The weird news story of the day is something Trump said yesterday at a press conference in Florida.
Here’s the first place I saw it:
Salon, Nandika Chatterjee, 9 Aug 2024: “I call complete B.S.”: Trump made up a story about nearly dying in a helicopter crash, subtitled “The former president falsely claimed he almost died in a helicopter crash with Kamala Harris’ ex-boyfriend”
More summary of this Brian Greene book. Earlier: post 1, post 2, post 3. In these chapters Greene summarizes how imagination, extrapolating from dreams and the perception of patterns, led to the formalization of myths into religions, which may have value without being actually true. And speculation into the value of the arts, how they too are ways to think symbolically, or moments of truth beyond rational explanation. At best, bids for vicarious immortality.
Ch7, Brains and Belief: From Imagination to the Sacred, p188
When I was growing up, “weird” wasn’t such the calumny as was the word “weirdo.” A couple of my friends on Facebook have taken the accusation of being “weird” as a badge of honor.
Slate, Madeline Zehnder, 7 Aug 2024: Bibles for Everyone, subtitled “Why Oklahoma’s plan to put a copy of the Good Book in every classroom matters.”
Why are they so obsessed by this? Continue reading
More summary of this Brian Greene book. Earlier: post 1, post 2. Today’s chapters concern how life gave rise to consciousness, and how mind gave rise to the imagination, and to stories.
Ch5, Particles and Consciousness: From Life to Mind, p115
Now people on the right are accusing Kamala Harris of being anti-Semitic because she *didn’t* pick Josh Shapiro.
New Republic, 7 Aug 2024: J.D. Vance Crashes and Burns Trying to Defend His Kamala Conspiracy, subtitled “When asked to explain how Kamala Harris is antisemitic, Vance couldn’t.”
On Wednesday, today, Vance denied having said it.
More summary of this Brian Greene book. Earlier: post 1.
3, Origins and Entropy: From Creation to Structure, p44
If the universe began with a big explosion, how has so much order, with complex structures, emerged? Because, consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, pockets of order can exist among wider disorder.
NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, Opinion, 5 Aug 2024: JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing That Progressives Are Subhuman
The book is Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, and ostensibly, as the title indicates, it’s about communist revolutions.
Sometimes the antics of the tribalists are on the front page of the New York Times, two days in a row. Though that shouldn’t be surprising, given that they’re half the population. Today’s topics:
NY Times, Adam Nagourney, 2 Aug 2024: Not One of Us: Trump Uses Old Tactic to Sow Suspicion About Harris, subtitled “Politicians have long cast their opponents as outsiders. But Donald J. Trump has taken the strategy to the next level against Kamala Harris.”
The print title was “Trump Paints His Opponent As an ‘Other’: Old Tactic Tries to Sow Suspicion About Harris”
Subtext: anyone not in our tribe is to be feared, is perhaps unhuman.
Seen in passing on Facebook today:
Understand science, and you’ll understand religion.
(In particular, I’d say, cognitive sciences, and human evolution.)
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Today’s topics:
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It boggles my mind how Republicans can claim that *Democrats* are anti-family, when it’s they who vote against programs to help families.
LA Times, Justin Talbot Zorn and Mark Welsbrot, Opinion, 4 Aug 2024: Opinion: Why is the ‘pro-family’ GOP blocking legislation that would help lift many kids out of poverty?
It’s a basic provisional conclusion on this blog that conservatives deal with short-term matters, corporate profits and so on, without concern for long-term effects, like climate change. They’re concerned about their children — but not enough concerned about how climate change will affect the lives of their grandchild. People with science-fictional perspectives do understand that long-term effects occur; our own society is a blip in a larger scheme of things; and we do worry about long-term effects, like climate change. As do all the scientists, and others who have a firm grip upon reality.
The US Berkeley economist Robert Reich has been doing a series on his Substack about economic myths. His tenth one appeared yesterday. (I should compile them all.)
Robert Reich, 2 Aug 2024: Debunking Myth #10: Economic growth is always good, subtitled “BUNK! The Earth is a finite resource — and infinite growth will destroy it”
To me this should be *obvious* –the continued expansion of humanity cannot go on forever. Would the world be covered in suburbs? But most people simply do not think long-term. Especially not conservatives, who are very concerned with the here and now, about how many women are having how many babies, for example, as if the species is under threat of extinction; and making this long-term problem worse.
Unconstrained economic growth is causing such grave harm to the climate that its costs are likely to be greater than the gains.
Mainstream economists don’t measure the costs of growth. They talk about climate change as a so-called “externality,” as if it were just incidental to growth.
But if you consider the deaths and injuries caused by chemical pollution, wildfires, and more intense hurricanes and storms, the costs of growth are huge.
It’s possible to shift from an economy organized around growth to one organized around sustainability. How? Dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels. Limit what can be mined and extracted.
Probably not.
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It’s also a provisional conclusion on this blog that people perceive the present as being worse than the past. It’s the essence of MAGA, and the conservative mindset — that the world needs to return to a glorious past. Despite all the evidence that indicates such a past never existed; the perception is a mental bias.
Still, there’s this:
OnlySky, Jonathan MS Pearce, 29 Jul 2024: This clusterf*** is bigger than you think, subtitled “Enjoying a morsel of good news in one corner of the world? Snap out of it.”
Most people seem unaware of how dangerous the entire world is right now, the scale of the precipice we are on and how precariously we are perched.
Momentary victories aside, we have a growing far-right electorate across Europe. Many of these countries are increasingly dancing to the tune of Vladimir Putin. And the possible next president of the US and his choice for VP are eager to join the dance. All of Ukraine’s allies and all of Russia’s allies are actively involved in a cross-domain World War III. The US, UK, and Germany provide weapons, ammunition, training, military intelligence, satellite imagery, military advice, special forces, medical equipment, logistics support—everything you would expect if we ourselves were embroiled in a conventional war.
We are involved in an economic war of sanctions and hydrocarbons, energy and commodities, financial institutions and components. We are involved in a political war of treaties and organization, alliances of friends and axes of enemies, all involved in games of influence peddling. We are involved in a cyber war with attacks on critical infrastructure throughout the world, where ransomware debilitates hospitals, hacktivists expose data, and nefarious entities under the protection of plausible deniability render pipelines and water treatment facilities unusable.
Well…. yes…. OK, but alarmists have been saying these things since the 1960s, at least. And we’re still here.
But that doesn’t mean that any one of these threats might still appear. Since there are so many of them, the likelihood of one appearing soon is still relatively high…
