Wednesday Bible Study: Sorry, we just have to get through this

I got nothin' else to say  about this incredibly boring bullshit. But I'm committed to reading the whole damn book so that's what's gonna happen.

19 The second lot came out for the tribe of Simeon according to its clans. Their inheritance lay within the territory of Judah. ² It included:

Beersheba (or Sheba),^[a] Moladah, ³ Hazar Shual, Balah, Ezem, ⁴ Eltolad, Bethul, Hormah, ⁵ Ziklag, Beth Markaboth, Hazar Susah, ⁶ Beth Lebaoth and Sharuhen—thirteen towns and their villages;

⁷ Ain, Rimmon, Ether and Ashan—four towns and their villages— ⁸ and all the villages around these towns as far as Baalath Beer (Ramah in the Negev).

This was the inheritance of the tribe of the Simeonites, according to its clans. ⁹ The inheritance of the Simeonites was taken from the share of Judah, because Judah’s portion was more than they needed. So the Simeonites received their inheritance within the territory of Judah.

Allotment for Zebulun

¹⁰ The third lot came up for Zebulun according to its clans:

The boundary of their inheritance went as far as Sarid. ¹¹ Going west it ran to Maralah, touched Dabbesheth, and extended to the ravine near Jokneam. ¹² It turned east from Sarid toward the sunrise to the territory of Kisloth Tabor and went on to Daberath and up to Japhia. ¹³ Then it continued eastward to Gath Hepher and Eth Kazin; it came out at Rimmon and turned toward Neah. ¹⁴ There the boundary went around on the north to Hannathon and ended at the Valley of Iphtah El. ¹⁵ Included were Kattath, Nahalal, Shimron, Idalah and Bethlehem. There were twelve towns and their villages.

¹⁶ These towns and their villages were the inheritance of Zebulun, according to its clans.

Allotment for Issachar

¹⁷ The fourth lot came out for Issachar according to its clans. ¹⁸ Their territory included:

Jezreel, Kesulloth, Shunem, ¹⁹ Hapharaim, Shion, Anaharath, ²⁰ Rabbith, Kishion, Ebez, ²¹ Remeth, En Gannim, En Haddah and Beth Pazzez. ²² The boundary touched Tabor, Shahazumah and Beth Shemesh, and ended at the Jordan. There were sixteen towns and their villages.

²³ These towns and their villages were the inheritance of the tribe of Issachar, according to its clans.

Allotment for Asher

²⁴ The fifth lot came out for the tribe of Asher according to its clans. ²⁵ Their territory included:

Helkath, Hali, Beten, Akshaph, ²⁶ Allammelek, Amad and Mishal. On the west the boundary touched Carmel and Shihor Libnath. ²⁷ It then turned east toward Beth Dagon, touched Zebulun and the Valley of Iphtah El, and went north to Beth Emek and Neiel, passing Kabul on the left. ²⁸ It went to Abdon,^[b] Rehob, Hammon and Kanah, as far as Greater Sidon. ²⁹ The boundary then turned back toward Ramah and went to the fortified city of Tyre, turned toward Hosah and came out at the Mediterranean Sea in the region of Akzib, ³⁰ Ummah, Aphek and Rehob. There were twenty-two towns and their villages.

³¹ These towns and their villages were the inheritance of the tribe of Asher, according to its clans.

Allotment for Naphtali

³² The sixth lot came out for Naphtali according to its clans:

³³ Their boundary went from Heleph and the large tree in Zaanannim, passing Adami Nekeb and Jabneel to Lakkum and ending at the Jordan. ³⁴ The boundary ran west through Aznoth Tabor and came out at Hukkok. It touched Zebulun on the south, Asher on the west and the Jordan^[c] on the east. ³⁵ The fortified towns were Ziddim, Zer, Hammath, Rakkath, Kinnereth, ³⁶ Adamah, Ramah, Hazor, ³⁷ Kedesh, Edrei, En Hazor, ³⁸ Iron, Migdal El, Horem, Beth Anath and Beth Shemesh. There were nineteen towns and their villages.

³⁹ These towns and their villages were the inheritance of the tribe of Naphtali, according to its clans.

Allotment for Dan

⁴⁰ The seventh lot came out for the tribe of Dan according to its clans. ⁴¹ The territory of their inheritance included:

Zorah, Eshtaol, Ir Shemesh, ⁴² Shaalabbin, Aijalon, Ithlah, ⁴³ Elon, Timnah, Ekron, ⁴⁴ Eltekeh, Gibbethon, Baalath, ⁴⁵ Jehud, Bene Berak, Gath Rimmon, ⁴⁶ Me Jarkon and Rakkon, with the area facing Joppa.

⁴⁷ (When the territory of the Danites was lost to them, they went up and attacked Leshem, took it, put it to the sword and occupied it. They settled in Leshem and named it Dan after their ancestor.)

⁴⁸ These towns and their villages were the inheritance of the tribe of Dan, according to its clans.

Allotment for Joshua

⁴⁹ When they had finished dividing the land into its allotted portions, the Israelites gave Joshua son of Nun an inheritance among them, ⁵⁰ as the Lord had commanded. They gave him the town he asked for—Timnath Serah^[d] in the hill country of Ephraim. And he built up the town and settled there.

⁵¹ These are the territories that Eleazar the priest, Joshua son of Nun and the heads of the tribal clans of Israel assigned by lot at Shiloh in the presence of the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. And so they finished dividing the land.

Footnotes

1. Joshua 19:2 Or Beersheba, Sheba; 1 Chron. 4:28 does not have Sheba.
2. Joshua 19:28 Some Hebrew manuscripts (see also 21:30); most Hebrew manuscripts Ebron
3. Joshua 19:34 Septuagint; Hebrew west, and Judah, the Jordan,
4. Joshua 19:50 Also known as Timnath Heres (see Judges 2:9)

4. 
   

Epistemology VI: Epidemiology

Epidemiology originally largely meant studying how infectious diseases spread, and that's still a major concern of epidemiologists. However, it also includes the study of any and every environmental or behavioral factor affecting human health. For example, the finding that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer (not to mention a bazillion other diseases) is an epidemiological finding. 

 

Epidemiology is largely an observational science, given the ethical prohibition against exposing humans to potentially hazardous conditions for experimental purposes. That's not to say it hasn't been done, with the victims being especially vulnerable people, but it's no longer condoned. And given the complex associations and interactions among elements of the human environment and behavior, it is usually very challenging to convincingly establish causal relationships. That's why the tobacco companies could hold out so long against the conclusion that their products were deadly, although truth be told they continued to deny it long after they knew it to be true.

There are just a few basic epidemiological study designs. They differ in time, cost and inferential value, so investigators have to balance the tradeoffs among these. The original finding of a link between tobacco and lung cancer was based on what's called a case-control study. The investigators found a bunch of people with lung cancer, and people without lung cancer who were otherwise similar in age and gender. Then they asked them a bunch of questions about their past behavior, including their smoking history. The association was striking: almost everybody with cancer was or had been a smoker, while the prevalence of smoking among people without it was much lower. The probability of this occurring by chance was infinitesimal. But . . . 

This did not prove that smoking causes cancer. The reason is that there might be some other factor, that the researchers didn't think to ask about, that is associated with both smoking and cancer. You can try to control for the factors you did ask about with various statistical techniques, but that gets complicated and there is often room for argument. Another possible objection is that people with cancer, who think smoking may have caused it, unconsciously over-report their smoking history. (Self-report bias is often a big problem, although it's a fairly minor one here.) 

