‘Since Jane Goodall’s famous observations of stick tool use by chimpanzees, animal tool use has been observed in numerous species, including many primates, dolphins, and birds. Some animals, such as New Caledonian crows, even craft tools. Elephants frequently use tools4 and also modify them.
We studied water-hose tool use in Asian zoo elephants. Flexibility, extension, and water flow make hoses exceptionally complex tools. Individual elephants differed markedly in their water-hose handling.
Female elephant Mary displayed sophisticated hose-showering behaviors. She showed lateralized hose handling, systematically showered her body, and coordinated the trunk-held water hose with limb behaviors. Mary usually grasped the hose behind the tip, using it as a stiff shower head. To reach her back, however, she grasped the hose further from the tip and swung it on her back, using hose flexibility and ballistics.
Aggressive interactions between Mary and the younger female elephant, Anchali, ensued around Mary’s showering time. At some point, Anchali started pulling the water hose toward herself, lifting and kinking it, then regrasping and compressing the kink. This kink-and-clamp behavior disrupted water flow and was repeated in several sessions as a strict sequence of maneuvers. The efficacy of water flow disruption increased over time. In control experiments with multiple hoses, it was not clear whether Anchali specifically targeted Mary’s showering hose. We also observed Anchali pressing down on the water hose, performing an on-hose trunk stand, which also disrupted water flow.
We conclude that elephants show sophisticated hose tool use and manipulation….’ (via Current Biology)
‘Law enforcement believe the activity, which makes it harder to then unlock phones (seized for evidence), may be due to a potential update in iOS 18 which tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have not been in contact with a cellular network for some time, according to a document obtained by 404 Media….’ ( Joseph Cox via 404 Media)
So if you are worried that police may seize your phone, hack in, and have access to sensitive information, perhaps make it a bit harder by setting up an auto reboot schedule. Unless Tim Cook, given his new bromance with donald trump, closes that loophole.
‘…[T]he right’s restrictions on abortion might just have been the beginning of a larger assault on personal freedoms, and not for the first time in history… We should remember one of the first things that Hitler did when he was elected—and he did get elected—was to declare abortion a crime against the state…’ ( Jane Mayer via The New Yorker)
Harris is significantly more popular, and the more favorable candidate has won the White House in 16 out ofthe last 17 recent elections, showcasing a trend that many analysts eagerly watch as election cycles progress. Pollsters have an incentive to err on the side of overestimating trump, especially after being embarrassed to have consistently underestimated him over the past eight years, leading to questions about the reliability of these polls. In contrast, they may be underestimating Harris, whose appeal is increasingly resonating with a broad section of the electorate. This is the likely explanation for why all the polls are neck-and-neck, creating a climate of uncertainty and excitement that could influence voter turnout significantly. Furthermore, the Democrats’ two biggest liabilities, inflation and immigration, have become less salient in recent months, as economic recovery and discussions around immigration reform take center stage, shifting focus away from these issues. And late deciders, who often play a pivotal role in elections, are breaking toward Harris in what seems to be an alignment with her vision for the future. Finally, although not discussed in the article, I think voters in some constituencies are concealing their preference for Harris because peer pressure may be significant, inhibiting open discussions about political choices in their communities. This dynamic could lead to a surprising outcome as the election date approaches, reflecting deeper shifts in public sentiment that may not yet be fully captured by current polling methods. (via Vox)
Addendum, in 20/20 hindsight: How deluded of me! Harris was not significantly more popular, pollsters did not overestimate trump, inflation and immigration appear not to have been deprecated as issues, and late deciders (like virtually every other demographic) did not break Blue.
‘In Japan’s stormy summer of 1983, Ikuo Ishiyama couldn’t stop thinking about a chilling pattern among his patients. They were dead, but that wasn’t what troubled him. As a specialist in forensic medicine at Tokyo University, Ishiyama was accustomed to seeing dead bodies. However, these victims—numbering in the hundreds—shared a similar demise. “The symptoms are the same,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Young men without medical problems are essentially dying in the same way, without warning.” What way was that? That may be the most mysterious detail: All of the victims died in their sleep.
Ishiyama’s concern grew when he heard about similar deaths halfway around the world, in the Midwestern and Western United States. There, they called it “nocturnal death syndrome,” but the circumstances were just as unsettling. “They passed away in the early hours of the morning,” the science journalist Alice Robb wrote in her book Why We Dream, “lying on their backs, with looks of horror in their eyes.” To this day, their exact cause of death is a mystery. But one University of Arizona anthropologist, who spent a decade studying the phenomenon, argued the victims suffered cardiac arrest due to what Robb describes as “stress, biology, and sheer terror.”
Were they victims of their nightmares?…’ (via Atlas Obscura)
‘The “secret” almost certainly involves a plan to install Trump in the White House if he loses the election—but this plan could be even worse than you think….’ ( via The Nation)
A reprise of my traditional Hallowe’en post of past years:
It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time.
With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve.
All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.
English: A traditional Irish turnip Jack-o’-lantern from the early 20th century.
Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North America, given how plentiful they were here. The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
Nowadays, a reported 99% of cultivated pumpkin sales in the US go for jack-o-lanterns.
Folk traditions that were in the past associated with All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition, and liminality.
The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards
The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (You may be familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.)
Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well. As this article in The Smithsonian reviews, ‘In the United States, Halloween is mostly about candy, but elsewhere in the world celebrations honoring the departed have a spiritual meaning…’
Reportedly, more than 80% of American families decorate their homes, at least minimally, for Hallowe’en. What was the holiday like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has now become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? Before the era of the pay-per-view ’spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] put it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like? One issue may be that, as NPR observed,
‘”Adults have hijacked Halloween… Two in three adults feel Halloween is a holiday for them and not just kids,” Forbes opined in 2012, citing a public relations survey. True that when the holiday was imported from Celtic nations in the mid-19th century — along with a wave of immigrants fleeing Irelands potato famine — it was essentially a younger persons’ game. But a little research reveals that adults have long enjoyed Halloween — right alongside young spooks and spirits.’
Is that necessarily a bad thing? A 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul, young or old.
“Maybe at one time Hallowe’en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe’en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”
That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.
The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).
The Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I’ve seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the evocative classics of the ’30’s and ’40’s when most eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here’s what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. “Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers.”
Boing Boing does homage to a morbid masterpiece of wretched existential horror, two of the tensest, scariest hours of my life repeated every time I watch it:
‘…The Thing starts. It had been 9 years since The Exorcist scared the living shit out of audiences in New York and sent people fleeing into the street. Really … up the aisle and out the door at full gallop. You would think that people had calmed down a bit since then. No…
The tone of The Thing is one of isolation and dread from the moment it starts. By the time our guys go to the Norwegian outpost and find a monstrous steaming corpse with two merged faces pulling in opposite directions the audience is shifting in their seats. Next comes the dog that splits open with bloody tentacles flying in all directions. The women are covering their eyes….’
Meanwhile, what could be creepier in the movies than the phenomenon of evil children? Gawker knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of the cinematic young:
‘In celebration of Halloween, we took a shallow dive into the horror subgenre of evil-child horror movies. Weird-kid cinema stretches back at least to 1956’s The Bad Seed, and has experienced a resurgence recently via movies like The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, and Cooties. You could look at this trend as a natural extension of the focus on domesticity seen in horror via the wave of haunted-house movies that 2009’s Paranormal Activity helped usher in. Or maybe we’re just wizening up as a culture and realizing that children are evil and that film is a great way to warn people of this truth. Happy Halloween. Hope you don’t get killed by trick-or-treaters.’
