Michael C. Perkins's Blog, page 3
July 24, 2018
well, no a classic case of nonsense (about genes)
From: A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Genes (the author is a geneticist from University College, London)
In July 2014, the world woke to the shocking news that the perfect storms of climate change and genetics had conspired to mark ginger hair for extinction. The first headline I saw was from the Scottish paper the Daily Record, with understandable concern given the prevalence of ginger in Caledonia. A scan revealed that every mainstream British newspaper carried the story, the Daily Mail, the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Mirror, and the Sun, with various pictures of sexy redheaded celebrities, frequently the actors Christina Hendricks, Julianne Moore, and Damian Lewis. Or Prince Harry.
Social media and news websites were ablaze with horror. Around the world, National Geographic, the Week and a host of other apparently sensible magazines and news outlets reprinted the story. The headline in the Independent was typical:
GINGERS FACE EXTINCTION DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE, SCIENTISTS WARN
Broadly, the newspapers were reporting that, according to researchers, climate change is going to make Scotland less cloudy and more sunny. Therefore, the selective pressure that nurtured the allele for red hair is eliminated, and red hair will no longer be of any use to bearers, and will drift off into the great evolutionary dustbin of once-useful traits. This is an excerpt from the article in the Independent, followed by a gallery of famous redheads:
Dr Alistair Moffat, managing director of Galashiels-based ScotlandsDNA, said: “We think red hair in Scotland, Ireland and in the North of England is an adaption to the climate. “I think the reason for light skin and red hair is that we do not get enough sun and we have to get all the Vitamin D we can. “If the climate is changing and it is to become more cloudy or less cloudy then this will affect the gene. If it was to get less cloudy and there was more sun, then yes, there would be fewer people carrying the gene.”
Well, no
.
Who is Alistair Moffat, and what is ScotlandsDNA? In fact, it is a genetic ancestry testing business, a partner company to Britains-DNA (see Chapter 4), and Alistair Moffat is their founder and chief executive. The story was drawn from a press release from ScotlandsDNA, which coincided with the promotion of a new additional service that tests for the presence of red-hair alleles in a customer’s genome.
Alas, a fiction can fly around the world before the truth has managed to pick the sleep from its eyes in the morning. Many condemned the errors inherent in the content quickly, and focused on the discomfit of PR dressed up as research that journalists sometimes fall for.
In July 2014, the world woke to the shocking news that the perfect storms of climate change and genetics had conspired to mark ginger hair for extinction. The first headline I saw was from the Scottish paper the Daily Record, with understandable concern given the prevalence of ginger in Caledonia. A scan revealed that every mainstream British newspaper carried the story, the Daily Mail, the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Mirror, and the Sun, with various pictures of sexy redheaded celebrities, frequently the actors Christina Hendricks, Julianne Moore, and Damian Lewis. Or Prince Harry.
Social media and news websites were ablaze with horror. Around the world, National Geographic, the Week and a host of other apparently sensible magazines and news outlets reprinted the story. The headline in the Independent was typical:
GINGERS FACE EXTINCTION DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE, SCIENTISTS WARN
Broadly, the newspapers were reporting that, according to researchers, climate change is going to make Scotland less cloudy and more sunny. Therefore, the selective pressure that nurtured the allele for red hair is eliminated, and red hair will no longer be of any use to bearers, and will drift off into the great evolutionary dustbin of once-useful traits. This is an excerpt from the article in the Independent, followed by a gallery of famous redheads:
Dr Alistair Moffat, managing director of Galashiels-based ScotlandsDNA, said: “We think red hair in Scotland, Ireland and in the North of England is an adaption to the climate. “I think the reason for light skin and red hair is that we do not get enough sun and we have to get all the Vitamin D we can. “If the climate is changing and it is to become more cloudy or less cloudy then this will affect the gene. If it was to get less cloudy and there was more sun, then yes, there would be fewer people carrying the gene.”
Well, no
.
Who is Alistair Moffat, and what is ScotlandsDNA? In fact, it is a genetic ancestry testing business, a partner company to Britains-DNA (see Chapter 4), and Alistair Moffat is their founder and chief executive. The story was drawn from a press release from ScotlandsDNA, which coincided with the promotion of a new additional service that tests for the presence of red-hair alleles in a customer’s genome.
Alas, a fiction can fly around the world before the truth has managed to pick the sleep from its eyes in the morning. Many condemned the errors inherent in the content quickly, and focused on the discomfit of PR dressed up as research that journalists sometimes fall for.
June 14, 2018
Why CSI is mostly fake
I rather liked the CSI Vegas show, although I always noticed holes in plotting and some inconsistencies in character that could be annoying. But the idea of using deductive science to solve mysteries was appealing.
What I didn't know is that The Academy of Sciences did an extensive investigation of the alleged science behind criminal forensics and published a comprehensive report in 2009. The conclusion? The only totally dependable evidence is DNA. Even fingerprints are not as definitive as we tend to believe, never mind bite marks and blood splatter. (I am currently reading a long account of how a husband was railroaded for the death of his wife using supposed blood spatter evidence).