 

So putting the nail in the coffin of coffin nails required more. Animal experiments showed that tobacco smoke causes lung cancer in rats, which helped. There were larger case-control studies that asked more questions. There were prospective cohort studies. These are more powerful for causal inference, but they take a long time -- decades in this case. Basically, you follow a bunch of people over the years, and you frequently get information about their behavior, environment and health. You can reliably ascertain who starts smoking and when, and compare their health to that of nonsmokers over the years. The so-called Framingham Heart Study, which has now gone on for generations, is probably the most famous example. 

So, I can tell you as certainly as I can tell you my name that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer, heart disease, strokes, other cancers, chronic obstructive  pulmonary disease, and a whole lot more you want no part of. So don't do it.

However, one area where there is serious controversy is nutrition. People get very annoyed, in fact, because the official nutritional advice has often changed over time. Among the many difficulties in nutrition research is getting accurate reports of what people eat. Most people don't remember what they had for lunch yesterday, let alone are able to give an accurate accounting of their entire intake for the past month. Diet is also inextricably linked with other characteristics of people, from income and social class, to ethnicity, to physical activity level, alcohol intake -- all sorts of confounders.

 

For a long time, a low-fat diet was promoted as healthy. Nope. In fact fat is good at slaking hunger, which means having it in your diet makes you less likely to overeat; and it doesn't cause the glycemic spike you get from starches, which creates risk of diabetes. So then they decided that it's not how much fat you eat, but what kind of fat. 

 

Without getting too much into the chemistry weeds, edible oils are long chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms attached, and what's called a carboxyl group on one end. Since carbon has a valence of four, each carbon atom (except for the ones at the ends) can have two hydrogen atoms attached, the other bonds going to their neighboring carbon atoms. If every position is occupied by a hydrogen atom, it's called a saturated fat. Animal fats, generally, are saturated. But if two adjacent carbon atoms have a double bond, they'll each be missing one hydrogen atom. If this happens, it's called an unsaturated fat.  In nature, almost always when this happens the hydrogen atoms adjacent to the double bond stick out on the same side. This is called a cis fat. But if they stick out on the opposite sides, it's called a trans fat. Although trans fats are rare in nature, they can be manufactured, and food companies liked them because they don't go rancid. They also tend to be solid at room temperature which is useful for some purposes.

 

Okay. To make a long story as short as I can, food scientists first decided that saturated fats are bad for you. They even promoted margarine -- a trans fat -- as a healthier substitute for butter. Whoops! It turns out that trans fats are the worst thing you can eat. They raise the bad kind of cholesterol and are associated with cardiovascular disease. Ultimately, the FDA banned artificial trans fats from the American food supply. (There is a small amount of trans fat in beef and dairy products, but it hasn't been found to be associated with disease.)

 

However, for a long time scientists still insisted that saturated fats are bad, and we should be eating unsaturated cis fats, which are various vegetable oils. There were more specific theories, such as omega-3 fatty acids -- with the carbon double bond in the third position from the tail -- have beneficial properties ranging from protection against heart disease to anti-depressive effectiveness. Right now, this is looking not so true after all. Saturated fats aren't so bad for you, and omega-3 fatty acids don't seem to have any super duper properties. (The idea that they do mostly came from their high prevalence in fish, and diets with a lot of fish do seem to be good. However, that doesn't seem to be the reason why after all.) There are other good reasons to reduce the amount of meat in your diet, but that doesn't seem to be one of them.

I won't get into any further discussion of the USDA nutritional recommendations. I do believe that high fiber diets are good, and that means whole grains. Veggies are good also, both for fiber and micronutrients. But are the proportions they recommend exactly right? That's really unprovable. Happy to see debate about this in the comments.

Sunday Sermonette: This will be over soon, I promise

I'm afraid we're still in excruciating boredom territory as the interminable process of dividing up the land continues. I still can't say what the point of all this is or why it's in the book. God works in mysterious ways I guess. My only comment is that it just seems impossible to get rid of the "giants." They are mentioned several times in Deuteronomy, and again in Joshua, and they are supposedly wiped out several times. But here they are again -- and they are still around in Judges. Hard to know what's going on with them.

18 The whole assembly of the Israelites gathered at Shiloh and set up the tent of meeting there. The country was brought under their control, ² but there were still seven Israelite tribes who had not yet received their inheritance.

³ So Joshua said to the Israelites: “How long will you wait before you begin to take possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has given you? ⁴ Appoint three men from each tribe. I will send them out to make a survey of the land and to write a description of it, according to the inheritance of each. Then they will return to me. ⁵ You are to divide the land into seven parts. Judah is to remain in its territory on the south and the tribes of Joseph in their territory on the north. ⁶ After you have written descriptions of the seven parts of the land, bring them here to me and I will cast lots for you in the presence of the Lord our God. ⁷ The Levites, however, do not get a portion among you, because the priestly service of the Lord is their inheritance. And Gad, Reuben and the half-tribe of Manasseh have already received their inheritance on the east side of the Jordan. Moses the servant of the Lord gave it to them.”

⁸ As the men started on their way to map out the land, Joshua instructed them, “Go and make a survey of the land and write a description of it. Then return to me, and I will cast lots for you here at Shiloh in the presence of the Lord.” ⁹ So the men left and went through the land. They wrote its description on a scroll, town by town, in seven parts, and returned to Joshua in the camp at Shiloh. ¹⁰ Joshua then cast lots for them in Shiloh in the presence of the Lord, and there he distributed the land to the Israelites according to their tribal divisions.

Allotment for Benjamin

¹¹ The first lot came up for the tribe of Benjamin according to its clans. Their allotted territory lay between the tribes of Judah and Joseph:

¹² On the north side their boundary began at the Jordan, passed the northern slope of Jericho and headed west into the hill country, coming out at the wilderness of Beth Aven. ¹³ From there it crossed to the south slope of Luz (that is, Bethel) and went down to Ataroth Addar on the hill south of Lower Beth Horon.

¹⁴ From the hill facing Beth Horon on the south the boundary turned south along the western side and came out at Kiriath Baal (that is, Kiriath Jearim), a town of the people of Judah. This was the western side.

¹⁵ The southern side began at the outskirts of Kiriath Jearim on the west, and the boundary came out at the spring of the waters of Nephtoah. ¹⁶ The boundary went down to the foot of the hill facing the Valley of Ben Hinnom, north of the Valley of Rephaim. It continued down the Hinnom Valley along the southern slope of the Jebusite city and so to En Rogel. ¹⁷ It then curved north, went to En Shemesh, continued to Geliloth, which faces the Pass of Adummim, and ran down to the Stone of Bohan son of Reuben. ¹⁸ It continued to the northern slope of Beth Arabah^[a] and on down into the Arabah. ¹⁹ It then went to the northern slope of Beth Hoglah and came out at the northern bay of the Dead Sea, at the mouth of the Jordan in the south. This was the southern boundary.

²⁰ The Jordan formed the boundary on the eastern side.

These were the boundaries that marked out the inheritance of the clans of Benjamin on all sides.