In any case: trick or treat! …And may your Hallowe’en soothe your soul.
‘Happy Jimi Halloween to everyone who celebrates. It’s that wonderful time of year when our favorite Japanese festival, Jimi Halloween, is on full display. Mundane Halloween, as we coined it back in 2018, is when people dress up in costumes so mundane they have to be explained….’ ( Johnny via Spoon & Tamago)
‘Iran, which created Hezbollah around 1982, might cut off support to the group, a decision that could reconfigure the politics of the Middle East….’ ( Robert F. Worth via The Atlantic)
‘It is reasonable to hope that moderates and independents will have had enough of trump in November, emulating British and French voters who rebuffed right-wing candidates earlier this year. A clear rejection of trumpism might deflate the maga movement for a while. But if trump loses narrowly and declares himself the winner, rallying dispersed local groups prone to violent resistance to install him in office, orderly de-escalation could prove impossible. If he wins, his march to autocratic coercion may be unstoppable, and it would inspire burgeoning resistance from the left. The historian David Blight has observed that tipping points can only be determined in retrospect, and he isolates Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided by the Supreme Court in 1857, as the point of no return in the run-up to the Civil War. When historians look back on this traumatic era of American politics, they will probably assess the 2024 election—not January 6—as the event that foreswore or foretold the collapse of the American republic….’ (Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson via The New York Review of Books)
‘Look, I’m not advocating betting money on the election, especially if you are heavily invested emotionally in the outcome. But there is a classic strategy for linking those two things in a productive way: hedge your political preferences with bets. Just ask yourself: how much money would I pay for my candidate to win? Then take that amount of money and put it on the other candidate. Now you either “buy” a victory in the election for what you already said you would pay, or you get a pile of cash you can use to mop up your tears on election night…’ (Matt Glassman via Matt Glassman)
‘For millions of the GOP faithful, …trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins….’ ( Tom Nichols via The Atlantic)
‘There’s no such thing as privacy anymore: Whatever you’re up to, someone, somewhere has all the details. Even if you take heroic steps to mask your online activity and scrupulously protect your privacy in real-life situations you’re still not totally anonymous. We all know that your credit history is pretty easy to access—and is increasingly used in just about every aspect of your life, from getting a job to renting an apartment. If you’re paying attention, you probably froze your credit report long ago.
But there’s another report that is just as invasive and just as important—and just as necessary to lock down so that it can’t be used against you without your knowledge. It’s called The Work Number, and you really need to start paying attention to it—and freezing it….’ ( via Lifehacker)
‘There’s been a feature lately on the New York Times website that invites readers to stare at a painting for 10 minutes and do nothing else.
I tried it, I got bored. Also, I really don’t need another reason to stare at my laptop screen. Still, it’s a good idea, as an exercise in focus, and Wednesday morning, eight a.m., I wondered, why not try the same thing at the coffeeshop around the corner from my office? Ten minutes of listening, looking, studying myself in that situation, with a notebook in hand.
Turns out, I enjoyed it so much, I stayed an an hour….’ ( Rosecrans Baldwin via Substack)
‘Psilocybin—the hallucinogen in magic mushrooms—continues to show promise as an anti-depressant, especially when combined with psychotherapy. Meanwhile though, it’s being explored for treating anxiety, OCD, irritable bowel syndrome, and other disorders. Two phase 2 clinical trials showing its efficacy in helping with hostility, somatization (the physical expression of psychological distress), and interpersonal sensitivity (heightened awareness of others’ perceptions and reactions) led to University of Toronto researchers to call for a broader reframing of psilocybin-based treatments. In a new Nature Mental Health scientific paper, hey suggest calling psilocybin an “anti-distressant.”…’ (via Boing Boing)
‘…[W]hen there’s a knock at the door or a pleading figure suddenly at your car window, it’s best to get a good look at their eyes before letting them in….’ (via Atlas Obscura)
‘> Sometimes the dog whistle of racism is an air horn. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the paper. Late last week, trump’s rants about immigrants polluting the country with “bad genes” were paraphrased by The New York Times as a “long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”
In the article referenced above, the Times was very clearly trying to address the eugenics behind trump’s rhetoric, but it failed. The reporter neglected to use the word “racist” or “racism” at any point. This tiptoeing approach also hides the larger threat of what it means for a national leader to embrace this language, and the danger to a country in which he remains a leading candidate for the presidency. In the news cycle that followed, only Politico seemed to reflect the full measure of trump’s clear descent into apocalyptic race-baiting in its headline “We watched 20 trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”…’ ( Andrea Pitzervia Trapped in a Company Town)
‘Bop Spotter is a real-time collector of songs played by passersby in San Francisco’s Mission District. Installed inside a box high up on a pole, a phone runs Shazam nonstop. The music discovery app allows users to look up an artist and song title by simply recording a few seconds of sound.
Solar powered with a microphone pointing down on the street, the phone pings every few minutes, detecting music and automatically integrating the tunes into a diverse and ever-growing playlist on the Bop Spotter site. So far, more than 1,400 songs have been collected, ranging from rock to hip top to meditation sounds…’ (Kate Mothes via Colossal)
‘This systematic review examines empirical evidence supporting the anecdotal assumption, that dogs look like and behave like their owners. To this end, we investigated 15 studies with the aim of testing that: (1) Owners and their dogs resemble each other in appearance and (2) owners and their dogs have similar personalities. Aggregation of the results supports evidence for both hypotheses. …’ (via ScienceDirect)
‘Unless you’re a die-hard trump supporter, a journalist, or an obsessive political hobbyist, you’re likely not getting that regular glimpse into the Republican candidate’s brain. But … maybe you should be?
Last Friday, I received an email with a link to a website created by a Washington, D.C.–based web developer named Chris Herbert. The site, trump’s Truth, is a searchable database collecting all of trump’s Truth Social posts, even those that have been deleted. Herbert has also helpfully transcribed every speech and video trump has posted on the platform, in part so that they can be indexed more easily by search engines such as Google. Thus, trump’s ravings are more visible….’ (Charlie Warzel via The Atlantic)
‘Sanewashing is the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal. Here’s how reporters can eschew it….’ ( Kelly McBride via Poynter)
The fields are nearly empty, because the crops have been plucked and stored for the coming winter. It is the time of the autumn equinox, Harvest Home, Mabon, the Feast of the Ingathering, Meán Fómhair or Alban Elfed (in Neo-Druidic traditions), is a ritual of thanksgiving. It is a time of plenty, of gratitude, and a recognition of the need to share our abundance with those less fortunate to secure the blessings of the Goddess and the God during the winter months. Day and night are of equal length, looking forward to the days’ shortening. The Autumn Equinox is the time of the descent of the Goddess into the Underworld. We also bid farewell to the Harvest Lord who was slain at Lammas. Welsh legend brings us the story of Mabon ap Modron, who dwells, a happy captive, in Modron’s magickal Otherworld — his mother’s womb. Only in this way can he be reborn.
In the northern hemisphere this equinox occurs anywhere from September 21 to 24. Among the sabbats, it is the second of the three pagan harvest festivals, preceded by Lammas/Lughnasadh and followed by Samhain. (via Wikipedia).
‘There is no one donald trump fears more than his shapeshifting opponent, Kamala Harris. First she turned Black, and now, apparently, she has also turned female.
trump disclosed this bit of intel when he took a break from golfing to appear on Fox’s Gutfield! show. On the subject of Harris replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, Trump revealed his discovery.