This Frontline piece covers the new findings very well. And, indeed, it comes out that DA's like forensic evidence, however shaky, to get convictions.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/fi...
What I didn't know is that The Academy of Sciences did an extensive investigation of the alleged science behind criminal forensics and published a comprehensive report in 2009. The conclusion? The only totally dependable evidence is DNA. Even fingerprints are not as definitive as we tend to believe, never mind bite marks and blood splatter. (I am currently reading a long account of how a husband was railroaded for the death of his wife using supposed blood spatter evidence).
This Frontline piece covers the new findings very well. And, indeed, it comes out that DA's like forensic evidence, however shaky, to get convictions.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/fi...
June 2, 2018
Elizabeth Holmes and the Steve Jobs Syndrome
Review of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
"The resignations infuriated Elizabeth and Sunny. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria. Copies of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho had been placed on every chair. Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there was anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company they should “get the fuck out.”
I have covered Silicon Valley as a journalist and author for three decades now. I’m not big on attending conferences, but made a point to go to an awards event at a favorite forum in September 2015. Among the recipients that year was Silicon Valley legend, Andy Grove, getting the lifetime achievement award.
Also on the list, getting the “global benefactor” award, was someone I had never heard of, Elizabeth Holmes. I had also never heard of her company, Theranos. Though I once worked for a business magazine, I never read any others. And Theranos was in the medical device “space,” which is pretty different from software and social media.
Her presentation was last. Joining her on stage was her Stanford professor and mentor, Channing Robertson. He spoke first. He told this story of Holmes as a kind of prodigy who camped out at the doors of his office and lab until he admitted her as a freshman into his upper division courses in chemical engineering. I would learn later that he considered Holmes a once-in-a-generation genius, comparing her to Newton, Einstein, Mozart, and Leonardo da Vinci. Heavy praise, indeed.
Holmes was up next. She wore a black, mock turtleneck that reminded me of Steve Jobs. Her dyed blond hair was up, slightly skewed, that struck me as a bit calculated. She had large, unblinking blue eyes and spoke in a low baritone. By the end of her talk, it struck me that she had essentially said nothing of substance about her product or her company. Instead, it was high-falutin’ claims that reminded me of the rhetoric Steve Jobs used when rolling out a new product, except that he had a real product he was demonstrating each time. I was immediately suspicious of Holmes and Theranos. I had seen too much over the years to take something like this at face value.
When I got home, I did a computer search and learned that Holmes had been on the cover of numerous business magazines as the first female tech billionaire. (My wife would always add: “on paper.”) In some photos she posed with a tiny vial of blood that was supposed to represent all that would be needed to do numerous tests with the company device.
Almost a month later, the first in a series of Wall Street Journal articles about Theranos, by the author of this book, was published. It reported that their technology did not work. (I was to learn later that the author interviewed 60 former Theranos employees for his research). My suspicions were confirmed. I eagerly read every new installment of the WSJ series.
But “Bad Blood” goes much deeper than those articles. It turns out that Channing Robertson was not the only older man over whom Holmes had a kind of hypnotic power, like the mythical Mata Hari. There was veteran venture capitalist, Donald L. Lucas, whose backing and connections enabled Holmes to keep raising money. Then Dr. J and Wade Miquelon at Walgreens and Safeway CEO Steve Burd, as well as General James Mattis (now Trump’s Secretary of Defense), George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger.
All of these men served as enablers, when they were in positions where they could have put a stop to the fraud. Most of these operations had experts who knew the science and tried to warn their superiors, but were ignored. And there’s no doubt that the medical miracles Theranos promised were very appealing to these older men, as well as to so many others who heard her spiel.
One of the most important older men was Sunny Balwani, her romantic partner 20 years her senior. He knew nothing about science, but was essentially her primary henchman for bullying dissenters in the company, heading up employee surveillance and doing the dirty work of firing people. He also subbed as CFO after the only one they had was fired for questioning company honesty. Balwani would pull numbers out of his butt and claim they were legitimate revenue projections.
Those who weren’t fooled were veteran venture capitalists who had been investing in the medical device space for years. During one of her pitches to these firms, she was asked so many questions she couldn’t answer that she stormed out of the conference room. In a one-on-one encounter with another successful venture capitalist he asked to see her device. Instead, she slapped her notebook shut and said: “if you can’t trust me, I can’t work with you” and slammed the door behind her as she departed.
In turns out that in spite of her time at Stanford, Holmes didn’t know much science. She described the process of her device as follows….
“A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.”
The selling point was no more needles, just a slight lance of a fingertip could provide enough blood to do countless tests. When the author queried Timothy Hamill, from the UCSF Department of Laboratory Science, he told him…
"….the pitfalls of using blood pricked from a finger. Unlike venous blood drawn from the arm, capillary blood was polluted by fluids from tissues and cells that interfered with tests and made measurements less accurate. “I’d be less surprised if they told us they were time travelers who came back from the twenty-seventh century than if they told us they cracked that nut,” he added.
