Month: March 2024

Reliable Sources

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My initial reaction to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was disbelief, I had just swiped open my phone, eyes adjusting after I rolled out of bed Tuesday morning, and saw the Daily Mail headline blazing on my Facebook news feed.  So immediately I Google “bridge collapse” and, sure enough, the highlighted results were full of similar headlines.  It must be true.

Since that moment there has been a flurry of speculation.  My first thought, of course, is was this deliberate?  Did the Russians do it?   But as I started to gather evidence, like the video showing the lights going out and puff of black smoke, mechanical failure was a plausible explanation.  That didn’t rule out some kind of sophisticated hacking attack, but then this isn’t a Tesla car or Hollywood fantasy where anything electronic can just be operated remotely through undisclosed magical means.

Theories are easy to create.  The hard part is to sift through the information pouring in and come up with something actually likely given probabilities and reliable sources.  A random guy online or old Larry at the parts counter isn’t trustworthy.  The corporate media is only slightly better, in that they at least get the general story right, yet are also politically motivated and basically parroting official sources or their ‘experts’ at a lower resolution.

What of these officials and experts?

I generally rate someone who has their own reputation on the line over someone who is spit balling and couldn’t change their own spark plugs.  Someone with credentials is a better choice for information given that they did put in the work to get their degree and prove their competence.  However, a PhD or government position doesn’t make a person honest or free of bias.  Those who get paid by the government are part of the political establishment and their partisan agenda should be assumed.

1) Professional Experience 

The sources that I trust are those who built a reputation outside of politics and within the industry—this is why I’ve subscribed to “What is Going on With Shipping?”  Later in the day of the collision and collapse of the bridge I found an established channel about maritime matters for explanation.  How do I know he’s credible?  His fluency is a start, he has the technical jargon and credibility with others who know shipping from first hand experience.  It is notable that nobody here is surprised that this incident could happen.  The details of his analysis give me confidence that the information is good.

Authority comes from having professional experience and a proven record.  When I picked my neck surgeon, for example, we had a conversation about his prior record and the procedure.  I sized him up.  He was articulate, empathetic, and had all the expected confidence of someone who could work a miracle of modern medicine.  He also was able to explain everything in terms that I could understand.  The trust I put in him paid off, my recovery was great and I’ve come back stronger than ever.  Licensing with charisma doesn’t mean someone is competent, but it definitely helps.

2) My Own Aptitude 

But my main tool for determining who to trust is based on my own aptitude.  I have a decent understanding of physics and spent my younger days curious about mechanical systems—and always needed to understand how they work.  I could turn a wrench.  I did my own diagnostics and repairs.  So when I do bring my car to the mechanic I’ve already done my homework. 

For example, when my car lost power right away I suspected the Ti-VCT system was to blame.  The engine then gave a code that supported this hypothesis and I took it to a local tire shop and inspection garage.  I told them exactly what to look for giving them a page of the diagnostics manual.  And yet, after having the car for a day or two (after changing the air filter and cleaning the MAF sensor) they concluded it could just be the car is old and losing compression.  Finally, after taking the time to look under the hood, I found the problem.  It was what I had been suspecting.  This time I took the vehicle to a real technician, a guy who with a reputation for good diagnosis, and he gave a beautiful technical explanation of what happens with a short in that system.  After an inexpensive repair I’ve had no issues since.

I’ve never worked in the engine room of a big cargo ship.  I know that they are huge and, despite involving the same principles, are on an entirely different scale.  For one, it takes a team to keep them running, this isn’t like your Toyota where you can simply turn the key, put it in drive and go.  No, they have a startup sequence and when I heard a play-by-play of the disaster unfolding, where the puff of black smoke was explained as being a fuel-air mixture imbalance when they were using a burst of compressed air to start the massive engine, I recalled hearing this being explained in a documentary and it all lined up with what I know about engines.  It is clear he was credible and therefore I felt the rest of his commentary had merit.  I’ll never trust the people who completely miss on the basics and then expect me to believe their conspiracy theories.

3) Most Plausible Explanation 

It could be the MV Dali crew were attacked by mind control aliens using the 5G cell phone network.  There’s no way to disprove this is not what happened.  However, it is not the most plausible explanation and certainly not the first stop (or last) of a reasonable analysis.  What is probable is the answer with the least amount of moving parts or crazy assumptions, which points currently in the direction that this was an accident waiting to happen or a matter of reasonable probabilities that needs no fanciful dreamt up explanation.

There are those times when fact is stranger than fiction.  But we should only go there if there is plain evidence of motives and the means.  Like when the Nord Stream pipeline exploded and prior to this the US President made a threat “We will bring an end to it.” It isn’t a big stretch to believe he had a hand in the sabotage.  The US Navy is one of the few in the world that have the capability of making this kind of attack, so that is a very plausible explanation.  It also wouldn’t just happen on its own or accidentally, so we do look for the potential connections.

Nothing is ever absolute.  We can’t know for certain.  But I’m going with the assessment of the professionals who don’t seem at all surprised that this could happen and can give an informative analysis.  I’ll weigh one of their opinions over ten thousand who claim that there’s something fishy or they feel it in their gut and who have never set foot in the bowels of a cargo ship.  The reliable sources are those with professional experience and are not tainted by ideologies or narratives that color their perspective of all events.

Navigation Of The Virtual Space

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As we rolled into Washington DC, national symbols emerging into view, I alerted my twelve-year-old son to the sites ahead.  He looked up, grunted an acknowledgement, and then immediately buried his head back into the device in his hands.  At which point, now frustrated, I let him have it with one of those classic back in my day dad speeches imploring that he join us in the real world.  

This episode segues well with a thoughts developed further this past weekend.

I had an informative conversation with a man who worked in the US Capital with prominent politicians and also knew a little about astronomy.  He showed me a picture of this formation of stars that he took while at his home in the Philippines.  I didn’t recognize it and he then proceeded to tell me that this is the Crux (or Southern Cross) and how early explorers had used this for navigation after the North Star slipped under the horizon.

I’ve been trying to define a problem that is more prevalent in to our time.  And it has to do with the difference between social constructs, suspended in language, and actual substance.  Before GPS, to navigate the globe required direct observation and accurate intuition.  A successful voyage depended on being grounded in the realities revealed by the tapestry of the stars above and celestial bodies.  Even without images from satellites they could properly deduce the shape of the Earth.

Today we are not looking up anymore, we look down to our smart phones and get lost in the mire of information space and tangle of interpretation.  It is sort of like the night sky is blotted out by artificial light, many do not know the difference between overlay of language or theory and the real bedrock of science.  They live in a world of distracting fantasies and imaginary monsters.  They float off into a sea of nothingness at very best and could potentially imperil the ship of civilization if their delusions took the helm.

Abstraction is great.  Thinking beyond what can be immediately seen is an important tool of human intellect.  Language, likewise, is a superpower.  And yet these things must be properly calibrated.  The sextant is only useful with the correct inputs.  Likewise, if the waypoints of our thoughts are incorrect and the final conclusions that we reach will be flawed as well.  Many sail boldly, despite having deviate far off course of sound logic and reason, with disaster ahead.

Collapsing the Narrative

The Francis Scott Key bridge was struck by a careening cargo ship after the first part of this of this blog was written and the many interpretations of that event provide even more fodder for thought.  Many have a hard time believing that this kind of accident can just happen without some kind of nefarious behind the scenes orchestration. 

These conspiracy minded folks are like the ‘woke’ who always see everything through the lens of race.  From my friends who tell me to not believe my eyes (or engineering intuition) and follow their gut feelings about “something fishy” or those on the opposite side trying to make a connection between this and “MAGA extremists” voting against a pork-filled ‘infrastructure’ bill—they mistake their ideological lens and partisan bias with special discernment.

The problem is, unlike the Key bridge that needs actual physical pillars to remain as a viable structure, there is no amount tonnage of reality that can knock down these towers of ignorance.  Those who confuse their own interpretive matrix with the actual substrate of reality can free-float in their fantasy lands and delusions pretty much indefinitely.  It is what Jonathan Swift explained: “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.”

The other day I stumbled across a video, “Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things,” that discussed the motivated reasoning that is detached from reality and delusion.  The description “fashionably irrational beliefs” (or FIBs) gets to the heart of the matter and that is that our intelligence is oriented in the direction of social status or acceptance and group belonging rather than some notion of objective truth.  This identity protective cognition leads us to believe a pile of nonsense:

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Saul Bellow

This disposition explains the eagerness of academics to join with their other colleagues in pushing agendas like transgenderism and concepts of white privilege. 

It also relates religious dogmas and doctrines, where you post a blog post questioning the idea that Anabaptists are the true church resulting in hate-mail from a self-described radical who couldn’t find polite words when their most cherished identity was challenged.  Whether the defense mechanism is middle-school insults or doctoral dissertations, it can all be lacking substance underneath.

As I’ve thought how to make this blog more concrete, I believe it all does come down to the disconnect between language (and the ideas contained) and the material world.  I can tell you that gravity is fake—something invented by the Pope in Rome to control and subjugate, but jumping off of a tall building will not likely go well for me.  In that case the ground rising up to meet me would be the final authority and my special “wisdom of the ages” splattered.

Unfortunately, while we can escape the virtual reality of our cell phones by looking up and just observing the world around us, we can’t ever be free of our own minds.  We’ll always be limited by our own perceptions and concepts—seeing the world as we are rather than as it is—but we can always at least be aware that we need constant calibration.  Abstraction needs to be grounded or it is useless for navigation and only good for entertainment.

The First Anabaptist Identity Conference

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Over the past couple of decades the liberal end of the conservative Mennonites and a few others get together to navel gaze about what it means to be them.  This “Anabaptist Identity Conference” (an annual event which some of us have dubbed the identity crisis) is truly a product of this time where nobody is sure of who they are as they once were.  There is a strong urge to seek out others, like us, as to bolster our shaking foundations. 

In this year’s event there is a line up of many meme worthy topics, like “The Anabaptists: Continuation of the Ancient Faith,” where ol’ David Bercot, a man who truly knows where his meal ticket comes from, will try to make the case that Anabaptism (as they define it) is somehow a direct lineage to the Apostle’s church.  This connecting the dots to make it fit narrative, of course, will play right into the confirmation bias of his audience who fawn over an educated outsider.  Maybe this year he’ll have pictures of whoopie pies painted in the catacombs?

Anyhow, some may believe that the first Anabaptist Identity Conference was held in 2007, in the Amish vacation Mecca called Sarasota, but there was one before this way back in 1536.  It occurred in the aftermath of an event that left Anabaptists then trying to find a path forward.  This is the Bocholt meeting that brought together survivors of the Münster rebellion and other factions in the Anabaptist movement:

In August 1536, the leaders of Anabaptist groups influenced by Melchior Hoffman met in Bocholt in an attempt to maintain unity. The meeting included followers of Batenburg, survivors of Münster, David Joris and his sympathisers, and the nonresistant Anabaptists.[4] At this meeting, the major areas of dispute between the sects were polygamous marriage and the use of force against non-believers. Joris proposed compromise by declaring the time had not yet come to fight against the authorities, and that it would be unwise to kill any non-Anabaptists. The gathered Anabaptists agreed to the compromise of no more force,[5] but the meeting did not prevent the fragmentation of Anabaptism.

No discussion of Anabaptism is complete without a little discussion about this crazy polygamous uprising.  Sure, the revisionist historians of the denomination may tell you otherwise, but the association is definitely there and the Wikipedia summary is accurate.  Menno Simons, in his 1539 Foundation Book, called the Münsterites “dear brethren” rather than claim they weren’t truly Anabaptists.  So are we really in a better position today to decide who is truly representative of the Anabaptist identity?  No, we’re not.

What is the Anabaptist identity?

In America it is mostly an ethnic group with a similar religious lineage.  Some within this category have openly lesbian pastors while others cling to traditional dress and buggies for transportation.  Unlike in the first 1536 identity conference, when their big debate was over use of violence, now the surviving Anabaptist groups agree on that and really not a whole lot other than that.  Even those who organize and attend the conference in the current year only represent a subset of the conservative Anabaptist groups.  The ‘spiritual’ lineage, while all claim it as their own, is too vague to put a finger on.

Men like Bercot and their ilk may want to declare the boundary lines even stricter than the early Anabaptists did, but that is just adding delusion upon a delusion.  No, I am not saying they aren’t Christians, that’s not my purveiw, but for one to claim they’re some kind of special remnant of the remnant is just plain grandiose.  And what comes to mind, at this juncture, is the “Stop It, Get Some Help” meme. 

Newsflash: You’re not even representative of the early Anabaptist —let alone the ancient church. 

This conference can’t speak for the plurality of the groups today who trace their roots the so-called “radical reformation” and do not have a voice in this identity rumination project.  What is hard to miss, for those outside looking in, is that this is an effort to preserve their distinction and not to seek the the unity in Christ that St Paul commanded (1 Corinthians 3) when some in the early church were busy commending themselves for their special identities.

I don’t have a problem with having an ethnic identity that is cherished.  I’m German, still Mennonite in many regards, and absolutely adore Old Order people.  I have no problem with having our own culture or celebrating our heritage.  It is why I encourage my son to keep his Igorot language and ways rather than have it all be erased in the American monoculture.  But there’s a vast difference between that and those basically arguing that they’re saved through heritage. 

Saying that Anabaptists are a “continuation of ancient faith” is only a half step away from being as crazy as the Schizophrenic who thinks they’re the second coming of Jesus.  The denominational ground you’re standing on is not sacred simply because you currently stand on it.  It is spiritually equivalent those Anabaptists in Münster declaring their own project to be the New Jerusalem.  We should know better than to live in that kind of self-delusion.  We should not condone or encourage it.

How Can You Love a Stepchild?

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There are questions that frame an issue the wrong way and are only answered by asking another question.  One of them is: How can you raise another man’s son?  The only real question for me is how could I claim to love my wife and then not love HER children?  

Maybe I simply look at the world differently from other men.  But the initial question to me comes off as sounding like “how can you love another man’s daughter?” Answer: “Well, we are the same species and it just happens naturally, I suppose?”

I believe the real issue is when someone is looking at step-parenting from a detached or deconstructionist view.  In this framing it is all about biology and evolution.  In other words, we should be like lions who kill the offspring of male rivals, not raising them as our own.  It is a sort of Social Darwinistic construct where a man should only ever be concerned about raising the product of his own immediate genetic insemination.

But I think this is truly a very naive view of human relationships.  We get along with our relatives as far as we relate to them and not after we DNA test them for our paternity.  It is the same for my son and I.  Probably a bit over six years ago I met this goofy kid with a bit of a crooked grin.  He was endearing to me for his energy and his incredible ability to make friends anywhere.  And, a few years later, when he asked me if he could call me “Daddy,” the die was cast.

The thing is, when I learned my bhest had a son I knew any romance with her would be a two for one deal.  It was never a question for me.  I did put considerable thought to it, worried more that this young person would accept me for this important role.  

There was assurance, along the way, that helped me settle my worries and came from a stepdaughter who absolutely adored her stepfather.  She told me that the fact he had choose to love her like a daughter made it a special love.  Good step-parents don’t make a mistake when they bring a child into their lives.  By contrast, there are many biological parents who become parents because they were unable to control sexual impulses.

In conclusion, my question is to those who ask the question: How could you not love a beautiful child, a wonderful miracle of life, who makes no judgement of you for your own multitude of faults?   A child can form attachment to any adult who loves them as a parent loves and the same works for men who are committed to love.

Despite our variety of gifts and superficial differences of appearance, we’re all genetic cousins.  My wife comes from the opposite side of the world, like our son, yet we are a couple very much compatible.  Sure, there are differences in cultural expectations, or personality conflicts that come along, but it is really what you’re willing to put in as far as building the bond that matters.

If you could not love or even raise a child simply because they aren’t genetically your own then my only advice is to step up your game.  Any man, who still has a functional reproductive system, can impregnate fertile women.  That doesn’t make him a father or worthy of raising a child.  No, it is always a choice to take responsibility for the needs and future of another unique individual.

It was our joint love for Ydran that helped us to push through years of waiting.  If it were only the future of two adults going separate ways would have been easier.  But when he called me “Daddy” on the phone, something changed in me and after that there was no way I would simply abandon him to fate.