America is Walter White, and Matters if Cosmic Relevance
Oof, what an indictment.
“As president, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests and betrayed our values, democracy and this country’s founding documents.”
The letter also condemns Trump's “unusual affinity” for dictators like Putin, and “contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior.”
A dire warning like this from Republicans who used to support him should be taken seriously.
New York Times- 111 Former GOP Officials Back Harris, Call Trump "Unfit To Serve"
September 18, 2024
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that since Kamala Harris has no biological children, she can't be humble. Somehow these weirdos are actually doubling down against those without biological children?! THAT'S their winning strategy?
It's a cruel and petty argument from a cruel and petty person, and her self-righteous judgment stands in glaring opposition to the humility she believes she espouses. So many of these people alienate significant swaths of the entire population and then have no idea why they lose.
September 18, 2024
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My favorite Ruth Bader Ginsburg minor tidbit- she was genuine friends with Antonin Scalia, their families used to go out to eat together. My favorite Antonin Scalia tidbit- voted to allow flag-burning. Not that he liked it, but he had no other choice but to see it as an expression of free-speech. That's what it means to believe in something in principle
Lessons to take from each of their deaths- the vast majority of us share the same principles. The Supreme Court upholds and defines those principles, who was are as a country.
All justices contribute, and in my view nobody in our lifetimes has contributed more than her. What defining principle will she be forever linked with? Equality. We have no higher principle.
September 18, 2020
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I don't think there's any good reason to support Trump, but I believe there's a best reason of all the bad reasons- if you overlook how awful a person he is, and the awful things he does, because you like the results. Or more simply, if you believe the ends justify the means.
This rationale reminds me of the Breaking Bad episode where Jesse Pinkman tells Walter White about Saul Goodman for the first time- "You don't want a criminal lawyer. You want a CRIMINAL lawyer."
If you are facing jail time, you want a lawyer who will keep you out of jail and you don't care how they do it. Reasonable, right? Sure, but in this analogy America is Walter White.
Who knows- maybe the ends do justify the means, maybe might is right, and we should take what we can get and to hell with everybody else. Or perhaps we're not living in a Machiavellian world, and can aim higher.
In my book though it's a moot debate- I think this guy's ends and means break equally bad. We seem to have a criminal lawyer who, by the end of the series, will be on the run. And we'll be dead!
September 18, 2020
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I'm only about three hours into the Ken Burns' Country Music documentary, savoring every moment. My favorite story so far is the one where Sara Carter's true love, Coy Bayes, moved to California at the insistence of his family, versus breaking up Sara's marriage. Sara had fallen out of love with her husband A.P. because he was often gone for weeks at a time leaving her to tend to the house and raise all the kids herself. Sara wrote to Coy but he never responded. It turned out his mother was intercepting the letters. The Carter Family was playing weekly at this radio station in Texas that was powerful enough to broadcast over the whole country. One night she said that she was dedicating a song to him in California, I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes, and guess what... he was listening and told his parents that he was going back to get her. They got married a few days later. Now that's a perfect story.
September 18, 2019
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The first cornerstone of the United States Capitol was laid by George Washington on this day in 1793.
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The Civil War Battle of Chickamauga began on this day in 1863. It had the second highest amount of casualties for any battle apart from Gettysburg.
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The Atlanta Exposition Speech on race relations was delivered by Booker T. Washington on this date in 1895.
"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin and not the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities."
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The 1906 Hong Kong typhoon killed an estimated 10,000 people on this day.
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The British submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoed Jun'yō Maru on this day in 1944, killing 5,600- mostly slave labourers and POWs.
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Fidel Castro arrived in New York City on this day in 1960, as the head of the Cuban delegation to the United Nations. Seems like a good movie premise.
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U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld died in an airplane crash on this day in 1961, while attempting to negotiate peace in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"The longest journey is the journey inward."
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Hurricane Fifi struck Honduras with 110 mph winds on this day in 1974, killing 5,000 people. Meanwhile, I sat in my kitchen getting used to solid foods.