The whole concept was flawed from the beginning. Holmes used non-company technology to try to cover this up. In a PowerPoint presentation she made to investors one slide showed scatter plots purporting to favorably compare test data from Theranos’s proprietary analyzers to data from conventional lab machines. But all the data came from non-Theranos technology. They often used other tech than company technology that could not to generate accurate results for patients. Theranos even resorted to using hypodermic needles, instead of the promised fingertip prick.
Meanwhile, Holmes continued to expand her Steve Jobs persona. She drank green kale shakes (Jobs was vegan), leased cars with no license plates (as he had), had several bodyguards who referred to her as Eagle1 (Eagle2 was Bulwani) and flew in a Gulfstream Jet. She referred to her device as the i-Pod of Health. And even hired the ad and pr firm that Apple once used, Chiat-Day, even though Theranos could not afford them. And looking back, it appeared that her dropping out of college was part of a script, just the way Jobs and Gates dropped out to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams,
When she went on the Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” show to denounce the WSJ, she sounded very Jobs-like when she said: “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then, all of a sudden, you change the world.“
Not surprisingly, Theranos kept missing their deadlines. Its contract with Safeway fell through, but Walgreen’s was more important to them. Several stores in Arizona went “live” with testing. Most tests done there were way off, resulting in unnecessary trips to the ER and potential over-treatment. Various doctors and patients published negative reviews on Yelp.
This put the company in the realm of reckless endangerment: “a crime consisting of acts that create a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person.”
This reality upset many employees who wanted no part of a fraud that would harm people.
At company meetings, Holmes would say: “If anyone here believes you are not working on the best thing humans have ever built, then you should leave.”
Many took her up on that, but it was never without controversy.
Meanwhile, bulldog Sunny was dispatched to Arizona to intimidate those who had posted negative Yelp reviews. And the company had hired super-lawyer David Boies to threaten suit against anyone who revealed insider info on the company. Just as one example, it cost the Schulz family $400k in legal fees to defend George’s nephew Tyler. Theranos knew Tyler had met with the author because they had a tail on both Tyler and the author.
When I finished the book I thought back on that awards ceremony I had attended where I first saw Holmes. I recalled Andy Grove, whose lifetime achievement award represented the original Silicon Valley of sweat equity. Grove lived through the Nazi occupation of his native country of Hungary and escaped after it became Communist. In New York, he worked as a busboy while he learned English and obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from City College of New York. Graduate work took him to the west coast, where he earned a Ph.D from U.C. Berkeley in chemical engineering. He would go on to help found chip maker, Intel, a company that truly changed the world.
These days, what I see in Silicon Valley is an increasing obsession with wealth and an absence of ethics, and the spread of the Steve Jobs Syndrome, like some kind of disease. Theranos epitomized all of this. The result is a lack of the honest work that Grove epitomized, in which wealth and notoriety were by-products not goals. The real goal was to do good work, first and foremost. And always tell the truth.
Michael Perkins is a founding editor of Red Herring Magazine and author of the bestseller, “The Internet Bubble” (HarperBusiness)
"The resignations infuriated Elizabeth and Sunny. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria. Copies of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho had been placed on every chair. Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there was anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company they should “get the fuck out.”
I have covered Silicon Valley as a journalist and author for three decades now. I’m not big on attending conferences, but made a point to go to an awards event at a favorite forum in September 2015. Among the recipients that year was Silicon Valley legend, Andy Grove, getting the lifetime achievement award.
Also on the list, getting the “global benefactor” award, was someone I had never heard of, Elizabeth Holmes. I had also never heard of her company, Theranos. Though I once worked for a business magazine, I never read any others. And Theranos was in the medical device “space,” which is pretty different from software and social media.
Her presentation was last. Joining her on stage was her Stanford professor and mentor, Channing Robertson. He spoke first. He told this story of Holmes as a kind of prodigy who camped out at the doors of his office and lab until he admitted her as a freshman into his upper division courses in chemical engineering. I would learn later that he considered Holmes a once-in-a-generation genius, comparing her to Newton, Einstein, Mozart, and Leonardo da Vinci. Heavy praise, indeed.
Holmes was up next. She wore a black, mock turtleneck that reminded me of Steve Jobs. Her dyed blond hair was up, slightly skewed, that struck me as a bit calculated. She had large, unblinking blue eyes and spoke in a low baritone. By the end of her talk, it struck me that she had essentially said nothing of substance about her product or her company. Instead, it was high-falutin’ claims that reminded me of the rhetoric Steve Jobs used when rolling out a new product, except that he had a real product he was demonstrating each time. I was immediately suspicious of Holmes and Theranos. I had seen too much over the years to take something like this at face value.
When I got home, I did a computer search and learned that Holmes had been on the cover of numerous business magazines as the first female tech billionaire. (My wife would always add: “on paper.”) In some photos she posed with a tiny vial of blood that was supposed to represent all that would be needed to do numerous tests with the company device.
Almost a month later, the first in a series of Wall Street Journal articles about Theranos, by the author of this book, was published. It reported that their technology did not work. (I was to learn later that the author interviewed 60 former Theranos employees for his research). My suspicions were confirmed. I eagerly read every new installment of the WSJ series.