“She’s somehow a woman,” he confided to host Greg Gutfield. And even more incredibly, he added, now that she is a woman, “she’s doing better than he [Biden] did.”…’
‘Musk’s now-deleted post questioning why no one has attempted to assassinate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris renews concerns over his work for the US government—and potential to inspire extremist violence….’ (via WIRED)
‘September will see the appearance of C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, that has traveled for tens of thousands of years through the solar system….’
‘Mansfield began teaching at Harvard in 1962 and stayed there until his retirement last year. During that 61-year tenure at America’s most famous college, he became a conservative institution unto himself: a beachhead in enemy-occupied territory, an Ivy Leaguer who has been mentor to some of the movement’s leading lights. His former graduate students include Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), leading pro-Trump intellectual Charles Kesler, and the famous Never Trump writer Bill Kristol.
Mansfield, an erudite Tocqueville scholar, disdains Trump — describing him as a demagogue and a vulgarian. Yet in a recent interview, Mansfield said he voted for said vulgarian in 2020 “with many misgivings” (Mansfield adds that he “crossed [Trump] off my list entirely” after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot).
But he has offered striking praise of Trump in one area: gender. Trump, he said in one interview, was “really the first American politician” to win office via “a display of manliness and an attack on political correctness.” He beat Hillary Clinton, per Mansfield, because American elections are “tests of manliness” — and “it’s difficult for a woman to do that in a graceful way, and to maintain her femininity.”…’
‘Even by MAGA standards, donald trump’s outlandish claims about immigrants eating dogs and women killing newborn babies last night was just plain bizarre.
So weird, in fact, that after his debate debacle, trump’s DJT stock plummeted to new lows today. And this might be one of the reasons why the mad king-wannabe is now calling for ABC News to shut down.
“They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” the perpetually angry candidate said as he sulked on Fox & Friends this morning about how the ABC moderators had fact-checked him. How dare the “fake news” want to get their facts straight!…’
‘”I better win or you’re gonna have problems like we’ve never had. We may have no country left,” trump said at his weekend swing-state rally. “This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This could be our last election.”…’
‘Harris and her team — holed up in Pittsburgh for a multi-day debate camp — wanted unmuted microphones so that the vice president could lean on her prosecutorial background, confronting the former president in the same way she laced into some of trump’s Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet members during Senate hearings.
Instead, four Harris campaign officials argued that she will be “handcuffed” by the rules, which were negotiated by President Joe Biden’s team earlier this summer.
“trump’s worst moments in the debates are when he gets upset and snaps,” said an aide to Harris in her 2020 presidential campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely. “And they have neutered that.”…’
‘Yesterday, at the Economic Club of New York, one member asked Donald Trump a very specific question about his policy priorities: “If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable, and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”
Trump’s reply was not only not specific; it was incoherent. After a little throat-clearing about how “important” an issue child care is, he seemed to turn to a discussion of his nebulous idea to increase tariffs on foreign imports, although even that is hard to ascertain. Trump said:
But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t—you know, there’s something … You have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.
But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.
Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have—I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country—because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.
In a rare occurrence, Trump here seems to acknowledge that he has diverged from the topic at hand. But he suggests that tariffs are, for some reason, the topic worth talking about instead. He continues:
But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.
We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question…’ ( Isabel Fattal via The Atlantic)
‘Late this morning at trump Tower, the former president took the microphone and spoke at length about the civil case in which he was found liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll. He mentioned the other allegations against him that came up in the trial. For good measure, he also dredged up the multimillion-dollar fraud judgment against him and the trial in which he was found guilty of 34 felonies. And, flanked by some of his lawyers, he griped about his representation. “I’m disappointed in my legal talent,” the former president said. …’ ( David A. Graham via The Atlantic)
‘Acadia Healthcare is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found….’ ( via The New York Times)
Earlier in my career, I spent several years as the medical director of a private (for-profit) psychiatric facility owned by a major competitor of Acadia which operated in much the same way. As one of my friends and colleagues, a medical director of a sister facility, put it, I felt like I had to shower off the filth every night when I came home from work. Fortunately, I resigned in time to preserve my self-respect and vowed never to work in private sector hospital-based psychiatric care again. Thanks to the New York Times for this exposé; things stay the same, don’t they?
This was an ironic or satiric blog by Christian Lander which was up from 2008-2010 poking fun at the tragically hip and politically correct (“This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable.”). Alas, I just discovered it. This is the full list of the 136 things white people are supposed to like. Most are timeless; only a few haven’t dated well. By my quick count, I would check off about 80 of the 136. Does that make me only slightly less than 60% hip? Or 60% white? How about you?
‘Some may know him from NeuroTribes, a deeply researched and also fiercely opinionated work. Other may be familiar with him from his writings for Wired and his work on the early days of the Internet and its online gathering place, the WELL. If you’re a Deadhead you recognize his name from liner notes to Dead albums, his co-production credit on the box set So Many Roads, or Skeleton Key, the Dead “dictionary” he co-wrote with David Shenk….’ (Rolling Stone)
According to kottke, his wish for his death was: “Just selfishly or selflessly use my own impermanence to WAKE UP to your own.”
Steve and I long ago discovered our affinity around an amazingly congruent and some would say improbable intersection of interests, ranging from our passion for the Grateful Dead (I envied his erudition and closeness to the seminal Bay Area music scene) to what some might call an equally countercultural take on mind-body and neurocognitive issues. And, oh, I loved the ceaseless social media venom with which he responded to the outrageous buffoonery of trump and his wingnut minions. I was delighted for the success of his book Neurotribes, which brought him well-deserved recognition for his sharp wit and incisive analysis of the issue of autism and neurodiversity. Although we never met in person, we bonded over some of our shared online writing and always intended to meet for dinner when next on the same coast. However, I have felt an immense sense of honor to be his friend. My thoughts are with his husband and other loved ones for this immeasurable loss. A number of the writers I follow on the web have been touched by his passing and took note of it online. Without a doubt, his good buddy David Crosby is beaming from ear to ear and welcoming him with open arms in the Great Beyond about now.
Lost in fantasy during a long-winded speech in Michigan, the insecure rambler first compared himself to his surging opponent, Kamala Harris. “I saw her make a speech, it was so bad,” he said, furious that the vice president’s speeches have revved up Democrats while his sharks-and-battery talks have gotten him nowhere
.”I make a speech for two hours, everybody loves it! I’ve got thousands of people, by the way, outside, trying to get in.” (The only people standing outside of his rally were angry folks who had received fake tickets online.)
“I must be a great speaker, right? I must!” he pleaded. “We’ve got thousands of people. No, we got thousands and thousands!” the desperate conman continued. And then, swept away by his overactive imagination, he blurted out, “If I were a Democrat, they’d say, ‘He’s the greatest that ever lived. He made Abraham Lincoln look like nothing.” (Boing Boing)
‘New laws and court rulings have created a range of guardrails against efforts to delay or interfere with the electoral process….’ ( Richard L. Hasen via WSJ)
‘As a child, Ashley Suszczynski used to draw copiously in her school notebooks and escape into the chimerical worlds of books. “I loved the imaginative illustrations,” she tells Colossal. “Each story sent me into a new world, and I kind of dissociated from my own… Every page was full of magic and mystery—an immersive adventure into lands of mythical monsters, talking animals, the weird and the wonderful.”
