- Essay on how the future of independence is interdependence;
- Short items about JD Vance’s sense of spiritual darkness, and his apparent welcoming of the “end times”; a new Navy Secretary who believes in witchcraft; asking why psychics don’t help in the Nancy Guthrie case; conspiracy theories about MAGA censoring and voter fraud; Vance again and “blood and soil”; and various ideas about who “elites” are.
We wouldn’t be the species we are — one with the particular spectrum of evolved human nature that we have — without having learned to overcome our primal instincts (most of us anyway) to learn to cooperate among large groups.
OnlySky, Angie Dixon, 31 Aug 2026: The future of independence is interdependence, subtitled “Every one of us depends on others; the only difference is how visible that dependence is.”
The writer is disabled in some way and depends on her family and various mobility tools for assistance.
It would be easy to look at this arrangement and see dependence. But I look at it and see a functioning life.
From this room, I write articles, attend appointments, talk to friends, manage projects, edit essays, and take classes in graduate school. The assistance and technology surrounding me do not prevent independence. They make my version of it possible.
This only sounds contradictory because our culture has adopted a bizarre definition of independence: doing everything yourself, without visible assistance.
By that standard, almost no one is independent.
She goes on about “the myth of the self-sufficient person”:
Yet the supposedly self-sufficient person wakes in a home built by other people, turns on electricity delivered through a vast public infrastructure, drinks water transported through municipal pipes, eats food grown and shipped by strangers, and drives on roads they did not construct.
They rely on mechanics, doctors, pharmacists, sanitation workers, software developers, farmers, warehouse employees, electricians, and thousands of people they will never meet.
Increasingly, they also rely on algorithms. Phones provide directions. Calendar alerts remember appointments. Search engines retrieve information. Apps deliver food, transfer money, refill prescriptions, and summon transportation.
And about “socially acceptable dependence,” “assistance versus agency,” how “The future can’t afford the fantasy” and how “technology is also interdependence.”
Her essay ends:
The independent individual has always been imaginary, and disabled people already know this. Independence does not mean needing no one. It means having enough support to direct your own life.
The future of independence is not isolation.
It is interdependence, designed deliberately, rather than denied.
So her theme here is about disabled people, and the increasing portion of the population that is getting older. But the larger idea of interdependence has driven human society for decades, centuries. It’s what Obama meant years ago when he said You didn’t build that (which conservatives, of course, took out of context to criticize him).
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Briefly.
- JMG, from Christian Post, yesterday: Vance: I Can Sense Spiritual Darkness In World Leaders
- He lives in a demon-haunted world, to quote Sagan. From him, I sense spiritual nonsense.
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- And again.
- JMG, from People, today: Vance: I’m Happy If My Work Hastens The “End Times”
- This is why some people describe Christianity as a death cult. They’re always looking forward the end of the world. He shouldn’t be anywhere near the government of a species trying to overcome religions like his.
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- Why is the Trump administration so full of people like Vance and this guy?
- JMG, today: Trump Taps Witchcraft Opponent As Navy Secretary
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- Serious question for all the believers in psychic powers.
- CFI The Morning Heresy, today: “Put Up or Shut Up” – Conspicuous Psychic Silence, Rampant Scams, and Which Kids Count at CDC?
- Here I’ll have to quote.
Monday marked seven months since much-publicized disappearance of Nancy Guthrie. The Center for Inquiry Investigations Group (CFIIG) revealed it has reached out to nearly 30 noted psychics from all over the country to ask why they can’t—or won’t—use their alleged powers to solve the high-profile case.
- Well, because they don’t actually have such powers and “are just fooling people for profit.” This is obvious.
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- The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, today: The MAGA Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored, subtitled “The conspiracy theory that persists even though no evidence supports it”
- Well, but isn’t a conspiracy theory virtually by definition a fantasy that has no evidence to support it? If there were evidence, there are plenty of eager journalists (and scientists) who would be ready to jump on it.
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- NY Times, today: Trump Administration Begins Blitz to Find Elusive Voter Fraud Ahead of Midterms
- Subtitled: “Election fraud is exceedingly rare, but President Trump has fixated on rooting it out this year, claiming without evidence that tens of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote.”
- Again, a conspiracy theory without evidence. But conservatives don’t do evidence; they do scare tactics, to cow voters. And Trump is doing everything he possibly can to discourage voters whom he thinks won’t vote for him.
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- Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 30 Aug 2026: Nine years after Charlottesville, GOP pushes “blood and soil”, subtitled “The nativist doctrine lives on in JD Vance’s vision for the US”
- This primal aspect of human nature will never go away. Smart people have tried to marshal it via ideals in documents like the Constitution. They only work for a while.
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- Washington Post, Megan McArdle, 30 Aug 2026: Who are the elites? Everyone, depending who you ask., subtitled “Theories about who really runs America don’t seem to make sense.”
- This is essentially the split between the common (conservative) person and the uncommon (progressive) person. All these disputes seem to align roughly along the same spectrum.