²¹ The tribe of Benjamin, according to its clans, had the following towns:

Jericho, Beth Hoglah, Emek Keziz, ²² Beth Arabah, Zemaraim, Bethel, ²³ Avvim, Parah, Ophrah, ²⁴ Kephar Ammoni, Ophni and Geba—twelve towns and their villages.

²⁵ Gibeon, Ramah, Beeroth, ²⁶ Mizpah, Kephirah, Mozah, ²⁷ Rekem, Irpeel, Taralah, ²⁸ Zelah, Haeleph, the Jebusite city (that is, Jerusalem), Gibeah and Kiriath—fourteen towns and their villages.

This was the inheritance of Benjamin for its clans.

Footnotes

1. Joshua 18:18 Septuagint; Hebrew slope facing the Arabah

Epistemology V: Clinical research

The science most people probably care about the most is the endeavor to promote human health and longevity. That's why the biggest part of the federal scientific enterprise is the National Institutes of Health, with additional money going to research sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the EPA, and others.

Human health research is difficult, however. Obviously, there are stringent ethical limitations on experimenting on humans. Formally, the requirement is that there be "equipoise" -- that you sincerely don't know, or even have compelling reason to believe, which of the experimental conditions is best for the subjects. That isn't really strictly observed, in my opinion, but that's a digression. In any case it means that progress in developing and evaluating new treatments is slow, because you have to pay so much attention to safety along the way. Another difficulty is that for many kinds of treatments, and certainly for lifestyle interventions, you need the people to go home and do something, whether it be take the pills, follow a certain diet, do certain exercises, and people can't be relied upon to do that correctly. In a clinical trial, you can put in extra resources to monitor and support them, but those won't be available if the intervention makes it to the real world.

There is also what's called heterogeneity of treatment effect. A treatment will be deemed effective if the average person is better off than the placebo or alternative treatment at the end of the trial. However, some people may benefit a lot, others not at all, others may be harmed. A treatment ruled ineffective may in fact benefit some people. But you can't go back and say retrospectively that one category of people benefited after all even if the average effect was null or harmful. I'm not going to try to give you a course in statistical inference here but in short, that would violate the mathematical logic by which we decide if outcomes are real or spurious. So you'd have to do a whole new trial just to test the subgroup effect. And that's expensive.

Also expensive is long-term follow up. Typically subjects are followed for no more than six months, but obviously how well they are doing after a year or two or ten matters a lot. There is supposed to be some effort to find this out  by what's called post-marketing surveillance but for the most part the drug companies don't really bother, even when the FDA orders them to. 

There are numerous other problems. People's subjective reports of well being may be influenced by whether they think they got a treatment, and even how the experimenters interact with them. Many conditions get better on their own, so sorting out the treatment effect can be challenging, even when comparing with a placebo. And if there are adverse effects, how do you weigh the against the benefits?

Given all these difficulties, the dirty little secret is that a lot of what doctors do, even quite routinely, doesn't have strong evidence for effectiveness. And human nature being what it is, they will even keep doing things that have been shown not to work, and getting them to stop is very hard. (For one thing they get  paid for it.) So medicine is more effective today than it was 50 or 60 years ago, and it keeps getting better, but progress is slow. There's a lot wasted on ineffective treatment, and finding effective treatments is hard and slow going. But there is an increasing commitment to science and evidence based medicine. La lucha continua.

Gaetzgate Update

Now that his perv pal Joel Greenberg is set to plead guilty to sex trafficking, among other charges, people figure Matt Gaetz is likely deep in the doo doo. Most likely he is, but what piques my curiosity is why the party of Family Values™ still seems fully enamored of him in spite of what is publicly known about his behavior, criminal charges aside. Paying young women to participate in group sex parties fueled by illegal drugs, and showing naked pictures of them to your colleagues on the house floor does not seem entirely consistent with the behavioral norms of the Moral Majority.

I think J.V. Last at The Bulwark has it right. (It's normally paywalled but they're giving this one away.) Republican voters no longer care about policy outcomes or principles of any kind. They only care about presentation,  symbolic enactment. Last compares it to branding, using the specific examples of Red Bull and Elon Musk. To wit:

A lot of people have goofed on Matt Gaetz for this statement: “If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.” But he’s right. . . . Does it matter to his future political prospects that Matt Gaetz doesn’t advance legislation? Does it matter that Madison Cawthorn staffed up his office with comms people? Does it matter that Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have committee assignments?

Well, these quirks would matter in a system where legislative accomplishments influenced voter behavior. But Republican voters don’t care  whether or not a border wall is built, or who would have (theoretically) paid for it. They don’t care about whether or not the government fails to manage a global pandemic, killing hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. They don’t care if unemployment is up—or down. They don’t care about stimulus checks. Or the national debt. . . .

Republican voters—a group distinct from Conservatism Inc.—no longer have any concrete outcomes that they want from government. What they have, instead, is a lifestyle brand.

 

As long as he isn't in jail, Gaetz actually benefits from his situation, because it draws attention to him. He gets to strut around blathering about Cancel Culture and the Deep State, and that's what the people want to hear. Same with their Orange God, who was one of the first to figure this out. Sure, the racism and general cultural resentments are a part of it, but those are also served by purely performative gestures. Well, and voter suppression. 

 

Epistemology IV: Conspiracy theories

This is a bit of a digression, I had intended to write about biomedicine and epidemiology next, but I decided to insert something else.

First, I'll just note that dictionary definitions of science aren't really accurate or useful. This is a member of a class of problems we run into frequently here, that is arguments about the meaning of words substituting for arguments about substantive matters. I would say that the reason you won't find a good dictionary definition of science is that the concept is too complex. You can read about the difficulty of defining science here, if you are interested in academic philosophy.

Specifically, the subject matter and product of science is not limited to proven facts. Scientists deal in the full range of certainty and uncertainty, from conjectures that they consider unlikely but ought to be tested, to alternative hypotheses, to conclusions of which they feel fairly confident, to conclusions which are generally accepted and are woven into broader, widely accepted theories. Note that the word "theory" as used by scientists does not mean what it usually means in the vernacular, which is more like what scientists call a hypothesis. Rather, a theory is an explanatory model that includes numerous observations and presumed causal relationships. For example, Einstein's theory of gravity hold that mass warps space-time, such that other masses' trajectory through space-time follows the warped path. 

 

There is a lot more to it than that but the essential point is that the theory makes numerous predictions which have been tested and found to hold true. That increases confidence in the correctness of the theory, but it will probably never be considered "proved." It's just the working theory we have now. And as I noted last time, doubts are creeping in. However, even if something else is going on, the theory is still useful for the purposes which have been established, just as Newton's theory is useful for everyday purposes.

Let us now turn to a commonly used term "conspiracy theory." People have come to use this to mean something more specific than the words taken by themselves would imply. After all, there are conspiracies, and there is nothing inherently irrational in having theories about them. Investigators and prosecutors formulate conspiracy theories all the time, and sometimes they prove them in court. I remember some years ago (before the present Q and pizzagate madness) a Big Professor publishing a study of personal characteristics associated with belief in conspiracy theories. He asked people about such theories as scientists conspiring to invent the hoax of global warming to get grant funding, the Illuminati secretly controlling global affairs, that sort of thing. One of his conspiracy theories was that drug companies conceal evidence that their products are ineffective or unsafe. 

I actually wrote to him and pointed out that the latter conspiracy theory is in fact true. He scoffed. The FDA has since changed its regulations to make this more difficult, but the problem has not been eliminated. By the way, this is why Purdue Pharma is out of business and has paid billions in fines and damages.

