What's going to keep your feet nailed to the platform when the Sunset Limited comes through at 90 miles an hour?

Without reservation, I recommend the movie The Sunset Limited starring Tommy Lee Jones (dir.), Samuel L. Jackson, and written by Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men, The Road, All the Pretty Horses).  It's a two-man play adapted with minimal changes to the screen.  Jones plays White, a burnt-out history/philosophy professor who is suicidal, Jackson plays Black, a convicted murderer who found Jesus in prison and is now living a quiet life in a low-rent New York City apartment. Black prevents White from stepping in front of the commuter train The Sunset Limited, brings him home, and they talk together for ninety minutes about life, death, and find some human connection and mutual understanding.  White presents a personalized version of Existentialist-Nihilism, and Black presents a personalized version of pietistic Christianity.  The movie is not a comedy in either the popular sense or the classical sense.  My own awe at the movie is with Cormac McCarthy's ability to capture the inner perspective of a  born-again ex-con who has drunk deeply from the Waters of Life and a career academic who has drunk deeply from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.  

The Sunset Limited - Behind the Scenes Featurette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM9esxT4GRs

JORDAN PETERSON | The relationship between Disgust & Sex

    

Pretty interesting.  

First is the short clip on disgust and sex, followed by the original lecture.            

https://youtu.be/35e5i6FQuMw

also at this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35e5i6FQuMw&t=1s

Covid Questions

In 2020, epidemiological reports falsely listed covid as the cause of death of large numbers of elderly patients. False numbers may or may not be the case, but news and medical agencies did not investigate. If any group did investigate, the reports were not made known. There was ample political and financial motivation to falsify the numbers. No one seems to be investigating these apparent misreports.

The PCR Covid test reportedly has a high false-positive rate. The values would be on the insert sheet for the test. Typically, patients do not receive the insert sheet to know the rates of true positives and false positives and true negatives and false negatives. The point is that false positives make the infection rates appear worse than they are.

Because the public believes reports of false-positive rates, decision-makers cannot tell when the public has reached herd immunity. Although Covid should act like any other virus, the US rates seem too high for our population.

There is an uncommon push not to allow advocacy of early treatment, e.g., anti-viral-replicating drugs. The data seems reasonably supportive of early treatment when started early. 

These facts and observations raise suspicions of political intrusion into medicine, lowering the credibility of medical opinion.

Music of The Spheres of Someone's Life

 There are a few music-makers whose music hovers close toward me and mine.  Usually, I have two immediate responses: two steps forward, "YES!" and a muted one step out of the queue, "But what about that?"   Haha, I was just looking at the lineup to the 2019 music fest at Nowhere Else, the ranch of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist, collectively known as Over the Rhine.  

Here's that poster. * 

*not 2021, mind you.  

Yes indeed. These are all such good people, and they make such good music.  About that "other" reaction, well, sometimes I look in the mirror and ask, "Who are you and what did you do with the guy?"  Probably the more comfortable we all get with life, the easier it is to love people and ourselves with comfort and grace, letting us all be what we are and not what we wish.  

Over the Rhine, or Linford and Karin, have a festival coming up this year.  Three days of peace and understanding, I think that's what I heard.  Maybe that was some other festival, I don't know.  But knowing the good folk at Nowhere Else, we can trust that the three days are likely to be the odds-on favorite bet for a good time in 2021.

