Heavens Doorways, a fun Tumblr featuring pictures of doors and windows.
Utter confusion about what happened in the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin.
Scott Siskind on AI psychosis, internet psychosis, and other psychoses.
A long Tweet about the war within the conservative movement between the "post-liberals" – people like Deneen and Pappin who are focused on religious and moral issues – and economic libertarians. The author says the post-liberals are trying to drive economists out of the conservative movement.
Review of Buddha, Socrates, and Us, a new book by Stephen Batchelor, who is a scholar of both Buddhism and western philosophy. Sounds interesting. Incidentally the author of the review is Costica Bradatan (aka Costică Brădăţan, but bookstore search engines can't cope with the diacriticals), a Romanian American philosopher; since I have loved all the little essays and reviews of his I have stumbled onto I just went and ordered one of his books.
Long but very interesting essay on Shulamith Firestone, who was briefly an icon of second wave feminism before descending into paranoid schizophrenia. She had many friends who tried to help her, but "a mental patient, like an alcoholic, is endlessly cunning when it comes to subverting salvation, and Shulamith Firestone was one of the best."
Interview with a scholar who thinks democracy has ruined American education.
Large British study finds that while trans youths do have mental health problems, they do not have a particularly high suicide rate.
Scott Sumner's final blog post at EconLog is a plea for integrity in government.
NY Times feature on New Orleans, which received more than $100 billion in outside funding after Hurricane Katrina but still somehow never recovered. My then employers were involved in this, and one issue was a conflict over vision. FEMA's general plan for flood recovery is to buy people out of the low-lying areas and move them to higher ground, but in New Orleans the low-lying areas are black and the high ground is mostly white, and the politicians said we're not signing onto a plan that invests in white neighborhoods while telling black residents to move on. So from the beginning there was no plan. But the authors of this essay are still talking about "equity" and ignoring geography, so the next time this happens the same fight will happen all over again.
A claim that Medicare delivers very small value to the people who receive it (Twitter/X). Obviously this is a hard number to calculate, but we have long known that the US spends an enormous amount on medical care for the dying, some of whom would probably rather be left to die in peace.
Large Bronze Age hoard found in Germany, likely related to three daggers found nearby in 1900.
I did not know that single men earn the same amount as women; the gender pay gap is entirely about how much married men earn. (Twitter/X) This is partly because they work more hours than anyone else.
For decades, Polish migration to Germany has been a major economic factor in Germany and a political irritant. But recently the rate turned negative, with more Poles moving back to Poland than going the other way.
In 2024, Barbados had 1,995 births and 3,008 deaths. We don't know about some other Caribbean island nations because they have stopped releasing these numbers. (Twitter/X)
St. Cristopher used to be depicted fairly often with a dog's head.
Re-reading Moby Dick at 58, Ahab's age.
New study finds that the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine reduced Covid mortality among the elderly by more than 50%. Via Marginal Revolution.
A philosopher ponders the eventual death of the universe, besides its general tendency to make things difficult rather than easy.
Huge lightning flash from 2017 is confirmed as the longest on record.
Tree fall in the Amazon reveals seven pre-Columbian funeral urns unlike anything I have seen from the region.
This week's past post is Dissatisfaction with Democracy in an Anti-Racist Age, from 2021.
3 comments:
Utter confusion about what happened in the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin.
So it went exactly as planned. Putin loves sowing confusion, as well as buying himself time by wasting everyone else's.
~~~
Interview with a scholar who thinks democracy has ruined American education.
How odd that democracy would only ruin education in one specific country, and spare all the other democratic nations.
Of course, that's only the headline of the article. The question it actually asks in the text of the piece is:
"Is local democratic control of schools a detriment to improving student outcomes? Vlad Kogan finds that school boards regularly prioritize the needs of teachers and administrators over students. Elections are unrepresentative and sometimes partisan and drive schools to distraction."
Now, in THAT regard, the matter becomes much simpler. School boards are a unique facet of American culture, inherited from New England Puritan practices which predate the country itself. And people have been pointing out how awful they are for a very, very, very long time now.
But of course, the media can't just have a headline about school boards being underwhelming at best - they have to frame it as Democracy itself failing, almost as if the writers and editors secretly hope it is.
"A philosopher ponders the eventual death of the universe, besides its general tendency to make things difficult rather than easy."
Which, philosophy or the universe? :)
@John
I just finished the philosopher's pondering of the eventual death of the universe. Quite brilliant and even admirably heroic, I thought. But it seems to me the problems the author is dealing with transcend terms like difficult and easy. In the specific context of interpreting the essay, what did you, John, mean by the universe's "tendency to make things difficult rather than easy"?
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