But “Bad Blood” goes much deeper than those articles. It turns out that Channing Robertson was not the only older man over whom Holmes had a kind of hypnotic power, like the mythical Mata Hari. There was veteran venture capitalist, Donald L. Lucas, whose backing and connections enabled Holmes to keep raising money. Then Dr. J and Wade Miquelon at Walgreens and Safeway CEO Steve Burd, as well as General James Mattis (now Trump’s Secretary of Defense), George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger.
All of these men served as enablers, when they were in positions where they could have put a stop to the fraud. Most of these operations had experts who knew the science and tried to warn their superiors, but were ignored. And there’s no doubt that the medical miracles Theranos promised were very appealing to these older men, as well as to so many others who heard her spiel.
One of the most important older men was Sunny Balwani, her romantic partner 20 years her senior. He knew nothing about science, but was essentially her primary henchman for bullying dissenters in the company, heading up employee surveillance and doing the dirty work of firing people. He also subbed as CFO after the only one they had was fired for questioning company honesty. Balwani would pull numbers out of his butt and claim they were legitimate revenue projections.
Those who weren’t fooled were veteran venture capitalists who had been investing in the medical device space for years. During one of her pitches to these firms, she was asked so many questions she couldn’t answer that she stormed out of the conference room. In a one-on-one encounter with another successful venture capitalist he asked to see her device. Instead, she slapped her notebook shut and said: “if you can’t trust me, I can’t work with you” and slammed the door behind her as she departed.
In turns out that in spite of her time at Stanford, Holmes didn’t know much science. She described the process of her device as follows….
“A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.”
The selling point was no more needles, just a slight lance of a fingertip could provide enough blood to do countless tests. When the author queried Timothy Hamill, from the UCSF Department of Laboratory Science, he told him…
"….the pitfalls of using blood pricked from a finger. Unlike venous blood drawn from the arm, capillary blood was polluted by fluids from tissues and cells that interfered with tests and made measurements less accurate. “I’d be less surprised if they told us they were time travelers who came back from the twenty-seventh century than if they told us they cracked that nut,” he added.
The whole concept was flawed from the beginning. Holmes used non-company technology to try to cover this up. In a PowerPoint presentation she made to investors one slide showed scatter plots purporting to favorably compare test data from Theranos’s proprietary analyzers to data from conventional lab machines. But all the data came from non-Theranos technology. They often used other tech than company technology that could not to generate accurate results for patients. Theranos even resorted to using hypodermic needles, instead of the promised fingertip prick.
Meanwhile, Holmes continued to expand her Steve Jobs persona. She drank green kale shakes (Jobs was vegan), leased cars with no license plates (as he had), had several bodyguards who referred to her as Eagle1 (Eagle2 was Bulwani) and flew in a Gulfstream Jet. She referred to her device as the i-Pod of Health. And even hired the ad and pr firm that Apple once used, Chiat-Day, even though Theranos could not afford them. And looking back, it appeared that her dropping out of college was part of a script, just the way Jobs and Gates dropped out to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams,
When she went on the Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” show to denounce the WSJ, she sounded very Jobs-like when she said: “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then, all of a sudden, you change the world.“
Not surprisingly, Theranos kept missing their deadlines. Its contract with Safeway fell through, but Walgreen’s was more important to them. Several stores in Arizona went “live” with testing. Most tests done there were way off, resulting in unnecessary trips to the ER and potential over-treatment. Various doctors and patients published negative reviews on Yelp.
This put the company in the realm of reckless endangerment: “a crime consisting of acts that create a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person.”
This reality upset many employees who wanted no part of a fraud that would harm people.
At company meetings, Holmes would say: “If anyone here believes you are not working on the best thing humans have ever built, then you should leave.”
Many took her up on that, but it was never without controversy.
Meanwhile, bulldog Sunny was dispatched to Arizona to intimidate those who had posted negative Yelp reviews. And the company had hired super-lawyer David Boies to threaten suit against anyone who revealed insider info on the company. Just as one example, it cost the Schulz family $400k in legal fees to defend George’s nephew Tyler. Theranos knew Tyler had met with the author because they had a tail on both Tyler and the author.
When I finished the book I thought back on that awards ceremony I had attended where I first saw Holmes. I recalled Andy Grove, whose lifetime achievement award represented the original Silicon Valley of sweat equity. Grove lived through the Nazi occupation of his native country of Hungary and escaped after it became Communist. In New York, he worked as a busboy while he learned English and obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from City College of New York. Graduate work took him to the west coast, where he earned a Ph.D from U.C. Berkeley in chemical engineering. He would go on to help found chip maker, Intel, a company that truly changed the world.
These days, what I see in Silicon Valley is an increasing obsession with wealth and an absence of ethics, and the spread of the Steve Jobs Syndrome, like some kind of disease. Theranos epitomized all of this. The result is a lack of the honest work that Grove epitomized, in which wealth and notoriety were by-products not goals. The real goal was to do good work, first and foremost. And always tell the truth.
