It's the information environment, stupid. Mainly. I think...

I really do think there is not enough thought put into this basic explanation of modern American politics.  That Will Stancil guy on Twitter keeps saying it, and I agree.  Two articles:

 An Overlooked — and Increasingly Important — Clue to How People Vote

Most election post-mortems neglect a key determinant of how people vote — where they get their news.

Some extracts:

The nature of these platforms has changed too — as more of their users come to rely on them for news. In 2020, 28 percent of regular Instagram users got their news there; in 2024, 40 percent did, according to Pew Research Center. In 2020, 22 percent of TikTok users got news there; in 2024, 52 percent did.

The other big factor that changed was one of the biggest platforms, X, formerly Twitter, having its owner (with 200 million followers) go all-in for one candidate.

These studies reveal an interesting fault line. While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, Pew found. This confirms that men and women often act on different sources of information. Yet while we spill many words analyzing whether New York Times headlines normalize bad behavior, we know very little about what news and information rises to the top on Reddit and YouTube.

Trump supporters will argue that this re-sorting of media consumption was a positive development, allowing people to get information unfiltered by the (biased) elite media. Indeed, Elon Musk declared that with this election, “Legacy media is dead. Long live citizen journalism!”

But there is much evidence that information on social media is more likely to include misinformation and provide news that reinforces preexisting beliefs than traditional mainstream media. And in 2020, studies showed that people who relied on social media for news were less knowledgeable. We’ll see if that remains true in 2024. At a minimum, we need to better understand the dynamics.

One meta-cause of the change is obvious: the rise of social media. The other is more indirect but still significant: the collapse of local news. We’ve lost one-third of our local newspapers; the number of reporters has dropped 60 percent in two decades. Studies have shown that the contraction of local news has created a vacuum — which has been filled by partisan news sources and social media (both polarizing and more likely to spread misinformation).

I’m certainly not arguing that issues like inflation or immigration were not important factors, or that if people just had different information they might have voted differently. But if we want to grasp the meaning of this election, we can’t ignore one of the biggest forces that shaped the electorate — or how the collapse of local news has changed the political equation.

And at New Republic, a broader look at the whole Right wing media networks (which obviously feed a lot of misinformation into the social media world):

Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?

It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.

Extracts (with my bold):

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times. 

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him.

The only confounding thing about this fundamental theory for this election, which a lot of Democrat supporting people have been noting on Twitter with puzzlement,  is the apparent significant number of people who split their vote.  Voted Democrat for Senators or state positions, yet swapped to Trump for President.

That really is hard to fathom.   (Some on Twitter arguing it's evidence of fraud in the system - even going as far as to say it was due to some election tallies been sent via Starlink, where Musk had the figures changed!)  I don't believe the conspiracies, but there is much further analysis to be done on understanding what was going on in the minds of voters who did that....

What to do about Twitter

 I'm surprised that there isn't a clearer online campaign for all non MAGA, Trump supporting persons to abandon Twitter and move to BlueSky, given the election results.

It seems that most of the major climate scientists have made the move, but there are a couple who are arguing that it shouldn't be abandoned and left to be a breeding ground for self supporting illusion.   

And Noah Smith, and a couple of other people I like to read, don't seem interested in a move either.

For what it's worth, I think the move should be made - and the app deleted - because a forum that it left to become its own bog of increasingly detached Right wing opinion loses credibility, at least if Truth Social is any guide.    And besides, Musk deserves to be punished for his pushing of conspiracy and fact free memes.  

But probably like lots of people, I still want to read the output of those holdouts who either can't be bothered, or who think they are fighting the good fight where it needs to be fought (or whatever).

So I am still reading it, for some of the post election analysis (see last post), but I'm feeling guilty about it.

Some better analysis

Just a random thought...

I think I have to reluctantly say that Biden trying to do a "normal" transition of power to Trump (and probably spending most of the time trying to convince him not to abandon Ukraine) is the moral and right thing to do.  (Same as when Biden rang him after the assassination attempt.)  But at the same time, you know that MAGA nuts will give zero credit to Biden for doing so - and Trump will do something like make one mention of having "a very nice meeting" and the next day call Biden demented and the cause of everything bad in the world, again.

