David Lynch has passed away. It's hard to dislike an eccentric artist who manages to get eccentric movies made in Hollywood; and certainly I did enjoy Twin Peaks a lot, at least until it became clear it had that common problem of a mystery series that seemed to have been set up before knowing how it would be resolved. (Well, I assume this is what happened. But I never looked into it.)
That said, I think that his films are a tad overrated by critics, for my tastes. But I would always watch him in interviews, and he seemed a nice enough guy in real life.
I cancelled my Washington Post subscription, even though in the process they offered another year at $4 a month, which is incredibly cheap.
I just can't see another way a message can be sent to its owner's interference with the paper's content.
I had been saying I was probably more inclined to cancel the New York Times - but Bezos's games with the paper and direct sucking up to Trump (and reported turmoil within the staff) just didn't leave a choice.
I'm sure my action will now result in regret and realignment by Bezos, and then I can resubscribe - hahahaha. I live in hope.
PS: what tipped me over the edge was a column this morning praising Trump for getting the apparent peace deal in Gaza through - claiming that his "mad man" approach to foreign affairs works and maybe we need more of it! At the time of posting, there are only 4 comments, but I'm expecting it will attract many, many more criticisms by the end of the day.
I pretty much took the day off work yesterday, due to a lingering cold that seems to have caught me on the flight back from Singapore (thanks, woman directly behind me who had to most awful sounding cough intermittently - I suspect you as the source), then got into a social media semi-argument with someone who had read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe book a decade or more ago and didn't really know about the "string wars" in physics in the 2000's and was reluctant to accept that Greene still promotes a too optimistic view of string theory's prospects.
Anyway, this led to me watching a lot of YouTube physics content, and reminded me that I had never watched enough of the channel Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal. It's really, really good.
Some of the content on The Institute of Art and Ideas YouTube page is very good on physics, too. (It reminded me that Roger Penrose thinks string theory is both "ugly" - contrary to claims by Greene that it's beautiful- and a complete waste of time.)
To suggest just one video I liked watching yesterday from those channels - I thought that Jacob Barande's summary of how quantum physics developed was well worth listening to:
I don't yet understand his take on the "reality" of the wavefunction, etc, for which I have to watch his full interview which goes for 2 1/4 hours!
I do think, though, that this issue of the way to understand the fundamentals is a really important topic.
I have a problem starting right there - the headline seems to assume that because the fire happened, LA was ipso facto "unprepared" for it.
Here's an early paragraph:
Experts said several key factors — including urban sprawl, a resistance
to clearing vegetation around homes, and a water system that’s not
designed to combat multiple major blazes at once — left L.A. exposed to
disaster. As climate change fuels record heat, leaving the hillsides
primed for wildfires to grow swiftly into massive conflagrations, these
factors led to catastrophe.
So "urban sprawl" - that happened many decades ago - is partly to blame? Well, I suppose humans learning to walk upright and build houses out of combustible material has a bit to do with it too, but seems not that much point in talking about it.
Sure, you can complain about the design of new subdivisions, I suppose:
Zeke Lunder, a wildfire mapping expert in Chico, California, and
director of an online outlet devoted to information about fires called
the Lookout, said the location and design of the Palisades neighborhood,
tucked between Topanga State Park and the Pacific Ocean, made it
especially vulnerable to fire — and almost impossible to protect.
I think that there are likely realistic limitations though, when trying to deal with this. Far better, I would assume, to require the new homes built to replace the old ones to have vastly improved resistance to catching alight from airborne embers - although even then, I suspect it may be difficult to make it foolproof as well as having a house attractive to the eye.
My biggest bugbear is one we saw in a different context in the Australian bushfires - the issue of clearing around houses. We saw this brought up by Right Wingers here who would complain that people were not allowed (for Greenie environmental reasons) to clear around their houses enough to protect them. In California, the WAPO article has people arguing this:
Before a home is threatened, experts say one of the few steps homeowners can take to make their property more fire-resistant is clearing it of grass and shrubs, removing fuel. In California, people living in risky areas are required to maintain a buffer around their homes — a five-foot perimeter free of vegetation known as “defensible space.”
But in practice, the rules haven’t been followed uniformly. Many homeowners are reluctant to remove wooden fences, replant their gardens and trim the lower limbs on pine trees. Aerial images of the Palisades neighborhood taken before the fire show homes surrounded by greenery, a common sight in wealthy areas where residents put a premium on privacy.
