Audio episodes are usually for paying subscribers only, but this week’s post is public. This PSA for Mama Bears struck a nerve, and I hope to see it shared far and wide, with mama bears everywhere.

Be a mama bear. Be ferocious in protection of your children, and then, ferocious in protection of all children. Act out of love for your child, not fear of what will happen if you don’t follow the fashion, or the authorities. Do not affirm that which is dangerous. Do not comply with that which is dangerous. Do not let your agreeable nature put your own children in harm’s way.

Please share widely, with anyone whom you think would welcome or benefit from these words.

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Written text of this short piece is here, first published on June 27, 2022. I realized, upon looking for a photograph to go with this post, that I wrote on the same broad topic on my Patreon back in October, 2018. I have unlocked that post: Faith, Cynicism, and Skepticism as Pre-, Post- and Modern Approaches to Life.

Excerpt from the June original:

I have, during Covid, sometimes been called a contrarian, even by friends. It has been invoked by way of defending me, even, as if to be a contrarian were a cute personality quirk, or even a positive one. But when I map “contrarian” on to the framework above—cynic, skeptic, or faithful—to be a contrarian is clearly to be in the domain of the cynic. A contrarian simply disagrees. A contrarian may well avoid making eye contact with any evidence that doesn’t suit them, so as to be assured that their “everything the authorities say is wrong” worldview can persist.

I am not a contrarian….I am a scientist. Scientists should be neither faithful nor cynical. Scientists are skeptics. Scientists do not accept what authorities say simply because the authorities have said it. Scientists do not accept what anyone says simply because a particular person or institution has said it.

Excerpt from the 2018 Patreon piece:

The modern approach, the one most deeply and accurately informed by an evolutionary world view, is based on skepticism. Be open to new solutions, but absent a good reason to change, stick to what has worked before. Seek out authorities in fields about which you want to know more, or about which you need to know more, and question everything that they say, at first. Ultimately you will either arrive at a near steady state, in which you accept much but not all of what they say; or, conversely, you will discover that the authority tends to be wrong, and is not worth paying much attention to at all.

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This week’s written post, about biological exploration and geological musings in The Bahamas, can be found here. There you will also find photographs, a short video clips, and footnotes. Enjoy!

Audio reads are usually reserved for paying subscribers, but I’m making this one freely available. Consider joining as a paying subscriber to get access to all such reads.

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Bret and I were recently sent a book of Wendell Berry’s poems by a fan (thank you). Within the book I found Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

My god is it good.

I read it aloud on DarkHorse #117. But I’m going to read it aloud here again now. Or now again here. This is a poem for ever after, but also for right now.

Friends: every day do something that does not compute.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008; New Collected Poems, 2012.

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Tomorrow, for paying subscribers: the audio transcript of last week’s post: Get Ready for the Biggest Game of Whack-a-Mole the World Has Ever Seen.

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After a bit of a delay, here is the audio from my first post of 2022, a post that turned out to be wildly popular. Touched a nerve, I guess. Or a lot of them. As such, I’m making this audio read publicly available.

Tomorrow I post Part I of an essay on sex differences in competition. The end of this post will segue nicely into that one.

Here’s an excerpt from today’s post:

Why are we catering to the delusions of the weakest and most confused members of society?

If you think you’re a girl but are really a boy, or

you think that exposure to ideas that you don’t agree with are violence against your soul, or

you think that discussion of early treatment or lockdowns or vaccine passports or mandates or the origins of the virus or the incentives of the drug makers or vitamin D or repurposed drugs or modifiable risk factors or actual risks from the disease or anything outside of the extremely narrow accepted covid narrative is dangerous to you and to society, then

I’m sorry, but you are wrong.

Again: I’m sorry you’re scared. Your fear is misplaced, however. And your fear shouldn’t be allowed to obliterate my freedoms.

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Here is the second of my two long pieces on higher ed from recent weeks. The first—The Twin Virtues of Trust and Uncertainty—is available to all in print. The audio edition is available to paying subscribers.

Here, too, is the video of the talk that I gave at the Department of Justice in 2018, which is referenced in this essay.

Finally: one brief excerpt from today’s essay (in print here):

Thus, if college faculty are to be granted the opportunity to educate, my simple rubric for what need be true of them is this:

* Know real things.

* Be able to communicate those things.

* Fundamentally believe in the humanity of your students.

