Historical Knowledge

I'm just trying to stay awake so I can pick up a friend at the airport whose arrival has been delayed until midnight, reading Twitter/X and finding gems like this:

A New Russian Joke is an Old Soviet One

A Russian man is in line at the gas station. "I've had enough," he says to his wife. "You take the wheel, I'm going to shoot Putin."

After two hours he returns and gets back behind the wheel.

His wife asks him, "Did you shoot him?"

And he replies, "No, the line to shoot Putin is longer than this one!" 

–source

The Latest from the Reflecting Pool

Today's Fortune

Tonight, the universe is conspiring in your favor.

So what should I do tonight? Place a big bet on an NBA game?

Actually what I will probably do is write, so maybe the universe will help me produce something brilliant.

It occurs to me, though, that while I opened this fortune cookie this morning, we had our Chinese take-out last night; so was this fortune supposed to apply to last night? If so, the universe really let me down.

The Uncertain Future

Over the past two days YouTube has three times offered me an ad that begins, "As a school custodian, you understand. . . " Do they have advance notice of pending layoffs in my company?

And school custodian? Well, it would beat being a greeter at Walmart.

The Ultimate Game Show

It turns out that the CIA can grant citizenship to 100 people per year; I suppose this has to do with spies and Soviet defectors.

But imagine the possibilities! We could have a televised draft like they have for the NFL or the NBA, with CEOs or governors choosing their top prospects.

We could have a game show! or multiple game shows, a quiz show for would-be tech stars, a Ninja warrior competition, and a sort of likeability contest in which charming schlubs from all over the world try to get the audience to vote them in.

Other ideas?

Fawning

The NY Times informs us about a new psychological threat: excessive fawning.

With her new book, Are You Mad at Me? How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You, Ms. Josephson hopes to help people who think that “I can’t feel OK unless the other person is OK,” she said.

I asked Ms. Josephson to explain three key takeaways from her book that can help people stop the urge to fawn.

Don’t automatically assume you did something wrong. You can challenge your perception that someone is mad at you, Ms. Josephson said, by asking these questions: Is this story I’m telling myself absolutely true? Is this person’s behavior unusual or just consistent with how he communicates? Could there be other reasons for the person’s perceived distance, such as work stress or a recent breakup? . . .

Check fawning behavior by starting small. For people who habitually fawn, it can feel intimidating to set boundaries and say no, Ms. Josephson said. So begin with low-stakes situations.

Notice when you’re using people-pleasing phrases that you don’t actually mean, such as “no problem” if something does present a problem, and “is this OK with you?” if it’s not OK with you. . . .

Why don't I know anybody like this? How come nobody is excessively fawning over me?

Instead of being surrounded by people who worry about offending me, I have “G.”

Sigh.

Oh, Naomi

From here.

A Russian Has a Suggestion for Elon

 

Topical

Letting the Data Speak for Itself

From Khoa Vu on Twitter/X.

The Disinformation Manifesto

From Scott Alexander/Siskind's fantasy presidential debate:

Alexander: Mr. Trump, you’ve been accused of being one of the chief spreaders of misinformation, both personally and through your website Truth Social. What do you have to say for yourself?

Trump: GK Chesterton said that fairy tales were more than true, not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. In the same way, I think misinformation is more than true - not because it tells us there are pedophiles in pizza parlors, but because it tells us that pizza parlor pedophiles can be discovered and dragged into the light.

The COVID vaccine might not literally contain a microchip that lets Bill Gates control your mind. But we really do grant unaccountable tech billionaires root access to our culture. And seemingly pro-social requests really can be a vector for establishing control. I, Donald Trump, might not literally lead a euconspiracy of patriotic Americans who are about to blow the lid off the corrupt Biden administration and liberal establishment. But it really is true that even in the darkest night, when all seems lost, there are seeds of hope visible to those who search for them, and that even the most invincible-seeming tyranny can fall in an instant if enough people push at it.

So who cares about the literal truths? The average American lives in a dull apartment building in a decaying city, his subsistence dependent on the whims of macroeconomic forces he cannot comprehend, let alone control. You want to tell him to spend his tiny sliver of time on Earth thinking about interest rates and carbon credits? We need to re-mythologize the world! We need to re-weave the rainbow, re-haunt the air, re-gnome the mine! If the scientists have robbed us of trolls under bridges, we will replace them with Satanic cults in state capitols. If they take our soma, we will invent adrenochrome.

If I’m elected president, I plan to double down on this. I will spread rumors of griffons in the Rocky Mountains, allude to unspeakable things beneath the deserts of Nevada, and question whether the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a mystical portal to dream-realms beyond the setting sun. Not because any of these things are true. But because they are more than true. They’re what makes this country great. 