The fascination with legends and supernatural creatures persisted into adulthood, forming the basis of Suszczynski’s love for photography, folklore, and cultures around the world. “Several years ago, I learned about a masquerade in the north of Spain called La Vijanera,” she says. “The characters looked like those I had imagined from the pages of my childhood stories.”
Suszczynski delved into further research about European masking rituals and rites, learning about the range of characters, history, and symbolism unique to each tradition. Festivals throughout the continent often centered on common themes, like the cycle of the seasons, life and death, or fertility, while expressing themselves through distinctive costumes. “It seemed as though every tiny village had their own unique ancient rituals that were still thriving in our modern society,” she says….’ ( Kate Mothes via Colossal)
As joyful and reinvigorated as many people were by the turn of events in the election season and the public opinion poll margin that the Harris – Walz ticket is developing, I have realized with despair that it only increases the likelihood of a post-election coup that will make trump’s January 6, 2021 actions look like a walk in the park.
Rumor has it at the Democrats are assembling an unprecedented legal team to fight the steal but, for all my obsessive reading about the issue, I was not seeing much that was encouraging about the ability to prevent trump’s insurrection. People without scruples always have those who respect the rule of law over a barrel. It begins not to matter who wins the popular vote, the battleground states, or crosses the electoral college threshold.
Now, the first sign that the Democrats will be proactive instead of merely reactive and paralyzed. ( Schouten & Sneed via CNN)
‘donald trump’s campaign remains jittery about the prospect of a power struggle inside the inner circle that could become a major distraction just months until the 2024 election, even if the jockeying for influence by top officials has ended with a truce, according to people familiar with the matter.
The momentary power play among the senior advisers is widely seen to be over, for now, after the 2016 campaign chief, Corey Lewandowski, distanced himself from suggestions he was returning to the fold to run the campaign and the current leadership remained in their roles. (Lewandowski was brought on the current campaign as an adviser.)…’ (Hugo Lowell via The Guardian)
‘A radio signal detected in 1977, sometimes claimed as evidence for aliens, may have been caused by a laser-like beam of microwave radiation…’ (New Scientist))
‘As donald seethes over Barack and Michelle Obama and the Democratic convention, a polling analyst discusses new data showing the anti-MAGA coalition coming together—the thing trump fears most….’ (The New Republic)
‘Journalist penned list of swing state officials who are election deniers
Officials part of ‘a decentralized network of pro-trump Republicans’…’ (News Nation Now)
‘In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.
The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec….’ ( via New York Times)
Many of you wouldn’t deny this, and even take it for granted. I am asking you not to take it for granted, to take seriously what it means to say that one party’s candidate will not try to cripple our system of free and fair elections, and one party’s candidate is guaranteed to. How high do his odds of success have to be before you treat this as a genuine emergency?…’ ( Adam Gurri via Liberal Currents)
‘In 1934, Dorothy Thompson became the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany for writing critically & unfavorably about the regime and its leader, Adolf Hitler:
He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.
Back in America as one of the most famous journalists and women of her time, she spent the rest of the 30s and early 40s trying to warn the nation of fascism both here and abroad. In 1941, she wrote a piece for Harper’s Magazine called Who Goes Nazi?, in which she muses about which guests at a party would become Nazis….’ ( via Kottke)
‘If anyone knows how to make your skin crawl, it’s Stephen King. And he just posted a bone-chilling reminder of why ex-president donald trump chose a new VP running mate.
“Just a reminder that the reason he has to pick a new VP is because his own supporters tried to kill his last one,” the master of horror posted yesterday….’ (Boing Boing)
Sorry I may have called the assumptions behind the calls for Biden to pull out of the race anti-Democratic or pro-authoritarian.  but I don’t think that is really important. Say all you will about how accurate public opinion polls are but the overwhelming evidence is that Biden cannot defeat convicted felon, twice impeached demagogue and proto-dictator trump. Mr. Biden, it may not be fair but it seems a fact of life no matter how stubborn you are about staying in the race. As someone who himself is aging demonstrably I know it is not fair but it is a fact of life. History will remember you as a good president and perhaps an extraordinary one if you save the Republic by giving up on your aspirations for a second term.
‘The Democratic Party held 57 primaries and caucuses; voters in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories had their say, as did Democrats abroad. Joe Biden won 87 percent of the total vote. He lost one contest, in American Samoa, to the little-known Jason Palmer. Suddenly, there are cries in the Democratic Party that, as goes a single territorial caucus, so should the nation.
I worked in five presidential campaigns for Republicans and helped elect Republican senators and governors in more than half of the country. For decades, I made ads attacking the Democratic Party. But in all those years, I never saw anything as ridiculous as the push, in the aftermath of last week’s debate, to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. For many in the party, the event raised genuine concerns about the incumbent’s fitness for a new term. But a president’s record makes a better basis for judgment than a 90-minute broadcast does. Biden has a capable vice president, should he truly become unable to serve. The standard for passing over Democratic voters’ preferred nominee should be extraordinarily high—and has not been met.
The fundamental danger of Donald Trump is that he’s an autocrat who refuses to accept the will of the voters. So the proper response is to throw out millions of votes, dump the overwhelming choice, and replace him with someone selected by a handful of insiders? What will the message be: “Our usurper is better than your usurper”?
‘To the surprise of almost everyone involved, therapy using MDMA — commonly known as ecstasy — will probably not become legal this year. That’s because Lykos Therapeutics, the company trying to get it approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), came under fire at a public hearing on June 4 over questions about whether MDMA plus therapy effectively treats PTSD and concerns about the safety of Lykos’s therapeutic approach.
After researchers put the company on blast, the FDA’s advisory committee voted against approval, though a final decision will be made by the agency in August.
There were lots of problems with the evidence about the drug itself. In Lykos’s clinical trials, participants who got MDMA experienced a significant reduction in their PTSD symptoms, doing better than those who got a placebo, but almost all the trial participants could tell which one they were getting. So, to what extent were those who got MDMA healing because they knew they were getting the real drug and expecting that it would help them? No one can tell.
Regulators also weren’t sure if MDMA would harm the liver or cardiovascular system in the long term because Lykos didn’t gather evidence for long enough to know. And we don’t know about the drug’s addictive potential because Lykos failed to report on addiction-driving effects like euphoria; worse, some claim that Lykos pressured participants not to mention bad outcomes….’ (Vox)
MDMA has long been available through channels other than a profit-driven pharmaceutical company; there ought to be access to less tainted data about efficacy and tolerability. And, with psychedelic research, it seems inherently flawed to rely on placebo-controlled studies without a clever workaround for the fact (as noted) that subjects will always recognize from how they feel that they have gotten the active agent.
‘Bloomsday celebrates Thursday, 16 June 1904, the day immortalised in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. The day is named after Leopold Bloom, one of the novel’s protagonist (the other being Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s 1916 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Joyce’s literary alter ego). The novel follows Bloom’s life and thoughts — as well as those of Stephen and a host of other characters, real and fictional — from 8AM through to the early hours of the following morning….’ ( via James Joyce Centre)
Bloomsday is celebrated from Dublin and around the world by Joyce aficionados with readings, reenactments and related observances. Gather with others who revere Ulysses or simply pull out your copy again and dive in today.
Murder rates and mass shootings make national headlines, defining the discussion over pervasive gun violence. But most gun deaths in America are self-inflicted. There were about 27,000 gun suicides in 2022. That was a record, and far higher than the 19,500 gun homicides documented that year.
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There have been more gun suicides than gun homicides in the United States every year for the past 25 years. Yet the harm inflicted on communities by suicides rarely registers in the national debate over guns.
