We Live in Extremistan

About a month ago, I mentioned Black Swan author Nassim Taleb’s designation of what amount to two types of randomness, Mediocristan and Extremistan. Here is a chart Taleb provided comparing the two:

Mediocristan	Extremistan
Mild randomness	Wild randomness
Typical member is mediocre	There is no typical
Winners get small piece of total pie	Winner-take-all
General Utopian-type Equality	Extreme inequality
Impervious to Black Swan	Vulnerable to Black Swan
Corresponds to physical qualities and restrained by them	Corresponds to numbers, like wealth; no restraints
Total not affected by a single instance	Total determined by small number of extreme events
Tyranny of the collective	Tyranny of the accidental
History crawls	History makes jumps

Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted. “

In some strange way I keep seeing Mediocristan as representative of man’s viewpoint, man’s ways, man’s attempt to control his world, and Extremistan as God’s ways, at least as they are perceived by man.  At one point Taleb says that our problems in general are that we believe we live in Mediocristan but we really live in Extremistan. That statement in particular resonated for me.

We think we can know, we think we can plan and predict and circumvent disaster. We think everything will continue as it has been. We think we have control of things. When we don’t. And it won’t. And we can’t.

 It’s an illusion. A deception.

Mediocristan is that which puts forth the idea that we are all the same, all equal, should all be treated alike.  That all will be routine, ordered, safe, controlled. It’s a place where there can’t be fear because there’s nothing to fear. It’s the world without God. The world wrestled under control of men, to be good and fair and equal. If you just do x and y, z will happen. Simple. It all depends on you. Safe.

Extremistan is what challenges us with our inadequacy. The fact that we don’t have omniscience, nor omnipotence. That we don’t know everything. That, in fact, we don’t even know half as much as we think we do because most of the knowledge we do have is flawed. (Did you see that it’s okay to drink coffee, now? It prevents diabetes and isn’t so hard on the heart after all. Apparently) It reminds us that even though we’ve spent 1000 days walking without incident along a certain path, the next day an airplane can fall out of the sky on you.

We don’t like to contemplate Extremistan because it’s scary and unpredictable so we pretend it’s not so.

Day of Mourning

Recently my publisher, Bethany House, sent me notification of the sad news that because The Shadow Within (Book 2 of the Legends of the Guardian King series) and Return of the Guardian King (Book 4 of the series) have not been selling sufficiently they have decided not to keep them on their list of active publications. That’s a bunch of words to say they’ve been declared out of print and BHP will be producing no more copies of them. I’ve asked to have the rights revert to me.  

So if any of you are still waiting to get the Legends Series, or specifically the final book in that series, I suggest you act now before they vanish forever, like What-a-Burger’s A-1 Thick and Hearty burger. (Though I seriously doubt the A-1 is really going to vanish forever.) ((I’ve clearly seen that ad WAAAAY too many times…)  The books are still available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online sites as of today, and I would guess you can still order through local stores, though the strange setups independent booksellers have with distributors makes that literally a guess.  

Books 1 and 3 (The Light of Eidon and Shadow Over Kiriath) apparently continue to sell well enough that they’ve decided to keep publishing them.  

I knew this day would come and suspected it would be sooner rather than later, particularly given our current economy. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Shall we accept good from Him and not adversity as well? He knows what He’s doing and I don’t, and whether the books are in print or not is no obstacle to Him getting them into the hands of those for whom they are written. Maybe they don’t even matter any more and have served whatever purpose He had for them.  

If I step back I still have to marvel that the entire series actually made it to print at all, since there was considerable doubt the initial books would sell well enough to justify putting out the rest. And seeing as Eidon came out in 2003, Shadow Within in 2004… that’s about five years of shelf life in a very transitory and unforgiving industry. Have to be happy about that.  

Plus this last fall, a German publisher contracted to publish all four of the GK books. So it’ll still be out there, even if I won’t be able to read any of the books.   

In any case, I still have another book to write, which, believe it or not, starting last week I’ve finally the time to get back to. Or maybe I should say, I have another proposal to prepare, since at this point, that’s all I’ve got the go-ahead to do.  

