly in the big "American" (Fiat Chrysler is owned by Stellantis, a Dutch company) company's favor.

    So Mahindra responded in a very humorous way...making all new Roxors look like the classics Toyota FJ.

    Well played, sirs.

Food coloring

Recently, the city of Baltimore has announced that it has extended its COVID policing policies indefinitely.  In the effort to control the spread of the virus, Baltimore decriminalized a large swath of previously punished behavior including:

    [Drug] possession

    Attempted distribution [of drugs]

    Paraphernalia possession

    Prostitution

    Trespassing  

    Minor traffic offenses

    Open container

    Rogue and vagabond

    Urinating/defecating in public

They also:

    Dismissed 1423 pending cases considered eligible by COVID policies

    Quashed 1415 warrants for the aforementioned offenses

    Reduce[d] the prison population...[with] the early release of 2000 people

    Of course a Broken Windows Policing Law and Order type looks at such things and immediately assumes the end of civilization as we know it.  But the BWPL&O type are not overly familiar with statistics since various places in Europe have decriminalized such things without resulting in the second coming of the the Visigoths.

    For those who are familiar with recent history, the results out of Baltimore are completely unsurprising.  Violent crime is down 20% over the year and property crime is down 36%.  If it weren't for grocery store brawls and home break-ins over toilet paper stashes, I daresay those decreases would be even greater.

    "But wait," you say, "Everybody was stuck at home, so of course crime went down over that time period!"

    Except crime went up in other major metropolitan centers.  And not just the ones where the citizenry were burning them down in protests.  Baltimore was an outlier among cities of its class.

    This has played out in our family's life as well.  When I was my children's age, I was dealing with parents who were...unwell.  We had lots of rules, but for various medical and mental reasons, the enforcement of those rules was quite arbitrary.  Much like most American adults today who commit by one estimate three felonies a day, we constantly lived at the mercy of "prosecutorial discretion."

    And so, many years ago, my wife and I decided to "decriminalize" all actions except direct defiance (to include lying).  Ever since, we have found that our children have stopped testing boundaries and have turned into generally respectful, compliant kids.  Certainly more obedient that I remember being at their age.

    There is, however, one barrier from describing our parenting style as fully libertarian:  Prohibition.  And not of alcohol or marijuana.  Oh no, something far, far worse:

    Red 40.

    Back before 60% of our family developed dairy intolerance to some degree or another, I decided one day to introduce our children to Strawberry Nesquik.  I remember liking it as a kid more than regular chocolate milk, although I eventually grew out of that.

    So I bought a can of the powder and gave our three kids their first dose.  What followed closely approximated Reefer Madness.  Now I'm not saying that mind-altering substances cause crime.  But I will say that the number of assaults and property damage that night definitely increased over our normal baseline.

    There were tears.

    And of course, the 15g of sugar per serving probably didn't help.  But our kids had no issue handling regular chocolate milk.

    Of course, being a scientist, I insist on the repeatability of an experiment before accepting a theory.

    There were more tears.

    Apparently, there were sufficient tears from enough parents that in 2015 Nesquik removed Red 40 from its strawberry offering, replacing it with beet juice powder.  But, of course, now our kids can't have milk for other reasons.

    And so there remains a ban in our house on Red 40.  Or at least a strict limit.  Because apparently, our kids can' handle their [redacted].

The Cold Solutions **Spoilers**

I finally did it.  Curiosity got the better of me,  and I sprung the 99 cents for a Kindle collection of Don Sakers short stories that included "The Cold Solution."  It's the legendary solution to "The Cold Equations," Tom Godwin's classic 1954 SciFi short that for all intents and purposes is "The Trolley Problem" in space.

    For anybody who never took freshman Philosophy, the Trolley Problem is the classic justification for Utilitarian "Ethics."  You're standing at a switch that can send a trolley down the tracks to run over one person or multiple people.  The "obvious" answer is that you save the largest number of lives.

    "The Cold Equations" frames the problem thusly:  A pilot has been dispatched to carry a load of serum to a colony that is going through an epidemic.  En route, he discovers that a young woman has stowed away to see her brother.  The problem is, the ship only has enough fuel for a safe landing of the mass calculated by the flight crew.  If the young woman stays on board, the ship will crash, killing not only the woman and the pilot, but also all those who will die from not receiving the serum.  