‘There is a simple, foolproof way to predict when Trump will describe something or someone as rigged or corrupt: when he doesn’t get what he wants. Elections he loses are fraudulent, legal decisions that go against him are rigged, and anyone who opposes him is corrupt. In every single instance, Trump is decrying not a corrupt individual or rigged process, but a person or process that is not corrupt or rigged enough to give him the results he seeks….’ ( Adam Serwer via The Atlantic)
I found this essay by Irish philosopher and literary critic Galen Strawson (DRB) grappling with ways to define the meaning of life, to be provocative. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the central theme exploring what relationship there may be between meaning or purpose and “narrativity,” the sense that one can make a coherent story out of one’s life, intrigues me. As a psychiatrist, I find that the endeavor of psychotherapy very often — almost invariably — involves helping our patients make a coherent narrative of their experiences as a means of bearing or alleviating suffering. (see, for example, the work of psychoanalyst Donald Spence.) Recent understanding in neuroscience (e.g. this), coming at it from a different angle, provides some support for narrative and autobiographical memory as a basis for self-understanding and sense of identity. Whether such a story is ‘true’ depends on deeply nuanced and challenging questions about what such ‘truth’ is. Not at all self-evident or easy to establish. You will very often find these issues couched in terms of provocative discussions about a related issue, whether we have free will or agency. Much of psychotherapy has an explicit or implicit goal of expanding choice, autonomy, and responsibility. I think one must constantly struggle with whether those notions are well-founded.
‘Dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain, used to be neuroscience jargon — something you’d read about in a biology textbook. But today, dopamine has become a cultural catch-all, shorthand for focus, yearning, and joy.
Scroll through TikTok or sit next to a Silicon Valley software engineer at a dinner party, and you’ll be bombarded with dopamine-related life hacks. Struggling to stay off your phone? Maybe you’re due for a dopamine detox. Concerned that you’re not enjoying life like you used to? Try dopamine fasting or, for a quick pick-me-up, get dopamine dressed.
Wanting to hack your brain isn’t some niche thing. Celebrity neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman’s 2021 “Dopamine Masterclass” episode, “Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction,” has racked up over 9 million views on YouTube — a staggering number for a 136-minute neuroscience explainer. This video and others like it offer techniques for controlling dopamine release. Some are behavioral, like quitting sugar or abstaining from pornography. Others involve buying supplements, phone apps, or life coaching.
But in reality, dopamine does both more and less than pop culture gives it credit for. While dopamine-driven wellness trends often hinge on its role as “the pleasure molecule,” most neuroscientists today agree that dopamine doesn’t represent pleasure at all — at least not directly. Its role in the brain is wide-reaching and nuanced, shaping everything from motivation to nausea. Outside of the brain, it helps to widen blood vessels, lower white blood cell activity, and more….’ (Vox)
‘Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add “udm= 14” to the search URL….’ ( via Tedium)
‘Ahead of two crucial polls, Kremlin ‘using all available means of leverage and interference to impose its will – short of bombing the country’.
Since the Ukraine invasion, concern has grown that Vladimir Putin would turn his attention to neighbouring Moldova in a bid to regain control of another former Soviet republic.
Although Moldova does not share a border with Russia, its separatist region of Transnistria has become the rallying cry used by Moscow to undermine the tiny country. In February, pro-Russian separatist leaders issued an appeal to Putin for “protection” that “echoed similar ‘appeals’ from inside Ukraine which set in motion the illegal Russian annexations of its territories”, said Chatham House experts…’ ( Elliott Goat, The Week UK via The Week)
‘So you’re on the spectrum, or you’ve got borderline personality disorder, or you’re a sociopath: once you’re sure that’s who you are, you’ve got a personal stake in a very creaky diagnostic system.
The process by which categories give rise to kinds of people is what the philosopher Ian Hacking called “dynamic nominalism.” There’s an interactive relation between the labels and those labelled….’ ( via The New Yorker)
‘Ten years before I was born, at 4:40 on the morning of Nov. 10, 1971, my mother and another woman sat “yogi-style” on the floor of an Ann Arbor, Mich., kitchen and lit themselves on fire. They were just blocks from the University of Michigan campus, where my mother had been a student. She had just turned 20. Police tracked the smell of burning hair to find the women sitting on the floor, facing each other, screaming….’ ( By Nina St. Pierre
‘In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record that few people outside the field of ornithology noticed. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 with a 213-foot wingspan and one of the most powerful jet engines in the world. During its journey, B6—an animal that could perch comfortably on your shoulder—did not land, did not eat, did not drink and did not stop flapping, sustaining an average ground speed of 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day as it winged its way to the other end of the world….’ ( Michael B. Habib via Scientific American)
‘Mike Flynn, Mike Lindell and others to attend event on election fraud by Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association
A group of far-right sheriffs is set to meet donald trump allies in Las Vegas on Wednesday for talks with dozens of Republican state officials and candidates focused partly on potential election fraud by non-citizens, which experts say is wildly overblown….’ ( Peter Stone via The Guardian)
‘Avatars of deceased relatives are increasingly popular for consoling those in mourning, or hiding the deaths of loved ones from children….’ ( Viola Zhou via Rest of World)
‘trump envisions a presidency in which he would quite literally be above the law, immune from accountability, and free to wreak vengeance on his opponents. The trump 2.0 strategy depends on the former president and his associates bending the institutions of government—including the military and the Department of Justice—to his will. Congress, especially one controlled by the GOP, is unlikely to be either a check or a balance if the other institutions fail.
Which leaves the courts.
The pointed rhetoric from these judges is an important indicator: The federal judiciary is the one institution left standing that viscerally understands, and is willing to actively resist, the threat the former president poses….’ ( Charles Sykes via The Atlantic)
‘trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.
Journalists rightly chose not to broadcast trump’s entire speeches after 2016, believing that the free coverage helped boost the former president and spread lies unchecked. But now there’s the possibility that stories about his speeches often make his ideas appear more cogent than they are – making the case that, this time around, people should hear the full speeches to understand how trump would govern again….’ ( Rachel Leingang via The Guardian)
‘I make use of the characteristics of more than 6000 rock bands to empirically analyze if and how the stability of their members helps them to get a higher level of success. Bands cover all genres of Rock music (from Country to Punk), and their performance is assessed by having a song ranked in Billboard 100. Analyzing how the turn-over of members of a band affects their performance, it appears that the total number of musicians that left the band (compared to the actual number of musicians) – used as an indicator of instability –positively impacts the probability of a success. This may reveal that more talented musicians tend to be recruited after the departure of founding members, or that new members bring fresh ideas. The latter interpretation is supported by another result, showing that solo artists have a higher probability of success than bands. Finally, I also show that bands that come back to the stage after a split do not perform better.
‘Since 1952, the White House has allowed major-party candidates access to classified intelligence briefings so that they will be current on important issues if they win the election. trump should be denied this courtesy.
…The decision rests, as always, with the sitting president, and Joe Biden is likely to continue this practice so that he will not be accused of “politicizing” access to intelligence. Such accusations need not be taken seriously; they would only be more meaningless noise from a GOP that has already stumbled in a clumsy attempt to impeach Biden after leveling charges of corruption at both him and his son. And although denying trump access to classified briefs would produce squawks and yowls from Republicans, it would also serve as a reminder that trump cannot be trusted with classified information.
