Anecdotes & Encounters

[Mettelus]

@Hypatia

I have never seen why Creationism conflicts with science. One could simply say: God created the world, and this is HOW He did it.

Books and video games are examples of worlds being created just like this. It doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that a God would do the same.

A person can propose that we live in a simulation and not take any heat from the evolutionist. These same evolutionists blow their top about people believing in a God.

Edit:

@Enon

Even wilder, why are some of the most dogmatic pseudo-skeptic Darwinists also the most likely to entertain the simulation hypothesis, which, if true, would falsify their scientistic arguments and beliefs?

I think virtue signal behavior is the explanation. For most everything there are rational people and there are those that are the equivalent of a person that virtue signals. This psychological behavior has nothing to do with what you know or don’t know. It has nothing to do with what you believe or don’t believe. The main goal of a person that virtue signals is acceptance and attention. Hey people look at me, I am the most devout Christian or I am the most anti-racist or I am the biggest Cowboys fan. Since it is good in the intellectual world to ridicule religion, these people will try their best to lead that charge. The same isn’t true of the simulation hypothesis so there are no points to be gained. Their goal isn’t to teach, learn or defend their hypothesis. They are simply “holier than thou”. The legit expert will take questions or criticism and calmly reply or take the opportunity to learn or study. The fraud will not allow the question either by ridicule or censorship. It isn’t even that they can not explain something. There are more points given (in their mind) for ridicule.

[Citizen_bitcoin]

Christianity: no limits on ridicule

Judaism: fine to ridicule so long as you support Israel

Islam: ridicule is a sign of intolerance and xenophobia!

[drlorentz]

I’m amused to find, upon my return after a few days’ absence, that an rather bland thread about people one has met has — dare I say it — evolved into a full-blown religious war. And by religion, I mean a conflict among the adherents to various forms of the Biblical narrative, as well as the numerous neo-, retro-, or classic Darwinisms — some of which are only represented in absentia, and poorly at that.

If there is any better illustration of how everything has become political, I can’t think of one. Returning to the subject of my comment that kicked off this turn of events, Steve Weinberg never hinted at his somewhat negative attitude about religion in the time I knew him. He was a kind, considerate person who cared about his students and didn’t go out of his way to rustle anyone’s jimmies. But somehow, from the grave, he has been able to do just that. It’s obviously more of a commentary on the current moment than it is on Prof. Weinberg.

[Enon]

Back to anecdotes.

This picture of my dad, David F. Harris, MD, was taken in Egypt on a Nile cruise in 2006 with Morgan (my sister), Helen (my mom), and Harriet (my grandmother). His mother, Harriet Miller Harris, then in her 90s, had long wanted to visit Egypt.

Grandmother Harris had long been a member of the ARE (Association for Research and Enlightenment, A.R.E., founded by psychic Edgar Cayce), a benignly nutty group with an interest in the mysteries of ancient Egypt, advocating some wild theories. (The powerful and controversial, some would say egomaniacal, Dr. Zahi Hawass of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities has had a long association with the ARE. )

So that’s really just to explain why he’s wearing a badly-tied headscarf. He grew up in Doylestown, near Philadelphia, got an honors degree in physics from Dartmouth ('66), then an MD from Cornell (NYC, '70) where he also worked at nearby Rockefeller University and he met my mother in the 15th St. NYC Quaker Meeting (they married in 1970 at the Matinecock (Locust Valley, Long Island) Meeting), interned in Chicago (Passavant, now Northwestern Memorial Hospital), allowed himself to be drafted into the Army as a class"1.A.O." conscientious objector (would treat soldiers, but not fight), spent his 2-year internship at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed doing independent research in antiseptics, completing his service in 1972 with the rank of Major. I was born at Walter Reed in 1972.

We lived in College Park with his sisters Beth (Harriet Elizabeth (Harris) Lulie) and Renee (Maureen (Harris) Norman) and their husbands Ed Lulie, and Andrew G.W. Norman, all of whom were in law school. Our next door neighbor and long-time family friend was Peter Modley, later head of MASINT at the State Department. My babysitter was often Carol Bruch (then Bruch Meyers) who was clerking for Justice Douglas at the time, the first mom to be a Supreme Court clerk.

So many anecdotes to choose from …
The one I set out to tell was about dad’s piercing gaze. He always looked like that, but some people found it intimidating, especially with him being 6’3". Dad was board-certified in clinical and anatomic pathology, but he also did at least a thousand forensic autopsies, mostly in central Kansas (where he was coroner for more than half the state in '79-'80) and Odessa, Texas ('80-'82). This included hundreds of homicide investigations, of course, and sometimes he’d have to testify in murder cases, which usually meant sitting in the courtroom through hours of trial. On more than one occasion, judges thought that dad merely looking at the defendant would prejudice the jury and expelled him from the court until called to testify.