Michael Perkins is a founding editor of Red Herring Magazine and author of the bestseller, “The Internet Bubble” (HarperBusiness)
May 24, 2018
You couldn't make this up
from the new release "Bad Blood" about the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos scandal. The book is chocked full of these first-person stories.
Sunny is the hard-ass bully and romantic partner of Holmes, 20 years her senior.
"the revolving door at Theranos continued to swing at a furious pace. One of the more surreal incidents involved a burly software engineer named Del Barnwell. Big Del, as people called him, was a former Marine helicopter pilot. Sunny was on his case about not working long-enough hours. He’d gone as far as to review security footage to track Big Del’s comings and goings and confronted him in a meeting in his office, claiming the tapes showed he worked only eight hours a day. “I’m going to fix you,” Sunny told him, as if Del were a broken toy.
But Big Del didn’t want to be fixed. Shortly after the meeting, he emailed his resignation notice to Elizabeth’s assistant. He heard nothing back and dutifully worked the last two weeks of his notice period. Then, at four p.m. on a Friday, Big Del picked up his belongings and walked toward the building’s exit. Sunny and Elizabeth suddenly came running down the stairs behind him. He couldn’t leave without signing a nondisclosure agreement, they said. Big Del refused. He’d already signed a confidentiality agreement when he was hired and, besides, they’d had two weeks to schedule an exit interview with him. Now he was free to go as he pleased and he damn well intended to. As he pulled out of the parking lot in his yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser, Sunny sent a security guard after him to try to stop him. Big Del ignored the guard and drove off.
Sunny called the cops. Twenty minutes later, a police cruiser quietly pulled up to the building with its lights off. A highly agitated Sunny told the officer that an employee had quit and departed with company property. When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
Sunny is the hard-ass bully and romantic partner of Holmes, 20 years her senior.
"the revolving door at Theranos continued to swing at a furious pace. One of the more surreal incidents involved a burly software engineer named Del Barnwell. Big Del, as people called him, was a former Marine helicopter pilot. Sunny was on his case about not working long-enough hours. He’d gone as far as to review security footage to track Big Del’s comings and goings and confronted him in a meeting in his office, claiming the tapes showed he worked only eight hours a day. “I’m going to fix you,” Sunny told him, as if Del were a broken toy.
But Big Del didn’t want to be fixed. Shortly after the meeting, he emailed his resignation notice to Elizabeth’s assistant. He heard nothing back and dutifully worked the last two weeks of his notice period. Then, at four p.m. on a Friday, Big Del picked up his belongings and walked toward the building’s exit. Sunny and Elizabeth suddenly came running down the stairs behind him. He couldn’t leave without signing a nondisclosure agreement, they said. Big Del refused. He’d already signed a confidentiality agreement when he was hired and, besides, they’d had two weeks to schedule an exit interview with him. Now he was free to go as he pleased and he damn well intended to. As he pulled out of the parking lot in his yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser, Sunny sent a security guard after him to try to stop him. Big Del ignored the guard and drove off.
Sunny called the cops. Twenty minutes later, a police cruiser quietly pulled up to the building with its lights off. A highly agitated Sunny told the officer that an employee had quit and departed with company property. When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
May 16, 2018
Is America becoming more secular?
In 2010, Christianity Today magazine, THE evangelical publication in the U.S., ran a cover article titled “The Leavers: Young Doubters Leave the Church.” After writer, Drew Dyck, gave numerous examples of friends and others who had left the fold, he dug into the data. He learned that what he was witnessing was not merely anecdotal.
Dyck reports (the next three paragraphs)…
“Recent studies have brought the trend to light. Among the findings released in 2009 from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), one stood out. The percentage of Americans claiming “no religion” almost doubled in about two decades, climbing from 8.1 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. The trend wasn’t confined to one region. Those marking “no religion,” called the “Nones,” made up the only group to have grown in every state, from the secular Northeast to the conservative Bible Belt. The Nones were most numerous among the young: a whopping 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds claimed no religion, up from 11 percent in 1990. The study also found that 73 percent of Nones came from religious homes; 66 percent were described by the study as “de-converts.”
Other survey results have been grimmer. At the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, top political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell presented research from their book American Grace, released last month. They reported that “young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate (30 to 40 percent have no religion today, versus 5 to 10 percent a generation ago).
There has been a corresponding drop in church involvement. According to Rainer Research, approximately 70 percent of American youth drop out of church between the age of 18 and 22. The Barna Group estimates that 80 percent of those reared in the church will be "disengaged” by the time they are 29.”
The PEW report also shows a distinct generational difference, in terms of commitment and church attendance, where 57% of the “Greatest Generation” expresses a “strong religious affiliation,” the “Silent Generation,” 50%, Boomers 43%, but only 18% of Millennials have such commitment and ever attend church.
Once again, to underline a key finding, young adults today are dropping religion at a greater rate than young adults of yesteryear—"five to six times the historic rate,“ say Putnam and Campbell.