The risks of denying trump these early briefings are negligible. As we learned from his presidency, trump is fundamentally unbriefable: He doesn’t listen, and he doesn’t understand complicated national-security matters anyway. The problem with giving trump these briefings, however, isn’t that he’s ignorant. He’s also dangerous, as his record shows.
Indeed, if trump were ga federal employee, he’d have likely already been stripped of his clearances and escorted from the building…’ ( Tom Nichols via The Atlantic)
‘After sending his wife a Valentine’s Day message and appearing on camera on February 15th, Navalny reportedly “felt sick after a walk and lost consciousness.” Only a fool would take the Russia’s announcement at face value – it is clear that Alexei Navalny’s death was an assassination by the murderous regime of Vladimir Putin.
Like Boris Nemtsov before him, Navalny was a challenge to a political system that marginalizes its opposition and crushes all dissent. His bravery should be seen as an inspiration for Russian civil society and his memory will endure beyond the regime that killed him. As we mourn his death, we should also mourn the Russia that could-have-been. Even though Putin would never have allowed his victory, Navaly’s 2018 presidential campaign was the last opportunity to bring political change via the electoral process in Russia.
In a speech this morning at the Munich Security Conference, his widow Yulia Navalnaya called upon the international community to hold Putin accountable. With this in mind, we should turn our attention to the Americans that have enabled and encouraged Putin every step of the way. Tucker Carlson gushes over Moscow’s subway stations and potemkin McDonalds as Putin murders his chief political opponent. donald trump openly invites Russia to attack NATO members while personally torpedoing military aid to Ukraine. These useful idiots should be seen as accessories to murder….’ ( Alexander Vindman via Why It Matters)
‘Brian Wilson’s family is seeking a conservatorship for the Beach Boys star, saying in a filing that he is “unable to properly provide for his own personal needs for physical health, food, clothing, or shelter” due to a neurocognitive disorder similar to dementia. The family said in a statement, shared on Wilson’s Instagram, that it took the decision “to ensure that there will be no extreme changes to the household” after the death last month of Wilson’s wife, Melinda, who had been caring for him. A conservatorship, the statement added, would allow Wilson to “work on current projects as well as participate in any activities he chooses.”
The court document, filed in Los Angeles and reported by The Blast and People, quoted a doctor’s description of Wilson as “easily distracted, often even when aware of surroundings.” The doctor added that Wilson “often makes spontaneous irrelevant or incoherent utterances” and struggles “to maintain decorum appropriate to the situation.” …’ (via Pitchfork)
‘Alexei Navalny, who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died Friday in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence, Russia’s prison agency said. He was 47…’ ( via AP News)
‘I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.
Since this development very directly affects my ability to do my job as I understand it, I talk about it a lot. And when I talk about it with nonacademics, certain predictable responses inevitably arise, all questioning the reality of the trend I describe. Hasn’t every generation felt that the younger cohort is going to hell in a handbasket? Haven’t professors always complained that educators at earlier levels are not adequately equipping their students? And haven’t students from time immemorial skipped the readings?
The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience. Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications, from a variety of perspectives. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing new obstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade—except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them….’ ( Adam Kotsko via Slate)
‘A vague warning by the chair of the House Intelligence Committee about a “serious national security threat” Wednesday is related to Russia’s attempts to develop an antisatellite nuclear weapon for use in space, according to two people familiar with the matter.
While the people did not provide further details on the intel, one of them noted the U.S. has for more than a year been concerned about Russia’s potentially creating and deploying an antisatellite nuclear weapon — a weapon the U.S. and other countries would be unable to adequately defend against….’ ( via POLITICO)
‘Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.
In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.
The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.
Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).
Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it….’ ( via Popular Mechanics)
‘Judges will face choices that affect when, and whether, trump stands trial.
In trump’s New York case, a judge is slated to finalize the timetable for his trial on charges that he falsified business records to cover up an affair with a porn star in the closing weeks of the 2016 election.
In his Washington, D.C., case, the Supreme Court may signal whether it will quickly resolve trump’s claim that he is “immune” from federal charges stemming from his effort to subvert the 2020 election.
In his Georgia case, where trump is also facing state charges related to the 2020 election, a judge has scheduled a Thursday hearing to examine an effort by trump and several co-defendants to disqualify the prosecutors.
And in his Florida case, a judge is weighing trump’s latest motion to postpone key deadlines — a likely precursor to delaying the May 20 trial on charges of hoarding classified records at his mar-a-lago home.
Here’s a look at each of the cases and what to expect this week…’ ( via POLITICO)
‘Whether donald trump faces trial this year for seeking to subvert the 2020 election appears increasingly certain to rest with the nine justices of the Supreme Court — three of whom he nominated himself.
trump is expected to ask the high court to stave off the trial following Tuesday’s ruling from a federal appeals court that emphatically rejected his bid for “presidential immunity” from the criminal charges.
The former president now faces a key deadline of next Monday to ask the Supreme Court to step in — and once he does, the justices will face a set of options with obvious ramifications for the presidential campaign.
They could hear trump’s appeal on an accelerated schedule. They could take their time — and in doing so, essentially guarantee that the federal election-subversion trial could not occur before November. Or they could simply decline to hear trump’s appeal at all — a move that would allow the trial proceedings, which have been stalled for nearly two months, to resume quickly.
And as if the choice weren’t fraught enough, the high court is grappling simultaneously with a separate trump question of historic proportions: whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause disqualifies him from running for president again. The court will hear arguments in that case on Thursday after putting it on an unusually fast track…’ ( via POLITICO)
‘…high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers – Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-Cal tech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU) was stitched together by Elder Fox Documentaries, creating what they call the most life like experience of being on Mars….’ (Open Culture)
As someone who has done his share of traveling around western US landscapes but who is not geologically sophisticated, what struck me about this was not how otherworldly it felt to travel around Mars but, to the contrary, how familiar it seemed. In a way there is something comforting about that. As a science fiction reader, I used to feel that many attempts to describe extraterrestrial landscapes felt disappointingly lame and prosaic (off the top of my head, think of Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Walk in the Dark”), but that turns out to be just right. Actually, the skies of these scenes felt much more alien than the terrain.
Columnist Nick Bolton wants to have a unique take on Apple Vision Pro, so he essentially likens it to crack cocaine:
‘I know deep down that the Apple Vision Pro is too immersive, and yet all I want to do is see the world through it. “I’m sure the technology is terrific. I still think and hope it fails,” one Silicon Valley investor said to me. “Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider.” Harsh words, but he feels what we all feel, a slave to our smartphone, and he’s seen this play before and he knows what the first act is like, and the second act, and he knows how it ends….’ ( via Vanity Fair)
Today is Groundhog Day . What hangs in the balance is whether spring is coming early. In the Pagan calendar, it is Imbolc (or Imbolg), which has marked the beginning of spring since ancient times, coming at the midpoint between the astronomical winter solstice (“Yule”) and the spring equinox (“Ostara”) in the northern hemisphere. It is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals that fall at the ‘quarter cross points’ between the equinoxes and the solstices, along with Beltane, Lugnasadh, and Samhain.
Imbolc was a time to celebrate Brigid (Brigit, Brighid, Bride, Bridget, Bridgit, Brighde, Bríd), the Celtic Goddess of inspiration, healing, and smithcraft with associations to fire, the hearth and poetry. When Ireland was Christianized in the 5th century, the festival of Brigid became Saint Brigid’s Day, although the chronology of the transmigration from the Celtic goddess to the Christian saint is not universally accepted. Imbolc derives from the Old Irish imbolg meaning in the belly, a time when sheep began to lactate and their udders filled and the grass began to grow.It thus coincided with the beginning of the lambing season, the spring sowing, and some of the earliest blooming plants. The gentle curve of a ‘just-showing’ pregnancy embodies the promise of renewal, expectancy and hope.
