‘Educator Arum Natzorkhang quite seamlessly pronounced every iteration of certain English swear words as they evolved from 5000 BCE to 2024 CE into the words we know today….’ (via Laughing Squid)
‘A group of the world’s leading biologists have called for an immediate halt on a technology you’ve probably never even heard of — but is so dangerous, they say, that it could upend the order life itself on this planet, if not wipe it out.
In a nearly three-hundred page technical report published this month, the scientists describe the horrifyingly existential risks posed by what’s known as mirror life: synthetic organisms whose DNA structures are a mirror image to that of all known natural organisms….’ (Frank Landymore via Futurism)
‘The Geminid meteor shower, one of the brightest and most prolific meteor showers of the year, peaks overnight on December 13 and 14. As the winter nights grow longer and colder, the celestial phenomenon is just the excuse we needed to bundle up and get outside.
But this year, an almost full moon will compete with the annual spectacle of shooting stars. Called the “Cold Moon” or “Long Night Moon,” December’s full moon inconveniently falls on the 15th of the month—meaning the bright light will make it harder to see the Geminids, and making it all the more important to plan ahead and find a slice of darkness near you.
With an unobscured dark sky, you could typically see between 100 and 120 shooting stars per hour as Earth passes through the densest part of the Geminids debris trail. While visibility becomes more difficult with city lights or a full moon, you can still expect to see 10 to 20 per hour this year….'(via Condé Nast Traveler)
Culture is humanity’s way of making sense of the world, expressed through language, traditions, and beliefs. Ancient customs—like the Pirahã people living without past or future tense, or the Inca communities risking their lives to rebuild a grass bridge—reflect the beauty and diversity of human creativity. Yet, globalization and economic pressures threaten these traditions. As languages vanish, villages depopulate, and artisans abandon their crafts, we lose not just skills but unique ways of understanding life.
The custodians of these traditions—whether a night watchman in Sweden, a soy sauce brewer in Japan, or a pasta maker in Sardinia—are inseparable from their crafts. Their quiet devotion reminds us of the profound value in dedicating oneself to something enduring. In a homogenizing world, their stories rekindle wonder and show us that humanity is defined by its beliefs, and the richness of life lies in the diversity of its expression.
By preserving these cultural wonders, we honor not just the past but the whimsical, soulful essence of what makes us human. (viaThe Next Big Idea Club)
‘MeMind has connected 10,000 at-risk people with mental health treatment, contributing to a 9% drop in suicides….’ (Lillian Perlmutter via Rest of World)
‘The rate of medical assistance in dying – also known as euthanasia – has grown in Canada for the fifth straight year, albeit at a slower pace.
The country released its fifth annual report since legalising assisted dying in 2016, which for the first time included data on the ethnicity of those seeking euthanasia.
Around 15,300 people underwent assisted dying last year, accounting for 4.7% of deaths in the country. Canada lawmakers are currently seeking to expand access to euthanasia to cover people with mental illnesses by 2027….’ (via BBC)
‘The renowned poet Nikki Giovanni has died. Giovanni died on Monday, Dec. 9, following her third cancer diagnosis, according to a statement from friend and author Renée Watson. She was 81. “We will forever be grateful for the unconditional time she gave to us, to all her literary children across the writerly world,” said poet Kwame Alexander in the statement.
Giovanni published her first poetry collection, Black Feeling Black Talk, in 1968. It established her as an emerging figure out of the Black Arts Movement. In it, Giovanni writes about the intersections of love, politics, loneliness and race. Her language is sometimes spare and longing, other times dense and righteous. The final lines in “Word Poem” read, “let’s build / what we become /when we dream.”…’ (Andrew Limbong via NPR)
‘Google on Monday announced Willow, its latest, greatest quantum computing chip. The speed and reliability performance claims Google’s made about this chip were newsworthy in themselves, but what really caught the tech industry’s attention was an even wilder claim tucked into the blog post about the chip.
Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in his blog post that this chip was so mind-boggling fast that it must have borrowed computational power from other universes.
Ergo the chip’s performance indicates that parallel universes exist and “we live in a multiverse.”…’ (Julie Bort via TechCrunch)
‘Given the degeneration of the Republican Party into a cult of personality, it is not at all unthinkable that if trump is still physically fit in 2028 that he and JD Vance could switch places on the GOP ticket, with the goal of having Vance elected and then stepping down to allow trump to return to the helm. There is nothing unconstitutional on its face about such a scheme. And there is no reason to think trump’s MAGA base would raise any objections to keeping their dear leader in power….’ (Bill Blum via Alternet.org)
‘It’s impossible to get catchy songs out of your head. That’s why we brought together music psychologist Dr. Kelly Jakubowski and audio engineers to create the Earworm Eraser – a scientifically-engineered track designed to get rid of earworms for good.The Earworm Eraser audio track works by incorporating scientific principles of music and the brain to disrupt the neural patterns that keep a catchy tune stuck in one’s head. The track features a series of audio patterns and rhythmic structures that are carefully designed to break the loop of the song in the listener’s mind.
‘Journalists who’ve lived through freedom-of-the-press-hating dictators who have some words of warning for us here in Murica: with trump in office.
The Nieman Foundation at Harvard asked journalists from places like Hungary, the Philippines, and other spots where democracy’s taken a few kicks to the teeth what they think about our current situation.
Remember when trump sued CBS News for $10 billion because he was mad about how they edited a Kamala Harris interview? Or when he threatened to yank broadcast licenses from media outlets that hurt his feelings? Our international journalist friends say these are the early warning signs:
“American colleagues, prepare for the worst,” writes Glenda Gloria, editor of Rappler, a news site in the Philippines whose staff endured years of personal attack and legal torment from the Rodrigo Duterte administration. “If it doesn’t happen, you’ll be happy to be proven wrong. If it happens, it could happen fast.”