In other words, the churches are not capturing the younger generation, they are losing them. For example, for the Catholic Church in America, 85% of young people drop out within 7 years of being confirmed in high school.
For many dropouts, a big issue is the heavy blending of Christianity with politics, often in a contradictory way that results in hypocrisy. This often leads to unChristian behavior, such as racism and blaming the poor. Some Leavers find this highly offensive and want to have nothing to do with it. There’s also frustration with anti-science and generally anti-intellectual attitudes in some communions. For others, there’s no hostility, they simply see Christianity as irrelevant to leading a good life.
And this dropout trend is not confined to young people. Over the last 7 years, for example, there has been a consistent drop in participation of white Evangelicals in the American South, ranging from 5% to 11% in Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Kentucky.
After absorbing the facts of this trend, I found it had a familiar feel to it. So I did some research on a similar phenomenon in Victorian England where Evangelicalism had dominated the culture and politics for many decades. The foundation for this began with John Wesley, his brother Charles, the revivalist George Whitefield, and the Methodists in the 18th century. The baton was eventually handed to William Wilberforce, a member of the British Parliament and an evangelical social reformer, best known as one who championed the abolition of the slave trade, more humane child labor laws and concern for the poor. But after his death, Evangelicalism in England began to change; it became much more fundamentalist and reactionary.
This alienated many in the younger generation, those in their 20’s, at the mid-19th century, who had been raised in evangelical households. This included the writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who could articulate her generation’s frustration with the faith. Her doubts seemed to have begun early, in adolescence, and her view of her childhood, articulated years later, was not positive.
“My childhood was full of deep sorrows,” Eliot wrote, “colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.”
Eliot “came out” one Sunday in 1842 (her 23rd year) when she refused to accompany her father to church. Her pious parents threatened to disown her, but her siblings prevailed upon them to change their minds.
Eliot was a prodigious reader of philosophy, science, as well as European literature in five languages. Her knowledge of German enabled her to read and translate some German theological works that were far more critical of the historicity of the Bible than most British scholars or clerics would accept. (The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 would serve to reinforce Eliot’s thinking)
She was also influenced by another work, Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity, by Charles Hennell, which also challenged the historicity of the Bible.
The consequences of the English ignorance of German scholarship shows up in Eliot’s masterpiece novel, Middlemarch, that features an Oxford rector, The Reverend Edward Casaubon, who marries a much younger woman, the idealistic Dorothea. Casaubon has been laboring for years on a futile academic endeavor. Dorothea does not realize this, but soon learns how pedantic the research is and how reluctant her husband is to publish anything, even a journal essay based on his work.
Dorothea meets a man her age, Will Ladislaw, who falls in love with her. He tells Dorothea: “If Mr. Casaubon read German, he would save himself a great deal of trouble.”
The dialogue continues:
"I do not understand you,” said Dorothea, startled and anxious.
“I merely mean,” said Will, in an offhand way, “that the Germans have taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have made good roads. When I was with Mr. Casaubon I saw that he deafened himself in that direction: it was almost against his will that he read a Latin treatise written by a German.”
Generally, because of such willful ignorance, Eliot had no respect for Evangelical clergy, as expressed in an essay that describes them as…
“Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.” (Evangelical Teaching)
Today, psychologists call this an exercise in confirmation bias. Researchers begin with the conclusion they are looking for and only accept such “facts” that would seem to support such a conclusion.
By the end of the 19th century, the evangelical community in England had shrunk considerably and been marginalized. It had merged with the Non-Conformists (left-over Puritans). It was this merged group, by the way, that concocted the modern apocalyptic scheme, known in theological circles as Dispensationalism, which speaks of the Tribulation, the Lake of Fire, and the Rapture, as portrayed in the badly-written Left Behind novel series. (This is NOT what the Early Church subscribed to). Modernism was in full sway and the evangelicals had lost their influence in Victorian society, so the Second Coming of Christ was earnestly hoped for.
After mid-19th century, the conservative English church had largely lost the younger generation to atheism, agnosticism, and aestheticism, even as the older believers passed away. The Church never recovered. Today, only 3.7% of the English people are evangelical. And the Church of England membership is half of that.
The generational trends re: Christianity and the Millennials are different than it was for the Boomers. It was always posited that many Boomers would eventually return to the fold. And to a significant degree that proved true. But given the Millennials, the people at Christianity Today explains…
“The life-phase argument may no longer pertain. Young adulthood is not what it used to be. For one, it’s much longer. Marriage, career, children—the primary sociological forces that drive adults back to religious commitment—are now delayed until the late 20s, even into the 30s. Returning to the fold after a two- or three-year hiatus is one thing. Coming back after more than a decade is considerably more unlikely.”
2017 report:
https://www.prri.org/research/america...
PEW Report (cited by CT):
http://www.pewforum.org/2010/02/17/re...
