"There’s a lot that we don’t know about our parents, and sometimes the not-knowing is more comfortable. It allows us to see the best in them."

Francesca Fontana writes in the Wall Street Journal,

...There’s a lot that we don’t know about our parents, and sometimes the not-knowing is more comfortable. It allows us to see the best in them.

...I wanted to believe my dad would tell me the truth after a lifetime of deception and distance. Instead, I had to face the reality that he probably never would.

...Despite knowing that I knew what really happened, he couldn’t give up the fantasies he had created. He needed the lies. It made me feel sorry for him, so I just let him talk. We all go through childhood wondering who our parents are when they’re not Mom or Dad. That’s why some of us eavesdrop, sneak into closets and rummage through dresser drawers in secret. As adults, we have to decide how much to dig and how much to let lie.

Months later, as I was finishing this story, I told my dad that I didn’t believe him. I laid out what he had told me, and how it differed from what my reporting showed. I told him I thought he was lying. I asked what he thought about that, and he shrugged.

“People believe what they believe,” he said. “You believe one thing, I believe something else.”

Mr. Fontana served 44 months in prison for his part in a group of people who impersonated police officers and stole money from drug dealers in Chicago. Read more here.

A novel idea: teaching students to question and to think

Bradley Birzer is the 2014-2015 visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at The University of Colorado. He writes in Centennial Review,

Look at the last hundred years. According to recent scholarship, when you count up everybody who was killed in the gulags, the Holocaust, the killing fields, something like 205 million people were executed by their own governments. The U.S. population right now is about 315 million. Imagine if two of every three people you know were gone. That’s the death rate of the 20th century.

In a century when warfare took 50 million lives, governments killed four times that many. The state did that. So these questions of left and right are not merely academic questions. They are literally questions of life and death. These matter.

...What are the virtues anyway? On opening day at Hillsdale, I ask my students to tell me the seven virtues. Someone will say happiness. I tell them no, happiness may be a goal in your life, but it’s not a virtue. Then one of the students from a religious background will say faith, hope, and love. Good, those are the highest ones. But remember that before those emerged in Christianity, the pagans had already identified prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.

...The worst thing I could do as a professor, right, left, or center, would be to expect my students to be little clones of Brad Birzer at the end of the semester. That would be diabolic. Those of us who go into the classroom have this responsibility never to try and conform those who trust us. Never. We teach them what we believe to be true, but the most important thing is teaching them to question and to think

Birzer has found that his students

are tired of platitudes. They want to search for something deeper. They long to hear stories of greatness. No matter how cynical this generation of college students may seem, at the core they want truth.

Read more here.

Personal ambition, bad science, politics, and bias

As I finish off my delicious meal featuring pollock, peas, carrots, wheat berries, red and yellow peppers, tomatoes, mango, avocado, orzo pasta, and rosemary glazed salmon, Mona Charen writes:

Throughout my adult life, I have conscientiously followed the guidelines dispensed by the health arbiters of our age. Trusting utterly in the scientific research of the American Heart Association, the CDC, and the USDA, I accepted the nearly universal wisdom of the medical and nutritional experts.

Boy, did I accept. I practically banned red meat from my diet for decades. Butter? Only on special occasions. Cream? Do they still make it? Lean chicken, turkey, and fish combined with complex carbohydrates and of course, lots of fruits and vegetables, were the ticket, I was certain, to the best odds of avoiding heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. When the Atkins diet craze swept the country I shook my head sadly, half expecting my friends who indulged in it to keel over from heart attacks.

Now, the Annals of Internal Medicine declares that beef, butter, and cream do not cause heart disease. Women whose total cholesterol levels are high live longer than those with lower levels.

How could the experts have been so wrong for so long?

Nina Teicholz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, notes that “there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics, and bias.”

The moral of this story is not to ignore science, but to stay skeptical. The scientific method remains the best way yet devised to ascertain truth. But the scientific establishment is hardly immune to politics, fads, bias, and self-interest. Bad science is endemic. As The Economist noted in October, “half of all published research cannot be replicated . . . and that may be optimistic.”

Our experience with nutrition science over the past half-century should arm us with doubt about climate science too. The point is not to ignore scientific data but to treat all studies, models, and predictions with a degree of skepticism. Don’t accept the argument from authority: That the entire medical establishment endorsed the war on saturated fat did not make it true.

Read more here.