   

 RIP

Graveyard photo by Qole Pejorian

Snow

Did you see the snow on my blog? It’s something WordPress does for the holidays. Sometimes if you move the cursor around, the snowfall will change directions.  Fun! 

 Here’s a picture of our snowy Jeep from several years ago when it snowed here,  just to make it more appropriate:

 

And here’s the snow paloverde the next morning… (I want to see if the snow will show up down here, too!)

 

If you’re a Feedblitz subscriber you won’t see the snow unless you go to the blog itself, here.  You can also click on the post’s title, “Snow” above.

Opinions are not Equal

Saw this today on Rush Limbaugh’s site and thought he expressed it so well, I wanted to share.

I don’t fall in the PC trap that every opinion has validity. It doesn’t. Opinions which are wrong are worthless. And just because you might be wrong with your opinion and you are human and you have feelings and shouldn’t be insulted, if you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I’m not afraid to tell anybody they’re wrong. I’m not afraid to tell myself I’m wrong. It doesn’t happen much, that’s why, but you’re never going to be properly educated unless you eventually tell yourself you’re wrong. “My opinion counts just as much as –” no, it doesn’t if it’s wrong. “Yes, it does Mr. Limbaugh, my opinion is valid. I think I have a brain and my opinion –” If you’re wrong, you’re wrong.                        ~Rush Limbaugh, December 10, 2009

I will add that I believe everyone has the right to hold an opinion, valid or not,and while I don’t think you should be afraid to tell someone they are wrong, I also think that it’s mostly unnecessary — futile, even —  to go around trying to straighten people out.  Freedom guarantees us the right to hold whatever opinions we desire. If our thoughts and opinions are foolish, and we act upon them in foolish ways, we will pay the price. Rush, however, is an entertainer and an educator and the whole point of his show is to express his opinion. If you don’t like it you don’t have to listen. But I did think his point that all opinions are not equal was dead on.

Tiger Barack

The recent revelation that Tiger Woods is as depraved as all the rest of us and the media’s obsession over it raises the question of why. Not why did Tiger Woods, who is a famous, rich, talented, attractive man with a sin nature, fall into adultery (when every other celebrity, sports figure and politician, it seems, has fallen into the same sin), but why is the media so fixated on it? Was it not so long ago that this same media was saying about another famous person, who lived in that white house in Washington, DC, and who was also caught in adulterous behavior… that everyone does such things and why were we making such a big deal about it?

There was an article Tuesday in The American Thinker by Lisa Schiffren entitled ‘Tiger, Barack, and the Law of Transitivity’ that sheds some light on the latest hysteria:

“We are interested because Tiger Woods, who may legitimately be the best golfer ever, had been turned into an all-purpose icon: a man of personal rectitude, a lovely smile, apparent openness; a family man, with a lovely wife and two adorable babies. And of course, he was our first living embodiment of the collective hope for racial reconciliation. Who knew that the early reports of his betrayed wife Elin swinging at him with a golf club constituted literal icon-smashing?

“We are staring because we’ve been had. Betrayed. We see now that the image was all a fraud. The talent was real. But the things that made the public like Tiger personally — the low-key demeanor, manners, and sweet smile of countless sports-page photos, magazine covers, political analogies, and most important, product endorsements, was an act.”

An act for ten years, according to Rush Limbaugh, who said on his show Tuesday that anyone high up in the golfing world knew these things about Tiger. Also that his personality is less than genteel and that some would even view him as arrogant.

Turns out Tiger is not so different from most people of prominence who have money, talent, attractiveness and the power — and temptations — that go with all that.

Schiffren continues:

“But it wasn’t just Woods’ act. The larger lesson here is about how much artifice — sustained, deliberate deception — goes into the construction of a public persona when there is profit to be made or power to be had.

“Jack Shafer, the Slate media columnist, spells out how this transpired. In the beginning, Shafer notes, Woods was your normal young, single, randy, skirt-chasing, heterosexual athlete. “Then, almost overnight, he became a golf phenom, and … for business reasons — Buick, Nike, Gatorade, Gillette, EA Sports, and Accenture being among them — Woods decided to exfoliate from his public image all things base, carnal, and even personal. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers.”