Evidence indicates that Imbolc has been an important date in the Irish, Scottish and Manx calendar since ancient times. The holiday was a festival of hearth and home with celebrations often embodying hearth fires, feasting, divination for omens of good fortune, and candles or bonfires representing the return of warmth and light. The point of many rituals seemed to be to invite Brigid, and the good fortune she would bring, into the home. Activities included:
— Brigid crosses, consisting of reeds or willows woven in a four-armed equilateral cross, often hung over doors, windows, or stables for protection
— making Bridey (Brideog, Breedhoge, or ‘Biddy’) dolls, representing Brigid, which were paraded from house to house. People would make a bed for her and leave her food and drink.
— visiting of holy wells, which are circled ‘sunwise’ and offerings left. Water from the well was used to bless home, family members, livestock and fields.
— a “spring cleaning” was customary
— Imbolc was traditionally a time of weather divination. Old traditions of watching to see if various animals returned from their winter dens seem to be forerunners of Groundhog Day.
Although many of the customary observances of Imbolc died out during the 20th century, it is still observed and in some places has been revived as a cultural event.Brigid’s Day parades have been revived in the town of Killorglin, County Kerry, which holds a yearly “Biddy’s Day Festival”. Men and women wearing elaborate straw hats and masks visit public houses carrying a Brídeóg to bring good luck for the coming year. They play folk music, dance and sing. The highlight of this festival is a torchlight parade through the town followed by a song and dance contest. Most recently, neopagans and Wiccans have observed Imbolc as a religious holiday.
’…It is the festival of the Maiden, for from this day to March 21st, it is her season to prepare for growth and renewal. Brighid’s snake emerges from the womb of the Earth Mother to test the weather, (the origin of Ground Hog Day), and in many places the first Crocus flowers began to spring forth from the frozen earth. The Maiden is honored, as the Bride, on this Sabbat. Straw Brideo’gas (corn dollies) are created from oat or wheat straw and placed in baskets with white flower bedding. Young girls then carry the Brideo’gas door to door, and gifts are bestowed upon the image from each household. Afterwards at the traditional feast, the older women make special acorn wands for the dollies to hold, and in the morning the ashes in the hearth are examined to see if the magic wands left marks as a good omen. Brighid’s Crosses are fashioned from wheat stalks and exchanged as symbols of protection and prosperity in the coming year. Home hearth fires are put out and re-lit, and a besom is place by the front door to symbolize sweeping out the old and welcoming the new. Candles are lit and placed in each room of the house to honor the re-birth of the Sun. Another traditional symbol of Imbolc is the plough. In some areas, this is the first day of ploughing in preparation of the first planting of crops. A decorated plough is dragged from door to door, with costumed children following asking for food, drinks, or money. Should they be refused, the household is paid back by having its front garden ploughed up. In other areas, the plough is decorated and then Whiskey, the “water of life” is poured over it. Pieces of cheese and bread are left by the plough and in the newly turned furrows as offerings to the nature spirits. It is considered taboo to cut or pick plants during this time. Various other names for this Greater Sabbat are Imbolgc Brigantia (Caledonni), Imbolic (Celtic), Disting (Teutonic, Feb 14th), Lupercus (Strega), St. Bridget’s Day (Christian), Candlemas, Candlelaria (Mexican), the Snowdrop Festival. The Festival of Lights, or the Feast of the Virgin. All Virgin and Maiden Goddesses are honored at this time…’
Imbolc also corresponds with Candlemas, the Christian observance of the baby Jesus’ presentation at the Temple in Jerusalem to officially induct him into Judaism when he was forty days old. It was originally described in the Gospel of Luke as a purification ritual. On Candlemas, a priest traditionally blesses candles which are distributed to the faithful for use throughout the year. In some places, they are placed in windows during storms to ward off damage.
Interestingly, in Scotland, along with Michaelmas, Lammas and Whitsun, Candlemas is one of the four term and quarter days, the four divisions of the legal year, historically used as the days when contracts and leases would begin and end, servants would be hired or dismissed, and rent, interest on loans, and ministers’ stipends would become due. Although they were later fixed by law as falling on the 28th day every three months, they originally occurred on holy days, corresponding roughly to old quarter days used in both Scotland and Ireland.
Some foreign observances:
In France and Belgium, Candlemas (French: La Chandeleur) is celebrated with crêpes. In Italy, traditionally, it (Italian: La Candelora) is considered the last cold day of winter. Tenerife (Spain), Is the day of the Virgin of Candelaria (Saint Patron of the Canary Islands). 2 February. In Southern and Central Mexico, and Guatemala City, Candlemas (Spanish: Día de La Candelaria) is celebrated with tamales. Tradition indicates that on 5 January, the night before Three Kings Day (the Epiphany), whoever gets one or more of the few plastic or metal dolls (originally coins) buried within the Rosca de Reyes must pay for the tamales and throw a party on Candlemas. In certain regions of Mexico, this is the day in which the baby Jesus of each household is taken up from the nativity scene and dressed up in various colorful, whimsical outfits. In Luxembourg, Liichtmëss sees children carrying lighted sticks visiting neighbors and singing a traditional song in exchange for sweets. Sailors are often reluctant to set sail on Candlemas Day, believing that any voyage begun then will end in disaster—given the frequency of severe storms in February, this is not entirely without sense.
‘In a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell, researchers present new evidence that a molecule called Xist — pronounced like the word “exist” and found only in women — is a major culprit in these diseases.
Better understanding of this molecule could lead to new tests that catch autoimmune diseases sooner and, in the longer term, to new and more effective treatments, researchers said.
Women typically have two X chromosomes, while men usually have an X and a Y. Chromosomes are tight bundles of genetic material that carry instructions for making proteins. Xist plays a crucial role by inactivating one of the X chromosomes in women, averting what would otherwise be a disastrous overproduction of proteins.
However, the research team found that, in the process, Xist also generates strange molecular complexes linked to many autoimmune diseases.
Although scientists conducted much of their work in mice, they made an intriguing discovery involving human patients: The Xist complexes ― long strands of RNA entangled with DNA and proteins ― trigger a chemical response in people that is a hallmark of autoimmune diseases…’ ( via Washington Post)
‘Earlier this year, mathematicians discovered a unique shape. Now do-it-yourselfers have found ingenious ways to put it to use….’ ( via The New York Times)
‘Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s eye-opening and disturbing new documentary, Eternal You, has a word of caution for everyone who plans on staying dead after they die: It may soon no longer be up to you.
Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on Saturday night as part of the World Cinema documentary competition, Eternal You does a deep dive into the digital afterlife industry and AI companies that peddle virtual immortality….’ (MovieMaker)
‘On January 6 trump fully revealed himself to be as someone who had the will to destroy the democratic republic even if he didn’t have the means . He attempted to subvert the republic’s constitution and laws and he defied the democracy’s will as expressed in the vote. He lost both constitutionally and popularly. In terms of the American form of government, he had no leg to stand on: neither legality nor legitimacy. But he attempted to remain in office. That he failed is immaterial. The simple fact is that he wanted to put an end to this country as we know it.