Of course he also had to autopsy many drownings, decayed bodies and mummified remains which were often hard to identify. One technique was to take fingerprints off the inside of the skin, which requires cutting off the hand, pulling off the skin like a glove and turning it inside out, leaving a rather nasty-looking flayed hand. Now, these ugly bits weren’t thrown out, but kept in a big freezer, labeled, but the freezer filled up, some specimens got pushed off the rack and fell behind everything, then became embedded in accumulating ice deposits. At some point the ice got too thick and the janitor (yes, he was Black) was called upon to defrost the freezer. “AAAAA! AAAA! YOU PEOPLE ARE CRAZY!! I AIN’T NEVER COMIN’ BACK HERE NO MORE!”

One thing I can say about dad is that he always saved the best stories for after dinner. And he never brought work home.

The same wasn’t always true of my mother’s father, Enoch Dwight Staats, MD, of Ripley West Viginia. He started practice in the 1920s and was an old-fashioned general practitioner who handled every specialty himself by necessity. He did his own lab tests, made some of his own drugs, sometimes did major surgery on kitchen tables out in places inaccessible to cars for people who couldn’t afford five dollars a day for a hospital. If you couldn’t make it up the stairs to his office, you got a house call. If an autopsy was wanted, he’d generally do it at the funeral parlor. But once or twice, that wasn’t an option.

Which is how my kindergarten-age mom came to walk in on him dissecting a dead guy in the front hallway of their house. It didn’t bother her, particularly, she said: “it’s remarkable how the most boring-looking people have the most colorful insides”.

[Gavin]

@drlorentz

Steve Weinberg … was a kind, considerate person who cared about his students and didn’t go out of his way to rustle anyone’s jimmies.

That is wonderful! You are very fortunate to have known Weinberg.

For those of us who never met him, we can judge only by what he wrote. Perhaps he made an unfortunate choice of words in that article, but his text certainly created the impression of someone who was arrogant in his sense of certainty and dismissive of any beliefs different from his own. However, none of us are perfect.

[drlorentz]

Those are some remarkable and enjoyable anecdotes. The picture alone is worth the price of admission, so to speak. Piercing gaze? Yeah, I’d say so. Brings to mind the film Lawrence of Arabia.

[drlorentz]

@Gavin

For those of us who never met him, we can judge only by what he wrote.

Fair enough, yet this judgement is being made on a couple of decontextualized sentences of a thousand-word speech, which itself constitutes a minute fraction of Weinberg’s writings. The topic of the speech was, as the green box in the PDF helpfully explains, “advice to students at the start of their scientific careers.” The title of the piece is Four golden lessons, not I hate all religious people and everything they believe.

We have come to this pretty pass within my lifetime and it saddens me. I just finished reading Lionel Shriver’s latest book, Mania, which touches on this topic, albeit tangentially. More about Shriver’s work on another thread.

[Enon]

I vaguely remember Dad’s remarkable resemblance to Maj. Gen. Lansdale being discussed when he was in the Army, but that may be a false memory.

Free-associating a bit, two of the spookiest spooks that ever overthrew a government to keep the heroin flowing, Gen. Lansdale and his subordinate Lucien Conein (who looks just a bit like my mom in this picture),
attended the funeral of John Paul Vann
who was pretty much running the Vietnam War when he was killed in a helicopter crash. Vann’s story is told in Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, which won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize and kicked off Brian Lamb’s Booknotes series on C-SPAN.

When my parents moved from College Park, Maryland, to Charleston, West Virginia, our neighbor was one of Vann’s chief lieutenants,

Richard Neely, who had been in charge of the economy of a quarter of South Vietnam. After graduating Dartmouth a couple years before my dad, he graduated from Yale Law in 1967, spent two years in Vietnam, returned to West Virginia, was elected to the state legislature in 1970, then to the West Virginia Supreme Court in 1973, shortly before we met him. He took office at age 31, the youngest judge of a court of final appeals in the English-speaking world in the 20th century. (This was no doubt aided by the name recognition of his grandfather, who had been variously congressman, senator (in both seats), governor, then senator again from 1913-1958.)

I first visited his lavish office in the state capitol building when I was not yet three years old. I was most impressed by his motorized shoe buffer, though, which was something like this:

It would go when you pushed the button! I did stop when my parents told me to, though.

Most of Richard Neely’s good anecdotes are on his Wikipedia page or in his several fine books. This 1993 LA Times / AP article is probably the best collection: “‘Dumbest, Laziest Judge’ Claims Title : West Virginia: Outrageous pronouncements and behavior of state Supreme Court justice wins him a multitude of critics and admirers.” A sample:

Neely, seeking a clerk, once placed this ad in the Virginia Law Weekly:

• “West Virginia’s infamous once and future Chief Justice Richard Neely, America’s laziest and dumbest judge, seeks a bright person to keep him from looking stupid. Preference will be given to U. Va. law students who studied interesting but useless subjects at snobby schools. If you are dead drunk and miss the interviews, send letters.”

