TIL

TUR (Transurethral resection) is passé. PVP (photoselective vaporization of the prostate) is now the cool kid.

Having cared for many post-op TUR men 55 years ago, I’m glad of the change.

I heard this read on a podcast a few hours ago and it blind-sided me in the best possible way. When I Am Asked | The Poetry Foundation

Having left the Protestant religious world 29 years ago next month, I nevertheless remain interested in its goings-on — sometimes horrified, sometimes filled with schadenfreude, occasionally pleasantly surprised — because America is deeply Protestant and I cannot entirely escape that fact short of, perhaps, getting me to an Orthodox monastery and forever eschewing news and political involvement.

But I’ve become increasingly aware that, in David Foster Wallace terms, because Protestantism is not the water I deliberately swim in, there’s not only things I’m better equipped to see but important currents I’m oblivious to.

My version of Protestantism has scarcely been updated since 1997 and a lot of it is shaped by my idiosyncratic experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was caught in a backwater of Wheaton-style evangelicalism — a strongly dispensationalist milieu adjacent to a broader mainstream. So I’m still tending to beat a dispensational premillennialist horse, though I see glimpses that it’s virtually dead.

But I’m updating my version through reading The Protestant Mind, a blog-like project of First Things with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In this epoch when “Evangelical” is almost synonymous with “MAGA” in the popular press, *The Protestant Mind*’s principal author, Dale Coulter, helpfully provides a taxonomy of the Christian Right in America 2026 (“The Two Evangelical Rights”). The major rubrics are New Protestant Right” and “new evangelical populism”, but there are substreams of each.

It helped me clarify a lot. I was tempted to speculate about which one I’d likely be in were I still Protestant, but that’s just a counterfactual too far.

This involved a Pastor Dave Swanson and sound like something our @dswanson might be interested in.

My periodic reminder that not all evangelicals are MAGA.

Is There Anything BPC-157 Can’t Cure? - The Atlantic.

Who else remembers DMSO, the liniment that left a garlic tasted in users’ mouths and cured everything? (It’s still around, somewhat to my surprise.)

Regarding the two Dan Sullivans running for the U.S. Senate in Alaska: The Alaska courts have sorted this according to Alaska law. The feds have no role in preventing or curing Alaska voters’ potential confusion.

Period. Full Stop.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

C.S. Lewis via Martin Shaw

Pet peeve: “fewer” has fallen out of our common lexicon; it’s now “less” regardless of context.

Man’s power over nature really is the power of some men over other men with nature as their instrument.

Paraphrasing C.S. Lewis (i.e., quoting from memory)

Recommended: Charlie Warzel’s podcast with the authors of End-Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. Transcript also available at link: (The Zealousness of the New Tech Right - The Atlantic).

With the Lewis quote in mind, is not the crypto-religious and totalizing potential of AGI (if achieved) likely to make Sam Altman and/or Dario Amodei richer and more powerful than Bezos and Musk (who already meddles in war policy)?

Does this exorcist need a social media detox? Celebrity exorcist priest to take one-year ‘media fast’ after meeting with Denver archbishop.

I suspect that “celebrity” is the key word.

TIL

Reticulated: Resembling or forming a net or network.

H/T @Miraz

1. My wife is very indulgent of our grandson.
2. I learned today that Amazon maintains an “About You” profile on its customers.
3. My profile was spot-on.
4. Amazon thinks my wife builds and rides dirt bikes (see point 1).

Gratifying to hear that the Bush family is backing über-corrupt Ken Paxton’s Democrat opponent.

First, there’s a primary fight between a nearby Senator who opposed redistricting and a MAGA agent-of-retribution. Recount and court fights result in a 3-vote win for incumbent.

Now, my own veteran state Senator is arrested twice for shoplifting and, not implausibly claiming unspecified cognitive deterioration, backs off active personal campaigning. Medical evaluation follows. Updating, he says he’ll resign if he’s re-elected, letting the party choose his successor - and they’re pouring money into ads to assure that he is re-elected.

This is a fairly red Senate district; I suspect it will stay in Republican hands – though I’m darned if I know who that Republican will be.

This story stunned me: U.S. officials privately advise states fearing Trump election meddling - The Washington Post

My YouTube feed is full of videos supposedly of “sovereign citizens” getting shot down by judges.

Thing is, though, not one of them said they were sovereign citizens. They were just your basic “fool for a client” representing themselves, which isn’t the sovereign citizen ideology.

Bruce Cockburn has a new Album, The Blood of Others. Gone are the protest songs, as befits an 81-year-old, arrived are some nice covers.

I wish I had saved all the texts I’ve gotten asking for political donations over the past few months. I’ve assumed most of them are scams, plus Psalm 145/146:3.

I can’t recall when I last gave to a campaign; must be a decade or more.

It is written somewhere in the stars that Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese should forever be rivals, but with the Fever out of the WNBA tournament, I’ll take Reese’s 30 points and 16 rebounds as a pretty okay showing.

The thing that will keep the United States united is nothing more and nothing less than the ability and willingness of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves and restraints on how far they will go, rhetorically and otherwise, to express their disagreements with their fellow Americans. You have to start from the position “no American is my enemy.” I don’t have to like him, I don’t have to agree with him, but no American is my enemy …

…

Not much matters. The things that matter matter hugely, but not much actually matters.

Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewed by David Brooks.

I take some comfort in the theory that the US seems destined to go through painful political spasms every 60 years or so, and the 2020s had a target painted on them.

The good news is we always (so far anyway) recover.

I’m not a particular fan of the 2nd Amendment, but this sort of thing should be part of our reckoning on guns.

If you hear anyone bragging about the explosion in numbers of “No Kings” protests, be advised, anecdotally, that our local No Kings rally was divided into five rallies for higher visibility.

Just sayin’.

Sigh.

‘Mystery continues:’ Purdue-backed expedition to uncover Earhart’s plane finds trees, instead.

I saw the photos. Those trees look a lot like a submerged plane.

Reflections on constrained preaching in a parish with many newcomers. The Gospel for People battered by bad religion .