Dyck reports (the next three paragraphs)…
“Recent studies have brought the trend to light. Among the findings released in 2009 from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), one stood out. The percentage of Americans claiming “no religion” almost doubled in about two decades, climbing from 8.1 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. The trend wasn’t confined to one region. Those marking “no religion,” called the “Nones,” made up the only group to have grown in every state, from the secular Northeast to the conservative Bible Belt. The Nones were most numerous among the young: a whopping 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds claimed no religion, up from 11 percent in 1990. The study also found that 73 percent of Nones came from religious homes; 66 percent were described by the study as “de-converts.”
Other survey results have been grimmer. At the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, top political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell presented research from their book American Grace, released last month. They reported that “young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate (30 to 40 percent have no religion today, versus 5 to 10 percent a generation ago).
There has been a corresponding drop in church involvement. According to Rainer Research, approximately 70 percent of American youth drop out of church between the age of 18 and 22. The Barna Group estimates that 80 percent of those reared in the church will be "disengaged” by the time they are 29.”
The PEW report also shows a distinct generational difference, in terms of commitment and church attendance, where 57% of the “Greatest Generation” expresses a “strong religious affiliation,” the “Silent Generation,” 50%, Boomers 43%, but only 18% of Millennials have such commitment and ever attend church.
Once again, to underline a key finding, young adults today are dropping religion at a greater rate than young adults of yesteryear—"five to six times the historic rate,“ say Putnam and Campbell.
In other words, the churches are not capturing the younger generation, they are losing them. For example, for the Catholic Church in America, 85% of young people drop out within 7 years of being confirmed in high school.
For many dropouts, a big issue is the heavy blending of Christianity with politics, often in a contradictory way that results in hypocrisy. This often leads to unChristian behavior, such as racism and blaming the poor. Some Leavers find this highly offensive and want to have nothing to do with it. There’s also frustration with anti-science and generally anti-intellectual attitudes in some communions. For others, there’s no hostility, they simply see Christianity as irrelevant to leading a good life.
And this dropout trend is not confined to young people. Over the last 7 years, for example, there has been a consistent drop in participation of white Evangelicals in the American South, ranging from 5% to 11% in Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Kentucky.
After absorbing the facts of this trend, I found it had a familiar feel to it. So I did some research on a similar phenomenon in Victorian England where Evangelicalism had dominated the culture and politics for many decades. The foundation for this began with John Wesley, his brother Charles, the revivalist George Whitefield, and the Methodists in the 18th century. The baton was eventually handed to William Wilberforce, a member of the British Parliament and an evangelical social reformer, best known as one who championed the abolition of the slave trade, more humane child labor laws and concern for the poor. But after his death, Evangelicalism in England began to change; it became much more fundamentalist and reactionary.
This alienated many in the younger generation, those in their 20’s, at the mid-19th century, who had been raised in evangelical households. This included the writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who could articulate her generation’s frustration with the faith. Her doubts seemed to have begun early, in adolescence, and her view of her childhood, articulated years later, was not positive.
“My childhood was full of deep sorrows,” Eliot wrote, “colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.”
Eliot “came out” one Sunday in 1842 (her 23rd year) when she refused to accompany her father to church. Her pious parents threatened to disown her, but her siblings prevailed upon them to change their minds.
Eliot was a prodigious reader of philosophy, science, as well as European literature in five languages. Her knowledge of German enabled her to read and translate some German theological works that were far more critical of the historicity of the Bible than most British scholars or clerics would accept. (The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 would serve to reinforce Eliot’s thinking)
She was also influenced by another work, Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity, by Charles Hennell, which also challenged the historicity of the Bible.
The consequences of the English ignorance of German scholarship shows up in Eliot’s masterpiece novel, Middlemarch, that features an Oxford rector, The Reverend Edward Casaubon, who marries a much younger woman, the idealistic Dorothea. Casaubon has been laboring for years on a futile academic endeavor. Dorothea does not realize this, but soon learns how pedantic the research is and how reluctant her husband is to publish anything, even a journal essay based on his work.
Dorothea meets a man her age, Will Ladislaw, who falls in love with her. He tells Dorothea: “If Mr. Casaubon read German, he would save himself a great deal of trouble.”
The dialogue continues:
"I do not understand you,” said Dorothea, startled and anxious.
“I merely mean,” said Will, in an offhand way, “that the Germans have taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have made good roads. When I was with Mr. Casaubon I saw that he deafened himself in that direction: it was almost against his will that he read a Latin treatise written by a German.”
Generally, because of such willful ignorance, Eliot had no respect for Evangelical clergy, as expressed in an essay that describes them as…
“Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.” (Evangelical Teaching)
Today, psychologists call this an exercise in confirmation bias. Researchers begin with the conclusion they are looking for and only accept such “facts” that would seem to support such a conclusion.
By the end of the 19th century, the evangelical community in England had shrunk considerably and been marginalized. It had merged with the Non-Conformists (left-over Puritans). It was this merged group, by the way, that concocted the modern apocalyptic scheme, known in theological circles as Dispensationalism, which speaks of the Tribulation, the Lake of Fire, and the Rapture, as portrayed in the badly-written Left Behind novel series. (This is NOT what the Early Church subscribed to). Modernism was in full sway and the evangelicals had lost their influence in Victorian society, so the Second Coming of Christ was earnestly hoped for.