And when trump’s out there at rallies saying things like, “Somebody would have to shoot through the fake news to get to me,” journalists who’ve seen their colleagues actually get murdered think it’s smart to take him at his word…’ (via Boing Boing)
‘Over and over again during the first reign of donald trump, weary students of strongman corruption and late imperial decline warned that “there is no bottom.” They were proven right, of course, and we’re about to experience an accelerated lurch into authoritarian chaos that makes the whole notion of a bottom seem quaint. Yet, with all those provisos fixed clearly in mind, it’s also safe to say that Kash Patel, hurriedly tapped over Thanksgiving weekend via the president-elect’s Truth Social account as the incoming director of the FBI, represents a significant signpost in the direction of the deeper chasms of the bottom….’ (Chris Lehmann via The Nation)
‘Joe Biden has now provided every Republican—and especially those running for Congress in 2026—with a ready-made heat shield against any criticism about trump’s pardons, past or present. Biden has effectively neutralized pardons as a political issue, and even worse, he has inadvertently given power to trump’s narrative about the unreliability of American institutions. …’ ( Tom Nichols via The Atlantic)
This morning, I awakened realizing that Follow Me Here is a quarter-century old. I misremembered and thought it was actually twenty-five years to the day since my first post, but looking back I actually opened the blog on November 15, 1999. Too bad, it would have been fitting if the anniversary were Thanksgiving Day! It has been a tumultuous quarter-century and also a third of my life. My career has grown and deepened as has my marriage. We have raised two children, the younger of whom was born just the year before, 1998. (Neither my wife, my son, or my daughter seem to be very interested in this pet project of mine although they certainly do not resent it and FmH has never been an intrusion or an interference in our family life, I would venture to say.) I am still in the same home I lived in when I started FmH, and it is still the same home on the web.
I don’t have the time right now to go back and read through the twenty-five years of posts but you can dive in if you like. Best is by simply going to the URL https://followmehere.com/yyyy/mm/, for any year yyyy and month mm. Or, in the righthand sidebar, navigate back month by month by the calendar, more painstakingly. I started out using the Blogger platform and migrated several years later to WordPress, which I still use. The Blogger posts, with a lot more hardcoded HTML, were imported into the WordPress corpus so I am not sure exactly when the transition occurred. I have played not so much with design tweaks through the years, changing the style of the attribution of each post and varying the page themes. But, in WordPress, whenever I change the theme it applies the change retroactively to the entire body of posts, so you won’t see the actual historical appearance of old pages, if you care. Maybe the Wayback Machine could help, I haven’t looked.
I have played a little more with the succinctness of the posts. Once in awhile but not too often, posts like this one have reflected on the meaning and purpose of blogging in a meta- sort of way. As you can tell by the name of the blog, Follow Me Here has always been mostly a chronicle of my reading on the web. I make no claims that it is anything more than a ‘weblog’, which is the original nomenclature for ‘blog’ if you weren’t aware. For a long time I insisted on using the full term but long ago ceded that battle to popular culture. Sometimes I have simply posted links to interesting content although it has usually been more than a tumblelog or microblog. At other times I have written original reactions or done a brain dump prompted by a link. Most often recently, as I am sure you have noticed, it has been mostly curating blockquotes, perhaps with a pithy comment at the bottom. While some readers over the years have pressed me to do more commentary, I am really more interested in trusting you to have your own reactions to things I point you to.
Especially with my attention to the deterioration in American political life after bearing witness to 9/11, the Bush Jr administration and its risible War on Terror, and of course the current Orange Menace and Orange Menace Resurgent, I have more than had my fill of self-important punditry and have no intention to add to that cacophony, although I am certainly opinionated and you probably do not read FmH unless your your worldview and mine intersect well. There have been times when posts have been more conflictual and provoked dismissive or hostile comments. I have always delighted in keeping comments turned on for all posts, although reader responses are few and far between these days… but always welcome and encouraged. (It is good that the WordPress commenting system is so functional that the moderator can readily eliminate imbecilic spam, I would add!)
The weblogging phenomenon has had its ebbs and flows, of course, over these years. It hasn’t mattered to me, since I haven’t cared about being faddish and haven’t been overly insecure about an audience’s flagging attention or size. I honestly don’t know what makes the difference about how much attention a blog attracts. It has been the furthest thing from my mind to do any search engine optimization, for example, and I have never had the slightest intention to monetize this site. This is pure and simple a ‘hobby’. As such, I cannot even take tax deductions for the associated expenses.
As weblogging has waxed and waned as a cultural phenomenon, I have been honored to be a peer to other thoughtful blogs over the years, few of which (with the notable exception of Kottke, around about as long but far more widely read) are active anymore. I think it was a site called Wood S Lot, with whom I had a friendly rivalry although he was far more erudite than I have been, that I felt the most kinship. And I felt close to another blogging pioneer, Rebecca Blood, who wrote an early book about the history of blogging and the cadre of ancestral sites that included FmH. I would also like to give a nod to another blogger for the ages, John Gruber and his Daring Fireball. The world of tech blogging that he inhabits (dominates?) rarely casts its shadow on FmH’s content, although, Mac geek in me, I do follow the field in my spare time.