No, I have Not Done This. I Swear.

Today's interesting story from the world of publishing:

A fantasy debut author who had a two-book deal with Penguin Random House on Tuesday admitted to creating fake accounts on the website Goodreads to sabotage other novelists by leaving negative reviews.

The novelist, Cait Corrain, posted an admission and an apology on the social media platform X, citing a struggle with depression and substance abuse. In the note, Corrain said that this month, she had suffered a “psychological breakdown” and created around half a dozen fake accounts that left positive ratings on her upcoming novel and “bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors.”

For this she was dropped by her agent, and her novel was withdrawn by the publisher.

Which led me to contemplate my own situation. I have, after all, posted several terrible reviews here, including some of recent fantasy fiction. But not to promote myself! I swear! I had no such intention!

Sometimes I just dislike books, and want to vent about them. Please, please don't ban me for it.

I am a good person!  I would never tear town others to raise up myself! I swear!

Unhelpful Tarot

Ace of Wands and The Devil

All you have is a blunt instrument, but that’s okay, because you’re pretty sure that everything you encounter can be dealt with by thumping it.

I just discovered a hilarious Tumblr, Unhelpful Tarot. Each post is just two cards with an amusing or absurd interpretation, like the ones above and below.

Two of Cups and Seven of Wands

You were so busy looking deeply into one another’s eyes that you completely missed the fight at the next table.

Choosing a Speaker

We should just have a lottery. If you lose you have to be Speaker.

–Representative Mike Collins (R-Georgia)

Farmers Praise their Gods

From one of the Songs of Inana and Dumuzi, the world's oldest body of love poetry, mostly spoken to the Goddess Inana by the young shepherd god Dumuzi. The odest texts date to around 2000 BC:

Maiden, colorful as a pile of grain, fit for the king,
Inana, colorful as a pile of grain, fit for Dumuzi!
Maiden, you are a shock of two-row barley, fully developed in loveliness,
Inana, you are a shock of two-row barley, fully developed in loveliness!

I mean, what could be more beautiful than a shock of two-row barley?

So Let's Suppose You're a Spy

So, you're a Chinese or Russian or Iranian spy, working like a dog to get little scraps of information about American military plans. And you go online today and discover that stuff beyond anything you thought you might ever find spent years sitting in crumbling cardboard boxes at Mar a Lago:

The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods. . . .

Even, like, in the bathroom. Which has a chandelier, for some reason.

And you missed it. Are you the greatest failure in the history of spying, or what? Are you kicking yourself up and down the street? What are your bosses going to say? How will you defend yourself? Will, "Who could ever imagine that the President of the United States would be such a doofus?" be a good enough excuse?

Of course maybe you did find it. In that case, did you tell your bosses that all you had to do was walk into the bathroom at Mar a Lago and open a box? Or did you invent a crazy story about your great inside sources and all the spycraft you had to use to contact them and arrange drops and all that spy stuff? I mean, who ever got promoted for walking into a bathroom and opening a box?

My Plan for a New Business as a Sensitivity Reviewer

According to one of my children who has spent time on web sites for writers, they are full of ads offering to pay people rather small amounts of money (often $50 or $100) to serve as "sensitivity reviewers" for book manuscripts.

I thought, what a way to make money! I could pose as a sensitivity reader with an expertise on every possible ethnic and gender situation. I could have a whole string of pseudonyns: Jay Whitewolf, Hector Gonzales, Ta-Nehisi Williams, Mahalia Brown, Susan Lepinski, Zephyr, Maddoger Bikerbabe, and an Appalachian sensitivity expert named Ripper T. Jackson.

I would do the reviews. I mean, I'm sure Google will tell me what the main red flags are. And I could be completely arbitrary as to whether I would just quibble about a couple of words or rip the whole thing to pieces for its plantation racist-neocolonial-transphobic-caveman sexist-suburban whitebread-out of touch Boomer attitudes.

And after I had duped people into paying me a few thousand dollars I could write an article for The New Yorker about the whole experience and what it says about America culture.

Foolproof!

How I Feel about Parties

The Investor

The mature young gentleman is a gentleman of property. He invests his property. He goes, in a condescending amateurish way, into the City, attends meetings of Directors, and has to do with traffic in Shares. As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares.  

– Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

And one more bit of this book:

Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap’s opinion.

That's the thing with Dickens; the plots are mostly riduculous, and this one seems especially contrived and silly, but there's a line like that on almost every page.