Monday Mule Pack – Free Speech, Altruism, Horses, and Rye

May 1, 2017

A weekly look at some of the more interesting articles from around the web.

What makes someone donate a kidney to a stranger?

“Extraordinary altruists,” as the researchers call them, come from all age, race and socioeconomic groups. Some are religious, others are not. But unlike almost everyone else, they don’t see less value in a stranger’s life than in the life of a close friend or relative, the researchers found. And they are genuinely puzzled that the rest of the world doesn’t view other people the same way.

Previous research by Marsh has established that extraordinary altruists have larger than normal amygdalas, a portion of the brain involved in compassion. (Psychopaths have smaller than normal amygdalas, she said). In brain scans, that part of altruists’ brains also appears to be more active than in average people when they are considering questions of altruism, she said.

Disliking Trump is getting very boring

One more quantitative analysis of his (lack of) accomplishments or his (mis)deeds during this period would have put at risk the sanity of the Western world. It’s over, done, finis — thanks be to whatever deity gets you through the night — and now we can relax into a possibly “major, major conflict with North Korea,” as suggested by the president during a recent Reuters interview. Whew.

Disliking Trump, even for all the right reasons, is exhausting and unsustainable. It’s also boring. With 265 days still left of Trump’s first year — talk about exhausting — our highest calling is to encourage wiser men and women to prevail, to ignore most of what Trump says and to keep our eye on the bouncing ball.

I thought about writing an article about the first 100 days, but I agree… it’s getting boring, and I don’t really have anything to say about it that a million other people haven’t already said. Not to say that we should stop talking about Trump. But the 100 day thing is silly to start with (and yet Trump keeps talking about it).

Trump’s Degradation of the Language

Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.

Here is the great danger: Many people expect a political lie to sound slick, to be delivered by intellectual elites spouting $5 words. A clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English reads as truth.

It is an upside-down world in which easy lies sound more true than hard facts.

In Ann Coulter’s Speech Battle, Signs That Conservatives Are Emboldened

The situation adds up to a striking reversal in the culture wars, with the left now often demanding that offensive content be excised from public discourse and those who promote it boycotted and shunned.

This has to stop. At the same time Trump is driving centrist Republicans to the left, the left is shoving them (and anyone who values free speech) back to the right.

Pediatrician’s Extreme Stance on Anti-Vaxxers Has Riled People Up

In 2015, the California pediatrician wrote up an impassioned response to “anti-vaxxers” — those opposed to vaccinating their children in fear that the vaccine will cause life-long adverse effects — where it later went viral on Imgur. It’s resurfacing and making the rounds again, today, sparking the same controversy. “In my practice you will vaccinate and you will vaccinate on time,” he wrote. “You will not get your own ‘spaced-out’ schedule that increases your child’s risk of illness or adverse event. I will not have measles-shedding children sitting in my waiting room.”

I like this guy.

The Unbearable Wrongness of Gwyneth Paltrow

Let us first examine the definition of “chemical” before we dig into Paltrow’s seemingly well-intentioned advice. A chemical is, quite literally, any substance. Life is composed of building blocks of chemicals in different formations. Chemicals do not have a morality. Chemicals simply… are. It’s easy to make a chemical sound scary if you haven’t heard of it before — have you heard of that malicious oxidane? Everyone who’s ever died has had it in their system…. It’s in baby food, it’s in pesticides, it’s even in the water supply. Should you be worried about oxidane?

No. Because oxidane is another word for water.

Reminder: It’s not just conservatives who are denying science; there are idiots on the left doing it too. (Of course, climate change is a bit more serious than sunscreen, but still…)

America Isn’t Growing Hostile Towards Christians, It’s Growing Hostile Towards Religious Bullies.

If America were truly hostile towards Christians, that would be a massive indictment against Christians themselves— because America is near-entirely controlled by Christians.

At some point in the past two millennia — peanuts on an evolutionary time scale — humans transformed their horses into equine speed demons. Selective breeding had a price, though, beyond $30,000 vials of pedigreed racehorse sperm. Unhelpful mutations plagued the animals. The current population of domesticated horses is about 55 million, but at some point in their history, their genetic diversity crashed. The Y chromosomes of all the world’s stallions are now quite similar, suggesting that only a relatively few males were the ancestors of today’s horses.

America’s Oldest Rye Whiskey Is Back from Extinction

Old Monongahela has also, until recently, had the reputation of being non-existent. Chasing after it was like chasing after a ghost: A few descendants of original producers persisted (Rittenhouse, Old Overholt, Hochstadter’s), but all had been acquired by bigger producers and production uprooted to outside the region. You could call these “Nongahela” ryes—the same in name but not necessarily in style or flavor.

I’m happy that rye whiskey is being made in Pennsylvania again, but as the article points out, the rye being made today is not using the same processes as the original distilleries used… so saying it’s back from extinction is not entirely accurate. Also this article has some issues with facts (as is often the case in Punch’s reporting)—Rittenhouse was never a Monongahela rye, it was from Eastern PA, nowhere near the Monongahela Valley. The whole article fails to really make a distinction between the styles of rye from yesteryear (Pennsylvania and Maryland).

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