Don't Judge Biochemistry

This is the third in my series on "don't judge," triggered by this episode where I rudely questioned a friend and then expanded in a post describing how false virtue can generate its own demand signal.

The Story

Both of my brothers died as addicts and alcoholics. As their conditions worsened over the years, my sister would tell me not to judge them because they'd had bad relationships with our parents. Both of them were a lot of fun to be around, at least until the last couple of years when their addictions devoured them. They had the gift of the blarney and were excellent story-tellers. You would have liked them had you met them.

Both of them were very intelligent. My oldest brother got a free ride to Yale and my middle brother had degrees in Pharmacy and Pharmacology. Hmm. I think there's a hint there.

Both of them died horrible deaths after a prolonged period of desperate suffering at the hands of their addictions.

Remember, kids, don't judge!

Morality Exists In A World Of Objective, Hierarchical Laws

Biochemistry is universal, objective, implacable and utterly pitiless. Biochemistry doesn't care if you didn't get along with mommy and daddy, if you are a poor, black kid in the ghetto or if you're a bored, spoiled trust-fund loser with plenty of cash and nothing to do all day. I asked ChatGPT to give me a summary of how cocaine, my brothers' drug of choice, affects you.

In the long run, it's a bad thing.

Cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, leading to excessive accumulation of these neurotransmitters in the synapses. Over time, this creates:

• Desensitization: The brain reduces its natural dopamine production and receptor sensitivity, leading to reduced ability to feel pleasure (anhedonia) without the drug.
• Neurotoxicity: Excessive dopamine levels generate free radicals, which damage neurons.

The neurochemical and structural changes lead to psychiatric symptoms:

• Anxiety, Depression, and Paranoia: Due to dysregulated neurotransmitter systems.
• Psychosis: Chronic use can cause delusions, hallucinations, and other psychotic symptoms.
• Addiction: The brain's reward system is hijacked, making cocaine the primary source of pleasure and motivation.

In the short run, it's a ton of fun. 

Cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine, causing it to accumulate in the synaptic cleft (the space between neurons). This leads to:

• Euphoria: The intense feelings of pleasure and reward.
• Increased Energy and Alertness: Due to heightened activation in reward and motivation pathways.

Cocaine also affects serotonin levels, which influences:

• Mood Elevation: A sense of well-being and reduced anxiety.
• Impulsivity and Risk-Taking: Enhanced serotonin activity can decrease inhibition.

Cocaine increases norepinephrine levels, leading to:

• Increased Heart Rate and Blood Pressure: Producing a feeling of physical arousal.
• Heightened Alertness: An enhanced sense of focus and vigilance.

That happens to everyone, whether the 'rents are nice or not. Make sure you're "not judging" phase happens in the short run. That way, you can be infused with delightful feelings of virtue and compassion while the addict is radiant with pleasure.

My objection would be simple. When do you start the judging?

My oldest brother got loaded one night, went driving and caused an accident which resulted in a man being crippled for life. It seems reasonable to say that the time to turn all intolerant and judgmental would have been before the crash. How would you know he was about to cripple someone? Timing is everything, oh great compassionate one.

My middle brother had four different women have abortions by him. He thought sex was a ton of fun. He slept with everything that wore a skirt. It was a bit rough on the babies, though. Assuming you're not into vivisecting infants, when would have been a good time to go full Torquemada on the dude and point your bony finger of accusation at him? Hopefully, you would have done that before the first abortion. Once more, timing is everything, oh noble virtue-signaler.

Morality Must Be Universal

This is what I'm on about when I say that your moral code lives in a world of universal structure. It lives in a world governed by biochemistry, physics, mathematics, biology and normal, human frailty. Sperm plus egg makes baby. Unwanted babies sometimes get killed. Cocaine plus central nervous system makes addict. Addicts typically spiral into destruction. These are predictable events. They aren't perfectly guaranteed, but it's common enough to be expected.

