Here’s a curious piece from Sunday’s NY Times, though it was posted online several days earlier.
NY Times, Opinion, Guest essay by Brad Stulberg, 30 Aug 2023: Stop Resisting Change
NY Times, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, 2 Sep 2023: The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel
This is a piece about some of the fall-out of the photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, and the fairly long-standing issues about how rival methods of measuring the expansion and therefore age of the universe haven’t quite agreed, for some time. I’ll quote the opening four paragraphs.
Where does morality come from? And who’s moral, and why?
Like a bad penny, David Barton keeps turning up from time to time. I’ve written about him a couple times before: in David Barton, Just this once in Sept 2013, and in The Mendacious David Barton in April 2017. Here’s another headline indicating where he’s coming from, from Right Wing Watch in 2017: David Barton: The Same Evil Behind Nazism Is At Work Today In The Push For LGBTQ Equality.
The thing about this piece today is that there’s a tiny core of truth to his claims, even though that core truth doesn’t do him any credit. Rather.
Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 1 Sep 2023: Christian liar David Barton: Democrats aren’t “God-fearing,” so they cheat in elections, subtitled “I can’t believe he said this with a straight face”
I’m preoccupied with setting up my new laptop — which has no CD/DVD drive for installing old software ! — but will post two or three more pieces about Vivek. Promise to move on to something else tomorrow.
AlterNet, Robert Reich, 30 Aug 2023: Who the hell is Vivek Ramaswamy and why is he surging in the polls?
I was going to drop the subject, but the more commentaries I read about Vivek Ramaswamy, the more I see him as a perfect example of trends in conservative voting. Trends I’ve noticed for decades. Conservatives (Republicans) like simple-minded solutions to everything; they like celebrities and hucksters.
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Vox, Andrew Prokop, 29 Aug 2023: The “I would simply …” candidate, subtitled “Vivek Ramaswamy says he would simply just solve America’s tough problems.”
I ordered a new laptop from Costco, and it arrived today about 4pm, and I’ve spent an hour getting it up and running. My old laptop has gotten cruddy, slower and slower, especially when rebooting, especially when closing and relaunching my browser — I’m still loyal to Firefox. When I’ve shut down the laptop to install updates, I figure at least an hour, on rebooting, before the browser and everything else are working smoothly. Also, its battery is dead; I’ve already replaced it once, and the current battery no longer recharges. That’s not exactly a problem, unless the power goes out; I always leave my laptop plugged in, and never rely on the battery. Furthermore… while I never leave files (Word, Excel, etc.) open overnight, I do sometimes leave them open during lunch, and increasingly, when I return, the app is hung, and I have to shut it down hoping I haven’t lost any work.
Still, I’ve realized that my pattern has been to replace my computer — in the past decade, a laptop connected to a full-sized keyboard and two big monitors — about every six years. The last time was 2017. Before that, 2011. Before that, 2007. So I now have another HP laptop, 17″ screen (this time a touchscreen), with the usual specs. An HP 17-cn3165cl, with Windows 11.
Here’s the other nonfiction book I alluded to yesterday. This book just came out today; my copy arrived from Amazon this afternoon.
The book is by Marcelo Gleiser and is titled The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future. I’m cautious but curious about this book. I’ve only read short pieces by Gleisner, lately on the Big Think site, and while he’s a physicist and astronomer, he strikes me as a bit soft on the need to assign [human-centered] “meaning” on the universe at large, and to assign faith-based motivations to science. Has he won the Templeton Prize yet? He sounds like a perfect candidate. (Also, it’s published by HarperOne, originally founded as a “New Age” publisher…) Still I’ll give his book a try. The piece at hand is an excerpt from the new book, at Big Think.
Big Think, Marcelo Gleiser, 27 Aug 2023: “Biocentrism”: A scientific answer to the meaning of life, subtitled “Life in the supremely vast cosmos is incredibly rare. We need a new vision for our living planet and for ourselves.”
Two pieces for today.
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Could this be some good news?
Salon, Dennis Aftergut and Philip Allen Lacovara, 23 Aug 2023: The mainstream media is winning the war against “fake news”, subtitled “Why ‘factual truth’ matters so much in fraught times”
It’s been my impression (I don’t have a quick link to cite) that one of the MAGA points is that the traditional nuclear family is threatened by modernity, and ideally society should return to those traditional roles. Father, who goes to work; mother, who stays home; children, who go to school. But in fact my understanding is that the nuclear family is a relatively modern invention, of the past century, perhaps enabled by the rise in America of suburbia and car culture. Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village” remark was reviled by conservatives, whose ideas about an idea past go back only to the 1950s; but they have a very limited perspective of human history.
Big Think, Mauro F. Guillén, 24 Aug 2023: Why we must replace the American nuclear family with a “postgenerational” society, subtitled “Ideal models of family life have been broken by societal, technological, and cultural shifts — and we need to rethink our options.”
