(Belatedly posted 19 Oct, items collected 12 Oct)
- A Republican *had* to use fake footage [i.e. lie] in an ad in order to attract voters;
- Whatever the meaning of life, people are more desperate to find it as they near death;
- Fill the government with barbarians, and you get a government that would conduct executions in public;
- How progress in science is often made when you don’t know what you’re looking for.
LGBTQNation, Alex Bollinger, today 12Oct: “AI slop”: GOP ad uses fake footage of opponent saying he supports men beating girls in sports, subtitled “The Republican behind the wildly transphobic ad said he had to do it to get Latino voters.”
He *had to do it* — use fake footage — in order to attract voters. Because his moral priorities apparently transcend mere lying.
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OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, today 12 Oct: Getting old and dying, secular style, subtitled “Death is a hard reality for secularists, but also a reminder to find meaning in life where we can.”
Not much here about what “meaning” might be, just that people become more desperate to find it as they come to the end of their lives. Intrigued by this para:
Then there is the political side of death. Accepting death is part of a general acceptance of limits. Death is a piece of a more ecologically sustainable attitude toward existence. We could think of death as the last chapter in Bill McKibben’s 2003 book, Enough. We could think of death as one form of nature’s rejection of capitalist accumulation.
I have that book, but haven’t read it. I’ll check it out.
The writer ends thus:
It is at the funeral that stories about the meaning of human life inevitably surface. It is in the encounter with aging and death that secularism will develop its new vocabulary of human flourishing—of what it means to live a fulfilled human life. One can already see the dueling narratives that will compete for our consideration. Is the goal of life to define oneself and make one’s own way in the world? Or should we think of our lives as a small part of a grand tapestry? Is it to be Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” or Walt Disney’s “Circle of Life?” Or some combination? Or something else entirely?
I suspect the basic measure of a fulfilled human life, for people around the world regardless of religion, is to raise children, to provide the next generation. To keep life going. There are many other options, as I’ve been exploring.
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It says something basic about human nature that this is not more of a scandal.
Washington Post, George F. Will, 11 Oct 2026: Fill the government with barbarians, you get barbaric government, subtitled “Pete Hegseth wants to morally instruct America with a public execution? The proper response is revulsion.”
Barbarian is a word I’ve generally avoided, but it equates with basic, tribal, human nature, and lack of civilized values.
A couple excerpts:
In 1936, America’s next-to-last public execution (the hanging of a Kentucky Black man convicted of raping a White woman) was enjoyed by perhaps 20,000 spectators, some of whom might have attended the previous evening’s “necktie” parties that were reportedly part of Owensboro’s festivities.
And
Capital punishment’s clear effect is to cloak the death-dispensing state with dark majesty, and a claim to infallibility. Hence the sudden enthusiasm, in the early days of Germany’s Third Reich, for executions by handheld axes.
Don’t give Hegseth any ideas.
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The point of funding scientific research is that you don’t know what you’re going to find. Conservatives, especially MAGA and Trump administration, completely misunderstand this. They only want to know what the immediate profit will be. Consistent with their short-term outlook, and failure to appreciate long-term investments.
Washington Post, 11 Oct 2026: This telescope is making priceless discoveries. The greatest was unforeseen., subtitled “Scientists don’t know what they’ll find until they find it.”
But its [the James Webb Space Telescope’s] most consequential discovery so far was unforeseen: a swarm of crimson specks of light in the distant, young universe, which astronomers have named “little red dots.” James Webb’s data reveal that those dots were everywhere back then: They thrived from 600 million to 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, and then … mysteriously disappeared. Nothing quite like them exists today.
The dots offer a lesson not only in the mysteries of the universe but in the peculiar economics of the scientific frontier. A space telescope has a calculable price: mirror, instruments, launch, operation. But what it discovers does not.
That relationship is true for any scientific venture. A discovery — especially an unexpected one — is the highest-value asset that a curious species like ours can acquire. But we never know what the discovery will be, where it will come from or when it will arrive. There is nothing to sell before it exists, and once it does, its returns rarely accrue to whoever paid for it. This is one reason pure science today is chiefly (but not exclusively) funded by public money.
With more about the “usefulness of useless knowledge.” And discoveries that pay off, in one way or another, years later.