And all this accomplished with the collusion of our media which is supposed to be reporting the truth and apparently isn’t much at all. The reporters who wanted access had to promise not to reveal the things they actually uncovered, but to go along with this elaborate and false construction.

When I read Hollywood Interrupted awhile back, the same thing was pointed out with regard to the various stars. Most of the stories you read about the stars, particularly in the more “respectable” publications, are going to be lies. It’s the same thing… if you want access you can only say what the star wants you to say (Rather like Anna’s first interview with that reporter who looks like a cross between Michael J. Fox and Tom Cruise on “V”). That accounts for why the interviewees are always saying that now that they’ve become parents (or gotten married or turned 40) it’s changed their lives. They love being a parent (or married or 40). It is the most fulfilling role they have every played, yada, yada, yada. The first few interviews I believed but when I kept reading the same stuff in all the interviews I began to wonder. And now, having read Hollywood Interrupted I don’t even read the interviews.

But I digress, because to me the other very interesting thing about Schiffren’s column was that she compared Tiger to President Obama. Who was a cipher before running for office, and pretty much still is.

I’ll let Schiffren say it:

“If I were watching the public’s disgust with the newly revealed Tiger Woods from an office in the West Wing, I’d be concerned. Because Barack Obama is about as completely manufactured a political character as this nation has seen. His meteoric rise, without the inconvenience of a public record or accomplishments, and the public’s willing suspension of critical evaluation of his resume allowed his handlers and the media to project whatever they wanted to on his unfurrowed brow.

Ironically, the parallels have nothing to do with race. The Obama campaign did explicitly attempt to borrow from the then-universal Tiger Woods appeal to allay any discomfort voters might have had with a mixed-race politician. They constructed a persona that would make the American electorate comfortable with a barely-known, first-term senator with a left wing voting record, a deliberately obscured personal and professional past, and no traditional qualifications for high office.”

She commented that while it doesn’t matter much if a great golfer turns out to be not as nice nor as moral as everyone made him out to be,

 ”it matters a lot if the president is revealed to be an inexperienced, excessively ideological, and weak man who is naive about the world and uncomfortable exercising American power during a time of war. It matters if nothing in his training would have equipped the president to understand what it takes to stimulate job growth. It matters that he is uninterested in the science behind global warming — and wishes to use the issue to amass power and reorder society. It matters that he has no interest in the construction of policy…”

And all this, I think, is merely a fractal of a much greater deception going on in the world. For Satan has deceived the whole world — and that includes Christians. Our battle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the atmosphere.” The cosmic (world) system is portrayed as offering all we could ever want or need to make us happy and fulfilled. We’re constantly being shown the good life, told how to think, what to want, what to do, the message confirmed with pictures of people like Tiger Woods, who seem to have it made.

Has it always been like this, or is it a product of our times? The result of unending news, advertisements and entertainment that all show us a world that doesn’t exist. Why do we keep searching for idols and icons and role models? Is it because we have all at some level rejected the only man who is qualified to be our idol and our role model? I speak of our Lord Jesus Christ, the only true celebrity. All the rest are depraved, with sick heads, deceitful hearts and not one bit of soundness in their flesh, from the top of their heads to the soles of their feet. Even Christians still wrestle with that wretched old nature. Our Lord is the only perfect man, the one who though He was rich for our sakes became poor. For our sakes set aside the exercise of his deity and took upon Himself the form of a man, submitting Himself to the obedience of a death on the cross. What other celebrity has ever done that for anyone?

 You can read the American Thinker article here.

Walk by Faith, not Sight

Continuing my thoughts stimulated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan  on the validity of human-acquired wisdom, information, predictions, etc. 

In Chapter 5, entitled “Confirmation Shmonfirmation” Taleb observes, “…a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence [of something]. Seeing white swans does not confirm the nonexistence of black swans…” However, seeing a single black swan will  prove that not all swans are white. In the same way finding a malignant tumor proves you have cancer, whereas not finding one doesn’t prove you don’t. [As the doctor said recently to my mother, the cancer cells migrated from the first location to the second and logic says they took up residence elsewhere besides in her leg bone. Hence they opt for another round of chemotherapy. How can we know that the chemo is needed, that it will kill the cells we are hoping it will? We can't.]

