The most intimate of all human relations is reduced to a paradoxical combination of animalism and detached managerialism.
(Rod Dreher) Dreher here is following up on reaction to his earlier post labeling “modern barbarians” the practitioners of the kind of hooking up featured in this New York Times item. The protagonist is
a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania [who] did what she often does when she has a little free time. She texted her regular hookup — the guy she is sleeping with but not dating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched a little TV, had sex and went to sleep.
Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls.
“We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she said, adding that “we literally can’t sit down and have coffee.”
I opined a few days ago that I thought Wesley Smith had missed some things about obesity. About the same time, I was noting in my personal dieting that calories burned (measured by a Polar heart monitor) never seemed fully to offset calories eaten.
Now Jonathan Adler tips me off to more fuel for the fire:
I came across an interesting new paper on SSRN looking at caloric intake and obesity across populations “Macronutrients and Obesity: Revisiting the Calories in, Calories out Framework” by Daniel Riera-Crichton and Nathan Tefft. Here’s the abstract:
Recent clinical research has studied weight responses to varying diet composition, but the contribution of changes in macronutrient intake and physical activity to rising population weight remains unknown. Research on the economics of obesity typically assumes a “calories in, calories out” framework, but a richer weight production model separating caloric intake into carbohydrates, fat, and protein, has not been explored. To estimate the contributions of changes in macronutrient intake and physical activity to changes in population weight, we conducted dynamic time series and structural VAR analyses of U.S. data between 1974 and 2006 and a panel analysis of 164 countries between 2001 and 2010. Findings from all analyses suggest that increases in carbohydrates are most strongly and positively associated with increases in obesity prevalence even when controlling for changes in total caloric intake and occupation-related physical activity. If anything, increases in fat intake are associated with decreases in population weight.
The fat finding may be counter-intuitive, but the finding that increases in carbohydrate consumption correlate more strongly with increases in obesity is not surprising at all. It conforms with much that’s been learned about weight gain and weight loss in recent years.
Or as my 17-year-old great-niece, a newly-minted vegetarian put it Saturday over a family dinner, “you won’t lose weight as a vegetarian if you just start stuffing carbohydrates.”
I have a good deal of ambivalence toward Alliance Defending Freedom, formerly known as Alliance Defense Fund, and often just called ADF.
I have a commitment to religious freedom that led me to attend one of their National Litigation Academies. It was, on the surface, “all expenses paid” from a nearby airport to a faraway place with a strange sounding name where we all stayed in an absolutely top-tier hotel (a gift, I seem to recall, from an ADF friend within that hotel system). Under the surface, it committed me to 450 hours of pro bono (free) “kingdom work” over the following three years. (I knew that going it; they didn’t spring it on me.)
Even before I went, I once objected, in a letter of my own, to ADF’s strident fundraising letters, and got a personal reply from the muse Alan Sears. You know the kind of letter: faux handwritten underlines in contrasting ink colors, lots of colorful adjectives, selecting and demonizing a target on the other side. Every ideological organization does it, yet I foolishly think Christian ideologues really shouldn’t. Sears didn’t dissuade me from my view.
ADF’s major demon, predictably, is ACLU, and a worthy demon it is in many ways. I occasionally thank God that the ACLU was there in a particular case, but generally, they’re the enemy. (If you’re a lefty, I hope you’ll occasionally thank To Whom It May Concern for ADF, too.) A secondary demon is The Gay Rights Agenda, which I perhaps unjustifiably perceive as spilling over into a “war against flesh and blood” (people with same-sex attraction) rather than warring against principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places.
I’m feeling warm toward ADF as I write because of a simultaneously rousing and thoughtful talk, given by Ryan T. Anderson last Thursday (disregard the patently anachronistic June 11 date) at the close of one of ADF’s academies. We’re in a sound bite culture, and The Right is losing by deploying sound bites against people who are playing a long game, and against whom sound bites sound mean-spirited because they’ve won the culture (e.g., through shows as insidious, and reportedly entertaining, as “conservative” Fox’s “Glee”) and thus have set the terms of what is beyond the pale.
I know no better strategy for turning things around than the kind of patient argumentation Anderson and his co-authors engage in, but he’s perceptive enough to know that we need imaginative storytelling, script-writing, and other arts, executed with genuine skill and not just pious intentions. It’s a sign of the times that piety, courtship and even chastity, just might be, mirabile dictu, Transgressive, and thus might appeal to trend-setters who are always looking for ways to be weirder than thou.
I thought there was no more to say on the George Zimmerman trial, but Steve Sailer came up with a novel idea:
Constitutionally speaking, wouldn’t it just be simpler for Obama to order a drone strike on Zimmerman’s condo?
(H/T Rod Dreher)
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 