After mid-19th century, the conservative English church had largely lost the younger generation to atheism, agnosticism, and aestheticism, even as the older believers passed away. The Church never recovered. Today, only 3.7% of the English people are evangelical. And the Church of England membership is half of that.
The generational trends re: Christianity and the Millennials are different than it was for the Boomers. It was always posited that many Boomers would eventually return to the fold. And to a significant degree that proved true. But given the Millennials, the people at Christianity Today explains…
“The life-phase argument may no longer pertain. Young adulthood is not what it used to be. For one, it’s much longer. Marriage, career, children—the primary sociological forces that drive adults back to religious commitment—are now delayed until the late 20s, even into the 30s. Returning to the fold after a two- or three-year hiatus is one thing. Coming back after more than a decade is considerably more unlikely.”
2017 report:
https://www.prri.org/research/america...
PEW Report (cited by CT):
http://www.pewforum.org/2010/02/17/re...
May 7, 2018
April 26, 2018
April 12, 2018
April 6, 2018
How to be heroic in the time of Trump
“Orwell was one of those upon whom nothing was lost. (This included, as Orwell himself said: “the power of facing unpleasant facts”). By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage..” (Christopher Hitchens)
the back story, which Orwell tells in his "Homage of Catalonia," is that he, a confirmed socialist, went to Spain to fight Franco and the fascists. But, unlike many deluded socialists in the West, he was willing to see that the Soviets present in Spain were actually fascistic in their own way, even as they sought to eliminate socialists there. This experience was to be the basis of Orwell's book Animal Farm. But his publisher in London refused to publish it because he still thought the Soviet Union was utopia. When it finally came out after WW II, two years after it could have been published, it sold 800k copies in England and went on to be an international bestseller.
I think down deep, most of us would like the truth instead of being lied to all the time by the media and political parties. We cannot allow ideology or party affiliation, of whatever stripe, to get in the way of searching out and finding the truth, no matter who it implicates.
the back story, which Orwell tells in his "Homage of Catalonia," is that he, a confirmed socialist, went to Spain to fight Franco and the fascists. But, unlike many deluded socialists in the West, he was willing to see that the Soviets present in Spain were actually fascistic in their own way, even as they sought to eliminate socialists there. This experience was to be the basis of Orwell's book Animal Farm. But his publisher in London refused to publish it because he still thought the Soviet Union was utopia. When it finally came out after WW II, two years after it could have been published, it sold 800k copies in England and went on to be an international bestseller.
I think down deep, most of us would like the truth instead of being lied to all the time by the media and political parties. We cannot allow ideology or party affiliation, of whatever stripe, to get in the way of searching out and finding the truth, no matter who it implicates.
March 15, 2018
The Man Who Stopped Clapping
The audience exploded into applause. Every person in the room jumped up and began to wildly clap, as if racing each other to see who could get to their feet the fastest. The applause was all to honor the dictator Joseph Stalin at a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.
But the big question soon became: Who would have the nerve to be the first person to stop clapping in honor of Comrade Stalin? No one had the courage, so the clapping went on…and on…and on.
You might be wondering why in the world anyone would be afraid to stop clapping for any leader. To understand this, you need to know Joseph Stalin.
Stalin was a ruthless dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952. Although no one knows the precise number of political prisoners he executed, estimates usually reach well over a million.
Historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev estimated that Stalin had about 1 million political prisoners executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38 alone. That doesn’t even count the 6 or 7 million who died in the famine that Stalin created through his policies, or the millions who had to do long, hard sentences in the Gulag labor camps.
So when people were afraid to stop clapping for Stalin, they had good reason.
Here is how the Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the surreal scene in his great book, The Gulag Archipelago:
“The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly…Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”
At last, after eleven minutes of non-stop clapping, the director of a paper factory finally decided enough was enough. He stopped clapping and sat down—a miracle!
“To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” Solzhenitsyn says.
That same night, the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years. Authorities came up with some official reason for his sentence, but during his interrogation, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”
But the big question soon became: Who would have the nerve to be the first person to stop clapping in honor of Comrade Stalin? No one had the courage, so the clapping went on…and on…and on.
You might be wondering why in the world anyone would be afraid to stop clapping for any leader. To understand this, you need to know Joseph Stalin.
Stalin was a ruthless dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952. Although no one knows the precise number of political prisoners he executed, estimates usually reach well over a million.
Historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev estimated that Stalin had about 1 million political prisoners executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38 alone. That doesn’t even count the 6 or 7 million who died in the famine that Stalin created through his policies, or the millions who had to do long, hard sentences in the Gulag labor camps.
So when people were afraid to stop clapping for Stalin, they had good reason.
Here is how the Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the surreal scene in his great book, The Gulag Archipelago:
“The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly…Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”
At last, after eleven minutes of non-stop clapping, the director of a paper factory finally decided enough was enough. He stopped clapping and sat down—a miracle!
“To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” Solzhenitsyn says.
That same night, the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years. Authorities came up with some official reason for his sentence, but during his interrogation, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”