Taleb calls this “negative empiricism” and contends that negative instances (like cancer, like a black swan) can bring us closer to the truth than verifying instances. ”It is misleading,” says he, “to build a general rule from observed facts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our body of knowledge does not increase from a series of confirmatory observations.”

That’s one of those sentences that makes you stop and ponder. It seems that the more we see of something, the more certain we can be of the truth, but the reality is, we just don’t have a large enough sample size. Or, put another way, we simply don’t know the big picture.

This recalls to mind God’s command that His children live by faith in His word and character and not by what they see. Sight would involve confirmatory observations, and we crave confirmation of the things that we believe. Yet as we grow God increasingly asks us to put that desire for confirmation aside.  Noah had never seen rain, had not one convert in his 120 years of preaching to the antedeluvian world, yet he kept on.

Abraham spent his entire life waiting for a city without foundations and is still waiting. Moses spent his adult life traveling toward the promised land and never got to enter it. The church has waited 2000 years for the return of our Lord with no confirmatory evidence for the most part. (Though lately that’s been less true than in the past!)

And then there was Job, who was actually being shown off by God to Satan and the world. “Have you noticed my servant Job?” he asked of Satan. “There is none like him in all the world.’

Job was a mature believer with whom God was well pleased. And what did He do with His mature believer, one who had been faithful for many long years? He drew Satan’s attention to him and allowed him to take all that he had without cause. And after Job lost all his children, all his livestock and houses and servants, and even his health, there wasn’t a lot of confirmatory evidence to bolster the notion that God loved him, and that He was a just God who had all under control.

Nevertheless, Job’s initial response was to affirm that very viewpoint: “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Even after his wife came advising him to curse God and die, he said, “Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” and did not sin with his lips. It was only when those three so-called friends arrived to sit with him silently for seven days before urging him to confess his sins because it had to be his fault that all this had befallen him — which was not at all the situation! — only then did he start to fail the test. Why? Because he had only the word of God to rest in and the lack of confirmatory evidence had gotten to him, especially when the “friends” used that very lack against him.

Our Lord also did not seem to be in the Father’s plan when He was tried, convicted and marched up to the hill of Golgotha to be crucified. There His enemies mocked Him, demanding, once again, confirmatory evidence: “Why don’t you come down from there if you’re the son of God? Where is He? Why doesn’t He deliver you if you’re really who you say you are??”

Of course the evidence did arrive eventually, but it’s in those dark hours that we most want it and don’t have it and the fact that we don’t is by God’s design.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a philosopher, concerned with human viewpoint, and the limitations of man’s perceptions. He doesn’t touch at all on divine viewpoint — at least not directly, but what I like is how he highlights many of the tendencies we have as humans that make having faith in someone we’ve never seen, having faith in the words of men long dead, as all the while the exact opposite is apparently staring us in the face and “everyone” is telling us how things “really” are, and they aren’t like how the Bible says.

 It also shows the myriad ways in which the cosmic system deceives. With such tendencies in us, it’s not all that hard. Especially when you combine it with our lack of brainpower to process all the details that surround us and our resulting need to summarize. And then there is our almost hard-wired inclination to make stories out of everything, regardless of the amount of actual facts we have. But those are subjects for future posts.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is when you search for confirmation of something you believe. Finding it then bolsters your belief. In The Black Swan, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb recounts a psychological experiment in which subjects were given the number seqence 2, 4, 6, and asked to guess the rule generating them by producing other three-number sequences that followed the same rule. The experimenter would answer “yes” or “no” in response to each sequence and from that the subjects would formulate their rule.