The people who celebrate it admit as much: they openly talk about “Caesarism.” So, they want a Caesar not a President. That is just not the American form of government. Also un-American is the notion that trump, as he himself declared on January 6th, represents some force of history that must be obeyed, or some deeper essence of the American volk that must be expressed, that he is the avatar of the “Real People” no matter what the laws and votes might say, and that frustrating him is in effect frustrating “the greatest movement in history,’ to use Trump’s words. That is not a democratic or a republican idea: it is quite simply fascist. Mussolini said and thought the same sorts of things, as did Hitler. And it does not matter if you clamor for it or ruefully reflect that is may just be our fate in this benighted era, it comes down to the the acceptance of a fascist mentality, even if adopted in a tragic or nihilistic key.
From a certain perspective, the critics who say that talking about fascism takes trump too seriously are correct: it involves too much hocus-pocus, it cloaks him in a certain dark grandeur, and gives everything a Spenglerian gloom that makes him seem bigger than he is. After all, he’s just a crook and a conman, an idiot. But the phoniness, that bombast, and the ridiculousness was a part of the original thing, too. There has always been a deeply moronic side to fascism. Fascism is perhaps most fundamentally a moron putting on world-historical airs. “Morons trying to make history” — what better way to describe January 6? The second biggest mistake is to take it too seriously. But the first biggest mistake is to not take it seriously enough….’ ( John Ganz via Unpopular Front)
‘Hawaii hardest hit by loss of eight birds, with an Ohio catfish, a Pacific fruit bat and eight freshwater mussels also disappearing…’ ( Maanvi Singh via The Guardian)
‘Since Jane Goodall’s famous observations of stick tool use by chimpanzees, animal tool use has been observed in numerous species, including many primates, dolphins, and birds. Some animals, such as New Caledonian crows, even craft tools. Elephants frequently use tools4 and also modify them.
‘Law enforcement believe the activity, which makes it harder to then unlock phones (seized for evidence), may be due to a potential update in iOS 18 which tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have not been in contact with a cellular network for some time, according to a document obtained by 404 Media….’ ( Joseph Cox via 404 Media )
‘…[T]he right’s restrictions on abortion might just have been the beginning of a larger assault on personal freedoms, and not for the first time in history… We should remember one of the first things that Hitler did when he was elected—and he did get elected—was to declare abortion a crime against the state…’ ( Jane Mayer via The New Yorker )
‘In Japan’s stormy summer of 1983, Ikuo Ishiyama couldn’t stop thinking about a chilling pattern among his patients. They were dead, but that wasn’t what troubled him. As a specialist in forensic medicine at Tokyo University, Ishiyama was accustomed to seeing dead bodies. However, these victims—numbering in the hundreds—shared a similar demise. “The symptoms are the same,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Young men without medical problems are essentially dying in the same way, without warning.” What way was that? That may be the most mysterious detail: All of the victims died in their sleep.
‘Psilocybin—the hallucinogen in magic mushrooms—continues to show promise as an anti-depressant, especially when combined with psychotherapy. Meanwhile though, it’s being explored for treating anxiety, OCD, irritable bowel syndrome, and other disorders. Two phase 2 clinical trials showing its efficacy in helping with hostility, somatization (the physical expression of psychological distress), and interpersonal sensitivity (heightened awareness of others’ perceptions and reactions) led to University of Toronto researchers to call for a broader reframing of psilocybin-based treatments. In a new Nature Mental Health scientific paper, hey suggest calling psilocybin an “anti-distressant.”…’ (via Boing Boing)
‘Bop Spotter is a real-time collector of songs played by passersby in San Francisco’s Mission District. Installed inside a box high up on a pole, a phone runs Shazam nonstop. The music discovery app allows users to look up an artist and song title by simply recording a few seconds of sound.
‘This systematic review examines empirical evidence supporting the anecdotal assumption, that dogs look like and behave like their owners. To this end, we investigated 15 studies with the aim of testing that: (1) Owners and their dogs resemble each other in appearance and (2) owners and their dogs have similar personalities. Aggregation of the results supports evidence for both hypotheses. …’ (via ScienceDirect )
‘Unless you’re a die-hard trump supporter, a journalist, or an obsessive political hobbyist, you’re likely not getting that regular glimpse into the Republican candidate’s brain. But … maybe you should be?
‘Sanewashing is the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal. Here’s how reporters can eschew it….’ ( Kelly McBride via Poynter )
‘Acadia Healthcare is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found….’ ( via The New York Times )
This was an ironic or satiric blog by Christian Lander which was up from 2008-2010 poking fun at the tragically hip and politically correct (“This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable.”). Alas, I just discovered it. This is the full list of the 136 things white people are supposed to like. Most are timeless; only a few haven’t dated well. By my quick count, I would check off about 80 of the 136. Does that make me only slightly less than 60% hip? Or 60% white? How about you?
‘After sending his wife a Valentine’s Day message and appearing on camera on February 15th, Navalny reportedly “felt sick after a walk and lost consciousness.” Only a fool would take the Russia’s announcement at face value – it is clear that Alexei Navalny’s death was an assassination by the murderous regime of Vladimir Putin.
‘I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.
‘It weaponizes the practice in a new way….’ ( Li Zhou via Vox )
‘A vague warning by the chair of the House Intelligence Committee about a “serious national security threat” Wednesday is related to Russia’s attempts to develop an antisatellite nuclear weapon for use in space, according to two people familiar with the matter.
‘Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.
‘Judges will face choices that affect when, and whether, trump stands trial.
‘Whether donald trump faces trial this year for seeking to subvert the 2020 election appears increasingly certain to rest with the nine justices of the Supreme Court — three of whom he nominated himself.
‘I know deep down that the Apple Vision Pro is too immersive, and yet all I want to do is see the world through it. “I’m sure the technology is terrific. I still think and hope it fails,” one Silicon Valley investor said to me. “Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider.” Harsh words, but he feels what we all feel, a slave to our smartphone, and he’s seen this play before and he knows what the first act is like, and the second act, and he knows how it ends….’ ( via Vanity Fair )
Today is Groundhog Day . What hangs in the balance is whether spring is coming early. In the Pagan calendar, it is Imbolc (or Imbolg), which has marked the beginning of spring since ancient times, coming at the midpoint between the astronomical winter solstice (“Yule”) and the spring equinox (“Ostara”) in the northern hemisphere. It is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals that fall at the ‘quarter cross points’ between the equinoxes and the solstices, along with Beltane, Lugnasadh, and Samhain.
Another traditional symbol of Imbolc is the plough. In some areas, this is the first day of ploughing in preparation of the first planting of crops. A decorated plough is dragged from door to door, with costumed children following asking for food, drinks, or money. Should they be refused, the household is paid back by having its front garden ploughed up. In other areas, the plough is decorated and then Whiskey, the “water of life” is poured over it. Pieces of cheese and bread are left by the plough and in the newly turned furrows as offerings to the nature spirits. It is considered taboo to cut or pick plants during this time. Various other names for this Greater Sabbat are Imbolgc Brigantia (Caledonni), Imbolic (Celtic), Disting (Teutonic, Feb 14th), Lupercus (Strega), St. Bridget’s Day (Christian), Candlemas, Candlelaria (Mexican), the Snowdrop Festival. The Festival of Lights, or the Feast of the Virgin. All Virgin and Maiden Goddesses are honored at this time…’
‘In a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell, researchers present new evidence that a molecule called Xist — pronounced like the word “exist” and found only in women — is a major culprit in these diseases.
‘We’ve learned a lot in the years since Jan. 6. But so have democracy’s opponents….’ ( Sam Adams via Slate )