It seems a low bar, this rubric, but it’s one that many faculty do not meet.

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Hello and happy Thanksgiving to all,

In the midst of more substantive posts—on higher ed (two of them!), and vitamin D and Covid, and why not to allow children to medically transition—here comes Thanksgiving. So I wrote a little bit about the food traditions that our family enjoys, and also what I have been grateful for. I shared that with paying subscribers last week. Now, on Thanksgiving, I’m sharing it more widely. You may listen directly, or download it, as you like.

Here is a paragraph from today’s audio post:

Cooking that much sweet and savory and spiced and meaty goodness over the course of days makes a house smell like home. It makes the noses of the cats twitch. No matter the weather outside, if there is warmth on the inside, and rich food made with love, some things, at least, feel right with the world.

Be good to one another, today and every day.

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This week I’ve brought The Boat Accident, which I wrote about in 2019 and experienced in 2016. There was some thought that this story should be included in A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, but we couldn’t figure out a way to incorporate it, so while two other near-death experiences are related in the book, this one is not.

From the middle of this essay:

The wave hits and it is searing chaos, impossibly loud, firehose water everywhere, me holding on to the metal railing with my left arm, as the boat rears up and bucks and finally flips, all the while thrashing my body, over and over and over again against hull and hardware, fiberglass and metal. I hold on to the boat through all of it. The water comes and comes and comes and it is fast and dreadful, whipping me, slamming me, darkest green and brightest white, screaming and foaming, and it feels like the end of the world, a whirlpool tugging into darkness and depth and death.

And then, suddenly, nothing. Utterly still. No movement at all. And silent. And fully dark, nothing through the darkness, no sense that there might be color out there somewhere, just a kind of lapping, sloshing, stillness, like the longest night has fallen and perhaps there had been people once, but now there are no more.

I am under the boat, trapped, with no air. Into my head, in front of my eyes, images come: my two boys, my man. And a mantra: I am not allowed to die.

I make a lateral move. Pause to assess, air in my lungs diminishing. No change: no movement, no light, no sound, nothing. I am not allowed to die.

Another lateral move. Still no change. This time I give myself a quick pat down, checking for obvious injuries. Ohh…the fact that I can actually feel my bone, my tibia, from the side of my calf where there was, until moments earlier, quite a lot of muscle, is not a good sign. I see my boys again, in my mind’s eye.

I am not allowed to die.

The audio transcripts of my Tuesday posts are usually restricted to paying subscribers, but I sometimes make them available to all, as this week. I am also, this week, beginning occasional posts to paying subscribers with links to articles and other media that have grabbed my attention. Later this week, look for the first one of those, which will include a link to an essay on why the world seems to have been so convinced that authoritarians exist only on the political right, and another to a research paper comparing relative risks to young men from mRNA vaccines, vs risks from Covid.

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This Tuesday’s essay, the second to focus on making meaning, is about flow.

Written essays on Natural Selections are always publicly available. Audio posts are generally for paying subscribers only, but occasionally—as this week—I will make them available to all. Please share. And thank you.

Some of us find meaning in creation—of building things that have never existed before, be they made of words or pigment or wood. Some of us find meaning in exploration and discovery—of finding new places, or new ways of looking at known places; of looking so close, or so far, that we see things that have not been seen before. Some of us find meaning in healing, in touch and insight that results in betterment, which allows the person on the receiving end to become more functional. Others in helping in other ways, or in elucidating—in teaching, for instance. Others in communication or interpretation, in building teams, or in leading them.

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On July 29, I posted my inaugural essay for Natural Selections: Fact-Checkers Aren’t Scientists. Every Tuesday I make a new post; these are available to everyone. Paying subscribers also receive an audio edition of the week’s essay. I am making the audio edition of this first essay available to all. Enjoy! And if you do, consider becoming a subscriber.

Let us learn some of the lessons that the pandemic has brought into sharp relief. Let us make our supply chains anti-fragile, and reduce inequalities in access and opportunity to key services. Let us interact in real time, with real people, as much as possible, rather than hiding behind screens—which will also help heal some of our political divisions. Let us remember that we are all more similar than we are different, and have much to learn from one another. Let us spend as much time outside as possible. And let us follow our curiosity, and our analytical and logical brains, towards a broader understanding of the world we live in, rather than a narrowly defined arena which has been brought to us by sponsors we did not choose, and should not want. 

Come with me on this journey, as we actually follow some science.

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