In this case the rule was “numbers in ascending order,” a simple rule which few of the subjects discovered.  To do so, they would have had to offer a number series in descending order (to which the experimenter would have said “no”). Being focused on trying to confirm whatever rule they had come up with, the subjects never thought to try to disprove it and thus never asked the right questions…

This practice of seeking evidence that disproves one’s theory is called skeptical empiricism, and is one Taleb advocates as a means of increasing one’s objectivity in perceiving reality.  However, it is so much against our nature that it requires a fair degree of concentrative energy. Our habit, our nature is to go for confirmation rather than falsification. Given man’s fallen state I can readily attribute this to the pride of the flesh, delighting in the cleverness of its own ideas and not at all pleased at the idea of being wrong

“The way of a fool is right in his own eyes…”  Pro 12:15

“He who corrects a scoffer gets insult for himself.” Pro 9:7

“Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”  Pro 26:12

Taleb says you can find confirmation for just about anything you want to believe. Confirmation in circumstances, confirmation in “references,” confirmation in events. Confirmation from other people.

The day before I read this section of the book, I was talking with someone who was advocating a health product whose method of operation and results I found difficult to believe. When I expressed my skepticism the person offered several incidents of the personal testimony sort as “proof” the product was legitimate and worked as advertised. As soon as I read about confirmation bias, I realized I’d just seen it in action.

In Frank Peretti’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Visitation, there is an incident where the protagonist was certain that God wanted him to go to the Billy Graham headquarters in Minnesota and offer his services. He was totally unqualified and really had no “services” to offer (except perhaps janitorial), nevertheless he was convinced it was God’s will and direction that he do this. He found confirmation on the side of a boxcar in a train he happened to pass as he started out on his bus trip to Minnesota. There on the side of the car was a number that just happened to be the same as the street number of the Billy Graham offices. Proof, he exulted, that he was indeed following God’s lead.

 Unfortunately when he arrived at the headquarters he was turned away without appeal… Which left him confused. Had God not been leading him after all? I’d say no. It was merely confirmation bias at work.

Complicating this tendency to want to confirm one’s theory or belief rather than to disprove it is the tendency to focus on the incidents that do confirm, while blotting out those that do not. Taleb calls this the silent evidence. You hear of the 10 people who were cured of cancer using this innovative technique, not the 1100 who died using it. You hear of the 100 writers who succeeded using such and so marketing technique, not the thousands who did not.

Sometimes, scientists just throw out the experiments that don’t confirm their theories while trying to force the ones with promise to do so… The recent CRU emails give some examples of this, and I distinctly recall an article I read a few years ago by Richard Lewontin, maybe, about exactly this. We are aghast at the practice, yet if we’re honest I think most of us will find we do the same thing, if on a lesser scale perhaps.

I’ll use an example that I’m familiar with. Let’s say I fear that deep down I believe that I’m not really a very good writer (my theory). I can get twenty very positive comments on my writing, from people I know and respect and yet, it’s the one negative comment, often from a total stranger, that I recall most vividly. Why? Because it’s corroborating my “I can’t write” theory. That’s also why the negative comments are the ones that tend to surface when I’m struggling to write the next book, corroborating my resurrected fear that I really can’t write after all. “See? Not only am I having trouble with the work in progress but some reviewer on Amazon confirmed that I really am just an imposter.”

Thankfully God’s growing me out of this ridiculous scenario, and this whole idea of confirmation bias is a very helpful concept in doing so. It also answers questions I’ve had about doctrinal or faith-based differences between believers. But more on that tomorrow.

Climategate

Many of you may have heard about the leaked emails out of the  Climate Research Unit at the University East Anglia in Britain. the CRU is supposedly the premiere research organization in the world when it comes to climate change, and the group that supplied two of the four sets of data that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used for its report. Its data and perspective are described as ”key to setting environmental agenda” for the world and turns out these climate scientists were doing exactly the same things  the evolutionists tend to do: making the data fit how they want it to fit, and in some cases even making the data up.

One of the things legitimate scientific researchers are supposed to do is give other researchers free access to the data they have collected to so they may come to the same conclusions, generally by repeating the experiment or process. In this case the CRU not only refused for years to allow others to examine their original data it now turns out that they managed to “lose” the original data… these would be temperatures they took over the years from various locations, information gleaned from tree ring studies and other elements they combined to “reconstruct” past temperature profiles. (that last immediately begins to sound fishy to me. Once people start trying to reconstruct something as ephemeral as specific temperatures of the past, my skeptic lights go on)

In any case, they took the temperatures they had gathered, put them through a sequence of computer programs (also top-secret  so others could not confirm) to “adjust” the temperatures to make up for various unspecified factors in the collection process and, oh my! they came up with a tidy rise in global temperatures over the last 150 years. Then they managed to ditch original readings from which they derived their adjusted temps.