    The colony does not have any ships to meet the relief ship in orbit to transfer more fuel or to take over transport.  There's no space suit, apparently.  The pilot can't jettison himself, because the woman doesn't know how to fly the craft.  Everything in the ship is welded down or essential to flight.

    Now, at this point, anyone with two brain cells will demand to know what the [redacted] kind of [redacted] dumb-[redacted] [redacted] [redacted] morons set up a flight mission with no safety margin?  Numerous writers and critics have pointed out that it would be utterly negligent.  

    Furthermore, Cory Doctorow observed that the characters in a story do not truly labor under the constraints of physical reality, but truly the constraints placed by the author, which is of course, the same complaint that can be made about the Trolley Problem, namely, "It's ludicrous."  In what sort of world are you going to come across multiple people tied up on railroad tracks?  For that matter, in what world is the switch open to public access?

    Of course, my biggest problem with the Trolley Problem is that I figure me and mine are usually the minority getting sacrificed for the majority.  And even if not usually, then almost certainly often.

    But, back to the story, after trying to figure out any way to save the woman, the pilot admits defeat.  The woman talks to her brother, then willingly walks into the airlock.

    For 40 years, people have rephrased the problem, trying to come up with a way out within the constraints of the story.  In 1992, Don Sakers tackled the problem, this time with a young woman as the pilot, and a 9yo boy as the stowaway.  Spoilers in...

5...

4...

3...

2...

1...

    In Saker's take, the pilot stands at the airlock door looking at the boy as he is about to walk into the airlock to be jettisoned, and thinks, "I'd give my right arm to save him."  At which point, she realizes that she has to throw out 25kg of body, but it doesn't have to be intact.  So she amputates the kids limbs and her own legs with her laser sidearm and jettisons them, then crawls into the pilot's seat and lands the craft.

    I really liked the solution because not only was it elegant, yet brutally ugly, it came at personal cost to the pilot.  The story ends with her going to see the boy getting his limbs regrown, but as an adult, it's hit or miss whether the limb regeneration treatments will work, and she may have to use prosthetics the rest of her life.

    I think that's what's missing from Utilitarian "Ethics":  the human factor that can think outside the box and discover solutions, even at personal cost.  The maxim of Utilitarianism is "The greatest good for the greatest number," but who defines what the greatest good is?  The current pandemic is a great example of this.  Many elderly people would rather risk an early death in the interest of continued contact with their families.  Others would rather trade a year or so now for the potential of 5 more years later.  Who's right?  Frankly, that's a stupid question.  The better question is, "Who has the right to tell either of them they're wrong?"  "The Cold Solutions" pilot decides to value her conscience over her own legs.

    And how do those making such judgments even know the outcome is going to be good?  The history of the last hundred-odd years is replete with Utilitarian decisions resulting in piss-poor outcomes.  Once upon a time, they thought it was "good" to purge the newly-founded national parks of wolves, because the wolves killed the ungulates.  But then the ungulate population exploded, overgrazed, and suffered more from illness than when wolves were picking them off.  To go back to the previous example, there's plenty of research to suggest that isolation is more deadly to the elderly than respiratory illness.  Worse yet, the combination.

    Utilitarianism requires actions to be judged by their outcomes, rather than their intent.  And for retroactive study, I'm all for that.  Let's absolutely judge the extermination of the Asian sparrow by the tens of millions of people who died in the famines it actually caused rather than by the tons of theoretical grain it was intended to save.  

    But let us also remember those gravestones when today's policy makers wish to justify their actions by their projected outcomes.

Nephrolithiasis Reviews

So what do you do when you're a hundred miles from home and too wiped out from fighting a kidney stone to work?

    Watch movies.

    Been a very long time since I reviewed a movie, largely because it's been a while since I've watched any.  But with nothing else to do, I pulled up the free movies on my Amazon watch list and binged.

    Zoombies is perhaps the perfect kidney stone movie.  A schlocky B-horror flick from the kings of such things over at the Asylum, it has precisely no real character development or plot.  Monkeys at zoo develop unexplained (beyond "enzyme in their brains") zombifying virus that can somehow infect other species, including birds, but not humans (yet?).  After the unprepared security team fails to contain them, our plucky band of disposable interns must escape the zoo while keeping the animals from doing the same.  Can easily be followed while on hydrocodone.