California’s five-foot rule “has been very controversial,” said Ken Pimlott, a former Cal Fire chief and firefighter for 30 years. “People are very upset about ‘What do I do about my fence, my plants I like,’” he said.
Oh come on! As with the biggest bushfire outbreaks in Australia in recent decades - when fires are spreading due to extremely high winds pushing embers kilometers ahead of the firefront, surely a 5 foot clearance of vegetation around a house is going to have very limited effect when you look at the big picture.
You always get cases in these types of fires of one house burning to the ground, and for some reason a neighbouring house might luck out and survive relatively unscathed. While in theory I would prefer not to have (say) a very combustible pine tree within a metre of house, I think it's fanciful in the extreme to think every house having a 5 foot clearance would make a significant difference to the total number of houses catching alight from embers falling from the skies in truly disastrous wind conditions. It's just common sense, I reckon.
The news conference marked the latest vivid display of Trump’s penchant for rambling tangents, insults, false statements and hyperbole.
The New York Times noted that he once again, absurdly, raised his long standing grievance against water efficient showers:
He waxed on about a favorite complaint during his first term: Shower heads and sink faucets that don’t deliver water, a symbol of a regulatory state gone mad. “It goes drip, drip, drip,” he said. “People just take longer showers, or run their dishwasher again,” and “they end up using more water.”
And this was their general take:
There was a lot of déjà vu in Tuesday’s news conference, recalling scenes from his first presidency. The conspiracy theories, the made-up facts, the burning grievances — all despite the fact that he has pulled off one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. The vague references to “people” whom he never names. The flat declaration that American national security was threatened now, without defining how the strategic environment has changed in a way that could prompt him to violate the sovereignty of independent nations.
Of course, the media outlets of Murdoch and the Right will do their best to "sanewash" this. Here's the New York Post:
Trump threatened 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico shortly after winning the Nov. 5 election, citing illegal immigration and illicit fentanyl imports.
Some observers speculated that he was making the threat as a bargaining tactic, and the leaders of both countries quickly pledged to work with the incoming commander in chief.
Trump also has jokingly suggested that Canada become the 51st state, while more seriously pressing for the US to acquire Greenland from Denmark and suggesting the US may need to reassert control of the Panama Canal Zone — topics he also revisited in his remarks.
The president-elect clarified at one point that the US would only use “economic force” to annex Canada before speaking rapturously about the potential benefits of a North American union.
“Canada and the US, that would really be something,” Trump said. “You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security.”
Elsewhere in his comments, the incoming president complained that America’s neighbor to the north “is subsidized to the tune of about $200 billion a year, plus other things. They don’t essentially have a military. They have a very small military. They rely on our military. It’s all fine, but they got to pay for that.”
Uh, all it will take to stop it is for Putin to ring and say "Donald, we don't want a platform for ICBMs so close to Mother Russia. Just leave it alone, and let me have the bits of Ukraine I already have." And Trump will go "Sure, I hadn't thought of it that way."
Guess which city I ended up in for New Year's Eve? Details will follow in an update...
Update: So, I'm still busy, and caught a cold on the plane on the way back. Anyway, here I was, with a few hundred thousand friends, at the countdown for NYE:
Yeah, I managed to reach the city state it's hard to keep me away from, Singapore, for a short break.
New things done this time:
* ate fresh durian at a street side stall (and it's better than I expected - will eat again.)
* ate fresh jackfruit (pieces bought at a supermarket). Yes, intensely sweet and fruity, like putting a couple of packets of Juicy Fruit gum in your mouth at the same time. But gets less sweet towards the centre. Pretty delicious, but leftovers will make your hotel bar fridge smell very fruity when you open it again.
* ate at the vegetarian cafe in the basement of Buddha's Tooth Relic Temple. I knew it was there, just hadn't gone down to it before. Has a decent variety of food which is tasty and cheap, a large sitting area, and is pretty popular with women and men at lunch time. (Somehow, I expected more women, but plenty of men there too.)
* made it to the Singapore Botanical Gardens. Yes, been there half a dozen times, and had never made it to these gardens before. As expected, they are huge and gorgeously tropical. The orchid garden is probably the highlight for everyone, and now it features an airconditioned section that is a relief to hang around in after hours outdoors. Very beautiful, and will upload some photos later.