Apart from the wild ride of the last quarter-century’s politics, FmH posts reflect other areas that grab me in my reading and thinking. At times I have tried to examine and explain new developments in my areas of professional interest, psychiatry and neuropsychiatry, although that is sort of a busman’s holiday, since that is what consumes me during my professional activities. I am a clinician, administrator, participate a little in research, but at this stage in my career I increasingly enjoy my teaching — students in mental health fields, younger colleagues, my patients, their families, and the lay public who (I am sure you will not disagree) need to understand human psychology and mental health problems better so we can remove impediments to addressing human suffering as best we can on an interpersonal and societal level. Over the FmH years, largely coinciding with the arc of my career, I have been so pained to see the decreasing dominance of dedicating oneself to service and the alleviation of suffering in my field. As Allen Ginsburg said, “And what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.” I have always believed in living a value-driven life as my way of addressing the problem of being, and like to bring others along for the ride. One of the most cherished compliments bestowed on my work at FmH was the late writer (and later friend) Steve Silberman‘s comment that he found me to be the “Oliver Sacks of blogging”, which I accepted with gratitude although I am too humble to accept that mantle. So, at least every once in awhile, I will probably go off on a fascinating psychological topic. On the other hand, this is anything but a psychiatric blog. I have read a few of these and they seem far to lackluster, narrow and constrained for my taste. And, of course, sometimes self-serving.
Before it became a kitschy term, I also aspired to posting “edgy” topics here, In the sidebar, I have always proclaimed, “You can only tell the shapes of things by looking at their edges…” In 20th and 21st century hubris, we have tended to think we know what’s what, no matter the topic, which strikes me as limited and pitiful at times. Some of my posts simply point to the mysterious events or phenomena in the world that we do not understand. It is as if I am simply saying, “Anomalous events happen. Get used to it. Don’t filter them out.” This is also in the service of a mindful approach to life, without simply trying to impose too much meaning. Even though I have always thought of myself as intellectually curious. On the other hand, another type of blog this emphatically is not, as you know by reading it, is one of the credulous sites that explore paranormal, supernatural, or cryptozoological topics exclusively. That’s just the spicing here.
As far as cultural criticism goes, I am an inveterate cultural consumer, although I am stuck way in the past, as befitting my age. The blog may at times reflect my love of the Beat poets, outsider art, and musical trends hearkening back to the counterculture of the ’60’s and ’70’s, as well as jazz and classical music. Apart from the reading I do in my professional field, I go for lowbrow and contemporary fiction. Some of that creeps into the things I log on FmH, I think. Cultural experiences for me are a nuanced balance between challenge and reverence for the past, so sometimes if I take note of a new, more disruptive, cultural trend, you can feel me rolling my eyes or shaking my head between the lines. Old fuddy duddy, maybe? But proud of it, and, yes, decrying the decline of western civilization. Also, when I am politically dispirited and particularly now as the authoritarian threat looms, I am more attracted to expressing resistance and rebellion in broader cultural terms.
Certainly, the frequency and intensity of my posting has fallen off. So, probably, has my readership, although I do not follow the statistics with any regularity. I think I am getting at most dozens, rarely hundreds, of visitors per day. But you few can count on continuing to find my awed, cynical, irreverent, enraged, wondering tone here, and I am immensely grateful you are following me here. To the next twenty-five years?
A special nod to my lifelong friend abby, who has enthusiastically supported my effort and dedicatedly read Follow Me Here since day one, as well as pointing me toward numerous pertinent items to post. (Hmmm, especially now that he is retired from his career, should I make him a co-author of Follow me Here?)
‘The word “kakistocracy” is trending as Trump makes cabinet picks – but it’s not the first time it’s been used to describe lousy leadership…’ ( Matthew Cantor via The Guardian)
‘Demure’, as used in a novel and divergent way, is apparently dictionary.com’s word of the year. Sorry, but this seems to me to be another sign of the decline of western civilization. (via CNN)
‘Some of the orcas off North America’s west coast have taken to wearing dead salmon on their heads, resurrecting a curious trend that was first reported in the 1980s.
Local photographers noticed the salmon-wearing orcas last month – and so did researchers. Deborah Giles, science and research director for the non-profit organisation Wild Orca, was observing the marine mammals in South Puget Sound in south-west Washington a few weeks ago. “We saw one with a fish on its head,” she says. “So that was fun – it’s been a while since I’ve personally seen it.”
We still don’t understand why the orcas – or killer whales – behave this way. “Honestly, your guess is as good as mine,” says Giles. But that doesn’t mean we will never find an explanation.
This trend seems to be specific to the west coast orcas, and given their long lifespan, it could have spread through the same whales that wore fish as hats decades earlier. “It does seem possible that some individuals that experienced [the behaviour the] first time around may have started it again,” says Andrew Foote at the University of Oslo, Norway….’ (Colin Barras via New Scientist)
‘trump hasn’t been sworn into office yet but, as one U.S. senator recently said, he’s already delaying his legal responsibilities when it comes to signing an ethics agreement that has to be on file before a presidential transition takes place.
The trump transition’s “unprecedented delay” is causing an issue with access to government records and even cybersecurity assistance, according to Politico.
For example, according to Politico, trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services has been “rebuffed” in efforts to communicate with outgoing government officials.
“Advisers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reached out to the Health and Human Services Department multiple times after donald trump tapped him to lead the massive agency, hoping to jumpstart coordination before his takeover in late January. They were rebuffed,” according to the report. “Kennedy’s inability to communicate with the agency he may soon manage, confirmed by an administration official with knowledge of the episodes granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations, is just one consequence of the president-elect’s continued foot-dragging on signing the standard trio of ethics and transparency agreements with the federal government — something h donald trump is team pledged to do shortly after the election.”
That’s not the only thing that’s being held up by the “standoff,” the report states.
“It also means they can’t access cybersecurity support or secure email servers for transition-related work, or request FBI background checks for their nominees,” it says. “Amid an uptick in hacking this year — including breaches of trump’s own team as recently as August — experts are alarmed that the transition is eschewing federal cybersecurity support, particularly as they begin to receive intelligence briefings.”