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Voyager I took the first distant photograph of the Earth and the Moon together on this day in 1977. Another piece of the cosmic puzzle that humans became able to conceive.
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On this day in 1984, Jack, Janet and Terri said their final farewells as Jack left for his life with Vicky, Janet left for her life with Phillip, and Terri left for Hawaii. I know it's ridiculous, but moments like this from TV history devastate me.
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Dr. Samuel Johnson was born on this day in 1709. When he had finished his first English dictionary, he was visited by a delegation of London's Respectable Womanhood who came to his parlor at Fleet St. and said, "Doctor, we congratulate you on your decision to exclude all indecent words from your dictionary."
He responded, "Ladies, I congratulate you on your persistence in looking them all up."
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The luminous Greta Garbo was born on this day in 1905.
She told close friends decades after World War II that Hitler was big on her, and kept writing her letters, asking her to visit Germany. She said that if the war didn't start when it did, she would have gone to Germany, pulled a gun out of a purse and shot him, because she believed she would be the only one not searched.
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Dee Dee Ramone was born on this day in 1951.
"I'd like to thank myself, and congratulate myself, and give myself a big pat on the back."
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Steven Pinker was born on this day in 1954. There's something comforting in the fact that neither Sam Harris nor Stephen Pinker are 60 years old yet.
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James Gandolfini was born on this day in 1961. The greatest television actor in history? Tie with Jon Hamm?
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Comedian Mark Normand was born on this day in 1983. As far as I'm concerned, a perfect joke:
"So I do this thing called exposure therapy, it’s when you face your fears. So if you are afraid of heights, your therapist takes you to a hot air balloon. If you’re afraid of water, boat ride. Me, I’m claustrophobic and afraid of intimacy. So my therapist took me into a closet, and fucked me."
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Leonhard Euler left us on this day in 1783.
"e^(iπ)+1 = 0"
A bizarre mix.
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Jimi Hendrix left us on this day in 1970.
"Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music."
He might have a point. Ken Burns' use of Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner at the beginning of the 1970s Baseball documentary, zowie, a knockout.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg left us on this day in 2020, just a ridiculously predictable thing.
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Other notable birthdays- Robert Blake (1933), Ben Carson (1951), Mark Romanek (1959), Ryne Sandberg (1959)
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Other notable deathdays- Franchot Tone (1968), Russ Meyer (2004)
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Not a left vs right issue. There's no argument against Trump being a cruel person.
https://fb.watch/n8IpC3o7eo
September 18, 2016
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Just Errol Morris and Werner Herzog talking about stuff...
https://youtu.be/OG0HvHQlvzM
September 18, 2010
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New York Times- Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Millionaires
Seems like this would have been a perfect idea while democrats were completely in control of Congress. (And proof that the millionaires in Congress don't want it to pass?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/us/politics/obama-tax-plan-would-ask-more-of-millionaires.html
September 18, 2011
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All That Is Interesting- The Most Important Image Captured By Hubble
Every time I get a new phone I google this image and set it as the background...
http://all-that-is-interesting.com/important-image-captured-by-hubble
September 18, 2013
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Would you believe me if I told you that the 10-year-old comedian, saffron Herndon is legit funny? Of course not, you shouldn't, yet she is. Her parents must be feeding her those hilarious jokes. Either way, who cares.
http://imgur.com/gallery/D3JSg
September 18, 2015
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Washington Post - This Is How Fascism Comes to America, by Robert Kagan
"His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-how-fascism-comes-to-america/2016/05/17/c4e32c58-1c47-11e6-8c7b-6931e66333e7_story.html
September 18, 2016
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The Onion- Melania Trump: ‘My Fat Piece-Of-Shit Husband Who Should Go Kill Himself Needs To Stop Bullying People Online’
Still satirizable.
https://politics.theonion.com/melania-trump-my-fat-piece-of-shit-husband-who-should-1828473870
Sep 18, 2019, 5:33 PM
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Fake, but creepy!
https://local21news.com/news/local/video-tourist-captures-ghost-sighting-at-gettysburg-battlefield-sparks-debate
September 18, 2020
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Not a left vs right issue. There's no argument against Trump being a cruel person. His attack on the Khan's was cruel.
https://fb.watch/fCRN6Kig3x/
September 18, 2016
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Dolly Parton released her first album, "Hello, I'm Dolly," featuring Dumb Blonde.
https://youtu.be/lN_VQ8GWEos
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Sacrilegious somehow.