* spotted some otters, but in the water off Gardens by the Bay. Hench, the only proof I have is photos of an otter nose that would pop up every minute or so - the photo is like one of a small Loch Ness monster. But there were two noses, and the swirl they made gave me confidence it was otters I was watching. Unfortunately, though, did not witness them coming ashore. Next time!
* visited Mustafa Centre, the shambolically organised department store in Little India that is open 24 hours. Some interesting and dubious electronics and other stuff to look at, but don't expect any sense at all from the layout, or to have guides as to where anything is.
* made it to the little Jade Emperor temple (only recently built) that is besides the oldest Chinese temple in Singapore, the Thian Hock Keng Temple. (Again, somehow I had never managed to walk down this street on previous visits.) More about these temples in a later post, but just a note that the entry requirements to the (not open anyway) Jade Emperor's temple were really tough!
This is an interesting Comment is Free article at The Guardian - arguing that Christianity really caught on as a result of a plague in the 3rd century which made a religion with a teaching and obligation to help the poor and suffering look much better than the pagan religions, in which the gods were capricious and mainly to be feared and appeased.
I wonder if some will challenge the image of pagan religion this relies on, though?
And now, let's ask Musk's AI thingee Grok to generate a nativity scene featuring New Jersey drones:
I guess the bearded Mary is the highlight, and is particularly ironic given it's the vision of anti-woke Elon's AI; but what on Earth is the ground covered with? The shed itself is in groovy 60's psychedelic style too, for some reason. And baby Jesus looks like one of those dolls made by stuffing stockings.
I see that Ireland is having second thoughtsabout being a hub for AI data centres, due to the huge amount of electricity and water they eat up. AI results like the above should make them even more concerned...
I'm finding it a bit hard to think of a worse year over the last several decades, in a "reasons to feel optimistic about the direction the planet is heading in," sense. I guess people may have felt this way in (say) the mid 70's - a far from happy decade - but I was still somewhat of a techno-optimist at that stage and had a teenage life to live.
But gee, I mean - now we have the whole Middle East a complete humanitarian disaster again; much of Africa in terrible governance and humanitarian crisis, again; the danger to the West and Western interests from Russia and China, again; the unbelievable election of Trump, again; the loonies he wants to put in control and the drug addled, power hungry billionaire who helped put him in place (well, I guess this not a case of again - it's like a bad gothic Batman story come to life for the first time.) Another Christmas market terror incident in Europe just puts the cherry on top.
Also - overlaying all of this (which was not the case in the 70's) is the global climate disruption that Right wing (mostly ageing) idiots still refuse to acknowledge, and which we can only deal with by waiting for them to die.
Anyway, I'm talking about the vagus nerve because of this interesting story at CNN:
Fournie had been married to his longtime sweetheart for two
years, and had no reason to suspect he had any mental health issues.
“I just thought to myself, ‘If this is it, if this is all
there is to life — if it ended now, I’d be OK with it,’” Nick, now 62
and based in Illinois, said of that fateful day outdoors nearly 40 years
ago.
But one day as he was mowing the lawn, his perspective on life abruptly
flipped from light to dark. The shift would set him and his wife, Mary,
on a tumultuous, yearslong journey of fighting for his well-being and
another chance at a happy life together — until they learned of an
alternative, obscure treatment that would change everything.
I wonder how often that happens - I am much more used to the idea that it develops somewhat gradually, or perhaps as a result of a sudden crisis such as a nervous breakdown.
In 1773, US polymath Benjamin Franklin argued that scientists should try to invent a method of embalming such that a human could be revived in the future. He admitted “a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence”. Neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston thinks that such brain preservation and revival could well become feasible. But his complex book acknowledges this proposition as “scary and disquieting” — requiring us to scrutinize our own mortality, “a deeply unpleasant task”.
The book is The Future Loves You. The description at the publisher's site is:
A brilliant young neuroscientist explains how to preserve our minds indefinitely, enabling future generations to choose to revive us.
I look forward to reading a lengthier review!
Anyway, I am surprised at the observation of Benjamin Franklin - quite ahead of his time there. (I see that Frankenstein wasn't published until 1818, and I presume it may have popularised the concept of revival of the dead.)
You sure want to pick the right 100 year period to be revived in, though. I mean, he died in 1790, and although the world of 1890 had undergone the industrial revolution, it had got nothing on the changes between 1890 and 1990. I'm not sure we'll ever see anything quite like that century again, in fact!
I think the Medical Journal of Australia used to run humorous short pieces at Christmas, so I had a look at it today, and instead became depressed while reading this article:
It's open access, so you can read it and marvel too at the intensity of what I sometimes describe as "sociology talk": the use of a terminology invented for their own field and which has gone on to become the navel gazing justification for academic careers: whole careers devoted to taking to talking to each other about their own terminology and world views, and telling others that they just don't get it like they do.
Now, I know: you could have the same criticism of philosophy, which is a field I am generally sympathetic to. But at least philosophers don't turn up at government meetings arguing that their insights are crucial to solving social disadvantage - they by and large have the good sense to let economists worry about economics, and doctors and epidemiologists worry about improving health, and so on.
To clarify: it's not as if I am one to think you ignore everything (say) a remote indigenous community thinks about their health services if you want to improve it. But that's the immensely irritating problem I have with the likes of this article: its insights could be condensed to something like this: "indigenous people come from a different cultural background, and it pays to try to work with them and take their views into consideration when trying to improve their health services."
But no, let's spend money on career academics and researchers and their conferences that spin a simple principle into well paying careers of waffle.
Here are some key paragraphs:
Decolonisation
Colonisation stems from, as well as perpetuates racial
imbalances of knowledge, knowledge production and knowledge practice.
Decolonisation and decoloniality are a few of many tools used in
attempts to dismantle, hinder, reverse, stop or remove colonising
practices, with the aim of privileging the rights of Indigenous people.13,20,21,22
We acknowledge the various, and sometimes conflicting
conceptualisations and applications of decolonising and decolonial
practices. These conflicts are influenced by place, people and
socio‐political contexts, including the lack of transformative actions
that should be of benefit to Indigenous peoples.21,23,24,25,26
Three key features, of the many, relating to decolonial and
decolonising practices that we implement in our team are described
below.
Establish and understand positionality
Positionality is where one speaks from; it is reflective of values, beliefs and worldviews and how these underpin daily life.1
For Indigenous peoples, positionality is reliant on relationality,
whereby relationships to Country, family and community underpin values,
beliefs and worldviews.1,3
Positioning includes one's professional context and intentions of
research, as much as it is about positioning within the workplace.21
Furthermore, understanding one's workplace and the relationships formed
with Indigenous communities, past and present, is essential.
Positioning in context of colonisation is also important. Non‐Indigenous
people need to understand their own positioning in relation to
colonisation, including privileges associated with unearned power.20
Whereas Indigenous peoples' positioning with colonisation is linked
with both historical and contemporary forms of oppression, which aims to
eradicate Indigenous peoples and knowledges. Indigenous peoples have
another link to colonisation; one that is associated with survival,
resistance and a reclamation of Indigenous Knowledges and practices
The reasons he presents for this seem way, way, more about his good mood after a holiday, rather than a serious consideration of evidence.
If anything, even if you restrict the view to the USA, the fact that even Catholics have swung to a character like Trump should give more grounds for pessimism about the future of religions, rather than optimism. I mean, here is the Washington Post talking about the Trump flunky just appointed to be his Vatican ambassador:
Burch co-founded Catholic Vote, a lay advocacy group in 2005. The organization backed Trump in 2020 and 2024. Burch is the author of the 2020 book, “A New Catholic Moment: Donald Trump and the Politics of the Common Good,” and co-author of a 2021 book “America Catholic Daily Reader,” about Americans who have been shaped by their Catholic faith.
According to exit polls, Catholic voters supported Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin. In 2020, Catholics backed Biden, who would become America’s second Catholic president, by a five-point margin. In both years, just over 1 in 5 voters were Catholic.
The only reason I think Ross can sense a mood swing might be around certain culture war ones such as the extremes of trans rights. But just because the extremes of identity politics might be undergoing some successful pushback hardly means a return to mainstream religion in the population overall.
You
have a foot in each of two worlds, faith and academia, that often seem
like rival sides of the God gulf. Can we find paths of mutual respect to
bridge that chasm?
The
Gospels most often speak in the language of stories and poetry.
Intellectualizing these traditions — or turning them into dogma —
doesn’t make them spiritually deep. What we call Christianity is not a
single thing. Instead, it consists of a 2,000-year-old collection of
stories, prayers, liturgies, music, miracles — sources drawn from
traditions as different as Eastern Orthodoxy is from Pentecostalism or
Christian Science. No one can swallow the entire tradition: It’s
undigestible. Instead, anyone who identifies as Christian chooses
certain elements of it.
A professor
friend said to me: “I’m an atheist. How can you believe all that stuff?”
First of all, as I see it, “believing all that stuff” is not the point.
The Christian message, as I experienced it, was transformational. It
encouraged me to treat other people well and opened up a world of
imagination and wonder.
Your own faith journey seems to
bridge the chasm. You were raised in a household hostile to faith, then
became an evangelical, then had a crisis when a friend died and you were
told he wouldn’t go to heaven because he was Jewish.
When some
Christians said to me that non-Christians are going to hell, I left
their church. That made no sense to me. What about Jesus’ message of
God’s love? At that point I left Christianity behind. For some people,
there’s no middle ground. You’re either in or out — that’s how it’s
often practiced. So for years I was out, although I knew that something
powerful was there. But after years of being out, I kept wondering, what
made that encounter with Christianity so powerful?
So
I had to go back, asking questions. How were these stories written? How
do they affect us so powerfully? They speak to a deep human longing for
a sense of transcendence and spiritual experience. For we can respond
to the same story in more than one way. As a historian, I question the
literal truth of the virgin birth story. But I still love the midnight
service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as
miracle. As poet Seamus Heaney writes, “Believe that a further shore /
is reachable from here. / Believe in miracles.”
But I guess I have to wait for Sabine Hossenfelder's view on it before I can tell how seriously to take it!
(And I wish the article did more to explain the "'timescape' model of cosmic expansion". Or did Sabine already talk about this? It's hard to remember, she puts out so much content!)
This section, for example, explains stuff that is very often missed out in the discussion:
First,
as ice melts in Greenland or Antarctica, meltwaters spill into the
ocean, raising global sea levels everywhere. But, counterintuitively,
the coastlines farthest from the ice sheets are hit hardest.
That’s
because the ice sheets are gigantic — so gigantic, in fact, that they
exert a gravitational pull on the ocean. (The Greenland ice sheet weighs
approximately 2.7 quadrillion metric tons, equal to about 450 million
Great Pyramids of Giza; the Antarctic ice sheet is 10 times heavier.)
Normally,
that enormous weight pulls oceans close to the ice sheets, making sea
levels around Greenland and Antarctica higher than they would be
otherwise. But as the ice melts, that effect lessens. Sea levels close
to the ice sheet fall, and sea levels farther away rise.
Jerry
Mitrovica, a professor of earth sciences at Harvard University and one
of the leading experts on melting ice sheets and ocean levels, recalls
looking at a plot of sea levels near Greenland. “I couldn’t believe it,”
he said. “It was just an incredible thing to see around this melting
ice sheet that sea level change, at least regionally, is dramatically
going down.”
Researchers use satellites to track this effect. TwoGRACE
Follow-On satellites, launched in 2018 by NASA and the German Research
Center for Geosciences, orbit the Earth about 140 miles apart — as they
do, subtle changes in Earth’s gravitational pull yank onefarther from the other. Those shifts paint a picture of the planet’s gravity,which scientists can use to predict the precise pull of the ice sheets on ocean waters.
which I haven't read in full (paywall), but the point appeals to me:
My father-in-law, with whom I was very
close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in
Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody
civil war taking place literally in front of his house. His family
experienced a lot of suffering. Some died; others spent years in jail or
were forced into exile. He himself spent a year in a refugee camp, an
experience that affected him for the rest of his life. Every time he
wanted to make a point about society or culture, he always started with:
“Well, during the civil war …”
One evening, a few months before he died, he read in his local paper an article of mine about unhappiness. “You have a lot of complicated theories,” he told me, “but the real reason people are unhappy is very simple.” I asked him to elaborate. “They don’t enjoy their dinner,” he responded. I asked him what he meant. “Well, during the civil war, we were always hungry,” he said. “But one day a year—Christmas—we got to eat whatever we wanted, and we were so happy. Today, people snack all day long, are never hungry, don’t enjoy their dinners, and aren’t happy—even on Christmas.”
Would I be happy with an Atlantic subscription? Possibly. Digital is $90 (US) a year. Maybe I ask the family to each pay a third.
Meanwhile, I still, lazily, haven't decided if I should drop the NYT or WAPO. I feel I only need one.
* Clive Robertson, the cranky persona-ed news reader and broadcaster, died last week. I hadn't thought about him for years, but his death reminded me how much I used to enjoy his late night news show. His droll, dry wit was very amusing, and I miss that we have nothing similar today.