If we wanted the ultimate in drama, though, let's say Biden asks Trump about his (and Elon's) relationship with Putin, gets some less than satisfactory responses, then pulls out a pistol and shoots him dead in the Oval Office.  And for the extra "MAGA" spice, then claims it was the dementia at fault.

So, two possible defences arising from MAGA and conservatives directly - acting in the interests of protecting America's security and therefore within the role of the Presidency, and going along with what MAGA kept telling themselves for the last 4 years. 

I know it won't happen, but as scenario for some movie, seems almost semi-plausible.

I'm in the "don't analyse too quickly" and "don't count numbers too quickly" group

Jon Stewart's early reaction to the Trump (and Republican) election win was pretty good, I think:  don't pay too much attention to the pundits' early rush to assess the alleged "lessons" of an election.  It takes a while to do any decent analysis, and anyway, a party that can look in a great condition after one election can be severely humbled in the next, making rushed views of how a party is going wrong look very dubious in retrospect.     

There were also some silly Lefty twitter accounts claiming that the total vote count indicated 20 million votes were "missing" - ignoring the fact that the vote was far from completed in California and many other states.

The Washington Post's Aaron Blake correctly argues that we shouldn't get too carried away with how big the win was (which was always my impression too):

....what about Trump’s earlier and related claim — that his and the GOP’s mandate was “unprecedented and powerful?”

Unprecedented: Surely not.

Powerful: That’s more subjective. But it’s evidently not that powerful, historically speaking.

While Trump’s win was larger than many expected and every swing state swung in his favor, his level of support is relatively par for the course for a victor. And Republicans on the whole didn’t do as well as he did.

It’s all worth diving into, given the major questions about whether Trump and the GOP will actually pursue some of the extreme proposals he has pitched on the campaign trail — and given that his and his party’s mandate, both perceived and real, will play a role in what lies ahead.

As things stand, Trump probably will sweep the seven swing states, but he will do so with only marginally more electoral votes (probably 312) than he won in 2016 (304) and President Joe Biden won in 2020 (306).

That 312 total would also outpace both of George W. Bush’s elections, but it’s fewer than in any election involving Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. And the 58 percent of electoral votes Trump probably will win would rank 41st all-time.

The other key measure here is the popular vote, which has no bearing on who is actually elected but does say something about their support nationwide.

Trump is currently taking 50.9 percent of the popular vote and leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 3.3 points. That will shift as the remaining votes are counted, but it seems Trump will actually win the popular vote this time, which he didn’t do when he won the 2016 election.

At the same time, his popular-vote share probably will drop as the remaining (mostly western and largely Californian) votes are counted. It’s likely he’ll win a smaller percentage of the popular vote than any non-Trump president-elect since 2000, when George W. Bush won despite losing the popular vote. A big question is whether he could wind up shy of a popular majority.

The rest is worth reading too - he points out that the Senate and (possible) House majorities are not going to be huge.

OK, with that said, I will comment on some of the early MAGA commentary on Twitter:  a very large number are referring to the culture wars, with "woke ideology" and trans advocacy in particular.   There is no doubt that trans issues played a significant role in the minds of the MAGA crowd (apparently there were a lot of ads about it on their social media, as well as Trump making nonsense statements about kids going to school and arriving home having changed sex - one of his "not literally, but seriously" moments, I guess).  

As I have suggested before, I do consider this a Lefty weakness and blind spot.   Social media has made it dead easy to show that there are (what would appear to be) many older "transwomen" who act as if it is primarily a sexual fetish for them, and it's pretty hard to build public sympathy if that is the motivation for being trans.  Furthermore, the genitally intact male who insists he can compete against women and its fair just doesn't pass "the pub test" as we would say in Australia.   It would pay for Democrats to acknowledge limits on the extent of support for "trans rights", because I reckon the tide has turned and will continue to do so while America spends a few years in lawfare from "de-transitioners", which is the ridiculously clumsy way America chooses so often to revise policy approaches.

That said, it's pretty impossible to assess the degree to which this would be a deciding factor for anyone - it's more likely that a element of a suite of sentiments which is impossible to separate.

As to the other sentiments - another post is coming!