How does your morality cope with that if it's always situational? What if you guess wrong and you "don't judge" right before the car crash or the baby butchery?

Imagine yourself sitting across the table from the crippled man and when he asks you if you knew the guy was loaded when he walked to his car you say, "Yes, but I don't judge." That's an over-the-top example, but it's not too over-the-top. My oldest brother was a loadie and he drove. It doesn't take Blaise Pascal to predict that such a tragic accident was likely to happen at some point. It might not be that you witnessed the drug-addled car-key grabbing, but it would certainly be true that you knew the guy's addiction was pretty serious.

Still, don't judge! Jesus wouldn't like it if you judged.

The End Is Predictable

I sat with my middle brother in the hospital as he was dying. Mercifully, he was unconscious. By the end, he hated me because I didn't help him get hammered. I was judgmental, you know. I hadn't ever helped him do that because I'm intolerant and full of hate.

By the time he died, he was homeless even though he had money in the bank. He had a girlfriend of sorts, so he might still have been getting a little tail even at the very end of his disastrous life.

That's OK, I guess. I'm not supposed to judge.

In the end, maybe the non-judgmental types will explain how it was loving and compassionate to do all that non-judging with him as he self-destructed, leaving me with no brothers at all.

I'm not holding my breath.

I'm sorry, you're a bit late. They just took the body away. He was such a fun character! He was full of charm and vitality, right up until he lost the last of his marbles and wandered around the streets, playing his guitar for a few coins that he could take to a liquor store. Remember, God is love. Don't judge!

Don't Judge Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones

If you didn't know, a self-licking ice cream cone is metaphorical shorthand for an organization or person whose sole output is the justification of its existence. For example, a research study that produces research grant proposals for more studies that produce research grant proposals is a self-licking ice cream cone.

Today, we extend yesterday's journey into the world of non-judgmental Catholics to self-licking virtue cones. In that post, I described how I managed to detonate a small bomb within my group of Catholic men by pulling logic threads after one of them claimed that there really isn't any universal, objective moral law after all, contradicting the teachings of the Church. My main point was this, taken from an analysis of the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8:3-11.

You can have a universal, objective moral code without stoning people to death. My groupies were conflating judging with punishing.

My detonations were triggered by one of the guys in my group, Sam.

Sam volunteers on the RCIA team at his parish. RCIA is where people who want to convert to Catholicism are taught about the faith and learn just how much we hate everyone else and how to properly light a fire underneath someone tied to a stake. As a part of it, he was talking about LGBT for some reason. I think one of his current crop is gay or trans or something. He told us how he doesn't judge and how they're all wonderful people and he doesn't judge them and how he accepts their moral choices being different than his own and how, did I say this already? - he doesn't judge.

Recalling the session, the RCIA candidate he told us about was trans. I don't know if it's a male-to-female trans or a female-to-male trans. It hardly matters. Either way, the trans person is completely screwed.

As we've never conducted large-scale experiments on young people, giving them regular, massive doses of wrong-sex hormones and mutilating their bodies by hacking off sex organs, trying to build fake ones, we've not had access to statistically significant outcome data. Blessedly, we are starting to get that data now. As the incandescently cheerful and blithely non-judgmental Sam might say, "Isn't science wonderful? Look at all the data we now have showing that poisoning and mutilating people leads to poor outcomes. I never would have been able to predict that without tens of thousands of experimental subjects!"

Biochemistry, unlike Sam and his compadres in the Church, is remorselessly judgmental. The data is coming in and it's ghastly. The trans industry has tried to suppress it, but it hardly matters. Everyone knew what it was going to say decades before the experiments were conducted.

If you don't want to click on that link, here's an excerpt of that thread from X.

It gets worse. Are you familiar with her Orwellian paper where they cut the breasts off over 40 girls age 13+ and gave them a "chest dysphoria" questionnaire that assumed they still had breasts? (asked if they bind at night, etc) 

At best it was an oblique measure of phantom breast syndrome, completely tautological to find a reduction after you cut them off.