Anyway, "conspiracy theory" now means a theory that is objectively ridiculous, generally involving powerful people somehow secretly controlling important matters or engaging in nefarious activities. However, this does actually happen. The difficulty, as with the demarcation problem, is in deciding which conspiracy theories are actually ridiculous. In some cases this should not be a problem. That prominent Democratic politicians and operatives, along with Hollywood stars, secretly run a global child sex trafficking ring and kill the children in order to extract a chemical that preserves the conspirators' youth is in that category. If you had any doubt of it before, you might reconsider since we had a Republican led administration and Department of Justice for four years and they didn't do anything about it.

But other cases are more doubtful. Did James Earl Ray act alone in killing Martin Luther King? How about Sirhan Sirhan and RFK? There is reason to doubt the accepted version of these events, but on the other hand there is no strong evidence in favor of any other versions. Where people go wrong is in feeling certain about one or another version -- deciding that they know the One True Story. Sometimes we don't, and probably never will. But some people have a hard time living with that.

 

 

Wednesday Bible Study: Hitting the snooze button

Joshua 17 continues with the division of the land. I'm afraid I just can't work up the energy to comment in detail on this, it all seems essentially pointless and boring. I'll just make some general observations. Remember that this is completely fictitious. None of this tale is based in historic reality, although one would suppose it does reflect something about the distribution of territory in the time of King Josiah. There may be politics involved, regarding how disputed or unclear boundaries, and aspirations that some clans may have had to acquire land, including from non-Israelites. There is no way to check on any of this because there is no other documentary evidence from this time. 

This does tell us that we are talking about a tribal society, and clans within the tribes. This type of organization persists among some semitic people, but the Jewish people were obviously homogenized in the diaspora. I should think, however, that the clans did not have such sharply defined territories in reality. The acknowledgment of the continued presence of other Canaanite people must reflect reality, even though it means God failed to keep his promises. The story of the daughters of Zelophehad refers back to Numbers 27 and 36. Although it is no doubt fictional the point is to establish a law of inheritance for a man who dies with daughters, but no sons, an obvious problem in a patriarchal society.

17 This was the allotment for the tribe of Manasseh as Joseph’s firstborn, that is, for Makir, Manasseh’s firstborn. Makir was the ancestor of the Gileadites, who had received Gilead and Bashan because the Makirites were great soldiers. ² So this allotment was for the rest of the people of Manasseh—the clans of Abiezer, Helek, Asriel, Shechem, Hepher and Shemida. These are the other male descendants of Manasseh son of Joseph by their clans.

³ Now Zelophehad son of Hepher, the son of Gilead, the son of Makir, the son of Manasseh, had no sons but only daughters, whose names were Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milkah and Tirzah. ⁴ They went to Eleazar the priest, Joshua son of Nun, and the leaders and said, “The Lord commanded Moses to give us an inheritance among our relatives.” So Joshua gave them an inheritance along with the brothers of their father, according to the Lord’s command. ⁵ Manasseh’s share consisted of ten tracts of land besides Gilead and Bashan east of the Jordan, ⁶ because the daughters of the tribe of Manasseh received an inheritance among the sons. The land of Gilead belonged to the rest of the descendants of Manasseh.

⁷ The territory of Manasseh extended from Asher to Mikmethath east of Shechem. The boundary ran southward from there to include the people living at En Tappuah. ⁸ (Manasseh had the land of Tappuah, but Tappuah itself, on the boundary of Manasseh, belonged to the Ephraimites.) ⁹ Then the boundary continued south to the Kanah Ravine. There were towns belonging to Ephraim lying among the towns of Manasseh, but the boundary of Manasseh was the northern side of the ravine and ended at the Mediterranean Sea. ¹⁰ On the south the land belonged to Ephraim, on the north to Manasseh. The territory of Manasseh reached the Mediterranean Sea and bordered Asher on the north and Issachar on the east.

¹¹ Within Issachar and Asher, Manasseh also had Beth Shan, Ibleam and the people of Dor, Endor, Taanach and Megiddo, together with their surrounding settlements (the third in the list is Naphoth^[a]).

¹² Yet the Manassites were not able to occupy these towns, for the Canaanites were determined to live in that region. ¹³ However, when the Israelites grew stronger, they subjected the Canaanites to forced labor but did not drive them out completely.

¹⁴ The people of Joseph said to Joshua, “Why have you given us only one allotment and one portion for an inheritance? We are a numerous people, and the Lord has blessed us abundantly.”

¹⁵ “If you are so numerous,” Joshua answered, “and if the hill country of Ephraim is too small for you, go up into the forest and clear land for yourselves there in the land of the Perizzites and Rephaites.”

¹⁶ The people of Joseph replied, “The hill country is not enough for us, and all the Canaanites who live in the plain have chariots fitted with iron, both those in Beth Shan and its settlements and those in the Valley of Jezreel.”

¹⁷ But Joshua said to the tribes of Joseph—to Ephraim and Manasseh—“You are numerous and very powerful. You will have not only one allotment ¹⁸ but the forested hill country as well. Clear it, and its farthest limits will be yours; though the Canaanites have chariots fitted with iron and though they are strong, you can drive them out.”

Footnotes

1. Joshua 17:11 That is, Naphoth Dor

Epistemology III: The Scientific Method

Okay, here's the dirty secret: there is no such thing. Scientists use many different methods. Some methods are characteristic of certain disciplines, while within disciplines there may be groups of scientists who specialize in or emphasize various methods. This is territory I fear to tread because it can give people some wrong ideas, also because it's quite complicated, but I'll try to keep it simple and be careful about walling off the wrong ideas.

In fact philosophers have found it very difficult to define science, or to clearly distinguish it from non-science or pseudo-science. Despite the pretensions of some, science is a flawed human enterprise and can be affected by cognitive biases, mistakes, and fraud. It is also dynamic -- we can't say that past theories that are no longer considered valid were unscientific. They may have been created by people who were doing perfectly good science at the time. That scientific theories and conclusions are often superseded -- that they turn out to be wrong -- leads some people to decide that there is no reason to believe anything scientists say, and that homeopathy or creationism are just as legitimate. In the jargon, they grant no "privilege" to science over other forms of explanation or knowledge generation.

Karl Popper, an Austrian-British philosopher, is well known for maintaining that the main criterion for a proposition being scientific is that it be falsifiable. It has to make predictions which, in principle at least, can be shown to be wrong. He should have added, in most people's view, that its proponents have to accept that it is wrong once the falsifying evidence shows up. However, even with this codicil, the idea is too slippery to really work. For one thing, you can usually find ways to modify the theory -- add a new piece that explains the discrepancy. That's how the ancient Greeks came to keep adding epicycles to account for planetary motions that didn't work in their simpler geocentric universe.

What killed the Ptolemaic universe was that Copernicus found a much simpler explanation. Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus certainly made the Ptolemaic universe require even more complicated bells and whistles, and the heliocentric universe worked much better -- until it didn't. Now we have a universe that has no center -- except that the center of the visible universe, all of the universe that we can ever see or know, is once again the earth, although at the same time the earth has no special importance, except to us. Everywhere else is also at the center, from its own perspective. Is this idea simpler? I'm not sure. It doesn't require all those epicycles but it requires a lot of differential equations and in fact the gravitational interactions of multiple bodies are unsolvable. 