RFK Jr wants people to hallucinate their way through the Trump presidency

This may be a little akin to an Italian under Mussolini saying "at least the trains run on time", but it remains true that it's probably impossible for any Presidency to not oversee at least a few good decisions.  (Even the Washington Post ran an article in 2021 noting some positive things under Trump's first administration.)   

Now, of all the bad/horrendous ideas that have floated around Trump and his appalling plan to put a nutjob Kennedy in charge of public health, there is one idea that, to an non American, sounds positive:  preventing drug companies advertising on TV.   

On the other hand, this apparently is RFK Jr's seriously weird list of interests if he gets control (my bold):

He forecast his plans for the F.D.A. on social media two weeks ago.

“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

And that's not evening getting to his crank views on vaccines and fluoride.   

As for his interest in "not suppressing" psychedelics, if we learned that Kennedy was a regular recreational user of magic mushrooms, or something, it would explain a lot.

Let me count the very many uncertainties

*   If Trump falls ill (or dies) would Vance make a worse or better President?   Undoubtedly he is smarter, but is that a good or bad thing given the policies he allegedly supports?

*   Mass deportation, if it really happens to the degree Trump has promised (remember the Mexicans paying for the wall, and how much of the wall actually got built), would undoubtedly cause some backlash in some communities, but how much cruelty are Republican voters really willing to watch when it starts to affect the neighbours who they thought were quite nice people?  Or their businesses?  

*   Who exactly put the mad "tariff everything and raise money that way instead of taxes" idea into Trump's head, and who amongst more sane Republican economists and politicians will now start telling him that he can't go too far without starting inflation that will be a direct result of the policy?   

*  It seems some are confident that the Republicans will win control of not only the Senate, but the House as well.   One upside of that - if they have complete control of government, and effectively the judiciary, Republicans and Trump will have to own everything that goes wrong.   

Should I wish for that (as it feels like one side saying "we're not really going to engage in politics for the next few years, just so you can hurt the country and we'll benefit from that"), or should I hope the Democrats maintain House control and (presumably) affect the implementation of some policies?

*  Should I punish the New York Times or the Washington Post by unsubscribing for their sanewashing efforts, or is it more important to see that they are viable for their reporting on the presidency they kinda helped create??    (And I have to acknowledge - given my General Theory of Trump in my previous post, how much did the sanewashing actually matter?   Clearly, the cultist part of Trump support is not reading the MSM media at all - and the other part can tell, just by watching Trump rallies, that he really is a dumb liar who works more as a circus act than a person with serious and well thought out policies.)  

Still tempted to set out the true and correct General Theory of Trump

How is it possible, I've seen it said, that a president ranked near the very bottom of worst presidents by historians be re-elected?

You can make a point about his populist appeal to the less educated, but it's also obvious that he gets support from the well educated.

The key is this:  roughly half of his support is from cultist followers who genuinely think he's smart, moral, shares their fundamentalist Christianity, and a fantastic person.   There is, basically, no reasoning with them.

The others are the better educated half who know full well he's dumb, constantly lies and spouts bullshit, is erratic and easily manipulated by appealing to his narcissism.  But they don't care, because they believe he will be manipulated by other people towards getting something they want, such as tax reductions, breaks for their business, power (especially in the case of many Republicans in the Senate or House) or even just a general culture more favourable to old school masculinity.

In other words, greed and self interest that having a dumb, easily manipulated President is good for them. 

Historians (and economists) don't judge presidencies that way, and hence there is every chance that the second Trump presidency will be ranked by them as at least as bad as the first.   

 

I should add that the second group has helped create the first group - the prime example being Rupert Murdoch, who does not like Trump at a personal level, but is happy to make money by maintaining a network that is pure propaganda during its key broadcast hours towards supporting the cult of Trump and demonising Democrats.   The same can be said for any Republican who Trump has insulted and attacked, but who has swung around to support him due to their recognising that there is no way the cultists can be persuaded to not support Trump.  

Wow - let the madness begin

With Trump having all but won, certainly against my longstanding expectations, there will be billions of words spilt on how it all happened, but at the end of the day, I reckon a few things are obvious, and there is no obvious solution to them:

*    There is no credible way you could say that Trump supporters based their vote on a well considered assessment of his policies, the state of the economy, or the history of the first Trump administration.   It was more a "vibe" election - they prefer to be entertained and affirmed in their grievance mongering and simply don't care about details.