The report further states that, “until the standoff is resolved, trump’s Cabinet nominees will gain no more insight than the general public into the workings of the departments they’re supposed to run.”…’ (David McAfee via Raw Story)
‘It’s thought that 4 per cent of the global population is plagued by a persistent, rumbling sound in their ears – the source of which is a total enigma. Ellie Harrison speaks to the people who’ve been trying to get to the bottom of a noise that has been wreaking havoc for many years…
The earliest reliable reports of the Hum date from the Seventies, when numerous Bristol residents wrote letters to the Bristol Evening Post to complain about hearing the noise, which has since been compared to the sound of an idling truck or thunder – and is different from tinnitus. Some Bristolians still hear it to this day, and it’s been reported in places around the world, from the suburbs of Tokyo to Taos in New Mexico and Largs in Scotland. It’s left many “hearers” anxious and depressed, and has been linked to several suicides. Over the years, many theories have been posed and investigations conducted, but there is no clear consensus on the cause…’ ( Ellie Harrison via The Independent)
‘Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a former constitutional law professor, said he suspects trump doesn’t actually want a constitutional crisis ― but also doesn’t care if he triggers one if that’s what it takes to get a loyalist like Gaetz running the Department of Justice. “He wants what he wants, and he’s not going to allow the Constitution to stand in the way,” Raskin told HuffPost. “But you know, he has happened upon, really, one of the Senate’s core functions.”
Raskin is optimistic that Republican senators, who this week elected Sen. John Thune of South Dakota as their incoming majority leader, will stand up for their institutional prerogatives. Thune has said he wouldn’t discard the filibuster, for example, and offered only a half-hearted endorsement of allowing recess appointments. “I don’t think, in the final analysis, that members of Congress are going to surrender our essential constitutional functions,” Raskin said.
Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, could see no good outcome if the choice is between installing the likes of Gaetz into the top law enforcement job in the country or bringing on a constitutional crisis. “I don’t even know what the difference is, what you just described. They both sound like the same thing,” Pelosi said.
For his part, Thune suggested Thursday evening in a Fox News interview that if trump did not have the votes to get someone like Gaetz through the Senate, then he also did not have the votes he would need to have the chamber agree to an adjournment.
“The same Republicans… that might have a problem voting for somebody under regular order probably also have a problem voting to put the Senate into recess,” Thune said….’ (via HuffPost Latest News)
‘What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs? Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?…’ ( Rick Perlstein via The American Prospect)
‘Long-term zinc creep-induced failure in the 57-year-old telescope’s cable spelter sockets was the root cause of the telescope’s collapse, the report says. Sockets filled with zinc held in place a set of cables suspending the telescope’s main platform over the reflector dish. Gradually the zinc lost its hold on the cables and allowed several of them to pull out, leading to the collapse of the platform into the reflector. …’ (via National Academies)
in The New York Times Magazine. Russell did not endorse any specific political party or economic system. Instead, he advocated for an intellectual mindset characterized by humility, openness to evidence, and tolerance for dissenting viewpoints. He perceived this approach as humanity’s most effective defense against fanaticism and authoritarianism.
The article concludes with Russell’s “New Decalogue”—ten principles for a free mind:
Refrain from absolute certainty in any belief.
Refrain from concealing evidence in the pursuit of belief, as it is inevitable to be discovered.
Refrain from attempting to suppress thought, as it is likely to be successful.
When confronted with opposition, even from family members, strive to overcome it through argument rather than relying solely on authority. A victory contingent upon authority is ephemeral and illusory.
Disregard the authority of others, as there are always alternative authorities to be found.
Refrain from using power to suppress opinions deemed pernicious, as such opinions may ultimately suppress you.
Embrace eccentricity in your opinions, as every currently accepted opinion was once considered unconventional.
Find greater pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement. If you value intelligence as you should, intelligent dissent implies a deeper level of agreement than passive conformity.
Be meticulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, as concealment is more disruptive than candidness.
Refrain from harboring envy towards the contentment of those who reside in a state of naivety, as only a fool can perceive it as happiness.
‘… The now-president-elect, according to that NBC survey, posted his biggest margin of 53%-27% among voters who don’t follow any news. trump’s win was a triumph of the ill-informed…’ (via Philadelphia Inquirer)
‘Now that trump is headed back to the White House, with X’s Elon Musk in tow, there is not even a pretense of hope on that platform for anyone who voted against trump. It’s better late than never, but it’s well and truly time to cut X loose….’ (Nitish Pahwa *via Slate*)
‘donald trump has vowed to deport millions and jail his enemies. To carry out that agenda, his administration will exploit America’s digital surveillance machine. Here are some steps you can take to evade it….’ ( Andy Greenberg via WIRED)
Don’t think this pertains to you? (a) Don’t be so sure. (b) Pass it on to someone who you know is not so lucky.
‘If changes to the social media site formerly known as Twitter have you thinking of ditching X, here’s how to completely leave the service behind….
1. Sign in to your X account and tap your profile icon.
2. In the side menu, scroll down and tap Settings and Support, then select Settings and privacy.
3. Select Your account > Deactivate your account.
4. Tap Deactivate.
5. You’ll be prompted to enter your password and tap Deactivate to confirm.
If you change your mind, you can restore your account for up to 30 days after you deactivate it. However, deactivating your account is not deleting your account. If you want to delete your account, you simply need to not access your account within the 30-day deactivation period. After the 30 days, your account will be deleted and your username will no longer be associated with your account…’ (via CNET)
‘Paradoxically, however, trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope.
trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers….
The kinds of actions that will stop trump from destroying America in 2025 are the same ones that stopped many of his plans the first time around. They are not flashy, and they will require sustained attention, because the next battles for democracy will be fought by lawyers and legislators, in Washington and in every state capitol. They will be fought by citizens banding together in associations and movements to rouse others from the sleepwalk that has led America into this moment.
trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do….’ (Tom Nicholsvia The Atlantic)
‘The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.
donald trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything—after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal—the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.
And trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong.
Certainly, even before he once again assumes the reins of power, trump has cemented his status as the most consequential American politician of this century.
And when he assumes the reins of power, he’ll start off as a powerful and emboldened president. He’ll have extraordinary momentum from his victory. He’ll be able to claim a mandate for an agenda that the public has approved. He’ll have willing apparatchiks and politicians at his disposal, under the guidance of JD Vance and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller, eager to help him advance that agenda. He’ll have a compliant Republican majority in the Senate. And it looks as if Republicans may narrowly hold the House.
It’s hard to imagine a worse outcome.
If you think, as I do, that trump’s agenda could do great damage to the country and to the world, if you think of deportations of immigrants at home and the betrayal of brave Ukrainians abroad and you shudder, if you think that turning our health policy over to Robert Kennedy Jr. will cause real harm, you’re right to feel real foreboding for the future.
And of course there is no guarantee that the American people will turn against trump and his agenda. They knew fully well who it was they were choosing this time. Their support may well be more stubborn than one would like. It certainly has been over the last four years.
So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.
But we can’t only do those things. As Churchill put it: “In Defeat: Defiance.” We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage from trump. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.
To do all this, we’ll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.
And we’ll have to have the fortitude to say, ‘Yes, at times a majority of the American people can be wrong.’ That they were wrong on November 5, 2024. That vox populi is not vox Dei.
I’ve sometimes quoted John McCain’s wonderful comment, something he used to say with deadpan irony: It’s always darkest . . . before it turns pitch black.
But the real McCain was cheerful about life and hopeful about America.
So as I write this before dawn Wednesday morning, and as I contemplate the dark and difficult period ahead, I’ll instead invoke, as he would in this circumstance, the original sentiment that he was using as his foil. As the mid-nineteenth century Irish writer Samuel Lover remarked:
There is a beautiful saying amongst the Irish peasantry to inspire hope under adverse circumstances: “Remember,” they say, “that the darkest hour of all, is the hour before day.”
“Hope under adverse circumstances.” That’s what we need. Hope followed by thought and action, all to help bring about a new day for a great nation which has, for now, made a terrible mistake….’ (William Kristol and Andrew Eggervia The Bulwark)
‘Hunter S. Thompson, writing in September 1972, a little over one month ahead of Nixon’s landslide reelection:
The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.
Well … maybe so. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves: finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government”, is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.
McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end?
If every damn word of that doesn’t ring true to you today, you’re deaf….’ (John Gruber via Daring Fireballl)
‘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)
‘The morning after donald trump won the presidential election this week, I stumbled out of bed and searched my bookshelf for a slim volume I hadn’t looked at in years: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Frankl knew a thing or two about living through a time of rising authoritarianism. A Viennese Jew born in the early 20th century, he was a budding psychiatrist and philosopher when he was sent to the Nazi concentration camps just months after he got married. His wife and other family members died in the camps — but he survived.
We are not, thank goodness, facing a situation even remotely as grave as Frankl’s. But trump has given us every reason to fear that he plans to hollow out American democracy and aspires to authoritarian rule. A big part of what makes that scary is the sense that our agency will be severely constrained — that, for example, even more of us will become unfree to make decisions about our own bodies. And that can lead to despair.
This is exactly where Frankl can help us: He argued that human beings always have agency, even when we’re facing a horrible reality that it’s too late to undo. “When we are no longer able to change a situation,” he wrote, “we are challenged to change ourselves.”…’ (via Vox)
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)
‘There are certain things you can say that can be a blessing or a curse at the same time, like when I would tell my kids, “May you have children just like you!” usually when I was angry. It’s the same with the phrase “May you live in interesting times.” I hadn’t thought much of it, but in the back of my mind I thought that was something Mr. Spock said on Star Trek. In that I may have been a victim of the Mandela effect. It was said in the Star Trek Universe, but by Harry Kim on the show Voyager, in the episode “The Cloud” from 1995. So where did I know it from, and where did the saying originally come from?
Robert F. Kennedy used the phrase in a speech in 1966, and attributed it to an old Chinese curse. From there, it was quoted by many memorable people. But Kennedy was not the first documented use of the phrase, and it may be much older -and it’s not an old Chinese curse. Read what we know about the history of “May you live in interesting times” at Mental Floss….’ (via Neatorama)
‘Hopefully you’re all recovering from the candy comas you might have slipped into after eating too much candy on Halloween. Judging from your (or your kids’) candy hauls, do you think you could guess the most popular candy in your state? …Innerbody analyzed Google Trends search data over a year to identify the most popular candy in each state….
Here are some highlights from their findings:
Dubble Bubble Gum was the least popular candy in the U.S. by far in 44 states.
28 states showed no interest in Dubble Bubble Gum and at least one other type of candy.
Charms Blow Pops and Jolly Ranchers were tied for the type of candy of greatest interest to the most states (seven).
In second place was Starburst (six states), Kit Kat (five states) stole third place, and Almond Joy (four states) was our runner-up.
With the highest combined search value (1,508), Utah is the most candy-loving state.
Alaska, with the lowest combined search value (616), loved (or at least searched for) candy the least…’ (via Boing Boing)
Is it possible to have a psychedelic experience from a placebo alone? Most psychedelic studies find few effects in the placebo control group, yet these effects may have been obscured by the study design, setting, or analysis decisions.
Objective
We examined individual variation in placebo effects in a naturalistic environment resembling a typical psychedelic party.
Methods
Thirty-three students completed a single-arm study ostensibly examining how a psychedelic drug affects creativity. The 4-h study took place in a group setting with music, paintings, coloured lights, and visual projections. Participants consumed a placebo that we described as a drug resembling psilocybin, which is found in psychedelic mushrooms. To boost expectations, confederates subtly acted out the stated effects of the drug and participants were led to believe that there was no placebo control group. The participants later completed the 5-Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness Rating Scale, which measures changes in conscious experience.
