More tearing down by MAGA and the current administration.
- NY Times, 17 Jul 2026: How to Abandon Your Climate Commitments and Get Away With It
- Subtitled “Big business made big promises about saving the planet. Following through hasn’t been easy.”
- A follow-up article yesterday gives the earlier article’s original title: “Big Businesses Quietly Desert Climate Goals”
- Because big business doesn’t care about doing the right thing; it cares about making money (that is the essence of capitalism), and so thinks in the short-term, and cares about public relations only until they don’t have to.
- JMG, today: Trump Boasts Of Gutting Endangered Species Act
- Make the sixth extinction great again.
- LA Times, today: The Pentagon is waging a war on critical thinking
- Don’t think. Just obey.
- That’s so you can believe something like this.
- JMG, today: Trump: Blue Cities And States Are “Threat” To Nation
- Think this through, if you can, for just a moment: *half* of the nation that’s blue, including all the drivers of the economy in the big (almost all blue) cities, are a threat to the “nation”? What nation is that?
- Also, Trump’s claims that blue cities are “filthy, dirty, smelly, and violent” is flat-out untrue. He’s pandering to his ignorant base, who… don’t think.
- Not being able to think, or judge real-world evidence, leads again to Trump’s claims of conspiracies of vandals.
- The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, yesterday: Trump’s Irrationality Is Dangerous
- Subtitled: “The president’s recent rant is a sign of serious dysfunction in the Oval Office.”
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Stepping out. Conservatives don’t want to think, they want certainty. That’s why this is a problem for them.
Vox, Elizabeth Weingarten (a journalist and applied behavioral scientist), today: How to tolerate uncertainty in a world that’s full of it, subtitled “Not knowing what’s going to happen is the worst. It’s also really good for us.”
At first, it seems innocuous. You’re burned out at work, and an influencer video promising the five steps to find the career you’ve always wanted catches your eye on Instagram. Perhaps you’re also anxious about a big birthday approaching, so while commuting home, you listen to a podcast host explain the seven essential habits you should start today to extend your lifespan by 20 years. Later on, you ask AI assistant ChatGPT to help resolve a debate with your partner.
In all of these moments, you are temporarily relieving your stress and anxiety. You might even be getting some answers. But with each path you go down, you’re also losing something important: the opportunity to sit with, and tolerate, uncertainty.
Being able to keep it together when an outcome is unknown is critical to enjoying your life. It’s what helps us manage friction in relationships, allows us to make considered decisions as opposed to acting on impulse, and empowers us to eventually take big leaps. But we’re collectively losing our ability to bear uncertainty.
Because when you’re absolutely certain about something, I would say — and this includes religion — you’re almost certainly wrong.
At first, it seems innocuous. You’re burned out at work, and an influencer video promising the five steps to find the career you’ve always wanted catches your eye on Instagram. Perhaps you’re also anxious about a big birthday approaching, so while commuting home, you listen to a podcast host explain the seven essential habits you should start today to extend your lifespan by 20 years. Later on, you ask AI assistant ChatGPT to help resolve a debate with your partner.
In all of these moments, you are temporarily relieving your stress and anxiety. You might even be getting some answers. But with each path you go down, you’re also losing something important: the opportunity to sit with, and tolerate, uncertainty.
Being able to keep it together when an outcome is unknown is critical to enjoying your life. It’s what helps us manage friction in relationships, allows us to make considered decisions as opposed to acting on impulse, and empowers us to eventually take big leaps. But we’re collectively losing our ability to bear uncertainty.
Yes, and now AI gives us instant answers even better than Google did.
The article goes on with some advice. I’ll list the items:
- Identify the small opportunities. (E.g., go to a restaurant without looking at the online menu first… which I tend to do.)
- Find a simple phrase to bring you back to the present. (Be curious.)
- Learn to ask the right questions. (A crucial, key element of science and philosophy, as I’ve explored.) This breaks down into:
- Avoid yes or no questions in favor of something more expansive. (As I’ve said, the world is complex; don’t think in terms of black and white.)
- Make sure your question is your own. (Again, as I’ve said: Avoid conformity, or the wisdom of the crowds.)
- Find a question that propels you forward. (This is about counterfactual thinking, the great talent of science fiction.)
- Take the pressure off. (Be patient. In my own life, I’ve found that crises tend to diminish and disappear with time. We don’t need to solve every question right away.)
Concluding:
It’s easy to let anxiety about uncertainty stop us from pursuing new experiences — even seemingly small steps into the unknown can feel very scary. When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure. Instead of defining security as being protected from challenge, we can define it as being ready to face whatever the future holds.
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Let’s go back to this Ezra Klein piece about The Odyssey, that I noted on Sunday. The article appeared in the print paper today.
NY Times, opinion by Ezra Klein, today: Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse
The story changes because society has changed.