    Leave No Trace was a much less appropriate choice for the circumstances, but a much better movie.  Kindasorta based on a true story from the '90s, it's about a vet whose PTSD precludes living a normal life trying to raise his daughter in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.  Eventually, the park service busts them, and they have to try to adapt to a "normal" work and house life.  The solution they find at the end is elegant, and the general theme of the movie--that individuals should be allowed to live in whatever way suits them, rather than what society deems proper--resonates with my own experience.

    American Ultra was another good kidney stone pick.  The plot was obvious, the action over-the-top, and Jesse Eisenberg always makes for a quirky lead.  The plot centers around successor programs to the well-documented MK Ultra hijinks those crazy CIA kids did for twenty years back in the '50s, '60s, and '70s.  Eisenberg portrays a sleeper agent dropped into a dead-end West Virginia town (redundant, I know) that gets activated by the program supervisor who can't bear to see him bumped off by her colleague's competing program.  Cartoonish violence and other hilarity ensues.  It did make me want to try some medical marijuana for pain relief.  But I don't think Montana has 18-hour green cards.

    The Silencing was a decent low-budget thriller.  Set in Alaska (I think), the story centers around a classic drunk whose daughter left his car while he was in a liquor store five years ago and never returned.  His penance was to turn his hunting and trapping land into a wildlife preserve in her honor.  Meanwhile, the local embattled sheriff is trying to crack the case of a serial killer who appears to hunt girls for sport.  It also feature the always-excellent Zahn McClarnon (Matthias from Longmire) as, well, basically Matthias from Longmire.

    The Vast of Night was a very well-acted, well-paced, artistic film.  The story of a small midwestern town being visited by aliens on a night in the 1950s, it went all out to capture the atmosphere of post-war/cold-war American culture.  Think a Norman Rockwell painting that a UFO flies into.  Unfortunately, like most artistic films I've seen, the ending seems to be phoned in.

    And not a movie, but I watched the South Park Pandemic Special.  An excellent sendup up pandemic dissonance ("I'm not talking to you until you put on a chin diaper!"), it has everything good about old-school South Park:  biting social commentary served up on a bed of moderately perverted toilet humor.

    So there it is, the playlist for your next case of renal calculli.

Kidney stone 1

Thanks to a childhood spent rehabbing houses for the state of Tennessee with a crew that believed OSHA regs were something to be laughed at, I accumulated some significant potential asbestos exposure.  As a result, I started getting screening imaging about 5 years ago.  While going over my first CT with the radiologist (joys of small-town medicine), he pointed out a bright spot in the lowest slice,which had picked up the top of my kidney.  He assured me that I could go my whole life with it lodged in there, never causing any problems.

    On the CT I had yesterday in the local ER, that spot is no longer there.

    Supposedly, I'm in the worst part.  The stone is located at the junction between the ureter and the bladder.  Once it pops into the bladder, I should have relief (until the last leg, which I'm told isn't as bad).  It's going to pop through any minute now.

    Any.  Minute.  Now.

    In the meantime (16ish hours at this point), I'm getting 30-60 minutes of dull ache between 10-20 minute episodes of curl-in-a-ball, pray-and-swear, try-not-to-puke-up-the-pain-meds pain.  It's like taking the worst balls shot of my life every 30-90 minutes.

    And on the downside of small-town medicine, there's no 24-hour pharmacy, so I'm stuck with a "starter pack" of 6 Norcos to last until Monday morning.

For Want of a Bolt

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For want of a horse the battle was lost;

For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost—

All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.

    This past week, I spent several days putting a new engine into Theseia.  This is the second time I've swapped the engine in her.  The last was about 9 years ago, and was the reason she and I were separated for all that time.

    Theseia is named for the classic philosophy problem, the Ship of Theseus.  For those not familiar:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

— Plutarch, Theseus

    When I purchased her, Theseia had the classic 258 inline 6 with a 2-barrel carburetor.  Theseia is a 1976 CJ-7, which raises an interesting question, because the 2-barrel carburetor was not introduced in America until 1979.  This means that at the very least, the original intake manifold had been replaced, and more likely, the entire engine.