 

The theory of evolution is in fact a whole lot more complicated than creationism, and it keeps getting more complicated. Parts of it that were once essential dogma have been abandoned, replaced by different concepts. Darwin had remarkable insights, but his theory is no longer the accepted theory. I suppose you could say that it has evolved. You could also say that it has been falsified, except that it hasn't -- essential pieces remain, so we still call it by the same name.

So maybe Popper should have said falsifiable or correctable, the distinction being a matter of degree. We should presume that whatever theories we hold today may be corrected in the future. Since Einsteinian gravity replaced Newtonian gravity, was Newton wrong? Not really. His theory worked just fine for the conditions he was able to observe and within the accuracy of the measurements he could make. But Einstein's theory is both more accurate and of wider application. It explains the motions of solar system bodies more accurately (although only within measurement tolerances unavailable to Newton) and it explains the much larger scale and much higher velocities of motion in the larger universe much better. Nevertheless many physicists are starting to think there may be something wrong with it. For one thing, they've had to add the epicycle of dark matter, a completely unexplained phenomenon which would account for 85% of all the matter in the universe. Oops! They've also had to add dark energy (aka the cosmological constant), another completely unexplained epicycle that accounts for 69% of all the mass-energy in the universe. Double oops! Finally, the theory cannot be reconciled with the current theory of the other forces in the universe, electromagnetism the strong forcee, and the so-called weak force. (Oh yeah, maybe there's a fifth one lurking.)

But where the average person has the most trouble is with biomedicine and its black-sheep cousin, epidemiology. To be continued .  . .

Epistemology II: Categories

I've discussed this before, but it bears repeating, and deeper consideration. Many philosophers have pondered these issues, but I base my thinking on the German philosopher Jurgen Hambermas in his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action. (I don't necessarily recommend that you try to read it, it's extremely wonky.) 

First, as an academic philosopher with a grounding in sociolinguistics, Habermas more or less takes it for granted, but I'll spell it out. Although we have bestowed the name Homo sapiens, "thinking man,"* on ourselves, what really distinguishes us is language. The other apes obviously think in some way; they can solve puzzles and make plans, although with not nearly our degree of sophistication. But we do our thinking with language. We run a silent monologue in our heads. We can record it, refine it, share it with others, by writing it down or saying it aloud. And others may criticize what we write and say.

Human society is largely created through the medium of language. It is of course shaped by the constraints of the physical environment, and some degree of physical coercion is also involved, but other apes cannot create nearly the degree of social complexity that we can because their communicative resources are far more limited. In fact it is a reasonable conclusion that a main reason there is more interpersonal violence among chimpanzees than there is among humans is because they don't have other ways of settling disputes or expressing displeasure with other's actions. Bonobos, who are our closest relatives, are more peaceful than chimpanzees. They bond through sexual activity, which they practice quite indiscriminately without regard to age or gender. 

Anyway, we largely bond through conversation, and we limit companionable sex to a small number of partners. It is through language that we label social categories and roles, define organizations, transact business, make rules and policy -- one can say that society is made largely out of language.

 

This means that language has to do several different kinds of work. Once you notice this, it seems glaringly obvious, but philosophers actually seemed not to realize it until the 20th Century. They were concerned with how language represents reality, and there was even an influential school that claimed that the meaning of a statement was equivalent to the means by which its truth value could be established. Oops! Along came John Searle and other speech act theorists who first noticed that the truth of a statement by a priest that you are married or a judge that you are guilty is established by the utterance itself. It took them a while longer to realize that most of what we say is either not verifiable at all -- it doesn't have a truth value, even in principle -- or, while criticizable, can't be strictly ruled true or false. What is the truth value of hello and goodbye? Of a question? Of an instruction?  

 

Then there are claims that do make some sort of representation but can't be strictly judged as true or false. These are of various kinds. If I assert that I am experiencing an emotion of some kind, you may or may not think I'm sincere but there is usually no way to prove it. (Emerging technology may complicate this claim but I will just note that the polygraph is bullshit.) A sharper distinction is that of moral evaluation -- claims about what is right or good, or evil, and to what degree, under what circumstances, by whom. Then there are claims about what is beautiful -- is that a good painting, or novel, and what is it worth?

To cut to the chase, Habermas refers to categories of "criticizable," rather than verifiable, claims. The category of representation -- hard core, "out there" truth -- certainly does exist. This may be subdivided into what we directly apprehend, and what may be concluded by deduction. The latter includes conclusions that require deep learning and thought -- expertise. If I tell you that I am presently sitting at an antique slant front desk, in principle you can determine if that is true. You would have to come into my house or look in the window, which is not possible in reality, but we can legitimately distinguish between my lying and telling the truth in this instance. 

If I were to tell you that the desk was made by the cabinetmaker Lemuel Walton in Philadelphia in 1834, I would be relying on expertise, whether my own or that of Leslie Keno. The assertion has a definite truth value, but the vast majority of us are incapable of evaluating it for ourselves. We have to rely on the experts, and so we have to judge how trustworthy they are. (I invented Walton, so it would not in fact be true.) Habermas puts both kinds of assertions in the "First World," the True.

 

Then there are moral categories. These also are of two kinds. There are my own personal feelings about what is right, and there are socially constructed categories that we are expected to accept. This is the Second World, of the Good, but watch out! Here we often encounter confusion. There are social facts -- assertions about the nature of society that belong in the First World. Police do have certain authority; people are classified by gender and expected to behave in gender conforming ways; people are classified by race and experience differential treatment depending on that classification. (Granted these sorts of assertions entail a great deal of complexity and definite conclusions about specifics can be debatable.) Whether that is good or right, however, belongs to the Second World, and does not have the same kind of truth value.

Finally, there is the Beautiful. What pleases you? This can be as trivial as being happy when the Yankees or the Red Sox win, or as profound as King Lear vs. Hamlet, but ultimately, nobody can tell you that you're right or wrong.

Mixing up these categories is a recipe for communicative failure, not to mention failure of the thought process, which as I said in the beginning is dependent on language. So take your time and make the effort to keep them all straight.

Epistemology

There are many important things that I know to be true to a moral certainty, that many other people do not believe. I could call these people misinformed or ignorant, but they are just as certain that they are right and I am wrong. There are also innumerable matters of which I am uncertain, but other people do have definite beliefs about them that I know to be wrong.

 

This is a knotty problem indeed, because convincing these people that they are ignorant or misinformed is nearly impossible, and they will certainly never convince me. So the urgent question is, how can I be so certain about these controversial matters? This is the subdivision of philosophy called epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge.

First I need to say something which is difficult for some people to hear: my personal history shapes my beliefs and gives me confidence in matters which as far as I'm concerned should not be controversial. This is difficult because I seem to be claiming a category of elite status that many people resent. Specifically, I grew up in a family of highly educated people, and I went on to get an expensive education of my own in highly selective institutions, specifically Swarthmore, Tufts, and Brandeis. I have a M.A. in environmental policy, which means I have taken graduate courses in biology, politics, economics and public policy; and a Ph.D. in social policy which means I have taken graduate courses and passed qualifying examinations in economics, political science, and sociology. I have extensive training in statistics and causal inference, research methods, and scientific writing. I have subscribed to Scientific American since I was 13 years old. I read JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and BMJ every week. I read the New York Times every day (and usually yell at it),and I subscribe to other magazines which I won't bother to list and I read 30 or more books of history, science, and sociology every year. I have more than 50 peer reviewed scientific publications, and additional book chapters, non-peer reviewed publications and reports, conference presentations, and other scientific production that goes on even longer.