Results
There was considerable individual variation in the placebo effects; many participants reported no changes while others showed effects with magnitudes typically associated with moderate or high doses of psilocybin. In addition, the majority (61%) of participants verbally reported some effect of the drug. Several stated that they saw the paintings on the walls “move” or “reshape” themselves, others felt “heavy… as if gravity [had] a stronger hold”, and one had a “come down” before another “wave” hit her.
Conclusion
Understanding how context and expectations promote psychedelic-like effects, even without the drug, will help researchers to isolate drug effects and clinicians to maximise their therapeutic potential….’ (Jay Olson et al, via Psychopharmacology [2020] 237:1371-1382)
‘Over the past three days, the streets of Toulouse, France, hosted an urban opera titled The Guardian of the Temple—The Gates of Darkness, in which three massive robotic puppets of mythological creatures—Lilith the scorpion woman, Asterion the Minotaur, and Ariane the spider—performed in several locations around the city. The show, put on by the French street-theater company La Machine, was directed by François Delarozière….’ (via The Atlantic)
‘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)
‘The web’s biggest AI-powered search engines are featuring the widely debunked idea that white people are genetically superior to other races….’ (via WIRED)
‘Key to the dynamic of The Dead was the way Mr. Lesh used the bass to provide ever-shifting counterpoints to the dancing lines of the lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, the curt riffs of the rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, the bold rhythms of the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and, in the band’s first eight years, the warm organ work of Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen….’ (via The New York Times)
‘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)
‘Dozens of interviews with people deeply familiar or involved with the election process point to a clear consensus: Not only could trump make a second attempt at overturning an election he loses, he and his allies are already laying the groundwork.
…2024 is not 2020. trump’s path to pulling it off this time is even narrower and more extreme. For one thing, trump lacks some of the tools he threatened to wield four years ago to upend the transfer of power; today, the military and Justice Department answer to Joe Biden. trump also needs allies to win elections that would put them in a position to reverse a defeat: Overturning a Kamala Harris victory would require an enormous amount of help from Republican power brokers in statehouses and Congress, some of whom spurned him four years ago.
trump’s first attempt to exploit the neglected machinery of American democracy also spurred real action by congressional Democrats. Updates to the Electoral Count Act in the wake of trump’s 2020 gambit aimed to bind vote counters, election officials and even Congress to the results certified by state governments, all of which makes it tougher, in theory, to steal an election.
But trump is heading into the 2024 election informed by his failure to overturn the results four years earlier. And his incentive to obtain the powers and protections of the White House is likely stronger than ever: If he loses, trump will face an avalanche of criminal proceedings that could last the rest of his life. If he wins, they are likely to go away.
“No one knows exactly what trump’s attack on the electoral system will be in 2024,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 select committee. “What will he do this time?”
The answer, according to lawmakers, congressional investigators, party operatives, election officials and constitutional law experts, goes something like this:
— He will deepen distrust in the election results by making unsupported or hyperbolic claims of widespread voter fraud and mounting longshot lawsuits challenging enough ballots to flip the outcome in key states.
— He will lean on friendly county and state officials to resist certifying election results — a futile errand that would nevertheless fuel a campaign to put pressure on elected Republican legislators in statehouses and Congress.
— He will call on allies in GOP-controlled swing-state legislatures to appoint “alternate” presidential electors.
— He will rely on congressional Republicans to endorse these alternate electors — or at least reject Democratic electors — when they convene to certify the outcome.
— He will try to ensure Harris is denied 270 votes in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House, where Republicans are likely to have the numbers to choose trump as the next president….’ (via POLITICO)
‘During an interview with Meet the Press, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) questions the legality of Elon Musk promising $1 million giveaways to voters who sign his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”…’ (via NBC)
‘Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started out tied and has only gotten closer.
We supposedly live in a country in which a plurality of voters are independents. You’d think they’d behave, well, independently and get swayed by events. But no. In our era the polling numbers barely move.
The second thing that baffles me is: Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched….’ (David Brooks via The New York Times)
‘In 2020, when donald trump questioned the results of the election, the courts decisively rejected his efforts, over and over again. In 2024, the judicial branch may be unable to save our democracy.
The rogues are no longer amateurs. They have spent the last four years going pro, meticulously devising a strategy across multiple fronts — state legislatures, Congress, executive branches and elected judges — to overturn any close election.
The new challenges will take place in forums that have increasingly purged officials who put country over party. They may take place against the backdrop of razor-thin election margins in key swing states, meaning that any successful challenge could change the election.
We have just a few short weeks to understand these challenges so that we can be vigilant about them….’ (Neal Katyal, professor at Georgetown University Law Center, via The New York Times)
‘Here is a short and incomplete list of things that former president donald trump has done this week:
Sunday: trump says the US military should be deployed against “the enemy within” on Election Day. It’s unclear who exactly he’s talking about, but he does refer to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) as an example of a domestic enemy later in the interview.
Monday: trump stops a town hall to conduct a 40-minute impromptu dance party, where he plays songs like “YMCA” and “Hallelujah” on stage with an obviously confused South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R).
Tuesday: When asked during a Bloomberg interview about his policy toward Google, trump responds with an extended riff on an election lawsuit in Virginia. When prompted to actually answer the question, trump launches into a rant about critical stories appearing on Google News, said he’d called “the head of Google” to complain, and then threatened to “do something” to the company in response.
Also Tuesday: trump warns that “hydrogen is the new car,” and tells a story about a man who died in a hydrogen car explosion near a tree and could not be identified by his wife. Hydrogen-fueled cars are in fact a 10-year-old technology with a small and declining global market share. There is no evidence that they can explode like the Hindenburg, as a car with hydrogen fuel cells is not the same thing as a dirigible inflated with hydrogen gas.
Wednesday: Asked about the “enemy within” comments from Sunday, trump doubles down — saying Democrats like Schiff are indeed such an enemy, that they are “Marxists” and “fascists” who are “so evil” and “dangerous for our country.”
Throughout these events, trump has come off as (alternately) a buffoon and a would-be dictator. One minute, you’re laughing at his campy dance moves and Hindenburg car rants, the next you’re worrying that he really might try to send troops after American citizens.
Yet the two trumps, the clown and the menace, are intimately tied together: The absurdity helps normalize his dangerousness….’ (via Vox)
‘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)
In bizarre town hall episode, sways and bops for nearly 40 min instead of answering questions.
‘Is donald trump well enough to serve as president?
The question is not temperamental or philosophical fitness—he made clear long ago that the answer to both is no—but something more fundamental.
The election is in three weeks, and Pennsylvania is a must-win state for both trump and Kamala Harris, but during a rally last night in Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, trump got bored with the event, billed as a “town hall,” and just played music for almost 40 minutes, scowling, smirking, and swaying onstage. trump is no stranger to surreal moments, yet this was one of the oddest of his political career….’ (David Graham via The Atlantic)
Related:
‘The scene comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity…’ ( Marianne LeVine via The Washington Post)
‘Go outside at sunset tonight and see a comet! C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) has become visible in the early evening sky in northern locations to the unaided eye. To see the comet, look west through a sky with a low horizon. If the sky is clear and dark enough, you will not even need binoculars — the faint tail of the comet should be visible just above the horizon for about an hour….’
‘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)
‘The New York Times reports that Bob Wordward’s new book War includes a few stories about donald trump being Putin’s stooge.
When the world, including the United States, was suffering a dire shortage of COVID-19 tests, trump was sending tests to his pal Putin for “personal use.” After leaving office, there are stories of donald rushing aides out of his way to take a private call with his good buddy, Vladimir. Campaign spokespeople do a terrible job denying the calls have happened or may be ongoing….’
‘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)
‘Parable of the Talents, a novel by Octavia E. Butler, published in 1998, portrays a dystopian United States under the control of Christian fundamentalists. The group, known as “Christian America,” is led by President Andrew Steele Jarret, whose slogan is “Make America Great Again.”…’
‘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’s nothing like an antisemite speaking at an event denouncing antisemitism. Which is what donald trump did yesterday in Washington, D.C., where he warned the conservative Israeli-American Council that if he loses in November, “the Jewish people” will be to blame.
“I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven’t been treated right, but you haven’t been treated right because you’re putting yourself in great danger,” trump warned, before whipping out his trusty old dog whistle.
“If I don’t win this election…I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss…”‘
‘JD Vance’s repeated attacks on Haitian immigrants have fueled a common refrain from Democrats — that he and former president donald trump are “scapegoating” immigrants by trying to shift manufactured blame onto them for the real-world problems of Springfield, Ohio.
The Republican ticket is indeed scapegoating Haitian immigrants. But for Vance, especially, there is likely nothing accidental or impulsive about it. In his own writing, the GOP vice-presidential nominee has clearly conveyed the power — and possible dangers — of scapegoating, casting “efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim” as “a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else.”…’
‘donald trump briefly followed the first attempt on his life with calls for unity. This time he’s going straight to a far more brazen message: Democrats’ rhetoric put my life in danger….’
‘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.”…’
‘Thousands of beepers and two-way radios exploded in attacks against Hezbollah, but mainstream consumer devices like smartphones aren’t likely to be weaponized the same way….’
‘The best times to view the event will depend on your location, but the lunar eclipse will peak at 10:44 p.m. ET, according to NASA. All of North and South America will have a chance to see the partial lunar eclipse and harvest supermoon depending on the weather. Europe and Africa will also have an opportunity to see the eclipse.
This lunar eclipse will be a partial one, with only the upper portion of the moon being plunged into the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow known as the umbra…’
‘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)
‘In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high (58 feet).
The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time.
Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. And unless the buoy had been taken for a ride, we might never have known it even happened….
“Proportionally, the Ucluelet wave is likely the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded,” explained physicist Johannes Gemmrich from the University of Victoria in 2022.
“Only a few rogue waves in high sea states have been observed directly, and nothing of this magnitude…
Unfortunately, a 2020 study predicted wave heights in the North Pacific are going to increase with climate change, which suggests the Ucluelet wave may not hold its record for as long as our current predictions suggest.”…’
‘The safeguards that kept trump in check during his first term have collapsed — starting with the MAGA-fication of the Republican Party. “We know from the first administration that trump was an amateur and lots of people stopped his most radical actions,” says Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works. He underscores that trump’s darkest ambitions were present from the beginning — from the Muslim ban to the coup attempt of Jan. 6. “The only thing that stopped him from being a full-on dictator was other people,” Stanley says. “We know that that’s not going to happen anymore.”…’ (via Rolling Stone)
‘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….’
‘When asked by Fox News why trump felt moderators hadn’t given the same treatment to Harris, trump answered: “Because they’re dishonest.” Perhaps, instead, Harris didn’t have the gall to lie so flagrantly and frequently on the national stage….’
‘If donald trump wins in November and launches a full-blown authoritarian presidency next year—as he has promised to do in his own words—what exactly would that national nightmare look like?
One set of oft-floated worst-case scenarios looks something like this: trump orders his pliant pick for attorney general to prosecute Liz Cheney and other high-profile critics and frog-march them before the cameras. trump invokes the Insurrection Act to dispatch the military into cities to crush mass protests. trump unshackles deportation forces to drag millions of undocumented immigrants from homes and workplaces. trump purges our nation’s intelligence services, stocks them with loyal foot soldiers, and unleashes them as a domestic spying force to gather information on designated enemies of the MAGA movement.