*   The lack of interest in details is largely a factor of the poisonous, self serving information network that the Right has built around itself over the last 30 years with the help of self-interested and greedy billionaires, as well as mini media moguls who find it dead easy to spew propaganda on social media for a living.   There is no plausible way of de-polarising American politics while ever propaganda controlled by billionaires is allowed free reign in the way it is.

*   The biggest issue may well not be Trump himself but those that surround him.   Possibly (as a forlorn hope) there are still some relative Right leaning moderates who see it as their obligation to get close to the administration to stop their most extreme ideas - but even if that doesn't happen, extremists tend not to work well together, and Trump likes to play games of pitting one against another too.  Hence whoever is working around him, we are guaranteed a haphazard and wildly fraught administration the likes of which we have never seen.

*   There is also the question of Trump's health.   Seems a dubious proposition that he will be able to make any sense at all in another few years.   

*   Goodbye Ukraine, been nice knowing you.   I am also greatly concerned that Trump will give away Taiwan - the Right has already been talking about it not being worth the effort.

*   The rest of the world will shake its head at the way the US has let a media and information environment evolve that has poisoned reason and goodwill in politics.

  

Not enjoying the count!

 

Another distraction post while waiting for election results

I'm still ploughing through the abridged version of Journey to the West, and have more thoughts:

*    I really seem to be reading this at just the right point of my life.  For example, I wasn't expecting so much reference (in chapter 11 I think) to the Chinese version of Hell and the kings in charge of it.  But I had a good introduction to this from my visit to Haw Par Villa in Singapore earlier this year, so the names were familiar, as well as the gruesome details.   As another example, I have enough knowledge of Buddhism now to understand the references to Great Vehicle Buddhism (Mahayana Buddhism), the texts of which is actually what the monk Tripitaka is sent to recover.    The book largely assumes knowledge of some of this background, so it's handy to have it!

*   I have been reminded while reading the book that someone I knew in my 20's (not very well, he was more a brief work companion) once told me that his fantasy career would involve bringing a realistic cinematic version of the book to the screen that would show the "true message" of the book.   (He was pretty dismissive of the TV versions that played it more as adventure/comedy.)   I don't know whether he was very religious or not, but I guess I still am not sure that his ambition is in any way possible - and until I get to the end, I'm not sure I understand the true message, anyway.   Well, it's very pro-Buddhist, of course, but I now wish I had engaged him more in that conversation.

*  For a person who has long been interested in comparative religion, it's very interesting.   We have a character dead for 3 days and coming back to life, and as another example, in Chapter 12 the Bodhisattva Guanyin reveals her true form at a "Mass" full of monks, her appearance described as follows:

 

 

OK, sure there are specific Chinese details, and I wasn't expecting a cockatoo!, but still, the description put me much in mind of the Catholic, pale blue robed, standing on a cloud, vision of the Virgin Mary.

More thoughts later....

Update:  Speaking of Bodhisattva Guanyin, here's a good summary of the figure from a website of the British Library.  Some extracts:

As Buddhism spread eastwards from its Indian heartland, Buddhist terminology in Sanskrit was adapted to other languages using either a sense-for-sense translation or a transliteration derived from the original pronunciation. For example, the name of Amitābha Buddha underwent transliteration to become ‘Amituo’ in Chinese. By contrast, Avalokiteśvara’s name was translated into Chinese based on its meaning and certain aspects of the Bodhisattva’s nature. This approach leaves more room for interpretation and, as a result, there are two common versions of the name, Guanshiyin and Guanzizai.

Guanshiyin, also known as Guanyin, is the name for this Boddhisattva that is seen in most sutras, such as the Etiquette of Great Compassion Repentance. This translation comes from the Sanskrit “Avalokita”, which means to observe (觀[guan]), and “svara”, which means sound (音[yin]). In other words, the Bodhisattva is “the sound-perceiver” or the one who hears the sounds (of sentient beings) of the world (世[shi]). This name is also referred to the Universal Gate Chapter of Lotus Sutra, which says: “Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva will instantly perceive the sound of their cries, and they (the suffering) will all be liberated”....

 

While there are a few different names to refer to this Bodhisattva, there are even more different forms that Guanyin can take when appearing to sentient beings in order to guide them away from suffering.

