Sibley Volcanic Park; the Doctrine of Discovery

Posted on Sunday 10 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Today — yet another pleasant day in the Bay Area, sunny and 74 degrees Fahrenheit — we went for a hike in the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, an area in the hills north of us where an actual volcano erupted some 10 million years ago. More photos in my Facebook post today.

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From a few days ago, two takes about a newly published book about the “Doctrine of Discovery” — the Catholic Church’s presumption, in the 1500s, that it could claim for itself any previously undiscovered (by Europeans) lands outside Europe, no matter who else might already be living there.

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Laptop Updates; More about the Crisis in Cosmology; Political matters; A History of Labor Day

Posted on Saturday 9 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • New laptop updates.
  • Another “calm down” reaction to the recent news about the “crisis in cosmology”;
  • Political matters, including Alabama’s defiance of the Supreme Court; parental rights; freedom and education;
  • And Heather Cox Richardson on the history of Labor Day.

Laptop updates. I solved one big problem I was having yesterday. The basic [cheap, $20] external CD/DVD drive I bought is, indeed, only intermittently recognized by my new Win11 laptop, upon inserting its USB socket. But at one point this morning, it worked, and through Windows Explorer I could see a new drive letter for the external drive, and a pop-up asking me what I wanted to do with the content of the disk (e.g. Run Install.exe). Woo hoo! I grabbed the Paint Shop Pro disk, popped it in, told the computer to run the install file. And got an error message that the software was incompatible with the 64-bit operating system. Huh. So then what. Then I thought, but didn’t I install this very same software on my previous laptop, 6 years ago? Let’s pop the install disc into that laptop. Same error message! Finally, I realized the problem: the version of PSP on that previous laptop is version 7, not the version 4.12 that I still have on a disc from 1996.

(The photo at top shows the new laptop in front, its screen partially hidden behind the two monitors it’s connected to, the install disc of Paint Shop Pro 7, and my reflection in the screen of the new laptop.)

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Items about the Economy and Atheism

Posted on Friday 8 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Settling in with the new laptop today, making all the fiddly adjustment settings away from the defaults that I’ve lived with for years on my previous device. It’s a decent exercise to re-examine why I made those changes. And to wonder, how have I accumulated so many files that it takes a 1 TB flash drive to back them all up? (Part of the answer: I have complete backups of the locusmag.com site, up until 2017 or so; of sfadb.com; and of markrkelly.com.)

Problems: this new Windows 11 laptop does not recognize the cheap external CD/DVD drive I bought, so I’m still unable to install my old 1996 version of Paint Shop Pro. Another minor irritant: whereas in Windows 10 I could move the Windows taskbar anywhere I wanted — top, left, bottom, right — Windows 11 sticks it across the bottom, while I’ve been used to it across the top. (Why would they *take away* functionality, I wonder.) Also, the new laptop doesn’t recognize its own camera to allow me to log in without typing in my PIN. Hope these and other things will work themselves out eventually. (Apparently the new laptop’s touchscreen allows me to long in with a thumbprint. I’ll have to try that out.)

Just a couple items today.

Paul Krugman, NYT, 7 Sep 2023: ‘I’m OK, but Things Are Terrible’

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Science Reporting in the Mass Media; Harari on the Discovery of Ignorance; The Republicans’ Need to Game the System

Posted on Thursday 7 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Two stories about how science stories are reported in the mass media: One about how humans nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago; another about that “crisis in cosmology”;
  • Yuval Noah Harari about the discovery of ignorance;
  • And three items that suggest Republicans need to game the system because they know their policies are unpopular.

This story has been making the rounds.

Scientific American, Anna Ikarashi and Nature Magazine, 6 Sep 2023: Human Ancestors Nearly Went Extinct 900,000 Years Ago, subtitled “A new technique for analyzing modern genetic data suggests that prehumans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals”

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Community, Conservatives, and Cynics

Posted on Wednesday 6 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

A round of assorted links from the past couple weeks.

  • The yearning for community, and how the churches are failing that yearning;
  • Adam Lee on the Supreme Court and how conservatism is focused on privileging wealthy, white, male Christians;
  • Thom Hartmann on how Republicans have tried it their way for 40 years, and it hasn’t worked;
  • And how a Canadian study to give $7500 to homeless people defied cynical conservative expectations.

The post here compiles reader responses to the opinion essay, shown above, from Aug. 21.

Washington Post, 28 Aug 2023: Opinion | Readers react to Perry Bacon seeking a ‘church of the nones’

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More About Misinformation, Disinformation, and Conspiracy Theories

Posted on Tuesday 5 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

These subjects aren’t going away, because so many people are as gullible as ever — understood as inevitable human nature. This may imply a cap on the potential of the human race, in terms of its ability to engage with reality to ensure its survival against existential threats. Items from OnlySky, BigThink (Lee McIntyre), and Scientific Mindset.

OnlySky, M.L. Clark, 18 Aug 2023: Meet the Fab Five of misleading information, subtitled “On misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, truthiness, and just-so stories”

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Change, and Conservative Retribution

Posted on Monday 4 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A NY Times essay about why to stop resisting change;
  • How the Republicans intend to impeach President Biden purely as a matter of retribution, without any evidence of any crimes committed.

Here’s a curious piece from Sunday’s NY Times, though it was posted online several days earlier.

NY Times, Opinion, Guest essay by Brad Stulberg, 30 Aug 2023: Stop Resisting Change

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A Crisis in Cosmology?

Posted on Saturday 2 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

NY Times, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, 2 Sep 2023: The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel

This is a piece about some of the fall-out of the photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, and the fairly long-standing issues about how rival methods of measuring the expansion and therefore age of the universe haven’t quite agreed, for some time. I’ll quote the opening four paragraphs.

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Morality and Projection

Posted on Friday 1 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Where does morality come from? And who’s moral, and why?

  • David Barton thinks Democrats cheat because they’re not “God-fearing” (despite the evidence of its being the Republicans who cheat);
  • In contrast to Phil Zuckerman’s evidence about how people without religious faith score higher on metrics of morality;
  • How Barton aligns to the most basic notion of human morality, about obedience to avoid punishment;
  • The every-day evidence of the GOP as a crime mob;
  • David Brooks about generosity, and morality;
  • A short item about how using the term “woke” is lazy.

Like a bad penny, David Barton keeps turning up from time to time. I’ve written about him a couple times before: in David Barton, Just this once in Sept 2013, and in The Mendacious David Barton in April 2017. Here’s another headline indicating where he’s coming from, from Right Wing Watch in 2017: David Barton: The Same Evil Behind Nazism Is At Work Today In The Push For LGBTQ Equality.

The thing about this piece today is that there’s a tiny core of truth to his claims, even though that core truth doesn’t do him any credit. Rather.

Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 1 Sep 2023: Christian liar David Barton: Democrats aren’t “God-fearing,” so they cheat in elections, subtitled “I can’t believe he said this with a straight face”

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Three More About Vivek

Posted on Thursday 31 August 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m preoccupied with setting up my new laptop — which has no CD/DVD drive for installing old software ! — but will post two or three more pieces about Vivek. Promise to move on to something else tomorrow.

  • Robert Reich on Vivek Ramaswamy: “mindless political entertainment”;
  • Conservative never-Trumper David French on civic ignorance and the abandonment of truth;
  • NY Times detailing Vivek’s changing positions on many issues.

AlterNet, Robert Reich, 30 Aug 2023: Who the hell is Vivek Ramaswamy and why is he surging in the polls?

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