When Odysseus concocts the trick of the Trojan horse, taking advantage of Troy’s veneration of the same gods he worships to sack the city and make its streets run red with blood, is he a hero or a villain? Is it a trick or a crime? To Homer, he was a hero. To Nolan, he is a soul in need of redemption. Between Homer’s time and ours came a revolution in civilizational values, an upending of what civilization even means. Which side of that divide are we on?
Here we are back to the great divide, or spectrum, in human nature.
The modern right believes that Western civilization has lost the appetite for strength and dominance and hierarchy that built it.
Klein discusses a book about tricksters, in world mythology.
The function of the trickster, writes Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book “Trickster Makes This World,” is “to uncover and disrupt the very things that a culture depends on.” The trickster dances across customs and taboos, says what may not be said, does what should not be done. The trickster injects disorder into order, renders visible what is ordinarily hidden. The trickster causes the damage that makes growth possible. But a happy ending is never guaranteed. The trickster can be regenerative or ruinous. Coyote brings fire; Raven brings the sun; Loki brings Ragnarok.
Hyde’s argument is that tricksters are both necessary and dangerous. They represent a tension every society must grapple with. A culture that cannot meet disruption with creativity cannot survive change. A culture that cannot protect its core values will be consumed by corruption. Too much order leads to paralysis; too much chaos invites collapse.
Back to contemporary politics:
And what the political opposition has to do now is recognize what Nolan recognized: That it is an affirmation of our civilizational values to say that cruelty is a weakness. That only compassion and reciprocity build a durable and decent society. That order is necessary but order without ethics and restraint is perversion or authoritarianism. That there is both beauty and wisdom in the injunction to avoid inflicting on others what we would not see turned against us and in remembering that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, too.
Ending:
Nolan’s Odysseus is not a trickster. He is a man living in the ruins brought about by tricksters. So, too, are we. This movie, and the reaction to it, is a sign that the age of the trickster is ending.
Now we need those who would remake this world.
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One more. David Brin, inspired by this Norman Rockwell painting.
Contrary Brin, today: Why the salty-Earth folks hate us – and especially hate science. There’s even a (slightly) valid reason!
Familiar Brin themes. My initial take: “they” hate us because science undermines their religious stories, which bind tribes and communities together, in a way no scientific findings can do. Brin identifies something subtler going on. (Some of these comments by Brin appeared earlier on Facebook.) Long post; I’ll excerpt.
Ever wonder why we experience relentless resentment by rural, salt-of-the-Earth folks toward city slickers, calling them – or folks who get too educated – ‘not real’? Or decadent or corrupt or impractically airhead?
Come on, we’ve heard it all our lives. We aren’t supposed to respond. Just grin wryly and accept it. Yep, New Yorkers talk fast and don’t have time to waste on pleasantries. That must mean they’re evil.
Okay, I’ve long offered a reason.
First, none of it is true. Rates of every turpitude average worse in most of Red America (except Utah), from gambling, addiction. STDs, domestic violence & divorce to murder to tax parasitism and convictions for graft and perversions.
–A point made repeatedly by Brin.
In fact, by all reasonable metrics, blue/urban America has been pretty damn nice to our salt-of-the-Earth neighbors! From FDR to LBJ all the way to Clinton/Obama, Blue America has poured many tens of billions into dams, roads, clinics, schools, power lines, internet and all the rest. In Appalachia alone, this transformed hillbilly hells into truly pleasant places. And gratitude was never the goal.
So why the bitterness?
It’s encapsulated in that long ago painting by the great Norman Rockwell, showing a worn-down farmer seeing his eager son off to college. A kid who spent his young life working hard to help Pa… but also studying for what they both hope will be a better life. One in which he may never come home again except for Christmas visits and showing his own kids the Family Farm.
And it’s good. The farmer knows it’s good! And yet…
…and yet it hurts. Dig it: every small town in America revolves around the high school, where each crop of seniors is the town treasure everyone talks about. The sport heroes, the cheer squad, heck even the science fair nerds! ‘Our pride and joy.’ And each summer they weep and hug…
…and then skedaddle as quick as they can to the bright lights. And that has got to hurt! Like an implied rebuke. A wound. Every year. Every damned year.
In short, conservatives are sore that their best kids leave.
The post has an addendum about the “Fauci Fables” — all the misrepresentations the right has expressed. With a graph I’ve seen several places today. And ending:
PS. Look at the chart again and ponder: does ANYONE have any memory? Like how at the beginning of the pandemic redders crowed gleefully about the covid death rates in CA & NY as proving that blue, city folk were ‘filthy’? Like any natural disaster in a blue state was “God’s wrath!” but anything hitting red zones is all “Help us now!”
And we always do.
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Today’s installment of music from The Thin Red Line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ_hrvXToLU&list=RDwZ_hrvXToLU&start_radio=1