It would be folly to dismiss these possibilities, since trump has repeatedly threatened to carry out something resembling every one of those things. He has vowed to prosecute his political opponents without cause. He has loudly called for the indictment of members of the congressional committee that investigated his January 6, 2021, insurrection attempt. He has mused aloud that he might send the military into Democratic-run cities. trump and his advisers have floated plans for mass migrant removals facilitated by huge detention complexes and even potentially carried out by the military. trump has repeatedly pledged to purge the supposedly corrupt “deep state”—his shorthand for federal law enforcement and intelligence services—and has openly suggested he would use state power to persecute domestic enemies he describes as “vermin.”
Yet as horrifying as all that is, another, less-garish scenario also potentially looms—and in some respects it might be a more plausible one. A second trump presidency could unleash a kind of lower-profile, slow-burn authoritarianism, something that unfolds much more quietly and largely behind the scenes. In its targeting of internal enemies and its efforts to carry out revolutionary changes via far-right governance, it could end up being much less dramatic, visible, or splashy—but at the same time, extremely insidious, difficult to track, and very challenging to mobilize against….’
‘The city of Springfield, Ohio, is already witnessing the consequences of trump’s baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets….’
‘…[T]he reaction from Republican vice presidential hopeful JD Vance … stood out as especially amazing. This was the message the Ohio senator pushed on Fox News, just hours after the former president’s related rant:
We admire Taylor Swift’s music, but I don’t think most Americans, whether they like her music, are fans of hers or not, are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.”
He added that the celebrity hasn’t been “hurt” by “grocery prices.”
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Can Swifties shift the election? Taylor ‘absolutely’ moves the needle for young women
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For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that grocery price inflation has already cooled significantly in recent months. Let’s instead consider the latest in a series of examples of Team Trump flunking tests of self-awareness.
Americans are unlikely to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans? Unless Trump is planning to drop out of the 2024 race, Vance’s running mate happens to be a billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.
Despite Harris’ challenge, Trump vows no more 2024 debates
In fact, it was of particular interest that the GOP senator referenced Swift and grocery prices, given that Trump has repeatedly made public comments suggesting he has no idea how grocery stores even work — including suggestions that he thinks consumers need to show identification to buy boxes of cereal….’
‘Earthquake scientists detected an unusual signal on monitoring stations used to detect seismic activity during September 2023. We saw it on sensors everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica.
We were baffled – the signal was unlike any previously recorded. Instead of the frequency-rich rumble typical of earthquakes, this was a monotonous hum, containing only a single vibration frequency. Even more puzzling was that the signal kept going for nine days.
Dickson Fjord is surrounded by steep mountains. Uwe Dedering / wiki, CC BY-SA
Initially classified as a “USO” – an unidentified seismic object – the source of the signal was eventually traced back to a massive landslide in Greenland’s remote Dickson Fjord. A staggering volume of rock and ice, enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, plunged into the fjord, triggering a 200-meter-high mega-tsunami and a phenomenon known as a seiche: a wave in the icy fjord that continued to slosh back and forth, some 10,000 times over nine days.
To put the tsunami in context, that 200-metre wave was double the height of the tower that houses Big Ben in London and many times higher than anything recorded after massive undersea earthquakes in Indonesia in 2004 (the Boxing Day tsunami) or Japan in 2011 (the tsunami which hit Fukushima nuclear plant). It was perhaps the tallest wave anywhere on Earth since 1980….’
Culture is humanity’s way of making sense of the world, expressed through language, traditions, and beliefs. Ancient customs—like the Pirahã people living without past or future tense, or the Inca communities risking their lives to rebuild a grass bridge—reflect the beauty and diversity of human creativity. Yet, globalization and economic pressures threaten these traditions. As languages vanish, villages depopulate, and artisans abandon their crafts, we lose not just skills but unique ways of understanding life.
‘MeMind has connected 10,000 at-risk people with mental health treatment, contributing to a 9% drop in suicides….’ (Lillian Perlmutter via Rest of World)
‘The rate of medical assistance in dying – also known as euthanasia – has grown in Canada for the fifth straight year, albeit at a slower pace.
‘Even a single degree of warming can have devastating consequences for the natural world….’ (Benji Jones via Vox)
‘Journalists who’ve lived through freedom-of-the-press-hating dictators who have some words of warning for us here in Murica: with trump in office.
‘Long-term zinc creep-induced failure in the 57-year-old telescope’s cable spelter sockets was the root cause of the telescope’s collapse, the report says. Sockets filled with zinc held in place a set of cables suspending the telescope’s main platform over the reflector dish. Gradually the zinc lost its hold on the cables and allowed several of them to pull out, leading to the collapse of the platform into the reflector. …’ (via National Academies )
“I suggest a variation of Hanlon’s Razor that one should never attribute to oppression that which is adequately explained by free choice.”
“Disregard the authority of others, as there are always alternative authorities to be found…”‘… The now-president-elect, according to that NBC survey, posted his biggest margin of 53%-27% among voters who don’t follow any news. trump’s win was a triumph of the ill-informed…’ (via Philadelphia Inquirer )
‘Now that trump is headed back to the White House, with X’s Elon Musk in tow, there is not even a pretense of hope on that platform for anyone who voted against trump. It’s better late than never, but it’s well and truly time to cut X loose….’ (Nitish Pahwa *via Slate*)
(via NBC)
Never a Better Time?
‘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.
‘The New York Times reports that Bob Wordward’s new book War includes a few stories about donald trump being Putin’s stooge.
‘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 )
‘Students of all ages still haven’t made up the ground they lost during the pandemic….’