I'm not bragging. This means I have expertise in certain areas, but I still have to trust and admire the expertise of automotive technicians, medical technologists, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, chefs, farmers, and a whole lot of other people who know how to do things I can't do. I don't try to tell them how to do their jobs. I also don't know a whole lot about, for example, physics and cosmology. I trust physicists when they say the universe is about 13.8 billion years, and I trust astronomers who say the earth is about 4.5 billion years (depending on when exactly you think the thing became enough like the rock we know and love to merit the name). 

 

Why? Because I know they have gone through a process similar to the one I went through, concerning a different area of expertise, to gain the kind of knowledge they promulgate. and I have read enough about how they come to their conclusions to see that it's consistent with areas in which I do have substantial expertise, it's internally consistent, and there is a professional culture of skepticism, mutual criticism, and caution in drawing conclusions that makes them credible. And I can see that the theories of cosmology, geology, and evolution are mutually consistent and can plausibly explain the world around me. 

When it comes to current events, I trust information sources that also trust scientific expertise. And I trust sources that provide information that is internally consistent, consistent with other observable reality, and logically presented. I trust sources that correct errors when they do (inevitably) make some, and that are able to separate information from analysis, to the extent that is possible.  I didn't personally count all the ballots cast in the 2020 election, but based on my knowledge of the world, and how elections work, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Joseph R. Biden won the presidential election by approximately 7 million votes, and that it was a fair election, and the vote count was honest and accurate. This is a fact, not merely an opinion. The sun rose in the east this morning (or more accurately the rotation of the earth brought it into view above the eastern horizon), and Joseph R Biden was elected president in a free and fair election. These assertions have equal epistemological status. They are both as knowably true as any assertion can be. 

And you know what else? Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy, and the 147 House members who voted not to certify the election results know it too. They are liars. To be continued.

Note: Yes, everything is public health -- guns, education, transportation, poverty, pollution, you name it, all public policies involve public health,

Nobody lied about the Gore/Bush election. There was legitimate controversy. Once the Supreme Court ruled, Gore conceded. There is a legitimate question about whether the SC ruling was correct, but nobody told lies about what had happened. Same with Stacy Abrams. There is no comparison whatever. So shove it.

 

 

Wednesday Bible Study: At least this chapter is mercifully short

More of the divinely inspired word. Note that as in most cases, God has failed to keep one of his promises. 

 

Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, ... and the Amorites, and the Jebusites. Joshua 3:10

For thou shalt drive out the Canaanites, though they have iron chariots, and though they be strong. Joshua 17:17-18

I'll have a real post later today.

16 The allotment for Joseph began at the Jordan, east of the springs of Jericho, and went up from there through the desert into the hill country of Bethel. ² It went on from Bethel (that is, Luz),^[a] crossed over to the territory of the Arkites in Ataroth, ³ descended westward to the territory of the Japhletites as far as the region of Lower Beth Horon and on to Gezer, ending at the Mediterranean Sea.

⁴ So Manasseh and Ephraim, the descendants of Joseph, received their inheritance.

⁵ This was the territory of Ephraim, according to its clans:

The boundary of their inheritance went from Ataroth Addar in the east to Upper Beth Horon ⁶ and continued to the Mediterranean Sea. From Mikmethath on the north it curved eastward to Taanath Shiloh, passing by it to Janoah on the east. ⁷ Then it went down from Janoah to Ataroth and Naarah, touched Jericho and came out at the Jordan. ⁸ From Tappuah the border went west to the Kanah Ravine and ended at the Mediterranean Sea. This was the inheritance of the tribe of the Ephraimites, according to its clans. ⁹ It also included all the towns and their villages that were set aside for the Ephraimites within the inheritance of the Manassites.

¹⁰ They did not dislodge the Canaanites living in Gezer; to this day the Canaanites live among the people of Ephraim but are required to do forced labor.

Footnotes

1. Joshua 16:2 Septuagint; Hebrew Bethel to Luz

Recommended reading

 If you haven't yet read this by Zeynep Tufecki, do so now. That is an order. 

 

I remember all too well the early days of the Internet, followed by its wholesale migration to the World Wide Web. There was an intoxicating culture of revolution. The Internet was going to make information -- assumed to be a synonym for truth -- free for all. It would bring down tyrants, and liberate everyone from the soft tyranny of ideology and politicians' seductive promises and lies. Of course, all of these visionaries couldn't perceive their own ideology -- this was all closely bound up with  a glib libertarianism and faith in a coming meritocracy in which they presumed they would rise to the top.

Well, that didn't happen. Before the WWW became largely synonymous with the Internet, the precursor of social media as we know it today was the on-line forum. Of course these still exist, with more sophisticated features, but the early experience should have served as a warning. The most popular subject for these fora was pornography, while accurate information and enlightening discourse were in short supply. With the development of contemporary forms of social media, the same excitement about a coming liberatory era re-appeared.  Instead we got a catastrophe. As Tufecki writes:

Power always learns, and powerful tools always fall into its hands. This is a hard lesson of history but a solid one. It is key to understanding how, in seven years, digital technologies have gone from being hailed as tools of freedom and change to being blamed for upheavals in Western democracies—for enabling increased polarization, rising authoritarianism, and meddling in national elections by Russia and others.

But to fully understand what has happened, we also need to examine how human social dynamics, ubiquitous digital connectivity, and the business models of tech giants combine to create an environment where misinformation thrives and even true information can confuse and paralyze rather than informing and illuminating.

 

But Tufecki is wise enough to understand that the blame does not rest foundationally on the technology. She observes that "The Russian government may have used online platforms to remotely meddle in US elections, but Russia did not create the conditions of social distrust, weak institutions, and detached elites that made the US vulnerable to that kind of meddling." She goes on to check the campaign of lies that led to the Iraq war; the 2008 financial collapse that enriched some billionaires while costing millions of ordinary people their homes and jobs; the growing inaccessibility of higher education; tax evasion by multinational corporations and their billionaire executives; and all of the conditions which have left so many people vulnerable to misinformation and demagoguery. We need a kind of revolution, but the digital one won't make it happen.

Blogger's block

I've had a hard time posting today because it seems half the world has gone batshit insane, smacking my gob. After all the shit she's had to put up with, I think Hillary deserves a hearing: 

Her bid for the White House was engulfed by a tidal wave of fabricated news and false conspiracy theories. Now Hillary Clinton is calling for a “global reckoning” with disinformation that includes reining in the power of big tech.

The former secretary of state and first lady warns that the breakdown of a shared truth, and the divisiveness that surely follows, poses a danger to democracy at a moment when China is selling the conceit that autocracy works. . . .

Five years on, Trump has come and gone from the White House and America now has a female vice-president in Kamala Harris. But the dangerous lies have continued to thrive online, notably in the QAnon conspiracy movement, leading all the way to the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January. Far-right Republicans have become openly anti-democratic, endorsing Trump’s falsehoods and seeking to suppress voters of color.

The traditional the-truth-is-somewhere-in-the-middle approach will no longer do, Clinton argues.

