The worst is yet to come

Well, it does indeed feel like that Decemberists song "Everything is Awful", with the Trump inauguration and the somewhat distressing feeling that we are living in one of the Batman movies, as far as the weirdo cast of characters is concerned.  

A billion or so words have been spilt online already about it, but here are my various thoughts:

a.    if anything, far too few words have been spoken as to how incredibly dangerous it is for any world leader to be believe they are on a divine mission:

 “Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom, and indeed to take my life,” he said, referencing a July 13 assassination attempt in which a bullet grazed his ear. “But I felt then and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Maybe it's because no one intelligent thinks he's a sincere believer in God, and this is just his usual narcissism spun to appeal to his Christofascist base?    But this is the entire problem with him as a politician - we're supposed to just live with the fact that something he says might be meant to be taken seriously, or might be completely unrelated to what will actually happen.    It's absurd, and it's absurdly dangerous if he is sitting in charge of a nuclear arsenal.

b.   Elon and the salute:   my theory, for what it's worth, is that he was high on ketamine (or something else), especially when you see the head movements in this video:

 

And yes, I reckon it was a Nazi salute done as a troll by a man off his face. Hilarious, Elon.

The inevitable falling out with Trump can't come soon enough.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Musk isn't approaching some sort of personal crash and burn - drug overdoes, car accident while under the influence, being shot by a former lover.  Would not be surprised in the slighest.

c.    The Pardons:   Biden's for Milley and Fauci and the J6 committee were well deserved, and if there a serious non MAGA republican left in the country, they ought to be thanking him for saving the Republicans from embarrassing themselves by wasting months on go no-where investigations, and suffering electorally for it.

The pardons of Biden's family - I'm not aware of specific threats to investigate or prosecute them, but if any had been said, it's fine as far as I'm concerned.

I understand that Democrat concern that it gives Trump carte blanche to do the same, and to encourage his administration (and family) to do absolutely anything under cover of a last minute pardon.   But such an authoritarian way of operating is not to go unnoticed, and Trump already has shown he hasn't a skerrick of interest in law and order if he thinks it's done him wrong (see all Jan 6 criminals pardoned, as well as crypto drug boy Ulbricht.)    In short - Trump didn't need the example of Biden to pardon actual criminals.  And if any of those released go on a revenge killing against any informant - it will be on Trump's head.

 

The "vibes" presidency

I think this Ezra Klein opinion piece in the New York Times (gift linked):

Trump Barely Won the Popular Vote. Why Doesn’t It Feel That Way?

is quite fair and accurate.   Let me extract some bits:

In 2024, Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points. Trump and Democrats alike treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a broad mandate for the MAGA movement. But by any historical measure, it was a squeaker.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points; in 2016, Hillary Clinton won it by 2.1 points; in 2012, Barack Obama won it by 3.9 points; in 2008, Obama won it by 7.2 points; and in 2004, George W. Bush won it by 2.4 points. You have to go back to the 2000 election to find a margin smaller than Trump’s.

Down-ballot, Republicans’ 2024 performance was, if anything, less impressive. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression; in the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won; among the 11 governor’s races, not a single one led to a change in partisan control. If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift.

And yet, they’ve felt like one. Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory. The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout. This is partially because he’s surrounded by some of America’s most influential futurists. Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have recognized. In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025, he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.

In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”

I was skeptical of Cowen’s post when I first read it, as it described a shift much larger than anything I saw reflected in the polls. I may have been right about the polls. But Cowen was right about the culture.

Klein then examines each of the things Cowen discussed.   I'll skip the social media talk, and go to the bit about corporations wanting to move Right:

The second factor is the corporate desire to shift right. Over the 2020s, corporations shifted left, driven by disgust with Trump, pressure from their work forces and perceived pressure from their customers. This was reflected in the endless corporate pronouncements over this-or-that social issue, the many green pledges, the construction of vast D.E.I. infrastructures and a general aesthetic of concerned listening on behalf of executives. Whatever mix of sincerity and opportunism motivated these changes, it curdled into resentment in recent years.

You can hear this in the interview Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder who has emerged as a major Trump adviser, did with my colleague Ross Douthat. “Companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution,” he said. “The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.” The biggest vibe shift Cowen misses in his list is the anger C.E.O.s — particularly tech C.E.O.s — came to feel toward their own workers and their desire to take back control.