They’d like people to believe it was all an accident, it was way back in the 80s when global warming wasn’t an issue, and maybe some would believe that  if it weren’t for the emails wherein heretofore respected AGW (that’s Anthropocentric Global Warming) scientists told each other to get rid of the data, moaned about how hard it was to get their vaunted programs to spit out the right conclusions, and discussed how they might keep their opposition from ever publishing in legitimate journals, thus providing themselves with the ability to marginalize their findings by pointing out they’d never been published in a respected, peer-reviewed journal.

These people are the main scientists involved in the UN study (IPCC mentioned above) that resulted in the alarmist warning that governments had better do something about this approaching disaster or mankind will destroy the earth. The same study that’s generated the upcoming conference in Copenhagen which our President is set to attend in just a few days.

Even Global Warming advocates are horrified and shocked that their heros, the scientists they respected and believed have pretty much violated every research protocol in the book. They want the head of the CRU to step down and last I heard he was going to. But even so, there are others who tsk and sweep it all under the rug. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, (whose degrees are in Industrial Engineering and Economics, not a climate science) told the UK’s Guardian, “The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report.” So he’s just pretending none of it happened. (article)

That just blows me away. I don’t know what universe these people live in, but it’s not the same as mine. Or maybe it is, and the truth is that they don’t care if they lie, don’t care, really, if anyone believes them, they just want to continue on with their plans until they have the power they are seeking. (Pachauri also thinks “Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed.”)  (article)

I’ve said it before, and this new development makes it clearer than ever that the whole thing is a hoax. It’s all wishful thinking, self-delusion, corruption, deceit, arrogance, and clearly, I think, part of the push toward one world government.

The interesting thing, as I mentioned earlier, is how closely the methods and comments and goals of the scientists are so similar to those I quoted as coming from evolutionists not too long ago. The same approach of deciding what the truth is, then setting out to “prove” it.

I find it also interesting that in both cases, God is shoved aside, deliberately, consciously and in some cases openly, excluded from the picture. Evolutionists are searching for a rational explanation for everything that does not include God or any sort of supernatural creative event. At the other end of the spectrum, Global warming alarmists say God cannot protect His creation and they are committed to proving that global disaster which only man can avert, is on the way.

And amazingly a lot of people believe both camps.

A quote from The Black Swan comes to mind (actually a lot of concepts do, but I’ll confine myself to one.)

“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but someone fall for the securities analyst — those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians.[And here I would add, global warming scientists] Using confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War…”

How weird to live in a world where people would rather trust fallible men spouting theories that the least bit of common sense would recognize as ridiculous, than God. How weird that these same people should take their own views a step further and describe them in religious terms. As happened last Monday as reported on Fox News by George Russell: “Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion ‘as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,’ according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world’s would-be environmental watchdog.”

For more on this:  Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation

Disjointed and Out of the Blue

Well, it’s been over a week since I’ve posted. We’ve done Thanksgiving, the leftovers which haven’t yet been eaten have been packaged and frozen, I finished the last of the cranberry sauce with my sandwich today and now it’s on to Christmas.  I’m thinking of making Christmas cookies tomorrow. Unless I decide to write instead…

My mother is finally doing well. Though her rehab therapists were supposed to request additional sessions before she completed the 13 her insurance had already approved, they did not.  On her last day they said  they would submit the request that very day and told me to call the next week to find out if they had received authorization. But when I called, the request STILL hadn’t been submitted.  It went out that morning — last week. I got a call yesterday to say the sessions had finally been approved, but by now my mother has been doing her exercises on her own, lifting her leg fairly easily, is getting into and out of my car just fine, walking without a cane and generally able to go about her life again. Now the only reason she can’t drive her car is because we had to forgo the planned cataract surgery back in September and she can’t see.  In any case, the therapists missed their chance and we won’t be going back.

