Republican policies have failed the nation — Thom Hartmann explains how. Republican positions have been wrong, wrong, wrong — David Brin explains why. Or have they? The rich are getting richer, and the fundamentalists are getting their way. Perhaps it’s just that Republicans are playing a different game, and are being disingenuous about it. More about this at the end.
The terrorists of 9/11 won by not destroying the country, but by instilling a paranoia in American society that entails those excruciating TSA lines to board airplanes that involve taking off shoes and belts. By millions of us, every day. That has gradually eroded civil trust in the 20 years since, and arguably has contributed to the political divide in this country. Now the gun nuts — er, second amendment absolutists — are doing the same, by undermining the confidence ordinary Americans have to participate in ordinary, traditional civic events. It’s only going to get worse.
Today, links about the threats, to American democracy and the survival of the planet, from conservatives, especially the religious ones.
NYT, Paul Krugman, 4 July 2022: Another Step Toward Climate Apocalypse
It’s always struck me that America (that is, the US) stands defiantly independent against the rest of the world, secure in its self-righteousness and uncaring or even contemptuous of what other countries think about it. After all, they’re not the US, and the US is the best. Just ask most USians.
My favorite print magazine (as I’ve said) is The Week, a sort of Reader’s Digest of other magazines, consolidating news on a wide variety of topics, and including opinions from a variety of perspectives. Continue reading
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” — variations by Bertrand Russell, William Butler Yeats, and others.
I’ve spent my blogging time this afternoon refining yesterday’s post about Michio Kaku’s book THE GOD EQUATION. I’m not sure reducing 20 bullets about each chapter to 10 bullets will make much difference, in terms of my goal to pass along knowledge I’ve gained to anyone reading this blog. But that’s what I did today, and I’m always thinking toward the big picture, that my accumulation of blog essays and summaries of significant books will add up to something, in the long run.
About this book — I remain a bit queasy about the author’s consideration of a “grand planner,” as if one were needed to explain the mathematical consistency of the universe, which he is agnostic about only because it can’t be proved. I am much more inclined to be persuaded — about the “reason” for the existence of our universe — by the idea that only one set of physical constants and mathematical principles is consistent. That somehow, our universe exists because nothing else can exist. And that, if were we far more intelligent, this would be obvious.
At the same time, I suspect these big issues are simply incomprehensible to primates like us, wandering around on the surface of an average planet, forever blinkered by the limitations of our senses, and our capacity to understand abstract concepts. Just think how tiny a proportion of the human population is able to understand the physics so far identified. We are like dogs thinking we might be able to understand arithmetic, and oblivious to concepts like geometry and calculus.
Here’s a book I thought suspect on two or three counts, but which turned out to be quite worthwhile. It’s a succinct, crisp history of physics, from the Greeks to the present, and ending with, though not dwelling too much on, string theory. Along the way we meet all the famous physicists we’ve heard about, matched up to their key discoveries, and in turned matched up to how those discoveries changed human history and have played out in the modern world.
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Jerry Coyne, 29 Jun 2022: Once again: A misguided article on why the theory of evolution is obsolete
This discusses an article in the UK newspaper Guardian, Do we need a new theory of evolution?, by Stephen Buranyi, which uses the image linked above.
Of course journalist Buranyi’s answer implies “yes” and evolutionary biologist Coyne’s is a definite “no.”
The New Yorker, Anna Wiener, 27 Jun 2022: The Weird, Analog Delights of Foley Sound Effects
Subtitled: “E.T. was jello in a T-shirt. The Mummy was scratchy potpourri. For Foley artists, deception is an essential part of the enterprise.”