Trump’s election acted as the pivot point for this trend, giving corporate leaders cover to do what they’d long wanted to do anyway. “The election has empowered some top executives to start speaking out in favor of conservative policies, from tax cuts to traditional gender roles,” The Financial Times reported. Announcement after announcement from major corporations pulling out of climate change compacts or dismantling D.E.I. systems have been a vibes multiplier, creating the sense of a major shift happening at all levels of American society.

I like his take on the feckless Zuckerberg:

I interviewed Zuckerberg in 2018, as he was still processing the backlash from the 2016 elections. He told me Meta had failed “on preventing things like misinformation, Russian interference.” He worried over “a big rise of isolationism and nationalism.” What made him confident in the future was that, among millennials, “the plurality identifies as a citizen of the world.”

Now Zuckerberg is going on Joe Rogan’s show, chain dangling from his neck, to say that the fact-checking Meta was doing was like “something out of ‘1984,’ ” that companies like his own became too hostile to “masculine energy” and that what makes him optimistic about Donald Trump is “I think he just wants America to win.”

And this paragraph near the end is, I think, exactly right:

Perhaps the cultural momentum of Trumpism will give Trump’s presidency added force. But it is at least as likely that it lures Trump and his team into overreach. It is always dangerous to experience a narrow victory as an overwhelming mandate. Voters — angry about the cost of living and disappointed by Biden — still barely handed Trump the White House. There is little in the election results to suggest the public wants a sharp rightward lurch. But Trump and his team are jacked into the online vibes-machine and they want to meet the moment they sense. I doubt there would have been ideological modesty in any Trump administration, but I am particularly skeptical we will see it in this one.

Re: David Lynch

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.  

Bullet bitten

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.

Musk truly disgusts me

 

Update:   This is Sam Harris talking, apparently:

Good physics content

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.

As noted on social media recently...

Naomi is an extraordinary nut.  Zuck is pathetic.

Is there no room for common sense here?

The Washington Post has an article with the headline "Why Los Angeles was unprepared for this fire".

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.

A better article about the claims and counterclaims about the fires is to be found at PBS.   

I really feel sick reading the bad faith political attacks that the Right makes when natural disasters happen.

Update:  yes, this guy makes the common sense statements that I have been longing to see in the media

Clearly, an idiot

Trump's rambling, grievance full, press conference is getting much attention.   This was big of him:

Asked on Tuesday whether he would rule out “military or economic coercion” to get control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, Trump declined.

“No, I can’t assure you on either of those two,” he told reporters.

Trump did rule out military force to annex Canada, one of the United States’ largest trading partners.

That was from the Washington Post, which said this about its general tone:

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.”

Even worse:

Greener pastures Why does Donald Trump want Greenland? It’s not as crazy as you may think

The United States considered making a bid for the North Atlantic island in 1867, when it also purchased Alaska from Russia.

 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."

Update:

 

Hey, I'm back

Happy New Year, folks.

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!

  

A plague and the rise of Christianity

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? 

Yeah, sure: this is worth all of the energy used up by AI...

First, have a Happy Christmas, everyone.

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 thoughts about 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...

Speak for yourself

For some of us, it's a boring, tedious drone that robs of the airwaves of something better...

Each to their own, of course:  but the thing about cricket that I find unforgivable is the incredible length of time it takes up.

Perhaps my favourite "Musk is really President" meme

It's the hair on the dog that does it for me 😀.

2024: the year the whole planet needed vagus nerve stimulation

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:

Vagus nerve stimulation may relieve treatment-resistant depression, study finds   

And this story that it opens with - about  how depression struck someone - surprised me (due to its sudden onset:

Nick Fournie was 24 years old when severe depression upended his life.

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.

A very short review

This is at the Nature website:

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!

The world of decolonialism waffle

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:

Decolonisation, Indigenous health research and Indigenous authorship: sharing our teams’ principles and practices

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

Ugh.

Unwarranted optimism, I think

Ross Douthat seems to have had such a good holiday in Italy, visiting a famous Benedictine monastery, that he has written a column headed:

Religion Has Been in Decline. This Christmas Seems Different. 

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. 

Update:   a more interesting article, to me, in the NYT is a short discussion with famous writer on early Christianity, Elaine Pagels, who really must be getting on in age.   (Yes, I see she is 81.)   This passage explains her views:

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.”

 

No dark energy?

This research sounds important:

Dark energy 'doesn't exist' so can't be pushing 'lumpy' universe apart, physicists say

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!)

A deep dive into rising oceans

Have a look at this very well made, graphics filled, article in the Washington Post that explains a lot about the rising ocean, and in particular, how it is likely going to be bad in the the south of the USA.  

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. Two GRACE 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 one farther 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.