• In 1986, he sued TWA for $38,000 after his baggage arrived 70 minutes late at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. He sought $3,000 from the airline as a speaker’s fee because he informed fellow passengers about the delay. He said he settled out of court for $12,500.

• In 1989, he told the American Legion youth leadership conference that police cannot prevent crime. He said, “It’s time for citizens like you and me to go home and get our baseball bats” to attack drug dealers.

• In 1990, Neely told the American Legion boys that society would be better off if women stayed home with their children. He said drinking, womanizing and fighting in wars are all right until men have a family.
  [ . . . .]
  “He’s obviously extremely intelligent,” said Peter Huber, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative New York City think tank. “He’s got a sharp mind. And he’s not the least bit afraid of stating his views. Critics would say he’s injudicious. I don’t find him injudicious. I find him refreshing.”

I was his and his lovely wife Carolyn’s house-guest on a couple of occasions. The greatest honor I ever received was his offer in 1996, after he left the bench, to take me on as a law partner, contingent on me graduating from a top-tier law school. He only ever had two partners in his firm, and those were at different times.

[Enon]

The scariest man I know well, my uncle Andrew:

His father was a colonel in British intelligence in Hong Kong. His mother looked quite like Queen Elizabeth II (but prettier), which she played up. They sent Andrew off to an English boarding school by ship when he was seven, where he learned how to get away with all sorts of mischief. Not tall, and skinny at the time, I have heard that he was a runner-up for the Olympic gymnastic team. He was then a paratrooper in N. Ireland during the Troubles, a stockbroker in London in the rolled-umbrella-and-bowler-hat era, then moved to the US about 1970, where he was a founder of the short-lived Harris family motorcycle club, with half-a-dozen members. (I remember him giving me a ride for all of about 15 feet when I was about two, before I decided that sitting in back was not fun.) He still collects motorcycles. He has earned military paratrooper jump wings in about 14 different countries, some of which no longer exist, such as East Germany. (There’s some sort of exchange program that lets ex-paratroopers do it in a few days.)

He worked as a Porsche mechanic to put himself through college. They all wore white lab coats. His English accent made him nearly the ideal front man to deal with the sort of men who drove Porsches in the '70s (German would have been more authentic, but an upper-class English accent is best for delivering shockingly large repair bills to American snobs).

He married my aunt Maureen (Renie) around 1974. They went to law school together, but she went into banking, while he became a prosecutor. Renie was a beautiful blonde (at least once her acne scars were sanded off in her teens). Coming into beauty late may have helped her personality (though I find beautiful women tend to have nice personalities, former middle-school “queen bees” are often mean to other women their whole lives), certainly it didn’t hurt, she is the most sociable of the Harrises.

Since this is an anecdote thread, this is a good spot to tell about one of Andrew’s first visits to the big old Maryland farmhouse that has been the center of the Harris clan since 1970. Newly arrived in America, he was unfamiliar with fireflies, which were in great abundance there at that time. When he asked what they were, the whole family spontaneously pretended not to be able to see them. At length. With completely straight faces, incredulity and solicitations for his eyesight and mental health. I doubt they would have kept it up so long for anyone else, but Andrew was an inveterate prankster himself.

Few of his pranks of his earlier years would make good stories, and most of the good stories he tells are suitable for a wider audience. I think he needed an outlet for his aggressions, I can’t recall any pranks after he became a federal prosecutor, at least, any except legal ones he played on defendants, who often deserved it. It’s likely genetic, he’s one of those Normans, the family coat of arms, which he now holds undifferenced, features a turbaned Saracen’s head on a pike, with blood running down the shaft. He is always armed, or at least always has been when I have been around him. His carry pistols and car long guns are seldom seen, most of his many, many guns are never seen. (Even when I lived with him and Renie for several months when I was 20, I only ever saw his usual CZ-70 on a handful of occasions.) For over a decade, until at least late 2001, he had an Air Marshal’s carry license to carry on aircraft, as well as other permits that let him carry in most Federal buildings, except perhaps the White House and a few other places. He has won a few police pistol competitions. The family “joke” is that if he wanted you dead he’d be having lunch with a federal judge at the time you got killed. He himself says that if he wanted to kill someone he’d do it in broad daylight in DC; the DC cops never solve anything.

As far as I know for sure, he hasn’t directly killed anybody. He did set up the Major Crimes Court in Tikrit, Iraq, which hanged a number of members of the Baath party, though. Other stories are less certain. Come to think of it, most of what I’ve heard doesn’t bear repeating. But make no mistake, he’s a very scary guy.

[Hypatia]

@Enon , these sketches cum photos are vivid and memorable. W O W! Your family members are lucky to have such an adept chronicler. You’re like Princess Irulan in Dune!

[Enon]

Here’s another of my ancestors, Jonathan Van Rensselaer Lasher, c.1870. His beautiful house in what was then western Virginia was constructed with “priest holes” for hiding runaway slaves taking the most direct Underground Railroad route to Ohio.
I recognize his look in the mirror.