One interesting development of Guanyin’s form is the way in which gender is represented. In general, the gender of deities in Buddhism are neutral and rarely discussed. Early depictions show Guanyin with a more masculine appearance, creating the impression that the original gender of Guanyin was male. However, the female form becomes more popular later in Mahayana Buddhism, particularly in China. The reasons for this are linked to the historical context. Traditionally, China was a very patriarchal society; a system reinforced by Confucian principles which put pressure on women to obey their husbands and give birth to sons (instead of daughters). As a result, women were generally the ones asking for Guanyin’s help in order to achieve these goals. In addition, it was thought that a woman must commit to one man for her whole life (even after his death), therefore it seemed more appropriate for a woman to worship a deity in female form. In this way, Guanyin starts to take on more feminine qualities such as kindness and grace and, in female form, she is seen as more accessible to women.

So far we have discussed the work of Guanyin in isolation, but this Bodhisattva does not go it alone in the rescue business; Guanyin also works with Amitābha Buddha and Mahāsthāmaprāpta Bodhisattva to guide the dead to the Western Pure Land. This trio is known as the Three Noble Ones of the West. When pictured together, it would be easy to recognise the Amitābha Buddha as he is always in the middle but sometimes it can be a bit difficult to work out which attendant is Guanyin since the basic style of Bodhisattvas is the same. One clue would be the plant they hold in their hand; Mahāsthāmaprāpta holds a lotus and Guanyin holds a willow. The other indication is the item on their head; it is a vase containing his parents’ ashes on Mahāsthāmaprāpta’s head and a statue of seated Amitābha Buddha on Guanyin’s. In this case, when a person approaches death, they can call upon not only Amitābha, but also Guanyin to ask for guidance.

Update 2:  And yes, Guanyin is known as Kannon in Japan, a country which has an unusually large number of giant size statues of her.  I'm been in one - the Sendai Daikannon.  I see that one big statue in Japan gives off particular Mary vibes, with her holding a baby:

David Frum on why he's confident there won't be another attack on the Capitol

 

A reminder that history is made in many different ways, on this US election day...

 Here's the actual story.  (And no, it's not about a bereaved billionaire who couldn't bear to live without his pet ferret.)

A curious apologia for Trump

The New York Times has a column that is a kind of apologia for Trump - arguing that even if he loses the election, he has already "won", due to Democrats (and even some economists) moving towards the Trumpian line on free trade and tariffs (because Biden kept his Chinese tariffs) and immigration (pushing a tougher line on it.)

I think this is a case of a small element of truth being wildly exaggerated for partisan purposes. 

One thing I still don't understand is how rapidly relations with China went downhill - I'm sure I've said this before, but it seemed that as soon the US decided to go with a nutty populist leader who nonetheless made his admiration for China's authoritarian leader obvious, said Chinese leader decided to hype up Chinese nationalism and aggression.   But (and this is where I could well be wrong*), they seemed to do it at the same time - not in a clear series of escalations that made sense.

I'm not convinced that the benefit of free trade has been shown up as inherently wrong headed in any way, even if clearly leads sometimes to difficult periods of adjustment.   And lifting people out of poverty at the global level is something we should consider "a good thing" - I mean, even the Catholic Church had that attitude to it.

So populist takes against it are always suspect - and Trump's loony idea of (more or less) universal tariffs is so mad it surely has to erase any apologia for him being "ahead of the experts" on the original decision to put tariffs on China.

On immigration I think there is even less reason to argue that Trump has swayed public opinion (even amongst Democrats) towards him.   His entire political career has been built on nasty, racist fear mongering about illegal immigration, a problem that the country has grappled with for decades, and surges in arrivals are often due to factors beyond American's direct control anyway.  The surge in arrivals in recent years would have pushed mainstream America to demanding a better response anyway - it didn't need Trump's Nazi level vilification of arrivals to reach that position.

 

*  Ok, so this Wiki article on the US/China trade war does show it as a series of escalations started by Trump - but at the same time, the Chinese tariffs on Australia in the same period seemed over the top aggressive.  It just seemed that China started to decide to punish anyone who criticised them with trade retaliation.  And the renewed Chinese aggressive stance to re-taking Taiwan was taking place at the same time.