“They’ve got to rid themselves of both-sidesism,” she says. “It is not the same to say something critical of somebody on the other side of the aisle and to instigate an attack on the Capitol and to vote against certifying the election. Those are not comparable, and it goes back to the problem of the press actually coming to grips with how out of bounds and dangerous the new political philosophy on the right happens to be.”

 

But if anything, the Republican party has just gotten more insane. The Arizona state government is actually paying a right wing conspiracy theorist to test Maricopa County ballots for bamboo fibers on the theory that China somehow inserted 40,000 fake ballots into the 2020 election. If you live in Arizona, your tax dollars are paying for this. Rupert Murdoch's minions are telling people not to get vaccinated, in other words committing murder for fun and profit. As you know -- no link necessary -- the Republicans are preparing to expel Liz Cheney from congressional leadership for not endorsing the absurd lie that the election was stolen. Some 25-30% of the country, at the least, is insane. We can't survive this.

Wednesday Bible study: My eyeballs roll up into my head

I warned you that we are in a very tedious stretch of the Book of Joshua. Why the authors decided to supply all of this surveyor's data I cannot say. I will just note verses 16 and 17: "¹⁶ And Caleb said, “I will give my daughter Aksah in marriage to the man who attacks and captures Kiriath Sepher.” ¹⁷ Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s brother, took it; so Caleb gave his daughter Aksah to him in marriage." So yes, according to Exodus, you're allowed to sell your daughter. She doesn't seem to mind much -- she comes back and asks Caleb for a spring, which he gives her. 

In verse 33, Eshtaol and Zorah are given to Judah. In Joshua 19, just four chapters later, they are given to Dan. Looks like the editor was napping on the job.

15 The allotment for the tribe of Judah, according to its clans, extended down to the territory of Edom, to the Desert of Zin in the extreme south.

² Their southern boundary started from the bay at the southern end of the Dead Sea, ³ crossed south of Scorpion Pass, continued on to Zin and went over to the south of Kadesh Barnea. Then it ran past Hezron up to Addar and curved around to Karka. ⁴ It then passed along to Azmon and joined the Wadi of Egypt, ending at the Mediterranean Sea. This is their^[a] southern boundary.

⁵ The eastern boundary is the Dead Sea as far as the mouth of the Jordan.

The northern boundary started from the bay of the sea at the mouth of the Jordan, ⁶ went up to Beth Hoglah and continued north of Beth Arabah to the Stone of Bohan son of Reuben. ⁷ The boundary then went up to Debir from the Valley of Achor and turned north to Gilgal, which faces the Pass of Adummim south of the gorge. It continued along to the waters of En Shemesh and came out at En Rogel. ⁸ Then it ran up the Valley of Ben Hinnom along the southern slope of the Jebusite city (that is, Jerusalem). From there it climbed to the top of the hill west of the Hinnom Valley at the northern end of the Valley of Rephaim. ⁹ From the hilltop the boundary headed toward the spring of the waters of Nephtoah, came out at the towns of Mount Ephron and went down toward Baalah (that is, Kiriath Jearim). ¹⁰ Then it curved westward from Baalah to Mount Seir, ran along the northern slope of Mount Jearim (that is, Kesalon), continued down to Beth Shemesh and crossed to Timnah. ¹¹ It went to the northern slope of Ekron, turned toward Shikkeron, passed along to Mount Baalah and reached Jabneel. The boundary ended at the sea.

¹² The western boundary is the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea.

These are the boundaries around the people of Judah by their clans.

¹³ In accordance with the Lord’s command to him, Joshua gave to Caleb son of Jephunneh a portion in Judah—Kiriath Arba, that is, Hebron. (Arba was the forefather of Anak.) ¹⁴ From Hebron Caleb drove out the three Anakites—Sheshai, Ahiman and Talmai, the sons of Anak. ¹⁵ From there he marched against the people living in Debir (formerly called Kiriath Sepher). ¹⁶ And Caleb said, “I will give my daughter Aksah in marriage to the man who attacks and captures Kiriath Sepher.” ¹⁷ Othniel son of Kenaz, Caleb’s brother, took it; so Caleb gave his daughter Aksah to him in marriage.

¹⁸ One day when she came to Othniel, she urged him^[b] to ask her father for a field. When she got off her donkey, Caleb asked her, “What can I do for you?”

¹⁹ She replied, “Do me a special favor. Since you have given me land in the Negev, give me also springs of water.” So Caleb gave her the upper and lower springs.

²⁰ This is the inheritance of the tribe of Judah, according to its clans:

²¹ The southernmost towns of the tribe of Judah in the Negev toward the boundary of Edom were:

Kabzeel, Eder, Jagur, ²² Kinah, Dimonah, Adadah, ²³ Kedesh, Hazor, Ithnan, ²⁴ Ziph, Telem, Bealoth, ²⁵ Hazor Hadattah, Kerioth Hezron (that is, Hazor), ²⁶ Amam, Shema, Moladah, ²⁷ Hazar Gaddah, Heshmon, Beth Pelet, ²⁸ Hazar Shual, Beersheba, Biziothiah, ²⁹ Baalah, Iyim, Ezem, ³⁰ Eltolad, Kesil, Hormah, ³¹ Ziklag, Madmannah, Sansannah, ³² Lebaoth, Shilhim, Ain and Rimmon—a total of twenty-nine towns and their villages.

³³ In the western foothills:

Eshtaol, Zorah, Ashnah, ³⁴ Zanoah, En Gannim, Tappuah, Enam, ³⁵ Jarmuth, Adullam, Sokoh, Azekah, ³⁶ Shaaraim, Adithaim and Gederah (or Gederothaim)^[c]—fourteen towns and their villages.

³⁷ Zenan, Hadashah, Migdal Gad, ³⁸ Dilean, Mizpah, Joktheel, ³⁹ Lachish, Bozkath, Eglon, ⁴⁰ Kabbon, Lahmas, Kitlish, ⁴¹ Gederoth, Beth Dagon, Naamah and Makkedah—sixteen towns and their villages.

⁴² Libnah, Ether, Ashan, ⁴³ Iphtah, Ashnah, Nezib, ⁴⁴ Keilah, Akzib and Mareshah—nine towns and their villages.

⁴⁵ Ekron, with its surrounding settlements and villages; ⁴⁶ west of Ekron, all that were in the vicinity of Ashdod, together with their villages; ⁴⁷ Ashdod, its surrounding settlements and villages; and Gaza, its settlements and villages, as far as the Wadi of Egypt and the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea.

⁴⁸ In the hill country:

Shamir, Jattir, Sokoh, ⁴⁹ Dannah, Kiriath Sannah (that is, Debir), ⁵⁰ Anab, Eshtemoh, Anim, ⁵¹ Goshen, Holon and Giloh—eleven towns and their villages.

⁵² Arab, Dumah, Eshan, ⁵³ Janim, Beth Tappuah, Aphekah, ⁵⁴ Humtah, Kiriath Arba (that is, Hebron) and Zior—nine towns and their villages.

⁵⁵ Maon, Carmel, Ziph, Juttah, ⁵⁶ Jezreel, Jokdeam, Zanoah, ⁵⁷ Kain, Gibeah and Timnah—ten towns and their villages.

⁵⁸ Halhul, Beth Zur, Gedor, ⁵⁹ Maarath, Beth Anoth and Eltekon—six towns and their villages.^[d]

⁶⁰ Kiriath Baal (that is, Kiriath Jearim) and Rabbah—two towns and their villages.

⁶¹ In the wilderness:

Beth Arabah, Middin, Sekakah, ⁶² Nibshan, the City of Salt and En Gedi—six towns and their villages.

⁶³ Judah could not dislodge the Jebusites, who were living in Jerusalem; to this day the Jebusites live there with the people of Judah.

Footnotes

1. Joshua 15:4 Septuagint; Hebrew your
2. Joshua 15:18 Hebrew and some Septuagint manuscripts; other Septuagint manuscripts (see also note at Judges 1:14) Othniel, he urged her
3. Joshua 15:36 Or Gederah and Gederothaim
4. Joshua 15:59 The Septuagint adds another district of eleven towns, including Tekoa and Ephrathah (Bethlehem).

About this herd immunity concept . . .

You have no doubt read, or heard on the teevee, that experts are now saying we are unlikely to achieve herd immunity to the Covid-19 virus. Many people take this to be terrible news, a cause of despair, and even a reason not to bother to be vaccinated.

No, no, and no. The fact is the term herd immunity was bandied about far too much, and far too irresponsibly, from the beginning. It isn't even a sharply definable concept, as a matter of fact. The idea is that if enough people are immune, whether from vaccination or having been infected, the virus will not find enough susceptible hosts for trains of transmission to be maintained and then even people who are not immune are unlikely to be exposed, so we can forget about the virus. However, this was never a realistic prospect because the proportion of people who are immune will vary enormously from place to place for the foreseeable future. And places include places outside of the U.S. Furthermore, transmissibility and the required proportion of immune people also varies, depending on factors such as populations density, household structure, the kinds of work people do, and so on. 

What this means is that no matter what the proportion of immune people in the U.S. population overall, there will always be the possibility of an infectious person showing up, whether it is a visitor from abroad, someone who has taken a trip abroad, or a pocket within the U.S. where circulation continues. Right now in much of the world, where the epidemic is raging, only a tiny percentage of the population has been vaccinated. Here in the U.S., thanks to some evil politicians and liars on television, something like 30% of the population doesn't want to be vaccinated. Meanwhile, the virus mutates and more transmissible strains are circulating, putting the threshold for herd immunity even higher. 

However, this is not a disaster. People who are properly vaccinated are very safe for now, and as the proportion of people who are vaccinated rises, transmission will slow even if it doesn't stop entirely. As the most vulnerable people are most likely to be vaccinated, the stress on the health care system and the death rate will continue to decline. In time, we can hope that nearly all young children will have been vaccinated, or been infected while they are at very low risk of severe disease, and that some degree of immunity will be long lasting. Unfortunately we don't yet know about the latter proposition, and it matters a lot. If that does happen, Covid-19 will go the way of common childhood diseases that pose little threat. If not, we may need to get booster shots every year or two, but once we don't have to try to vaccinate the entire population all at once that can be handled as all vaccinations are now provided routinely.

In other words, this probably won't go away, but it will become manageable. Getting vaccination to low and middle income countries has to be a priority for the rich countries -- it's in our interest. And Tucker Carlson needs to eat shit and take a vow of silence. Here's a discussion at the NYT, if the paywall stops you Digby has pulled an excerpt.

Sunday Sermonette: My eyes glaze over

Joshua 14 continues with the division of the land among the tribes, with specific bequests to a couple of individual characters. Again, I'm really not sure why the writers in the 7th Century BCE thought it useful to tell this tale. It must have something to do with regional and national politics at the time but I haven't found any efforts to reconstruct it. And I don't really have anything to say about it, except that it is clearly completely irrelevant to any contemporary religious interest, or any interest for at least the past 2,000 years at the very least; and has no historical reality either. Yet here it is, taking up a good chunk of the holy book which is supposed to guide people's lives. Whatev.

14 Now these are the areas the Israelites received as an inheritance in the land of Canaan, which Eleazar the priest, Joshua son of Nun and the heads of the tribal clans of Israel allotted to them. ² Their inheritances were assigned by lot to the nine and a half tribes, as the Lord had commanded through Moses. ³ Moses had granted the two and a half tribes their inheritance east of the Jordan but had not granted the Levites an inheritance among the rest, ⁴ for Joseph’s descendants had become two tribes—Manasseh and Ephraim. The Levites received no share of the land but only towns to live in, with pasturelands for their flocks and herds. ⁵ So the Israelites divided the land, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.

Allotment for Caleb

⁶ Now the people of Judah approached Joshua at Gilgal, and Caleb son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite said to him, “You know what the Lord said to Moses the man of God at Kadesh Barnea about you and me. ⁷ I was forty years old when Moses the servant of the Lord sent me from Kadesh Barnea to explore the land. And I brought him back a report according to my convictions, ⁸ but my fellow Israelites who went up with me made the hearts of the people melt in fear. I, however, followed the Lord my God wholeheartedly. ⁹ So on that day Moses swore to me, ‘The land on which your feet have walked will be your inheritance and that of your children forever, because you have followed the Lord my God wholeheartedly.’^[a]

¹⁰ “Now then, just as the Lord promised, he has kept me alive for forty-five years since the time he said this to Moses, while Israel moved about in the wilderness. So here I am today, eighty-five years old! ¹¹ I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then. ¹² Now give me this hill country that the Lord promised me that day. You yourself heard then that the Anakites were there and their cities were large and fortified, but, the Lord helping me, I will drive them out just as he said.”

¹³ Then Joshua blessed Caleb son of Jephunneh and gave him Hebron as his inheritance. ¹⁴ So Hebron has belonged to Caleb son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite ever since, because he followed the Lord, the God of Israel, wholeheartedly. ¹⁵ (Hebron used to be called Kiriath Arba after Arba, who was the greatest man among the Anakites.)

Then the land had rest from war.

Footnotes

1. Joshua 14:9 Deut. 1:36

The wheels of justice grind slow . . .

Before I get to the sermonette, first, offered without comment, Marik von Rennenkampff and David Corn.

 

Merrick Garland became AG on March 12, IIRC. The DoJ has a huge backlog of work, not least the Jan. 6 insurrection which has already resulted in charges against more than 100 people with more being added regularly. This is one of the most complicated investigations and prosecutions ever. While trying to clear the cases of individuals who got caught up in the riot, investigators are untangling the leadership, relationships and actions of the organized groups who came to the Capitol armed and with a specific plan to stop certification of the election and harm or murder members of congress. 

Meanwhile, the SDNY is investigating the Trump organization's finances. They just got access to the financial records and tax returns about a month ago, after DoJ obstruction ended. There are reported to be literally millions of pages of documents. They are also investigating Rudy Giuliani's actions in Ukraine, which are at least tangentially linked to the 2016 election -- some of the same players are involved -- and directly linked to what may be corrupt and illegal actions by members of the Trump administration. 

 

There is a good deal more corruption that occurred in the previous administration, some of which has been publicly reported and even led to resignations, which has not resulted in prosecution. Then there is the case of Matt Gaetz, which seems fairly simple on its surface but there are rumors that it is more complicated. In any case they will have to sew it up very tight in order to proceed. All of this will take a while, and they will have to decide whether and when to follow up on Robert Mueller's referrals for possible prosecution. As a legal and practical matter, these will not be easy decisions and events will certainly not move quickly. Patience, grasshopper.