On Monday we saw the oncologist who said that her cancer, seeing as it migrated to her leg, has to be regarded as a chronic illness that must be managed for the rest of her life and that she will have to have another round of chemotherapy. Not a fun prospect. He said she doesn’t have to begin until January. So we have a bit of a reprieve.

The above are only two examples of the myriad details that have lately filled my life:  Thanksgiving, Christmas preps, trying to get new waterbed sheets… They are no longer available in Tucson so I had to try online — which has turned into an ordeal of uncertainty I probably should chronicle on one of those review-our-business sites. They charged my credit card before the sheets were even shipped and after three weeks informed me that they aren’t even being made any more and did I want to get a different kind? I said yes, but then they called to say that the new sheets had been backordered to early December so I have no idea when they’ll come. 

The local termites made a reappearance in our dining room, so we had to deal with that. Javelina are roaming the neighborhood eating peoples’ pumpkins and flowers… and my husband’s strawberry plants. Quigley is Quigley and I have been strangely wordless of late.

I did finish The Black Swan and it’s full of dog-eared pages. The concepts gleaned from it apply to so many things and I still want to write a few more posts about confirmation bias, how we change our memories each time we remember, the narrative fallacy that pervades our news and the pervasive delusion that we know much more than we think we do.

My mother suggested a new treatment to her oncologist that she’d heard about where massive amounts of Vitamin C are infused directly into the bloodstream and so boosts the immune system that it begins to fight the cancer. He said, “When you figure out what exactly the immune system is, let me know.”  I loved it. Things, particularly organic, living systems are so complicated and we’re always trying to make things fit into a box (Plato’s forms?), trying to simplify, homogenize, one size fits all. It’s easier that way. We can’t handle the complexity… but that’s a post for another day.

For now, disjointed and out of the blue as it is, I have a post for today. Disjointed and out of the blue is really quite characteristic of my life these days, though, so maybe it’s just appropriate.

So Blessed, So Thankful

Things I am Thankful For:

My Lord and Savior
His work on the Cross so I could be free
The Gospel
Eternal life
The Word of God
My pastor, Robert McLaughlin, and his faithful teaching
Rebound (If we confess our sins He is faithful and Just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from ALL unrighteousness)
The fact that “there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ.”

Living in America!
Freedom…
…And the soldiers who’ve sacrified to provide and defend it
Roads and highways
My Jeep
The American medical system
Airplanes
Fighter jets and warthogs (and living under their flight paths)
The Internet
Email and blogs
People who email me!
People who read my blog!

My house
Living in Tucson, Arizona
Sunny days
Rainy days
Windy days

Thunderheads!

Daily Bible Class
The filling of the Holy Spirit
God’s tailor made plan for my life
The pattern for it set by my Lord
Being a New Creature, set free from the power of the flesh
Trials and difficulties, for they give me the opportunity to trust God under suffering — something I can never do in heaven
Obnoxious people, for they give me the opportunity to apply God’s love and forgiveness.
Living in the End times, for it gives me the opportunity to see God’s word validated as foretold events unfold before our eyes.

Comfortable clothes
Royal Family Friends
Long, deep, doctrinal conversations
Good health, and the ability to exercise
The gift to write and readers who respond to it
Having six published books and the opportunity to write a seventh

Quigley! What a magnificent creature he is!

Turkey and dressing
Stamping and card making
Receiving the peace that passes understanding, even if only sporadically
Autumn walks
Bible conferences
Soft sheets
A good book
Music and singing

Arizona sunsets

Thanksgiving dinner leftovers
Chocolate chip Cookies!
Molasses cookies
Christmas cookies

Knowing He will never leave me nor forsake me
Knowing that my Lord controls history and all will unfold according to His purpose regardless of how things might appear
Knowing I am His bride, His jewel, the apple of His eye

Rebound

Peace

Contentment

Purpose

So blessed, so thankful

I hope you’ll take the time over this holiday to reflect on the myriad of ways that God has blessed and provided.

Happy Thanksgiving!