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Mark Twain- “When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.”
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Douglas Adams- "It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop."
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Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness- "The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them."
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Bill Maher- "If you think you have it tough, read history books."
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Marcus Aurelius- "Whatever happens to you, has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time."
The Epic of Gilgamesh- "From the days of old there is no permanence. The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, they are like a painted death.”
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Werner Herzog- "If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn't matter whether you're bold or cowardly, or whether you're stupid or intelligent. Doesn't get you anywhere."
That's how I feel about training for and then running a marathon.
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Stephen Jay Gould- "People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along."
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Jimmy Carr- "Remember to never answer a phone during sex, even if you hilariously answer with, ‘I can’t talk now, I’m going into a tunnel.'”
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Michel de Montaigne- "To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it."
Addendum
I'd kind of like my Steven Pinker quotes to be in one place...
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful."
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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise."
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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition. A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind to be raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire's quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
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Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)
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Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress- "Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause."
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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence…the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason."
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Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress- "What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer. Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress."
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The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature-
"Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?"
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Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century- "As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days."
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Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress- "Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems."
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Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature- "Nothing invests life with more meaning than the realisation that every moment of sentience is a precious gift."
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Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress:
Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.
Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don't confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason."
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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "Once again, the point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don’t, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful."
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Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language- "In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary."
Huh!
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Steven Pinker- "I find a naturalistic understanding of human nature to be indispensable to leading a wise and mature life, and it is often exhilarating. Wisdom consists in appreciating the preciousness and finiteness of our own existence, and therefore not squandering it; of being cognizant of what makes people everywhere tick, and therefore enhancing happiness and minimizing suffering; of being alert to limitations and flaws in our own judgments and decisions and passions, and thereby doing our best to circumvent them. The exhilaration comes from understanding that we are a part of natural world; that deep mysteries can be explained; and that the world -- including our own mental lives -- can be intelligible, rather than a source of superstition and ignorance. Yes, mortality sucks, but given that it exists, I'd rather know that than be kept in a childlike state of delusion."
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Steven Pinker- "The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window."
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Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress- "People are by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by “one, two, many” and by rough guesstimates. They understand physical things as having hidden essences that obey the laws of sympathetic magic or voodoo rather than physics and biology: objects can reach across time and space to affect things that resemble them or that had been in contact with them in the past (remember the beliefs of pre–Scientific Revolution Englishmen). They think that words and thoughts can impinge on the physical world in prayers and curses. They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence. They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group onto any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, in black and white, and physically, treating abstract networks as concrete stuff. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them. They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck."
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Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature- "If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes “culture,” and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western “moral thinkers,” including feminists."
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Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works- "The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions."
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Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature- "If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? I a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings. But fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, hammers don't ham, humdingers don't humding, ushers don't ush, and haberdashers do not haberdash...If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth? One goose, two geese-so one moose, two meese? If people ring a bell today and rang a bell yesterday, why don't we say that they flang a ball? If they wrote a letter, perhaps they also bote their tongue."
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When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.
Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works- "No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn."
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Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style- "Journalists assigned to an issue often cover the coverage, creating the notorious media echo chamber."
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Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct- "We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a word boundary with no one to hear it has no sound. In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. This becomes apparent when we listen to speech in a foreign language: it is impossible to tell where one word ends the next begins. The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in 'oronyms', strings of sound that can be carved into words in two different ways: The good can decay many ways / The good candy came anyways."
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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn’t happen to them."
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Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined- "Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions."
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