* Australian author John Marsden has also just died (at only 74 - as I age, I long to read only about deaths that are at older ages than that!). I only read his famous first book in the "Tomorrow - When the War Began" and thought it was OK, but I knew he had been very influential in the youth fiction market, and in youth education generally. I didn't recall this:
John’s youth was harrowing in different ways, and he never hid the fact
that he was a bit bruised by life. He became suicidal as a university
student and was institutionalised; he once wrote that the world of the
psychiatric hospital was in some ways “more real than the one outside.
In here the masks are off, people don’t pretend so much. [They] don’t
have the energy or strength.” Perhaps that’s why he was able to inhabit
his characters so fully. It is extraordinary for a man of his generation
to write teenage girls so convincingly and with such empathy.
Update: yes, as Tim points out below, now Michael Leunig has died, aged 79. (Again, fellas, for my long term planning, I only want to see people start to leave this mortal coil from about 85!) I guess like most people I didn't mind Leunig at his peak, but his brand of idiosyncratic eccentric takes did start to wear thin in the long term.
If anything, I reckon it was way, way too gentle on Musk, even though she doesn't think his plans will happen any time soon.
She spends too much time on the long term difficulties of permanently colonising Mars (the issue of it not being to retain an atmosphere due to solar wind is covered, for example) without talking enough about the short term wild implausibility of Musk's fantasy - the huge number of rocket builds and launches needed, the totally tricky orbital re-fueling that has not been tried and is (I reckon) always going to be a high risk manoeuvre - probably with the potential to create a huge mess of orbital debris - and the routinely overlooked matter of how difficult it will be to build a biologically self supporting colony on Mars.
I think this latter issue is just common sense - look at the problems the Biosphere experiment went through, and that was on a planet where all the organic material needed could just be driven in on the back of a truck.*
At least I saw some support in the video comments for my view that if you want a "lifeboat" for planet Earth, why not build it on the Moon? (The only plausible reason against it that I can think of is that no one knows what effect low gravity pregnancy will have on the babies - but then, the same might turn out to be an issue in Mars gravity too. Wouldn't it be ironic if it turns out it's really, really difficult to carry a baby to term in low gravity, for some reason we have no idea about at the moment. That would ruin Musk's "longtermism" pretty rapidly.)
I remain very confident that Musk will face a downfall sooner or later, and people will wonder why more experts didn't speak out about his wild overconfidence earlier...
* Have a look at the website for a long on-going research project of the European Space Agency to develop a closed system for life support, including food, called Melissa. As far as I tell, they might be up to trying it out on a small rat colony. And I liked this part from their FAQ page:
Why after 30 years the project is not finish yet ?
The proper answer to this one is probably:
Why man has no try to duplicate the
Earth functions earlier ? In other words, although humans are fully
depending of the Earth ecosystem functions (e.g. oxygen, water, food,
...), we have today no back-up. Anyone who looks a bit more carefully to
the challenges of artificial ecology will rapidly perceive the enormous
difficulties. We have seen over the years many similar projects :
CELSS, CEEF, CERES, BIOSPHERE 2… almost all of them had to stop due to
incorrect evaluation of the challenges, and necessary amplitude and
duration of the efforts.
Yeah, I've slowed down a bit in my reading of the abridged version of Journey to the West, and I note as follows:
a.it takes to about the half way point of the book before the journey actually begins;
b.I am now 55% percent in, and we still haven't met the 4th travel companion (Sandy in the TV series);
c.I was rather surprised that in Chapter 17, the Heart Sutra suddenly appears in full. I had just watched one of the Doug's Dharma videos on Youtube in which he spoke about it.
Stancil, who it seems annoys a lot of people for reasons unclear to me, has (along with David Roberts) been one of the most consistent messengers about how that the Left needs to start paying much more attention to the inherent damage the information environment (including its speed and ease of manipulation) has caused.
So, we're getting a fair bit of handwringing over much of the public reaction to that US health fund executive being murdered:
While I agree that it's not good to celebrate vigilante actions, I'm also on the side of those on the Left who think that the Right complaining about bad taste is too often used to sustain a bad status quo.
And it has made me finally post a thought I've had about Trump for years.
I predict - if ever he is successfully assassinated, I reckon the reaction of about 60% of Americans (and 90 of the rest of the globe) will be exactly like the end of the Seinfeld episode in which George (accidentally) kills his fiancée Susan: a couple of awkward exchanges and half sincere mutterings of "that's so bad", and within 60 seconds, "so, wanna get some coffee?"