While I'm saying nice things about music and musicians, let me share with you my admiration for Susie Glaze, who, with her husband Steve Rankin and long-time musical friends Fred Sanders and Mark Indictor, play good music and aim for the high ground, shall we say. I just love these folks. This recent performance was brought to my attention, and I'd like to bring it to yours.

https://youtu.be/lLa9AYEGQTg

FYI, you can find both Over The Rhine's festival and Susie Glaze by following these links, and you'll also find a hearty helping of each over at YouTube.

http://www.nowhereelsefestival.com/#nowhere-else-festival  (This is for the 2021 festival.)

http://overtherhine.com

https://www.susieglaze.com

(In an earlier version, I had a picture of Antje Duvekot's album cover, "The Near Demise of the High Wire Dancer."  https://www.antjeduvekot.com/index.php?page=cds&display=1007  Please visit Antje at https://www.youtube.com/user/AntjeDuvekotChannel)

Keep your balance

It's all about making your way through ordinary life and the trials thereof.  And not getting too caught up in the winds that blow and the momentary light afflictions.  Stay the course.

These are a few helpful areas to emphasize, so we can keep together in troubled times.

Human touch.  Make peace with those in your house.  Family and loved ones.  

The music is good.  Music to listen to, and music as music practice and lessons and preparing for performing and then performing.  Even for people in your house and on the street where you live.  Some people make online concerts, which can be as low key as you like.

Exercise.  My grandkids are into weightlifting and the like, but when the gyms closed, they stopped.  But that's just a hindrance, not a closed door.  I'm as low-key a fellow as you're likely to find, but even I have a treadmill that will work when I turn it on.  

Is this all?  Nope, not by a long shot.  Is it complete advice? Nah.  Is it something?  Well, yeah.  And, gotta say, it's what I've been landing on, to emphasize, to keep my own balance.  I didn't even mention the regular strategies.

A problem with giving and taking advice about how to get through life is that people have their own issues, circumstances, and so forth.  For instance, someone has trouble seeing.  So you say, my glasses helped me, here try them on.  What? They didn't help? 

THE USA is holding to a higher standard of social distancing than the world at large. Why? PART ONE.

The USA is holding to a higher standard of social distancing than the world at large.  

Reflected in markers such as that we want to keep schools closed, while the rest of the world is not.

Why is this?

Two heuristics or guides to thought are to use personality traits (OCEAN/the Big Five) to predict what ought to happen if such and such were the case, and to view things through what ought to happen if a group assumes Christian metaphysics as the reality on which we base the rightness or wrongness of our prudent actions.

A problem with trying to ask and answer this title's question is that an ad hoc explanation could go either way and have no compelling force.  So to make the analysis a little better, we would have to spell out what the conditions were, and predict what the assumptions would lead to, singularly and in interaction.

Loving the Truth, Receiving the Truth, Defending the Truth.

One of my children, when he went to college, thought that the philosophy class would be a lot like dinnertime with Dad, where we would socratically talk about ideas, to get to the truth.  But, alas, he was being asked to remember dates and pivotal figures and power struggles.  It would be fair to say that this child of mine did not enjoy the course, any more than I would have.

Over adult years, this child of mine, now fully grown with serious responsibilities, and whom I respect greatly, has stopped having discussions like these with me.  He thought that I was sparring, or playing, with no serious point to it.  As if our adult conversations were to the truth as high school wrestling is to hand to hand warfare with bayonets.  I was seeing our adult conversations as more analogous to Fort Benning or Parris Island, with the truth as being the next hill to take, at possible cost to our lives.

And as anyone who has trained and fought in the military or as a first responder, there is a joy to being part of a Band of Brothers (or the equivalent), and a joy in fighting a good fight, even where there is pain and suffering and the possible loss of all good things.  The stakes are high, in loving and receiving the truth, and in defending the weak and the oppressed and in defending freedom.

When Lewis uses the word 'art', we may fairly substitute 'philosophy' or 'ideas' or even the humble term, 'words'.

Lewis writes:

A work of (whatever) art can be either ‘received’ or ‘used.’  When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities. The one, to use an old-fashioned example, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know roads we have never yet explored. The other is like adding one of those little motor attachments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides. These rides in themselves may be good, bad, or indifferent. The ‘uses’ which the many make of the arts may or may not be intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid. That’s as may be. ‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.

C.S. Lewis.  An Experiment in Criticism, p. 88.