    That 258 never ran right, so I decided to replace it with a V8.  I (like every AMC Jeep owner) toyed with the idea of a Chevy 350, but I decided instead to stay AMC and put in a 304.  Working for Tennessee Med Tech wages at the time, I had to scrape together all my savings and liquidate an asset to put together the princely sum of $650.

    Recently, I purchased the 360 that I am working on putting in and a backup 304 for $400, so make of that what you will.

    Anyway, the 304 I purchased had apparently been lowered a wee bit energetically when removed, and the oil pump housing was cracked.  I jumped on the Jeep Forum and bought a used one for $15 or so.  When it arrived, I threw it on the engine and promptly went out with my brother for a test drive.

    Unfortunately, I forgot to reassemble the oil pressure relief valve.

It goes right there.

    And so it was that my brother and I blew all the oil out of the engine all over the back roads of McMinn County.  We got about 20 minutes of use out of the engine before it started making funny noises.  By the time I figured out what had gone wrong, the engine was seized.

    I was out of discretionary money (indeed, shortly thereafter, we began to accrue debt after the Shieldmaiden quit her job to stay home with the kids), so Theseia sat.  And sat.  About 2 years later, we finally recognized that we couldn't make ends meet in Tennessee and moved to Montana.  The next year, Theseia made it as far as my parents' cabin in Michigan.  It took many more years until we could arrange to haul her out to Montana, and so she sat and sat some more.  All told, she's been sitting for the next best thing to a decade.

    All for want of 2 minutes' labor.

    Anyway, the new engine is in, though there's still a few more days of work to get it running.  More importantly, the brake system needs to be purged so that she'll stop.  

    But this time, I put the oil in and have been letting it sit for a week to make sure there's no leaks before I start her up.

Puddleglum's Wager

On the topic of Hogfather, I've gone down a bit of a Jordan Peterson rabbit hole recently.  What does that have to do with Terry Pratchett?  Mostly, that I find an interesting similarity in Peterson's arguments that mythologies are useful to controlling human behavior:

    “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

    REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

    "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

    YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

    "So we can believe the big ones?"

    YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

    "They're not the same at all!"

    YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

    "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

    MY POINT EXACTLY.”

    Death here is echoing Plato's "Noble Lie" in The Republic.  His belief is that in order for society to rise above Hobbes's bellum omnium contra omnes, humanity requires myths to stir their aspirations to higher ideals.

   This is similar to two of America's founders (whose identities escape me at the moment).  In personal correspondence, one mentioned that he was contemplating coming out as an atheist.  The other cautioned him against it saying that while he personally agreed, some form of theism was required for a society to function.

    What I find interesting is the comparison and contrast with another, older British work of fantasy:

    "One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

    The comparisons are obvious.  Both authors are suggesting that belief in a higher narrative is required for virtuous behavior, and can instill virtuous behavior, even if the higher narrative is false.  The contrast, of course, is that in The Silver Chair, there is a Narnia.

    Peterson seems to fall between the two.  He seems open to the idea that there is reality to the metaphysical claims of Christianity, but so far as I have seen, he never affirms it.  He seems more interested in the practical outcomes of Christian virtue, i.e. that the world is a better place when people love their neighbors as themselves, and if it's necessary to love God with all one's heart, soul, and mind in order to do so, then let's not dismiss that.  It's much the same as the many psychologists who say that if a ritual will make you feel calmer, then you should use it for its practical value whether there's any objective religious or magical "power" in it or not.

    Of course, as any sophomore logic student will point out, this smacks of appeal to the consequences.  And to the extent that someone makes the statement, "__________ must be true, or else __________ will happen," it is.  It is absolutely irrational to say, "Christ must have risen from the dead, or else holodomor."

    But if one accepts that beliefs result in actions, then consequences are worth considering.  A friend of mine, writing on the occasion of a school shooting, said the question is not "Why does this keep happening?" but rather, "Why does this not happen more often?"  It's a good question.  If one is to throw out all metanarratives that would appeal to a higher story than the individual's existence, then you quickly find yourself in solipsism.  In such a worldview, other individuals are NPCs in your story.  And as a college acquaintance noted about playing Halo 2, "[NPC] teammates are just there as ammo drops."

    Why, yes, he was a bit scary.