Far from encouraging news

The Washington Post says that scientists believe they have identified the cause of an upswing in atmospheric methane - microbial production from warmer fields, wetlands (and also cows' stomachs, apparently.)

 How do they know?:

Different sources of methane give off different carbon signatures. Methane produced by microbes — mostly single-celled organisms known as archaea, which live in cow stomachs, wetlands and agricultural fields — tends to be “lighter,” or have fewer C13 atoms. Methane from fossil fuels, on the other hand, is heavier, with more C13 atoms.

As the amount of methane has risen in the atmosphere over the past 15 years, it’s also gotten lighter and lighter. The scientists used a model to analyze those changes and found that only large increases in microbial emissions could explain both the rising methane and its changing weight.

The concern is that it may be a dangerous climate feedback happening all by itself, but they can't say for sure:

Michel says it’s too early to say whether this is the beginning of a vicious cycle. “Are these coming from human-caused changes in freshwater systems, or are they a kind of scary climate feedback?” she said. “I want to be careful about what we can and cannot say with this data.”

Researchers say it doesn’t mean that the world can just keep burning natural gas. If wetlands are releasing methane faster than ever, they argue, there should be an even greater push to curb methane from the sources humans can control, such as cows, agriculture and fossil fuels.

 

A short piece against nihilism

Seems an odd piece for the New York Times to publish when everyone is concentrating on the election.  But a cosmologist argues against nihilism in the face of a mostly empty universe:

Artists and philosophers have long understood the power of the void. The 12th-century Buddhist monk and poet Saigyo reflected on the gaps between falling raindrops, noting that the pauses between their sounds were just as important as the drops themselves, if not more so. The composer John Cage challenged us with “4ʹ33ʺ,” a performance consisting entirely of silence, creating a manifestation of the void that audiences sought to fill with awkward coughs and nervous laughter, which became its own music. The famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas celebrated the utility of negative spaces, proclaiming, “Where there is nothing, everything is possible.” For the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the void was a psychological space that we must enter to realize our full potential and forge a new life.

Billions of years from now the sun will engorge and Earth will turn to dust. The cosmic voids, guardians of great nothingness, will remain. That bare fact, at first uncomfortable, gives us the ability to treasure what we’re given.

Tell a joke to your friends. Fight for what you believe in. Call your mother. Create something the cosmos hasn’t seen before. The implacability of the cosmic voids calls us to action. The universe won’t do anything for us except give us the freedom to exist. What we do with that existence is entirely up to us. It is our responsibility to imbue the cosmos with meaning and purpose.

Some days this sounds an attractive approach; other days, not so much.

The problem comes down to the issue that talking about "meaning and purpose" seems to presume  that there is something by which to judge between competing ideas of what makes for a valid meaning and purpose, but the purely materialist universe says there isn't.

Watching corn grow

I went to the Mulgowie markets last month, and returned again on the weekend. This is the same (enormous) cornfield that featured in my last post, so you can see how much it has grown.  

What an absolute, 100% rolled gold, MAGA moron

Update:  Of course, he is also going to swallow entirely the line, when Trump loses, that it must have been due to cheating, because (he will claim) the polls and betting market showed a Trump landslide.   The New York Times discusses the obvious:

The torrent of polls began arriving just a few weeks ago, one after the other, most showing a victory for Donald J. Trump.

They stood out amid the hundreds of others indicating a dead heat in the presidential election. But they had something in common: They were commissioned by right-leaning groups with a vested interest in promoting Republican strength.

These surveys have had marginal, if any, impact on polling averages, which either do not include the partisan polls or give them little weight. Yet some argue that the real purpose of partisan polls, along with other expectation-setting metrics such as political betting markets, is directed at a different goal entirely: building a narrative of unstoppable momentum for Mr. Trump.

The partisan polls appear focused on lifting Republican enthusiasm before the election and — perhaps more important — cementing the idea that the only way Mr. Trump can lose to Vice President Kamala Harris is if the election is rigged. Polls promising a Republican victory, the theory runs, could be held up as evidence of cheating if that victory does not come to pass.

The importance of the bargaining God?

This is just an idle thought that came to me after watching a video by that secular Buddhist guy on Youtube (Doug's Dharma) that discussed the question "Is forgiveness not Buddhist?" 