She also withheld most of the outcome variables of her 2023 study giving hormones to kids (as opposed to blockers), and didn't disclose in the journal article that those variables even existed, making it fraud. See the image for some of the variables, from the study protocol doc. They reported Beck depression, anxiety, life sat, positive affect, and appearance congruence. That's it.

They **didn't report** suicidal ideation, resilience, negative affect, self-harm, stress, autism spectrum, and a bunch of others, including peer/parent ratings.

This is satanic. Meanwhile, my Catholic friends who don't judge smile warmly and preen about their compassion and inclusivity.

The trans people are the walking dead. There is absolutely no doubt that their conditions will only worsen with time. In order to maintain your appearance as the wrong sex, you must continue to take massive doses of wrong-sex hormones for the rest of your life. If it harms you in the short run, it doesn't take a computer model to figure out that it's going to harm you even more a couple of years down the road.

Further, Trump's victory spells an end to the trans people's primary payoff - social approval. As most of them will never again achieve an orgasm, the benefits are not sexual. Instead, it is the adulation and praise they get from their peers and society in general that makes it all worthwhile.

Trump ran one ad more than any other. It was the one showing that Kamala wanted to give trans-affirming care to prison inmates and illegals. They poured money into that ad campaign like water. The Democrats got mauled in the election and can see that the trans issue is a political loser. Kamala's supporters within the party and their toadies in industry, education, entertainment and the media see it, too. Loyalty is to the party, not the cause which means that the social support for trans is going to evaporate.

The trans people are the walking dead and I would bet that most of them will take their own lives. It was all a lie and as their conditions worsen and their payoffs vanish, they will face lives of pain, suffering and despair. Since the trans movement is distinctly atheistic, there will be no moral impediment to suicide.

Self-Licking Virtue Cones

The nice thing about it for Sam, my bishop, my diocesan university and all the other Catholics who simper about inclusion and affirmation is that they will be happy to walk the parents to their kids' graves after the funeral service. They will be as warm and loving and supportive and non-judgmental with the grieving parents as they were with the kids' gender delusions.

It's virtue all the way down.

My goodness, you two certainly did a great job maintaining Dani's old bedroom. I'll bet she felt your warmth and love, coming back home to visit before she killed herself.

Don't Judge And Don't Throw Rocks At Girls

Well, I stepped into it this time. 

Within the Catholic lay movement known as Cursillo, we do something called grouping. You form a group of a couple of other men or women, depending on your sex, and each week you meet to discuss what you did over the last 7 days to be a better Christian. There's more to it than that, but that's a decent summary. Over time, you grow very close to your groupies as the sharing can be pretty personal. It's a beautiful thing and has made a huge difference in my life.

This week, I managed to metaphorically shoot one of my groupies in the head, one in the chest and one in the shoulder. It was all good, innocent fun until it wasn't and the wasn't was my fault. I thought I could control myself and I couldn't.

One of my groupies, we'll call him Sam, a bit older than me, is the kind of guy who never has a bad word to say about anyone. He is the very incarnation of a Teletubby Catholic. Everything is sweetness and kindness and love. If he had met with a group of ANTIFA rioters after they had burned down half of San Diego, he would tell you, while chuckling innocently, "Golly, those young people have so much energy! They spent the whole night shattering windows, looting stores and setting things on fire. I couldn't do that. I wouldn't last 20 minutes carrying a crowbar and smashing things. It's wonderful to see all that enthusiasm!"

Sometimes, Sam drives me bonkers with that Teletubby act.

Sam may indeed drive me bonkers, but in many ways he is an exemplar of the Christian ideal a great deal more than I am. While he is the embodiment of love and gentleness, I'm sitting there pulling logic threads in my head, trying to figure out what it all means in terms of God's telos for the world. A group made up of grumpy theoretical mathematicians, all channeling their inner Jordan Petersons would be pretty sterile and unhappy.

This week, however, Sam managed to trigger me, as the blue-haired, feminist crazies would say. I took the bait and in no time at all, the grouping session consisted of me metaphorically drawing a Chandelier in our poker game, pulling out my Colt revolver and shooting everyone at the table.

Sam volunteers on the RCIA team at his parish. RCIA is where people who want to convert to Catholicism are taught about the faith and learn just how much we hate everyone else and how to properly light a fire underneath someone tied to a stake. As a part of it, he was talking about LGBT for some reason. I think one of his current crop is gay or trans or something. He told us how he doesn't judge and how they're all wonderful people and he doesn't judge them and how he accepts their moral choices being different than his own and how, did I say this already? - he doesn't judge.

Well, that was like waving a raw steak at a small, fat chihuahua. I took the bait, in my mind thinking that I wouldn't engage in a debate, but just ask some questions to understand his internal logic. Farther back in my mind, there was the tiny voice of my guardian angel howling at me to stop because we both knew Sam didn't have any logic at all and the only thing that was going to happen was the Chandelier incident. I went ahead anyway because poking around in people's logic, theology and behavior is disastrously fun for me.

My guardian angel gave up on me at that point.

Sam's thinking was, as I had suspected, completely incoherent. I kept pulling at the threads he gave me and in no time at all, everyone in our group could see it was incoherent. I kept pulling anyway. BANG! BANG! BANG!

I started by asking if we had thrown out all the sexual sins now. He replied with the moral relativist answer that since he can't judge, what is wrong for him might be right for someone else. He, after all, can't judge. I pointed out that he was effectively editing the Bible by deleting all of the passages dealing with sexual morality. He said that it wasn't a big deal, there weren't that many. I didn't press that point, but kept asking my questions. While we were discarding the sections of Scripture that dealt with sexual sins, maybe we could throw out the ones dealing with my particular weaknesses. Like drunkenness, for example.

I've always thought that if we were going to give blessings to same-sex couples, why can't we give a blessing to me as I hold a highball glass filled with a particularly potent Alabama Slammer?

Maybe I could get the Pope's homeboy, Father James Martin, SJ, LGBTQWERTY, to do it.

When you're done with that pen, Sam, scratching out one Bible passage after another, hand it to me and I'll really get to work on that stupid book.

Things went off the rails pretty severely at that point and my guardian angel walked out of my body, headed for the local bar. I should have gone with him, but instead it was all BANG BANG BANG.

Since then, I've spent time working through the logical flaws in his arguments and those of my other groupies, not to prove I'm superior, but because I can't help but work to further clarify my own thinking. I might as well get something out of the affair as the bodies are carried away. Pulling logic threads is just what I do. 

And yes, I can see that such behavior can be sinful if it's done in the service of pride. I hope I'm doing it in the service of being a better witness to the Truth on this blog and elsewhere, but it's entirely possible that I'm doing it for my own glory. I do try to watch out for that.

Getting back to the idea of judging, which is the topic of this particular post, note that judging and punishing are separable. Dig this from John 8: 3-11.

Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.

Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. "So what do you say?”

They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.

But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Again he bent down and wrote on the ground.

And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him.

Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”

Lots and lots of Catholics have taken that passage and blown it up into a complete and impenetrable theology. For them, all of Catholic thought can be condensed into "God is love and don't judge." More on that in future posts.

For now, however, consider the story for what it is. Jesus tells the men to not throw rocks at the girl. He doesn't tell them that adultery might be OK for some and a sin for others. He is clearly saying that adultery is always and everywhere a sin. It is part of God's universal, objective moral law.

Think about the men in the story. Do you think any of them left thinking, "You know, sexuality is a wonderful mosaic of diversity and love. Whatever gets your rocks off is fine with me. Jesus said don't judge so I don't judge any more. Adultery, threesomes, goats and amphetamines, it's all fine with me now."

You can have a universal, objective moral code without stoning people to death. My groupies were conflating judging with punishing.

As Andrew Klavan likes to say, the English language is a crude tool for expressing ideas and feelings. In this case, some of us have taken the wrong connotation from "do not judge" and turned it into a commandment that subsequently dissolves any concept of a universal, objective, moral Truth.

Artistic Lizards

Tim made a few good points about my AI art illustration from yesterday's post on frilled lizards with annoying pet peeves. Replying to him is actually worth a blog post, methinks.

Tim: it looks like the AI art has let you down again. I'm sure you specifically asked for a Frilled Lizard, but the one that it gave you is clearly an iguana. Well, at least it is giving you a fairly consistent "grumpy old man" these days (even if his hands do look like they were mangled in a horrible accident).

Tim made a larger point about the content of the post, illustrated with a link to a cartoon that is worthy of another blog post, perhaps tomorrow. 

Anyway, dealing with the issue of AI art, it certainly has come a long way in the year or so since I started using it. As long as I ask for no more than two characters, it does a fine job, giving me something I like on the first try almost every time these days. My "old Southern man and his cat" series is working really well.

However, AI art still can't handle any more than two characters. I tried a dozen or so variations on the image above with a prompt something like this: "an old southern man and his cat looking annoyed at a frilled lizard which is furiously exhibiting deimatic behavior." That was the best I got before I ran out of patience and went with it.

The cat is supposed to be a gray tabby. The lizard is supposed to be frilled. The old man's hands are indeed deformed, but at least he was brandishing a broom, giving the scene the appropriate comic feel. Each time I corrected the AI, it would introduce new errors. Usually, the cat's expression was completely out of place. Sometimes the lizard was unthreatening. It was really frustrating.

I keep experiencing this same limitation - 2 characters, no more. For Thanksgiving, I tried the old, Southern man with his cat and a happy family on the porch, but almost every time, the people in the background looked like mutants. I tried a scene from the Arthurian legends, but ended up with a knight fighting a lady while the characters in the background reacted with indifference or faced in the wrong direction.

If you want surreal scenes or goofy illustrations and you only care about the mood and general characteristics of the subject, AI art does fine. Ask for a panda floating through the air, hanging from a bouquet of balloons and you get what you wanted. Ask for a surreal scene of fiery destruction and you get a decent illustration of the SEC this year.

If you want to precisely illustrate something from a story or a multi-person event, forget it. Adobe Premiere's beta of their next version has the ability to use AI to extend a video a couple of seconds past its end point, but the results there have been disappointing as well. 

I don't see how this will change without the AI translating the still image or the video into 3D wireframes and applying biomechanics to them. At that point, it's not large language modeling any more, it's a modern video game.

First try: "an old southern man and his cat pondering life while drinking coffee in the morning." His pose is a bit stiff, but it's fine for what I wanted to illustrate given that I didn't want to spend any more than 60 seconds producing it. Had I added anyone or anything else into the scene, your guess is as good as mine as to what the result might have been.

Pet Peeves And Frilled Lizards

We all have them, you know.

Pet peeves, not frilled lizards. I mean some of us might have a frilled lizard or two running about the house, but most of us don't. Some of us might even have named one our lizards Peeve so we might have a Pet Peeve Frilled Lizard. It's hard to say.

Hmm. I seem to have lost my train of thought. Ah, there it is.

While each of us have peeves, pet or otherwise, we also have tics or habits that can be annoying. It dawned on me that when a pet peeve in one person meets an annoying tic in another, it turns into a frilled lizard.

Frilled lizards, if you didn't know, are reptiles that, when threatened, can puff up flaps of skin on their necks to make themselves appear much larger than they really are. If your peeve meets my tic then you react to an annoying behavior of mine that seems larger than it really is. You're reacting to a frilled lizard, as it were.

And who wants to spend their lives doing that?

Git! Go on! Git out of here, ya dadburned frilled lizard! I don't need to make nobody's annoying habits no bigger than they already is!

Why The Fine People Hoax Survives

I listened to the excellent Joe Rogan - Mark Andreesen conversation recently and heard Joe lament that President Obama had severely disappointed him by trying to perpetuate the Fine People Hoax.

If you're not familiar with it, the phrase refers to an out-of-context quote from President Trump about the Charlottesville protests over Confederate statues. Trump said there were fine people on both sides of the debate and the press clipped out that part and ran with it, asserting that President Trump was referring to the neo-Nazi opportunists who joined the protests as "fine people." If you listen to a couple of minutes of Trump's speech on either side of the "fine people" snippet, you can tell that he was talking about the statue supporters being fine people and clearly said that the Nazis were horrible.

As someone who would like to see all of the Confederate statues remain standing and the ones that were removed replaced, I would like to think that, despite my many flaws, I'm still a fine person. I don't support the statues and the rebel flag because I'm racist, but because I think they represent the distinct and beautiful cultural heritage of the South.

Going back to Rogan, he talked about how it was utterly dishonest for Obama to repeat the hoax over and over again in campaign speeches stumping for Kamala. He was disillusioned with Obama because Barack knew he was lying, but did it anyway. Joe Rogan was missing the point.

The Fine People Hoax is not about lying, it is an oath of allegiance to DEI and the racial groups the Democrats believe are the core of their constituency. All of the progs in the media, the academy, entertainment and politics thoroughly understand that it's a hoax. When they keep propping it up, they aren't lying to you so much as they are reciting a portion of their version of the Nicene Creed.

"I believe that everyone who supports Confederate symbols in any form is a white supremacist. I believe that blacks are held down by white supremacy. I believe that strident and united political action is the only solution to the scourge of white supremacy. I believe that white supremacy is everywhere, permeates our institutions and must be fought at all times without any reservations."

For the progs, even the slightest hesitation to recite this or missing an opportunity to refer to things like the Fine People Hoax is an unforgiveable act of apostasy and heresy. The progs have excommunicated former members of their tribe for such things. You cannot even hint that you are willing to give the slightest benefit of the doubt to those of us who like the Confederate monuments and symbols.

Obama and the rest of them aren't lying, they're signaling to their comrades that they are still walking on the razor's edge of proggy acceptance. To deviate even slightly is to be cast out of the group. That's why the Fine People Hoax will continue for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully, this statue was dropped into the fires of Mt. Doom.

Deep Fried Turkey For The Win!

 ... plus, a helpful, if dangerous, tip.

We had a turkey-off yesterday. I did one in the smoker and one in the deep fryer. The unanimous decision was that the deep-fried turkey was the absolute best. Even the people who don't normally like turkey loved the deep-fried one.

For prep, I dry-brined the deep-fried one to get the skin crispy. That involved drying the bird as best I could with towels and then putting salt and pepper on the skin. I let it sit in the fridge, uncovered overnight. I do that same process with steaks and they come out nicely, too.

The smoked one was brined in an apple juice, sugar and salt fluid to keep it moist as it smoked. It got a rub made of various herbs and brown sugar. I then smoked it at 225 for about 5 hours. It was good, but nowhere near as good as the deep-fried one.

Dangerous Tip: I had timed everything out quite nicely except that I forgot that the fryer takes about 45 minutes to come up to temperature. I took most of the oil, put it in a deep pot and used the stove to get the oil up to about 375. That took very little time. I poured the hot oil back into the fryer and it signaled almost immediately that it was ready to go. Whew! Day, saved. I'd prefer not to do that again as pouring two gallons of hot oil is asking for trouble.

Anywho, that's our results from this Thanksgiving. Deep-frying is the way to go.

The winner!

A decent effort, but a distant second.

Our gas range saved the day.

Bonus Star Trek Analogy

KT: We've left the fryer off. It's completely cold. It will take 30 minutes to heat the oil.

Daughter-in-law kittehs: The other dishes are almost done. The grandchildren are getting hungry. We'll be ready to eat in 50 minutes. The turkey has to go into the fryer now.

Wife kitteh: KT!

KT: I can't change the laws of physics. I've got to have 30 minutes!