The video is about an article by Ken McLeod that appeared in Tricycle, the glossy Buddhist magazine, which argued that forgiveness only makes sense in the context of a transactional religious view, such as in the Abrahamic religions, where the idea of God engaging in agreement (covenants) leads to the idea of debt and forgiveness too - as part of putting broken deals right.   I don't think he mentioned it specifically, but a "transactional" God in the Jewish sense includes the idea of divine bargaining.  God engaged in a negotiation with Abraham as to how many righteous men it would take for Sodom to be spared is the great example.  The idea of deals or transactions being done at the divine level continues into Christianity - with the ransom theory of atonement, for example.   

As to how unique the Jewish origin of the idea of a transactional God is, I suppose you could argue that any religion that practices sacrifice or offerings as a placation to a god or the gods has an element of "bargaining" too; but then again, the Old Testament portrays a very direct and personal involvement of God being prepared to "do deals".   I mean, there were temples all through ancient Greece and Rome (and over in the Americas) at which sacrificial offerings were routine;  but as far as I know, you don't have traditions of (say) Zeus coming down and having lengthy negotiations with religious figures about the exact details of a bargain.

And this led me to think - is the Jewish reputation for success at capitalism traceable to a cultural attraction to the idea of bargaining that was there from the very start? 

The topic of Jews and success at capitalist enterprises is not exactly a new topic, and this book sounds interesting:

...in his slim essay collection “Capitalism and the Jews,” Jerry Z. Muller presents a provocative and accessible survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success and why that success has earned them so much misfortune.

As Muller, a history professor at the Catholic University of America, explains it, much anti-Semitism can be attributed to a misunderstanding of basic economics. From Aristotle through the Renaissance (and then again in the 19th century, thanks to that Jew-baiting former Jew Karl Marx), thinkers believed that money should be considered sterile, a mere means of exchange incapable of producing additional value. Only labor could be truly productive, it was thought, and anyone who extracted money from money alone — that is, through interest — must surely be a parasite, or at the very least a fraud. The Bible also contended that charging interest was sinful, inspiring Dante to consign usurers to the seventh circle of hell (alongside sodomites and murderers). In other words, 500 years ago, the phrase “predatory lending” would have been considered redundant.

Lending at interest was thus forbidden across Christian Europe — for Christians. Jews, however, were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church to charge interest; since they were going to hell anyway, why not let them help growing economies function more efficiently? (According to Halakha, or Jewish law, Jews were not allowed to charge interest to one another, just to gentiles.) And so it was, Muller explains, that Judaism became forever fused in the popular mind with finance. In fact, Christian moneylenders were sometimes legally designated as temporary Jews when they lent money to English and French kings. 

As Europe’s official money­lenders, Jews became both necessary and despised. The exorbitant interest rates they charged — sometimes as high as 60 percent — only fed the fury. But considering the economic climate, such rates probably made good business sense: capital was scarce, and lenders frequently risked having their debtors’ obligations canceled or their own assets arbitrarily seized by the crown.

This early, semi-exclusive exposure to finance, coupled with a culture that valued literacy, abstract thinking, trade and specialization (the Babylonian Talmud amazingly presaged Adam Smith’s paradigmatic pin factory), gave Jews the human capital necessary to succeed in modern capitalism. It also helped that Judaism, unlike many strains of Christianity, did not consider poverty particularly ennobling.

Most of Muller’s strongest arguments are in his first essay, which draws on everyone from Voltaire to Osama bin Laden to illustrate how the world came to conflate the negative stereotypes of Jews with those of capitalism’s excesses. The book’s remaining three essays deal somewhat unevenly with the fallout of the Jews’ economic success, and in particular the resentment it inspired among history’s economic also-rans. Muller explores, for example, how Jews improbably became associated with both abhorred poles of political economy: hypercapitalism and ­Communism.

I'm not sure that he covers "because they always thought a deal could be cut - even with God" - but it seems worthy of consideration!

A remarkable photo from the Spanish floods

Once again, we are watching the consequences of a remarkable flash flood, this one in Spain, with at least 95 people killed: yet the Washington Post puts its story about it way, way down the website:

 

This short clip shows some of the flood in action: